"Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret, In terris oppressa gravi sub religione, Quae caput e coeli regionibus ostendebat Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, Primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra."[116]
How alienated from the life of God were those who conceived such sentiments, and those whose creed excited this repugnance. And when amongst ourselves, as it occurs in some unhappy instances, a similar bitterness is cherished, it is matter of double sorrow,--of grief at once for the alienation prompting thoughts so dark and unjust towards our God and Father, and for the misshapen guise in which our holy religion has been presented to make this aversion possible.
The phrase "alienated from the life of God" denotes an objective position rather than a subjective disposition, the state and place of the man who is far from God and and his true life. God exiles sinners from His presence. By a necessary law, their sin acts as a sentence of deprivation. Under its ban they go forth, like Cain, from the presence of the Lord. They can no longer partake of the light of life which streams forth evermore from God and fills the souls that abide in His love.
And this banishment was due to the cause already described,--to the radical perversion of the Gentile mind, which is re-affirmed in the double prepositional clause of verse 18: "because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart." The repeated preposition (_because of_) attaches the two parallel clauses to the same predicate. Together they serve to explain this sad estrangement from the Divine life; the second _because_ supplements the first. It is the ingrained "ignorance" of men that excludes them from the life of God; and this ignorance is no misfortune or unavoidable fate, it is due to a positive "hardening of the heart."
Ignorance is not the mother of devotion, but of indevotion. If men knew God, they would certainly love and serve Him. St Paul agreed with Socrates and Plato in holding that virtue is knowledge. The debasement of the heathen world, he declares again and again, was due to the fact that it "knew not God."[117] The Corinthian Church was corrupted and its Christian life imperilled by the presence in it of some who "had not the knowledge of God" (1 Cor. xv. 33, 34). At Athens, the centre of heathen wisdom, he spoke of the Pagan ages as "the times of ignorance" (Acts xvii. 30); and found in this want of knowledge a measure of excuse. But the ignorance he censures is not of the understanding alone; nor is it curable by philosophy and science. It has an intrinsic ground,--"existing _in_ them."