Hard by the temple of Mammon stands that of Belial. Their votaries mingle in the crowded amusements of the day and rub shoulders with each other. Aselgeia flaunts herself, wise observers tell us, with increasing boldness in the European capitals. Theatre and picture-gallery and novel pander to the desire of the eye and the lust of the flesh. The daily newspapers retail cases of divorce and hideous criminal trials with greater exactness than the debates of Parliament; and the appetite for this garbage grows by what it feeds upon. It is plain to see whereunto the decay of public decency and the revival of the animalism of pagan art and manners will grow, if it be not checked by a deepened Christian faith and feeling. _Past feeling_ says the apostle of the brazen impudicity of his time. The loss of the religious sense blunted all moral sensibility. The Greeks, by an early instinct of their language, had one word for _modesty_ and _reverence_, for self-respect and awe before the Divine. There is nothing more terrible than the loss of shame. When immodesty is no longer felt as an affront, when there fails to rise in the blood and burn upon the cheek the hot resentment of a wholesome nature against things that are foul, when we grow tolerant and familiar with their presence, we are far down the slopes of hell. It needs only the kindling of passion, or the removal of the checks of circumstance, to complete the descent. The pain that the sight of evil gives is a divine shield against it. Wearing this shield, the sinless Christ fought our battle, and bore the anguish of our sin. FOOTNOTES: [112] “The persons here denounced,” says Lightfoot on Phil. iii. 18, “are not the Judaizing teachers, but the antinomian reactionists.... The stress of Paul’s grief lies in the fact that they degraded the true doctrine of liberty, so as to minister to their profligate and worldly living.” Comp. 1 Peter iv. 3, 4; 2 Peter ii. 18-22. [113] Comp. Col. ii. 20-iii. 4; Gal. vi. 14, 15. [114] _Phæao_: § xxxv. [115] See p. 129. [116] “When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth, crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face” (Munro). [117] 1 Thess. iv. 5; 2 Thess. i. 8; Gal. iv. 8, 9. CHAPTER XX. _THE TWO HUMAN TYPES._ “But ye did not so learn the Christ; if so be that ye heard Him, and were taught in Him, even as truth is in Jesus: that ye put away, as concerning your former manner of life, the old man, which waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”--EPH. iv. 20-24.