When This Last Barrier to Vice is Broken Down

[356 words] While recently reading from Moses Lard’s Commentary on Paul’s Letter to Romans, my attention was captured by a sentence from Lard on the following text: “There is no fear of God before their eyes” ( Romans  3:18). Among Lard’s comments on the preceding verse is this statement: “Where God is not feared, nothing else is; and when this last barrier to vice is broken down, sin comes in like a  flood” (emp. added).  Is there a sense in which the fear of God is the “last barrier to vice”? The voices of America’s Founders certainly resonate with this conclusion. George Washington, in his Farewell Address (1796) put it in the  form of a rhetorical question: “Let it be simply asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths…?” Daniel Dreisbach, in his fascinating book, Reading the Bible…