LECTURE IV. ROMANS i, 18-24. For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse; because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, through the lusts of ther own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves." THE word translated here to hold, signifies not merely to hold, but to hold fast. Now this may be done for the purpose of keeping in secure possession that which you wish to retain. And so this is the word in that place where they who eousness. They have the truth-they are in possession of it. But they keep it down. They chain it, as it were, in the prisonhold of their own corruptions. They throw the troublesome adviser into a dungeon-just like a man who has a con receive the word are said to "keep it, and science to inform him of what is right, but bring forth fruit with patience; "* and who stifles its voice, and brings it under where the Corinthians are praised by bondage to the domineering ascendancy Paul because they observed "to remember of passion and selfishness and all the law less appetites of his nature. Thus it is with men who restrain the truth, or suppress the truth in unrighteousness. V. 19. "That which is knowable of God, is manifest among them." him in all things, and to keep the ordinances which he had delivered them;"† and where he tells them, that they are saved if they "keep in memory, that which he had preached unto them;"† and where he bids the Thessalonians "hold fast that which is good;") and where he informs the Hebrews, that Christ dwelleth in them, if they "hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end;"|| and also that we are made partakers of Christ, if "we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end; "T and finally, where he encourages them to godliness and unrighteousness of men, "hold fast the profession of their faith without wavering."** It is not in the sense of the word in any of these passages that we are to understand it here. They who hold the truth in unrighteousness, do not hold it for the sake of keeping it in possession, as an article which they valued; and therefore were desirous of retaining in safe and cherished custody. Or one may hold fast for the pupose of confining or keeping down, so as to impede and repress that which is thus confined, from the putting forth of its energies. And accordingly this is the very word which Paul uses, when he says to the Thessalonians, "And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed V. 20. "For ever since the creation of the world, that great manifestation of God's power and Godhead, these invisible things of Him are clearly scen." V. 21. "In their reasonings." The following then is the paraphrase of this passage. For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all un who stifle the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which might be known of God is manifest among them-for God hath shown it to them. For the invisible things respecting Him, even His eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seenbeing discernible from the things that are made, so as to render them inexcusable. Because when they did know God, they did not do Him glory as to God, neither were they thankful to Him; but departing from the grave and solemn and simple reliance that was due to the Creator, they went into vain reasonings about Him, and so changed the truth into a deceitful imagination, and their foolish heart was darkened. In the profession, and in in his time. For the mystery of iniquity the prosecution of wisdom, they became fools: And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four doth already work; only he who now so that he came not out into full and im- Luke viti, 15. 1 Thes. v, 21. ** Heb. x, 23. † 1 Cor. xi, 2. 1 Cor. xv, 2. Heb. iii, 14. †† 1 Thess. ii, 6, 7. men. The wrath is not an element framed | magnified that law and made it honouraor fermented upon earth. It is conceived ble. And all this apart from any obediin Heaven; and thence it cometh down ence of ours. All this the produce of a on the unrighteousness of men, as the subject of it. And as with the wrath of God, so it is with the righteousness of God. It too cometh down from Heaven in the shape of a descending ministration. It is no more the righteousness of man in the one case, than it is the wrath of man in the other. It is affirmed here, and most prominently referred to in other parts of the epistle, as the righteousness of God. The wrath has its origin in the breast of the Divinity; and it goeth forth from an upper store-house, from a quarter above our world and foreign to our world; and all that the world furnishes is the reservoir into which it is poured-the unrighteousness and the ungodliness of men, which form the fit subjects for its application. And there is not an individual man who is not a fit subject of it. The wrath is unto all unrighteousness; and there is none who has not fallen into some unrighteousness. All who do these things are worthy of death; and there is not a human creature who has not done one or more of these things. But there is a way, it would appear, in which they who are thought worthy of death and are under the wrath of God, may nevertheless be made to live. They die by the wrath of God being inflicted on them. They live by the righteousness of God being administered to them. The one is just as much the rendering of a foreign application as the other. In the one case there is a displacency at sin on the part of the Godhead; and this bodies itself into a purpose of vengeance against the sinner; and the infliction of it is sent forth from God's remote and lofty sanctuary, originating there, and coming down from thence upon the unrighteousness of And as with the wrath of God ministered unto the world, so it is with the righteousness of God which is ministered unto the world. It has all a separate existence in the upper courts of Heaven. It is no more man's righteousness