CONDITION OF THE HEATHEN.
By John L. Withrow
THEY are living in sin. And, however much this may sound like a truism to you, there is need just now to say it over again, and to examine the statement until we shall be sure that unless the witnesses have been corrupt or incompetent, the case stands proven; that the pagan world lies in wickedness. Perhaps we may well begin with the thought that if they are not sinners against the Most High they are better off without the gospel than we are with it. And in that event, for us to send them missionaries and the Bible to announce to them the glad tidings of salvation, is exceedingly more absurd than carrying coals to Newcastle, or contributing money for a charity dinner for Dives. Indeed, it seems more than absurd. Is it not a pitiful or a vulgar impertinence which the pagan world might properly resent, and reply, "Physician, heal thyself"? But if the Spirit of God moved the mind and made the logic of Paul when he "proved both Jew and Gentile that they are all under sin," then the case stands gravely different. If "sin is the transgression of the law," and if the Holy Bible solemnly asserts that the Gentiles have "the law written in their hearts," and yet they have so "changed the truth of God into a lie," that "they are without excuse," then the case is closed and the verdict inevitable. Skepticism must either impeach the testimony of Christ's apostle and challenge the authority of these scriptures of God, or else quit the contention and accept the fact that all mankind, barbarian, Scythian, bond, and free, stand guilty before God; "for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." All men, the apostle meant, the same "all" that he referred to when he wrote, "In Adam all die." For Paul no more meant to limit these "alls" to the children of Abraham than he intended to limit them to those who have curly hair or high foreheads. His mind was not running on lines of national peculiarities, but was acting under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and that eternal word which was uttered, "The soul that sinneth it shall die!" No difference in what age, or nation, nor under what dim or dazzling rays of moral illumination, if only one knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin. What, then, is the testimony of those witnesses on whom we are wont to rely for information of idolatrous and unevangelized nations? Does Juvenal's satires on the sins of the Romans of his time read as if that pagan poet thought them not sins, but simply the reckless acts of moral idiots, whom neither God nor man should hold responsible? One of the moralists of Rome, whom modern times164most often mention with approval, said of the pagans of his day: "We have sinned, some grievously, others more lightly; some purposely, others accidentally impelled or led astray. And not only have we transgressed, we shall continue to do so till the end of life. It was the complaint of our ancestors, it is ours, it will be of our posterity, that morals are subverted, that corruption reigns! The human mind is by nature perverse, and strives for what is forbidden." Such was Seneca's judgment of the moral condition of the world, without God and without hope, but not without sin. And let any who are given to doubt whether the heathen are already enough lost to be liable to all consequences of sin, go hence and bury themselves beyond the line of the light, and the saving influences of the lives of men under the gospel; go hence, where "darkness covers the earth and gross darkness the people," and stay there for some years, eye-witnesses to the ways of those sunken creatures.—J. L. Withrow, D. D.