most extravagant accounts of the natural powers and gifts of man. Now if
these powers and gifts do belong to human nature by its constitution,
they certainly lay a foundation for responsibility; and all such
theorists must either be able to show that the pagan man has made a
right use of them, and has walked according to this large amount of truth
and reason with which, according to their own statement, he is endowed,
or else they consign him, as St. Paul does, to "the wrath of God which is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, and unrighteousness of _men
who hold the truth in unrighteousness_." If you assert that the pagan man
has had no talents at all committed to him, and can prove your assertion,
and will stand by it, you are consistent in denying that he can be
summoned to the bar of God, and be tried for eternal life or death. But
if you concede that he has had one talent, or two talents, committed to
his charge; and still more, if you exaggerate his gifts and endow him
with five or ten talents, then it is impossible for you to save him from
the judgment to come, except you can prove a _perfect_ administration and
use of the trust.[3]

2. In the second place, it follows from the doctrine of the text, that
_the degraded and brutalized population of large cities is in a state of
condemnation and perdition_.

There are heathen near our own doors whose religious condition is as sad,
and hopeless, as that of the heathen of Patagonia or New Zealand. The
vice and crime that nestles and riots in the large cities of Christendom
has become a common theme, and has lost much of its interest for the
worldly mind by losing its novelty. The manners and way of life of the
outcast population of London and Paris have been depicted by the
novelist, and wakened a momentary emotion in the readers of fiction. But
the reality is stern and dreadful, beyond imagination or conception.
There is in the cess-pools of the great capitals of Christendom a mass of
human creatures who are born, who live, and who die, in moral
putrefaction. Their existence is a continued career of sin and woe. Body
and soul, mind and heart, are given up to earth, to sense, to corruption.
They emerge for a brief season into the light of day, run their swift and
fiery career of sin, and then disappear. Dante, in that wonderful Vision
which embodies so much of true ethics and theology, represents the
wrathful and gloomy class as sinking down under the miry w