In vanity of mind and darkness of reasoning men stumble onwards to the end of life, to the end of time. The world’s wisdom and the lessons of its history give no hope of any real advance from darkness to light until, as Plato said, “We are able more safely and securely to make our journey, borne on some firmer vehicle, on some Divine word.”[114] Such a vehicle those who believe in Christ have found in His teaching. The moral progress of the Christian ages is due to its guidance. And that moral progress has created the conditions and given the stimulus to which our material and scientific progress is due. Spiritual life gives permanence and value to all man’s acquisitions. Both of this world and of that to come “godliness holds the promise.” We are only beginning to learn how much was meant when Jesus Christ announced Himself as “the light of the world.” He brought into the world a light which was to shine through all the realms of human life. II. The delusion of mind in which the nations walked, resulted in a settled state of _estrangement from God_. They were “alienated from the life of God.” “Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,” St Paul said in chapter ii. 12,[115] using, as he does here, the Greek perfect participle, which denotes an abiding fact. These two alienations generally coincide. Outside the religious community, we are outside the religious life. This expression gathers to a point what was said in verses 11, 12 of chapter ii., and further back in verses 1-3; it discloses the spring of the soul’s malady and decay in its separation from the living God. When shall we learn that in God only is our life? We may exist without God, as a tree cast out in the desert, or a body wasting in the grave; but that is not _life_. Everywhere the apostle moved amongst men who seemed to him dead--joyless, empty-hearted, weary of an idle learning or lost in sullen ignorance, caring only to eat and drink till they should die like the beasts. Their so-called gods were phantasms of the Divine, in which the wiser of them scarcely even pretended to believe. The ancient natural pieties--not wholly untouched by the Spirit of God, despite their idolatry--that peopled with fair fancies the Grecian shores and skies, and taught the sturdy Roman his manfulness and hallowed his love of home and city, were all but extinguished. Death was at the heart of Pagan religion; corruption in its breath. Few indeed were those who believed in the existence of a wise and righteous Power behind the veil of sense. The Roman augurs laughed at their own auspices; the priests made a traffic of their temple ceremonies. Sorcery of all kinds was rife, as rife as scepticism. The most fashionable rites of the day were the gloomy and revolting mysteries imported from Egypt and Syria. A hundred years before, the Roman poet Lucretius expressed, with his burning indignation, the disposition of earnest and high-minded men towards the creeds of the later classic times:--