church is and must be the church militant, and carry on the war against the world, whatever shape it may assume. With the ancient Gentiles the world rather perverted and corrupted the truth than absolutely rejected it, and fell into idolatry and superstition rather than into absolute atheism. The Epicureans were, indeed, virtually atheists, but they never constituted the great body of any Gentile nation. The heathen generally retained a dim and shadowy belief in the divinity, even in the unity of God; but they lost the conception of him as creator, and consequently of man and the universe as his creature. By substituting in their philosophy generation, emanation, or formation for creation, they obscured the sense of man's dependence on God as creator, and consequently destroyed the necessary relation between religion and morality. No moral ideas entered into their worship, and they worshipped the gods to whom they erected temples and made offerings, not from a sense of duty or from the moral obligation of the creature to adore his Creator and give himself to him, but from motives of interest, to avert their displeasure, appease their wrath, or to render them propitious to their undertakings, whether private enterprises or public war and conquest. They asserted for man and society independence of the divine order as a moral order. Severed from all moral conceptions, their religion became a degraded and degrading superstition, an intolerable burden to the soul, and their worship the embodiment of impurity and corruption. Such was the effect of the great Gentile apostasy, or Gentile attempt to realize the freedom and independence promised by Satan. The promise proved a lie.