When the apostle says "without God _in the world_," this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that He has made, where His "eternal power and Godhead" have been visible from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86] To be without God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child, wandering in an empty, ruined house.
In these words we have an echo of Paul's preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, entitled _Obermann once more_, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.
"On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell."
The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: "Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more." Such were the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would prove less demoralizing. We are "saved by hope," said St Paul: we are ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of conduct.
Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ's teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,--and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.