As if animated by the word of benediction, he returns to denounce "the abominable thing which God hateth" with still more terrible explicitness. [Sidenote: Ver. 26.] =For this reason,= because of their preference of the worse to the infinite Good, =God gave them up to passions of degradation;= He handed them over, self-bound, to the helpless slavery of lust; to "_passions_," eloquent word, which indicates how the man who _will_ have his own way is all the while a "sufferer," though by his own fault; _the victim_ of a mastery which he has conjured from the deep of sin.
Shall we shun to read, to render, the words which follow? We will not comment and expound. May the presence of God in our hearts, hearts otherwise as vulnerable as those of the old pagan sinners, sweep from the springs of thought and will all horrible curiosity. But if it does so it will leave us the more able, in humility, in tears, in fear, to hear the facts of this stern indictment. It will bid us listen as those who are not sitting in judgment on paganism, but standing beside the accused and sentenced, to confess that we too share the fall, and stand, if we stand, by grace alone. Aye, and we shall remember that if an Apostle thus tore the rags from the spots of the Black Death of ancient morals, he would have been even less merciful, if possible, over the like symptoms lurking still in modern Christendom, and found sometimes upon its surface.
Terrible, indeed, is the prosaic coolness with which vices now called unnameable are named and narrated in classical literature; and we ask in vain for one of even the noblest of the pagan moralists who has spoken of such sins with anything like adequate horror. Such speech, and such silence, has been almost impossible since the Gospel was felt in civilization. "Paganism," says Dr F. W. Farrar, in a powerful passage,[15] with this paragraph of Romans in his view, "is protected from complete exposure by the enormity of its own vices. To shew the divine reformation wrought by Christianity it must suffice that once for all the Apostle of the Gentiles seized heathenism by the hair, and branded indelibly on her forehead the stigma of her shame." Yet the vices of the old time are not altogether an antiquarian's wonder. Now as truly as then man is awfully accessible to the worst solicitations the moment he trusts himself away from God. And this needs indeed to be remembered in a stage of thought and of society whose cynicism, and whose materialism, show gloomy signs of likeness to those last days of the old degenerate world in which St Paul looked round him, and spoke out the things he saw.
=For their females perverted the natural use to the unnatural.= [Sidenote: Ver. 27.] =So too the males, leaving the natural use of the female, burst out aflame in their craving towards one another, males in males working out their unseemliness--and duly getting (ἀπολαμβάνοντες) in themselves that recompense of their error which was owed them.=
[Sidenote: Ver. 28.] =And as they did not approve of keeping God in their moral knowledge,[16] God gave them up to an abandoned mind,= "_a reprobate, God-rejected, mind_"; meeting their _disapprobation_ with His just and fatal _reprobation_ (δοκιμάζειν, ἀδόκιμος). That _mind_, taking the false premisses of the Tempter, and reasoning from them to establish the autocracy of self, led with terrible certainty and success through evil thinking to evil doing; =to do the deeds which are not becoming,= to _expose_ the being made for God, in a naked and foul _unseemliness_, to its friends and its foes; [Sidenote: Ver. 29.] =filled full of all unrighteousness, wickedness, viciousness, greed; brimming with envy, murder, guile, ill-nature; whisperers,= [Sidenote: Ver. 30.] =defamers, repulsive to God, outragers, prideful, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,= [Sidenote: Ver. 31.] =senseless, faithless, loveless, truceless, pitiless; people who (οἵτινες) morally aware of (ἐπυγνόντες) God's ordinance, that they who practise such things are worthy of death, not only do them, but assent and consent with those who practise them.=