ualist? Why does he not tell us that
because this civilized man acts no better, therefore he knows no better?
Why does he not maintain that because this voluptuary breaks all the
commandments in the decalogue, therefore he must be ignorant of all the
commandments in the decalogue? that because he neither fears nor loves
the one only God, therefore he does not know that there is any such
Being?

It will never do to estimate man's moral knowledge by man's moral
character. He knows more than he practises. And there is not so much
difference in this particular between some men in nominal Christendom,
and some men in Heathendom, as is sometimes imagined. The moral knowledge
of those who lie in the lower strata of Christian civilization, and those
who lie in the higher strata of Paganism, is probably not so very far
apart. Place the imbruted outcasts of our metropolitan population beside
the Indian hunter, with his belief in the Great Spirit, and his worship
without images or pictorial representations;[1] beside the stalwart
Mandingo of the high table-lands of Central Africa, with his active and
enterprising spirit, carrying on manufactures and trade with all the
keenness of any civilized worldling; beside the native merchants and
lawyers of Calcutta, who still cling to their ancestral Boodhism, or else
substitute French infidelity in its place; place the lowest of the
highest beside the highest of the lowest, and tell us if the difference
is so very marked. Sin, like holiness, is a mighty leveler. The "dislike
to retain God" in the consciousness, the aversion of the heart towards
the purity of the moral law, vitiates the native perceptions alike in
Christendom and Paganism.

The theory that the pagan is possessed of such an amount and degree of
moral knowledge as has been specified has awakened some apprehension in
the minds of some Christian theologians, and has led them,
unintentionally to foster the opposite theory, which, if strictly
adhered, to, would lift off all responsibility from the pagan world,
would bring them in innocent at the bar of God, and would render the
whole enterprise of Christian missions a superfluity and an absurdity.
Their motive has been good. They have feared to attribute any degree
of accurate knowledge of God and the moral law, to the pagan world, lest
they should thereby conflict with the doctrine of total depravity. They
have mistakenly supposed, that if they should concede to every man, by