1 Thessalonians 4:5 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

As the Gentiles, which know not God,— The idolatrous Gentiles in general, and those of Thessalonica in particular, were remarkable for their impurity; and how brutish and preternatural the vices of many in the heathen world were, and those not condemned, but practised in the world instances, by their philosophers, may be seen in numbers of ancient Greek and Latin authors. And were those philosophers the fit men to educate youth? to shew them the beauty of virtue, and the odiousness of vice?—The representations of the boundless and unnatural lusts which their own poets gave the heathens, even of their chief gods, were enough to encourage their votaries in the like enormities: nay, such monstrous obscenities became part of their religious worship, as Christian and chaste ears could not even bear to have mentioned. See Ephesians 5:12. What their satirists, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius have intimated, and what Suetonius has suggested, as to the emperors themselves, would make a modest person blush even to read or hear; and when the people, philosophers, emperors, and gods were such notorious offenders, how exact a picture has the Apostle drawn of the heathen world, in Romans 1:21-32.