idols,--possessing eternal power and supremacy ([Greek: theotaes])
immediately emerges in his consciousness. The instant the missionary
takes this lustful idolater away from the circle of his idols, and brings
him face to face with the heavens and the earth, as Napoleon brought his
captains, the constitutional idea dawns again, and the pagan trembles
before the unseen Power.[1]

But it will be objected that it is a very dim, and inadequate idea of the
Deity that thus rises in the pagan's mind, and that therefore the
apostle's affirmation that he is "without excuse" for being an idolater
and a sensualist requires some qualification. This imbruted creature,
says the objector, does not possess the metaphysical conception of God as
a Spirit, and of all his various attributes and qualities, like the
dweller in Christendom. How then can he be brought in guilty before the
same eternal bar, and be condemned to the same eternal punishment, with
the nominal Christian? The answer is plain, and decisive, and derivable
out of the apostle's own statements. In order to establish the guiltiness
of a rational creature before the bar of justice, it is not necessary to
show that he has lived in the seventh heavens, and under a blaze of moral
intelligence like that of the archangel Gabriel. It is only necessary to
show that he has enjoyed _some_ degree of moral light, and that he _has
not lived up to it_. Any creature who knows more than he practises is a
guilty creature. If the light in the pagan's intellect concerning God and
the moral law, small though it be, is yet actually in advance of the
inclination and affections of his heart and the actions of his life, he
deserves to be punished, like any and every other creature, under the
Divine government, of whom the same thing is true. Grades of knowledge
vary indefinitely. No two men upon the planet, no two men in Christendom,
possess precisely the same degree of moral intelligence. There are men
walking the streets of this city to-day, under the full light of the