CONFERENCE I1í. 485 pliance may approve or condemn them. But this is far from asserting, that every man and woman in the heathen world has thewhole lawof God actually written in their hearts, or an actual knowledge of all the truths and duties necessary to religion and happiness. The most rade and barbarous creatures in America, may sometimes be awakened by nature and conscience to do a fewof the social duties of life, which are contained in the law, without supposing them to have found out all the necessaries of true religion : And they may also resist the dictates of their reason and conscience, so far as to condemn them justly, without the least probability of one in a thousand following the leadings of reason and conscience, in the enquiryand practice of the true religion, so far as to save them. And therefore it may be ob- served, that the apostlè does not say, that any shall be saved without the written law but that those who have sinned without it, shall perish without it : And though in some particular in- stances their consciences mayexcuse them as well as accuse them in others, yet in the whole of their practice he does not affirm their consciences will actually excuse anynf them. In the last place, I desire it to be considered, that the apostle couldnever suppose the brutish and barbarous part of the heathen world to have any proximate or practical sufficiency forreligion and salvation, or such capacities and advantages as were ever likely to attain that end, when the characters which he gives, even of the more polite nationsthrough whichhe travelled, are so exceeding dismal and desperate, so widelydistant from the knowledge, fear, and love of the true God, and so universally abandoned to gross errors, idolatry, and shameful vices, that they were without God, or atheists, and without hope in the world; Eph. ii. 12. In the first chapter to the Romans, which has been already cited, the wise men amongst them, who knew God,. did not like to retain God in their knowledge, theirfoolish heart was darkened, they were given over to a reprobate mind, they were filledwith all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, he. Backbiters, haters of God, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without °under- standing, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful ;. 2 Cor. iv. 4. Their minds are blinded by the God of this world, that is, the devil and his angels, whom manyof themworshipped as their gods. And in Eph. iv. 18. Having the understanding darkened, being alienatedfrom the life of God, through the igno- rance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; with many other expressions to the same purpose in his epistles. Let' it be observed here, that the people where this apostle preached, and to whom his letters are written, lie inGreece, or round about it, and were within the verge of that learning and politeness which from Greece diffused itself round the neighbour is h 3
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=