in the one case, than it is man's wrath in the other. There was a ransom found out by God. There was a surety accepted by God. There was a satisfaction which that surety rendered. There was an obedience undertaken for us by one who inhabited eternity; and with this obedience God was man. transaction in which we had no share. All this a treasure existing in the repositories of that place, where the Father and the Son hold their ineffable communiona righteousness not rendered by us, but rendered to us; and which is the only one that God can look unto with complacency. This is the righteousness of God, standing altogether aloof and separable from the righteousness of man; and which He offers to administer to us all, in place of that wrath which, upon our refusal of His better offer, He will administer. And the way in which both the wrath and the righteousness are set before us in this passage, as being each of them a descending ministration-the one of them being as purely a dispensation from Heaven as the other should prepare us for the still more pointed asseverations of the apostle, when he tells us that the righteousness upon which we are accepted is altogether of God, and borrows not one particle of its worth from the obedience of man; that it comes upon us in the shape of a previous and a prepared grant, which we are simply to lay hold of; that we are not the authors of it, but simply the subjects of it: And much is to be gathered from the information, that, like as the wrath of God is unto man's unrighteousness, so the righteousness of God is unto man's faith. The question is, Whether that thing on which we are justified is the righteousness of Christ alone accepted by God, and therefore called the righteousness of God, and rendered ours upon our receiving it by faith-or, Whether it be the righteousness of man as alone or in part the plea of man's justification. It will be found in the sequel, how strenuously and how unreservedly the apostle cleaves to the former term of this alternative; and in this opening passage of his Epistle, does he afford us no obscure or unsatisfying glimpse of that doctrine, on which lie suspended the firmest securities of our peace in this world, and the dearest hopes of our eternity. The next thing to which we direct your attention, is the precise reason that is intimated to us here, of God's provocation with man. There is something in the principle of His anger, which accords with what we experience of the movement well pleased. There was a righteousness of anger in our own bosoms. An infant on the part of man, which in itself brings an outcast of condemnation there, whc agent of gratification to them, was a mere | diately good, was sought after for itself, channel of conveyance for His liberality; was valued on its own account, was en that, behind all which was visible, there joyed without any thankful reference to were a power and a Godhead invisible Him who granted all and originated all; which He could acknowledge. There was a duteous and devoted off offering, which to Him was the incense of a sweet-smelling savour. There was a virtue which shone in spotless lustre even to His pure and penetrating eye; and a merit which not only met the demand of His holy law, but or an animal may do an action which is materially wrong, without calling forth our resentment. It is the knowing it to be wrong, on the part of the doer, which is indispensable to our anger against him being a rightful emotion; and it is neither the acting nor the thinking erroneously down upon them the wrath of God. It is their doing so intelligently. It is their stifling the remonstrances of truth in the work of unrighteousness. It is that they voluntarily bid it into silence; and, bent on the iniquity that they love, do, in the wilful prosecution of it, drown its inward voice-just as they would deafen the friendly warning of any monitor who is standing beside them; and whose advice they guess would be on the side of what is right, and against the side of their own inclinations. Were there no light present to their minds, there would be no culpability. On the other hand, should it shine clearly upon them, this makes them responsible for every act of disobedience to its lessons. But more, should it shine but dimly, and it be a dimness of their own bringing on-should they land in a state of darkness, and that not because any outward luminary has been extinguished; but because, in hatred of its beams and loving the darkness, they have shut their eyes-or should it be a candle within which has waned and withered to the very border of extinction, under their own desirous endeavours to mar the brilliancy of its flame-should there be a law of our nature, in virtue of which every deed of opposition to the conscience causes it to speak more faintly than before, and to shine more feebly than before, and should this be the law which has conducted every human being on the face of our earth to the uttermost depths, both of moral blindness and moral apathy-Still he is what he is because he willed against the light, and wrought against the light. It is this which brings a direct criminality upon his person. It is this which constitutes a clear principle for his condemnation to rest upon; and it is enough to fasten blame-worthiness upon his doings, that they were either done in despite of the convictions which he had, or done in despite of the convictions which but for his own wilful depravity he might have had. The Bible, in charging any individual with actual sin, always presupposes a knowledge, either presently possessed or unworthily lost or still attainable on his part, of some rightful authority, against which he hath done some act of wilful defiance. The contact of light with the mind of the transgressor, and that too in such sufficiency as, if he had followed it, would have guided him to an action different from the one he has performed, is