46 The Fundamentals splendid Pantheons there were lords many and gods many— gods of painting and statuary, of poetry and eloquence, of war and revenge, of drunkenness and lust, but no true, holy and living God. And when the polished Paul preached unto the wise men of Athens Jesus and the resurrection, they told him that he was a babbler, and a setter forth of strange gods. The men of this civilization worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator; and for this cause God gave them up to vile and unnatural lusts and passions; they were filled with unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covet ousness, murder, deceit, malignity—without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful. The unutterable vileness of this god less wisdom is apparent in the fact that even now there are rooms in some of its buried and exhumed cities, into which no female is ever allowed to enter. “And so this ancient society perished of its own inherent rottenness. Its enormous, all pervading, universal vice sapped the foundation of virtue. The mass was corrupt to its very core. Its strength perished by the mere exhaustion of its vices.” Godlessness and vice, irreligion and immorality, went hand in hand, as they always do, until the people, having lost all knowledge of God, lost also all shame and virtue; and this splendid civilization of this old world perished of its own hopeless and helpless corruption. The less the people knew of God, the viler and more debased did they become. MODERN WISDOM’S FAILURE TO FIND GOD The world of our day claims to have grown greatly wiser in the last nineteen centuries, but still it knows not God; nor will it, apart from His Word and His Son, ever know Him. King out the old battle-cry, the foolishness of God is wiser than men; this conflict will never cease; perish the craven, who having undertaken to fight for Jehovah and His Christ, is appalled at the war drums of the enemy. Let the godless
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