that almost all conceivable forms of immorality were brought to
imagination, most of them into experiment; and the greater number into
prevailing practice, in those nations: insomuch that the sated monarch
would have imposed as difficult a task on ingenuity in calling for the
invention of a new vice, as of a new pleasure. They would perhaps have
been nearly identical demands when he was the person to be pleased.

Such are some of the most obvious illustrations that the absence of
knowledge was a cause, and added in an unknown measure to the strength of
all other causes, of the excessive corruption in the heathen nations. And
if this depravity of a world of moral agents did not, contemplated simply
as a destruction of their _rectitude_, appear equivalent to the gravest
import of the terms "the people are destroyed," the _misery_ inseparable
from the depravity instantly comes in our view to complete their
verification.

We are aware that the wickedness and misery of the ancient world, as
asserted in illustration of the natural effect of estrangement from divine
truth, are apt to be regarded as of the order of topics which have
dwindled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated just because they
have often been repeated before; a sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up
wells. There is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose
conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as discarding the
greatest number of topics and arguments as obsolete or impertinent. It is
to be reckoned on that some of these, on hearing again the old maxims,
that a people without divine instruction must be a vicious one, and that a
vicious people must be an unhappy one,--and those maxims accompanied with
a description of the old pagan world as illustrative evidence,--will be
prompt to let forth their comments in some such strain as the
following:--"The state of the ancient heathens, thus brought upon us in