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kind worshipped and served the creature more than the 
Creator, would not so much appear to indicate utter apostasy 
from the worship of God, as a confusion of that worship with 
idolatry, and might seem to favour the notion that, although 
the truth of God was changed into a lie, the lie and the truth 
became so commingled, that the latter, proving imperishable, 
might be eliminated in the course of ages, and that Moses, 
the Prophets, and the Apostles might gradually recover, and 
work it up again into a slowly developing system of religion, 
latterly shaped into Christianity, perhaps to ripen hereafter 
into something yet more perfect. 
But a glance on the original text of the passage I have 
quoted shows that it cannot so be understood. It does not 
represent humanity as in divided allegiance between the Crea- 
tor and the creature, but in a state of apostasy from the 
truth, lost and blinded with the lie. The words are these : — 
MEr/jXXci^av tj)v aX/;0etav tov Oeov tv rqt \ptvSti, kcu tcrefiaaOiiaav 
kuX tXurptvaav Trj KTiati 7rapa rbv Kriaavra. 
They changed the truth of God into the lie, and they wor- 
shipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. The 
construction of the words is exactly the same as irapa <j>\miv, 
against nature, a little farther on. The passage is so under- 
stood by critics generally, and is closely rendered by the Vul- 
gate potius quam Creatori. Utter opposition rather than par- 
tial desertion is the idea which St. Paul must have intended to 
convey ; he has conveyed it very distinctly. My object is to 
show that his language perfectly agrees with the history of 
the case, for that the generation to which reference is made 
worshipped the creature rather than the Creator. 
Moses records evidence of the forgetfulness of God, whereof 
St. Paul speaks, and it can only bo concluded from the text 
of Moses that, with the death of Abel, divine worship ceased, 
and was not resumed until after the birth of Enos. “ Then it 
was begun (brqn tn) to call upon the name of the Lord ” (Gen. 
iv. 26, v. 3-7). T Doubtless there continued, from the first, 
some tradition of the One True God, but so far as is anywhere 
apparent, it was limited to a few, and not uninterrupted in its 
current. It is not found to have been incorporated with any 
of the cosmogonies. Systems of polytheism were framed ; 
and in the great nations of earliest antiquity there is not 
discovered any recognition of His existence, however the rare 
tradition may have been cherished by a few faithful ones. 
By the True God is not merely meant a first, or a greatest; 
not some one supreme doity by others inferior to itself; not a 
Baal, with his wifo Beltis, and they rejoicing in a growing 
family of gods; not the chief Son of an inferior father, a 