essential to the sinfulness of that action -insomuch that on the day of reckoning, when the men of all nations and all ages shall stand around the judgment-seat, here is not one who will be pronounced will not feel an echo in his own conscience to the righteousness of the sentence under which he has fallen; and who, though living in the midst of thickest heathenism, will not remember the visitations of a light which he ought to have followed, and by resisting which he has personally deserved the displeasure of God that shall then be over him, the doom of the eternity that shall then be before him. In the 19th and following verses, the apostle, aware that to establish the guilt of the world's unrighteousness it was necessary to prove that it was unrighteousness committed in the face of knowledge, affirms what it was that man knew originally, and how it was that the light which was at one time in them became darkness. That which it was competent to know about God, was manifest among men. God himself had showed it unto men. He had either done so by the wisdom that shone in creation, making it plain to man's natural discernment that it was the product of a supreme and eternal intelligence; and this is one way in which we may understand how the invisible propertics of the Godhead are clearly seen, even from the impress of them, stamped and evident to the reflecting eye on the face of creation itself. Or He had expressly revealed the fact to man that the world was created, and that He was the Author of it. Instead of leaving them to find this out, He had made it known to them by actual communication. It is not necessary to conceive from these verses, that the doctrines of the existence and perfections of God are the achievements of man's unaided discovery at first. In that age of extraordinary manifestations, when God put forth the arm of a creator, He may also have put forth the voice of a revealer; and simply announced to men that the world they lived in was a piece of workmanship, and that He Himself was the builder and the maker of it. With the simple information that the world made not itself, but had a beginning, they could rise to the perception of Him who had no beginning. They could infer the eternity of that Being who Himself was uncreated. They could infer the magnitude of His power, seeing it to be commensurate to the production of that stupendous mechanism which lay visibly around them. They could infer his Godhead, or in other words His supremacy-the subordination of all that existed to His purpose and will -His right of property in this universe, and in all those manifold riches which fill and which adorn it-and more particularly that He originated all their faculties; that He provided them with all their enjoyments; that every secondary source and which had been from eternity, and were now put forth in bright and beautiful development on a created expanse, where everything was that could regale the senses, and be exuberant of delight and blessedness to the living creatures by whom it was occupied. It is not necessary to enter into a contest about the powers or the limits of the human faculties-though we shall afterwards attempt to make it evident, that, debased and darkened as we are by sin, there is enough of light in the human con and this too in the face of a distinct knowledge, that every thing was held of Godin the face of an authoritative voice, claiming what was due to God-in the face of a conscience powerful at the outset of man's history, however much it may have been darkened and overborne in the subsequent process of his alienation. And thus the tenure of his earthly enjoyments was gradually lost sight of altogether; and the urgencies of sense and of the world got the better of all impres. sions of the Deity; and man at length science to render inexcusable human un- felt his portion and his security and his godliness. But let us at present confine all to be, not in the Author of creation, but in the creation itself with all its gay and goodly and fascinating varieties. His mind lost its hold of a great and subordinating principle, by which he could have assigned its right place, and viewed ac ourselves to the circumstances adverted to by the apostle, according to the historical truth of them. He is evidently describing the historical progress of human degeneracy; and begins with the state of matters at the commencement of a dark-cording to its just relationship, all that ening and deteriorating process, which was around him. The world in fact, by took place on the character of man. And, a mighty deed of usurpation, dethroned without resolving the metaphysical ques- the Deity from the ascendancy which betion How far man without a direct com- longed to him; and thus the rule of esti munication from Heaven could have found his way to the Being and attributes of the Divinity, let us just take up with the commencement of matters as it actually stood. It was a period of extraordinary manifestations; and God made Himself directly and personally known, as the one Creator of all things; and men had only to look with the eye of their senses to these things, and to conclude how much of power, how much of wisdom, how much of rightful sovereignty and ownership, belonged to Him that framed all and upholds all. We may not be sure, in how far man could, on the strength of his own unborrowed resources, have steered his ascending way to the knowledge of a God. But the communicated fact that God did exist, and that He was the framer and the architect of all, put him on high vantage groundfrom which might be clearly seen the eternal power of the Supreme, and His eternal Godhead. We have only time to advert, shortly, to the way in which the truth respecting God was changed into a lie. The creature became more loved and more depended on, than the Creator. He was not glorified as the giver, and the maker of all created good. But