Chap. II.]

DUTY OF REVERENCING GOD.

71

indeed, did their understandings become, by reason of their re-jecting the knowledge of God, that although they professed them-selves to be wise, they were guilty of the foolishness of changingthe glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like tocorruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creep-ing things; and moreover, of changing the truth of God into alie, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the Crea-tor, who is blessed for ever. It was for this, that God gave themup to unnatural lusts and every species of vile affections. Grow-ing worse and worse, “ as they did not like to retain God in theirknowledge,” (v. 28,) “he gave them over to a reprobate mind,”and, after their hardness and impenitent hearts, to treasure upwrath to themselves against the day of wrath and the revelation ofthe righteous judgment of God.* To prevent a declension to theways of vice and the depths of sin so fatal, and to keep up inmen’s minds that strong conviction and deep sense of God ,which is the root and branch of practical morals, and which theScriptures call faith in him, we must rely on the conscientiousperformance of the duties which spring from the relation whichwe sustain to him ; which duties are now to be examined andunfolded.

CHAPTER II.

THE GENERAL DUTY OF REVERENCING GOD.

When submitted to a careful and exact analysis, reverence forthe Deity comprises a deep sense of our own insignificance, —of his divine majesty, his incomprehensible nature, his eternalexistence, knowing equally no beginning and no end ; of hisAlmighty power, to which all things are equally easy, and inwhose operations all degrees of facility , whether in the creationof a world or of an atom, are unknown ; of our ignorance, and ofhis omniscience and divine wisdom, unsearchable and past finding

Rom. ii. 5.