Christian Theology - Media Sabda Org

e the imitations in their votaries when they had such originals to copy?
This was their general state and character.
"But were not the highly cultivated Greeks and the learned and polite
Romans illustrious exceptions?" I except none of them from this general
censure. Read their own histories: those of the republics of Greece; and
what do you find? Treasons, insurrections, crimes, and carnage of all
descriptions. Consult also the Roman writers on their republican, consular
tribunal, regal and imperial states; and see the portraits which those
master painters have sketched; and what do you behold? No caricatures,
but likenesses from life—features fell and distorted, scowling through the
deep and murky shades which serve to relieve and make them prominent.
Nor has the lapse of time mended the moral condition and character of
the heathen nations. Our extensive commercial connections, not only with
the nations of Europe and America, but also with the principal heathen
kingdoms and states in most parts of the world, have brought us to an
intimate acquaintance with the dark places of the earth which are filled
with the habitations of cruelty; and what have we seen? Darkness
covering every land, and gross darkness the hearts of the people; idolatry
the most disgusting, and superstition the most foolish and degrading,
closely associated with ridiculous ceremonies and cruel rites; religious
suicide; abandonment of the aged to starvation when past labour, or left
in the woods to be devoured by wild beasts when in hopeless disease;
exposure of infants; burning of widows with the bodies of their deceased
husbands, their own children lighting the funeral pyre; the most painful,
unmeaning, and lengthened-out pilgrimages; religious fasts, by which
health and strength are exhausted; and feasts where the man sinks into the
beast:—all these, and more of a similar kind, equally degrading and
destructive, prevail among the millions of Asia, and especially among
what are called the civilized, mild, and pacific inhabitants of Hindostan.
What a gradation is here! 1. In our fall from God, our first apparent
state is, that we are without strength; have lost our principle of spiritual
power, by having lost the image of God, righteousness and true holiness,