[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.= Here is a terrible accusation of human life, and of the human heart; the more terrible because it is plainly meant to be, in a certain sense, inclusive, universal. We are not indeed compelled to think that the Apostle charges every human being with sins against nature, as if the whole earth were actually one vast City of the Plain. We need not take him to mean that every descendant of Adam is actually an undutiful child, or actually untrustworthy in a compact, or even actually a boaster, an ἀλαζὼν, a pretentious claimant of praise or credit which he knows he does not deserve. We may be sure that on the whole, in this lurid passage, charged less with condemnation than with "lamentation, and mourning, and woe," he is thinking mainly of the then state of heathen society in its worst developments. Yet we shall see, as the Epistle goes on, that all the while he is thinking not only of the sins of some men, but of the sin of man. He describes with this tremendous particularity the variegated symptoms of one disease--the corruption of man's heart; a disease everywhere present, everywhere deadly; limited in its manifestations by many circumstances and conditions, outward or within the man, but _in itself_ quite unlimited in its dreadful possibilities. What man is, as fallen, corrupted, gone from God, is shewn, in the teaching of St Paul, by what bad men are.