what was sensibly and imme mation was subverted within him, and his foolish heart was darkened. This disorder in the state of his affections, while it clouded and subverted his discerning faculties, did not at the same time restrain the exercise of them. The first ages of the world, as is evident from the history of Babel, were ages of ambitious speculation; and man, with his love strongly devoted to the things of sense, still dreamed and imagined and theorized about hidden principles; and, with his sense of the one presiding Divinity nearly as good as obliterated, he began to fancy a distinct agency in each distinct element and department of nature; and, to make use of the strong phrases of God giving them up and giving them over, we may infer a law of connection between a distempered state of the heart, and a distempered state of the understanding; and thus their very wisdom was 'turned into folly; and to their perverted eye, the world was turned into one vast theatre of idolatry; and they personified all that they loved and all that they feared-till by the affections and the judgment acting and reacting, the one upon the other, they sank down into the degrading fooleries of Paganism. LECTURE V. ROMANS i, 28. "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to de those things which are not convenient." BEFORE proceeding to enforce the lesson jin a state of progressive corruption. But that may be educed from this text, let us he rather sketches out to us in this chapter the progress of the world's degeneracy from one age to another; and we would infer from his account that men, in the first instance, had a far more clear and convinced sense of God; but, not liking to retain it, committed the sin of a perverse disposition against the light which they had, and in part extinguished itthat they of course left their own immediate posterity, in a light more shaded and reduced than that which shone around the shortly remark, that the not liking to retain God in our knowledge, might have been rendered by the not trying to do so, not exercising our minds on the proof and information that were before them-so as to fix the right belief about God, and to perpetuate the right view and perception of Him. At the same time it is very true that not to try the evidence, and not to prosecute the guidance gu of the light which we have about any doctrine, argues either a dislike to that doctrine, or an indiffer- outset of their own progress through the ence about it-so that any slight amend-world-that these still disliked the rement which may be made of the English mainder of truth which they enjoyed; translation upon this score does not affect and, by their wilful resistance to its les the truth which it here sets before us, that God gives over to a reprobate mind, those who do not like to retain Him in their knowledge. But the term 'reprobate' too, admits of some little remark in the way of explanation. In its prevailing acceptation, it suggests to our minds a hopeless and abandoned wickedness of character; and so is expressive of a diseased state of the moral sons inflicted upon it a further mutilation, and transmitted it to their descendants with a still deeper hue of obscurity thrown over it that thus, by every successive step from one generation to another, the light of divine truth went down in this world's history more tarnished and impaired than ever; but still with such glimpses as, however feeble and however faded, were enough at least to try the principles. In its primary sense it was affection of man towards it, were enough equivalent to the term undiscerning, or to stir up a distinct resistance on the part undistinguishing; and so is expressive of of those who disliked it, were enough tc a darkened state of the understanding. keep up the responsibility of the world, In your larger Bibles, you will find a re- and to retain it in rightful dependence on probate mind rendered on the margin into the judgment of Him who made the world a mind void of judgment. But still it is so as to make it clear on the day of judgment, not exercised on any secular or reckoning, that men, even in their state philosophical question, but the judgment of most sunken alienation from the true of what is moral and spiritual-that kind God, were never, like the beasts that of judgment where error leads necessarily perish, so helplessly blind, and so destiand immediately to practical unrighteous- tute of all capacity for discerning between ness; and where therefore the love of the the good and the evil, as to render them unrighteousness disposes us to prefer the the unfit subjects of a moral sentence and darkness rather than the light. It is thus a moral examination. With every huthat the understanding and the affections man creature who shall be pronounced act and react upon each other; and that worthy of death on that day, will it be we read of men of corrupt minds having seen that there was either a light which no judgment, or being reprobate concerning the faith; and of those who are abominable and disobedient, being also void of judgment about every good work, or unto every good work being reprobate. In the sad narrative of the apostle in this chapter, he appears to refer not to the history of one individual mind, or of one individual conscience the defilement of which two provinces in our moral and intellectual nature, goes on contemporaneously, with every human being who is he actually had and liked not to retain, or a light which he might have had and liked not to recover. To whom much is given of him much shall be required; and there will be gradations of punishment in hell; and in that place where the retributions of vengeance are administered, will there be the infliction of many stripes upon some, and of few stripes upon others; and it will be more tolerable for those who lived in a darkness that was not wilfully of their own bringing on, than for |