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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, 22 and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing 23 themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible mau, and of birds, aud four- footed beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be Senseless, or, ' without understanding,' as the word is translated in ver. 31.?Heart. Here. as so often in the Bible, this refers to the whole inuer man.?Was darkened. (Comp. Eph. 4 : 18.) This is the culmination of the process: not worshipping and thanking God, although they knew Him, they became vain in their reasonings; this made their heart senseless, and thus it was darkened, deprived of the truth which it might have had (formerly had) from the light of nature. Ver. 22. Professing themselves to be wise. While (not, because) they professed themselves to be wise. This has reference, not to heathen philosophers, but to the conceit of wisdom which lay back of heathenism itself.?They became fools. ' It is not merely that they expose their real folly, but that folly is itself j udicially inflicted by God as a punishment for the first step of declension from Him.' (Sanday.) Their folly was manifested in their idolatry. ' For heathenism is not the primeval religion, from which man migh( gradually have risen to the knowledge of the true God, but is,on the contrary, the result of a falling away from the known original revelation of the true God in His works.' (Meyer.) Ver. 23. And changed. Comp. the strikingly similar passage, Ps. 106: 20. 'Exchanged' is the meaning, as in ver. 25, where, however, a stronger word is used.?The glory, etc. God's majesty, perfection, e...