Colossians 1:21

And you, being in time past alienated and enemies in your mind in your evil works.

In one of the most perceptive statements read in many a day, Hendriksen observed that:

This state of estrangement, moreover, was not due to ignorance or innocence. There are no innocent heathen! On the contrary, they were estranged and hostile in disposition. It was their own fault that they had been and had remained for so long a time "far off," for they had actually hated God!"[49]

This is the truth that was hidden from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophical father of the Romantic movement in literature and thought. It was he, according to Will and Ariel Durant, "who had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of the eighteenth century."[50] And it was he who filled the people's minds with the garbage relative to "natural man," "the noble savage," and the totally uninhibited human animal. Here in the sparkling words of an apostle is revealed the truth about natural man" or the "noble pagan." Paul described him as the end-result of devolution downward from a prior state of having known God and then having fallen away from it.