4. And is it not a fine business, to talk of seeing the " face of God," which shone forth in Christ, in a carved image, or a painted figure ? Is not this to confess plainly that your images are teachers of lies ?
5. Your logic is like your divinity. Inartificial argument or testimony you use none in this place, and I desire you would draw your dis- course into a syllogism : " ' Christ is the brightness of the glory of God; God shows us his face in him:' therefore we ought to make images of wood and stone, carved and painted, and set them up in
THE WORSHIP OF IMAGES. 453
cluirclies to be adored/' "Ovif Un ds7^ar, And hereby you may also discern what is to be judged of your defence of what you had affirmed in your " Fiat/' — namely, " That we had a command that we should liave images, and a command that we shovild not have images;" which I never imagined that you would put upon a various lection of the text, and thought it sufficient to manifest your failing to intimate unto you the express preciseness of the prohibition, with which your fancied command for images is wholly inconsistent. God hath strictly forbidden us to make any image, either of himself or of any other person or thing, to adore or worship it, or to put it unto use purely religious: this is an everlasting rule of our obedience. His "own making of cherubims," and placing them in the most holy place, whilst the Judaical economy continued, gives us no dispensation as to the obedience which we owe to that command and rule whereby we must be judged at the last day.
Your last exception is laid against what I affirmed concerning the relation you fancy between the image and its prototype, whereby you would excuse the honour and worship which you give unto it, which I said is a mere effect of your oivn imagination. To which you reply, that, " speaking of a formal representation or relation, and not of the efficient cause of it, you cannot but wonder at this illogical assertion." But, sir, this your " formal representation or relation," which you fancy, must have an efficient cause, and hath so, — a real one if it be real, an imaginary one if it be fictitious, — and this I in- quired after ; and I think it is not illogical to affirm that the relation you pretend is fictitious, because it hath no cause but your own ima- gination, on which alone it depends. A divine institution constituting such a relation you have none, nor doth it ensue on the nature of the thing itself; for the carving of a stock into the likeness of a man gives it no such relation to this or that individual man, as that which is done unto the one should have any respect unto the other. But you add, " Is the picture made by the spectator's imagination to re- present this or that thing, or the imagination rather guided to it by the picture? By this rule of yours, the image of Caesar, did not my imagination help it, would no more represent a man than a mouse." But you quite mistake the matter. The relation you fancy includes two things: — First, that this image represents not a man in ge- neral, but this or that individual man in particular, and that exclu- sively to all others; for instance, Simon Peter, and not Simon Magus, who was a man no less than he or any other man whatever. Now, though herein the imagination may be assisted when it hath any certain grounds of discerning a particular likeness in an image unto one man when he was living more than to another, yet you in most of your images are destitute of any such assistance. You know not
454 A VINDICATION OF THE ANIilAD VERSIONS ON FIAT LUX.
at all that your images represent any thing peculiar in the persons whereof you pretend them to be the images; which sufficiently appears by the variety that is in the images whereby you represent the same person, even Christ himself, in several places : so that though every man in his right wits may conceive that an image is the image of a man and not of a mouse, yet that it should be the image of this or that man, of Christ himself or Peter, he hath no ground to imagine but what is suggested unto him by his imagination, directed by the circumstances of its place and title. When Clodius had thrust Cicero into banishment, to do him the greater spite he demolished his house, and dedicated it as a devoted place to their gods, setting up in it the image of the goddess Libertas. The orator, upon his return, in his Oration ad Pontifices for the recovery of his house, to overthrow this pretended dedication and devotion of it, pleads two things: — First, that the image pretended by Clodius to be the image of Libertas was indeed the image of a famous or rather infamous whore that lived at Tanager. Had this dedication passed, I wonder how this image could have had any relation unto Libertas but by virtue of the imagi- nation of its worshippers, when in very deed it was the image of a Tangrsean whore. And the same orator tells us of a famous painter, who, making the picture of Venus and her comjoanions for their temples, still drew them by some strumpet or other that he kept company withal. And whether you have not been so imposed upon sometimes or no I very much question ; in which case nothing but your imagination can free you from the worship of a quean when you aim your devotion another way. Again : he pleads that the de- dication of that image was not regularly religious, nor according to that institution which they esteemed divine; whence no sacredness in it could ensue. And want of institution Avhich may be so esteemed is that also which we object against your dedication of images; for, besides a relation to this or that individual person, — which, as I have showed, the most of your images have not, but what in your fancy you give unto them, which is natural or civil, — you fancy also a reli- gious relation, a sacred conjunction, between the image and prototype, so that the worship yielded to the one should redound to the other in a religious way. And this, I say, is also the product of your own fanc}^ If it be not, 1 pray, will you assign some other cause of it? for, to tell you the truth, excluding divine institution, which you have not, other I can think of none. And if you could pretend divine institution constituting a sacred relation between images and their protot}"pes, yet it would not presently follow that they were to bo worshipped, no, not supposing the prototypes themselves to be tbo proper objects of religious adoration, which as to the most of them you know we deny, unless you have also a command to warrant you :