^ When the populace of Paris adorned the statue of Stras- bourg with immortelles, none, even the simplest of the pious decorators, would suppose that the city of Strasbourg itself, or any spirit or ghost of the city, was actually there, sitting in the Place de la Concorde. The figure was delightful to them as a visible nucleus for their fond thoughts about Strasbourg; but never for a moment supposed to he Strasbourg.
Similarly, they might have taken delight in a statue pur- porting to represent a river instead of a city, — the Ehine, or Garonne, suppose, — and have been touched with strong emotion in looking at it, if the real river were dear to them, and yet never think for an instant that the statue was the river.
And yet again, similarly, but much more distinctly, they might take delight in the beautiful image of a god, because it gathered and perpetuated their thoughts about that god ; and yet never suppose, nor be capable of being deceived by any argu- ments into supposing, that the statue was the god.
On the other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably lay it aside in some, to him, sacred place, and believe
I JOHN V. 21 409
the stone itself to be a kind of god, and offer prayer and sacrifice to it.
In like manner, any other strange or terrifying object, such, for instance, as a powerfully noxious animal or plant, he would be apt to regard in the same way ; and very possibly also construct for himself frightful idols of some kind, calculated to produce upon him a vague impression of their being alive; whose imaginary anger he might deprecate or avert with sacrifice, although incapable of conceiving in them any one attribute of exalted intellectual or moral nature.^
2. Man must have a God, and when he loses the vision of the true God, he makes a God for himself. The making of idols is an attempt to find God, and God is always built up out of the imagination, and according to the pattern of the builder himself. Every idol is the result of a conception of God which is the magnified personal self -consciousness of the man who creates his idoL Or to put it in another form, idolatry is self-projection. First man imagines his God, and the God he imagines is himself enlarged. "Eyes have they, noses have they, hands have they, feet have they." The Psalmist in those words took the physical facts, and showed how man in making a God projects his own personality ; and calls that magnified personality God. It is seen at once that the result is magnified failure, intensified evil. So all human conditions which are evil, being active in the thinking of the man who would construct his deity, are to be found intensified in that deity. To go back to the Old Testament, we have Baal, Molech, and all the evil deities. What are they but the evil things of humanity magnified ? And so everywhere we find that men have made idols according to their own understanding.
Dear God and Father of us all Forgive our faith in cruel lies. Forgive the blindness that denies.
Forgive Thy creature, when he takes For the all-perfect love Thou art Some grim creation of his heart.
Cast down our idols; overturn Our bloody altars : let us see Thyself in Thy humanity.
^ Ruskin, Aralra Pentelici ( Works, xx. 229).
4IO THE PERIL OF IDOLATRY
3. The whole history of the Jews, of which the Bible is the record, is one long warning and protest against idolatry. Abraham became the father of the faithful because he obeyed the call of God to abandon the idols which his fathers had worshipped beyond the Euphrates. Jacob made his family bury under the Terebinth of Shechem their Syrian amulets and Syrian gods. But Israel was constantly starting aside into idolatry like a broken bow. Even in the wilderness they took up the tabernacle of Molech, and the star of their god Eemphan, idols which they had made to worship. Even under the burning crags of Sinai, " they made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image " ; and for centuries afterwards the apostate kings of northern Israel doubled that sin in Dan and Bethel.
The seven servitudes of the Book of Judges were the ap- propriate retribution for seven apostasies. From Solomon to Manasseh, king after king, even of Judah, forsook Jehovah. Then came the crashing blow of the Exile, the utter ruin of every hope of domination or of independence. The agony of being thus torn from their temple and their home and the land they loved cured them forever of material idolatry ; but they fell headlong into another and subtler idolatry — the idolatry of forms and ceremonies, the idolatry of the dead letter of their law. Pharisaism was only a new idolatry, and it was, in some respects, more dangerous than the old. It was more dangerous because more self-satisfied, more hopelessly impenitent ; more dangerous because, being idolatry, it passed itself off as the perfection of faithful worship. Hence it plunged them into a yet deadlier iniquity. Baal worshippers had murdered the Prophets; Pharisees crucified the Lord of Life.