A flood of ungodliness

But the wisdom of God was always foolishness with men. No wonder, then, that the great mystery of the gospel should now also be hidden from the wise and the prudent, as it was in the days of old. No wonder that it should be almost universally denied, ridiculed, and exploded, cast out as mere frenzy, and that all who still dare avow it are branded with the names of madmen and enthusiasts. This is that falling away which was to come, that general apostasy of all orders and degrees of men, which even now we find to have overspread the earth.

Run to and fro in the streets of Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man, a man who loves the Lord his God with all his heart and serves him with all his strength. How does our own land mourn, that we look no farther, under the overflowings of ungodliness? What villainies of every kind are committed day by day, yes, too often with impunity, by those who sin with a high hand, and glory in their shame? Who can reckon up the oaths, curses, profaneness, blasphemies, the lying, slandering, evil-speaking, the Sabbath-breaking, gluttony, drunkenness, revenge, the whoredoms, adulteries, and various uncleanness, the frauds, injustice, oppression, extortion, which overspread our land as a flood?

And even among those who have kept themselves pure from these grosser abominations, how much anger and pride, how much sloth and idleness, how much softness and effeminacy, how much luxury and self-indulgence, how much covetousness and ambition, how much thirst for praise, how much love of the world, how much fear of man, is to be found? Meanwhile, how little of true religion? For where is he who loves either God or his neighbor as God has given us commandment?

On the one hand are those who have not so much as the form of godliness. On the other, those who have the form only. There stands the open sepulcher, and there the painted sepulcher. So that in very deed, whoever looked earnestly at any public gathering of the people, and I fear those in our churches are not to be excepted, might easily perceive that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees. The one have almost as little concern about religion as if there were no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit. The other make it a mere lifeless form, a dull round of external performances, without either true faith, or the love of God, or joy in the Holy Ghost.