VII. RESULTS OF ITS NEGLECT, 1. To the individual: (I) an unloving spirit arising from a consciousness of disobedience to a command; (2) a habit of refusing to submit to positive injunctions, and, growing out of that, a hal1it of choosing which of God's ,commandments he will obey ; (3) a loss of religious op1,ortunities, and consequently a. gradual falling away from the habit of public worship, and therefore from the spiritual Jife; (4) a sense of being overwhelmed by the business and worries of life which con- tinue without cessation, and thence a want of calm peacefulness and cheerfulness. 2. To a nation: (1) growth of ungodliness and irreligion; (2) increase of self-indulgence and mere amusement-seeking ; (3) growing oppression of tae poor, who are made to '6erve the amusements or requirements of the rich instead of enjoying their weekly rest cand refreshment of body and mind and soul; (4) the displeasure of God, whose primeval law is disobeyed. Ver. 4.-Tbis verse contains the laws of piety and of faith. " Turn ye not unto idols,. forbids the worship of false gods; "nor make to yourselves molten gods" forbids in addi- tion the sin of worshipping the true God under the form of a molten shape. I. The great temptation to the Jews down to the time of their captivity appears to have been that of taking the gods of the nations round about them as their gods ; Baal Ashtoreth, Molech, Chemosh, drew off their affections from Jehovah. They did not desire apparently to give up the worship of God altogether, but to combine the worship of false gods with it, that is, to transfer a part of the religious affections which were due to God to some other object. This is done in the present day, (1) by the Roman Catholic Church, which sanctions the transference of worship which ought to be confined to God, from him to St. Mary and other saints; and the moral and .reli!!ious 0 reaard, 0 which is due to God alone, not only to saints, but to a living man, who has been ca lled the idol of the Vatican; (2) by worldly men, who occupy their thoughts and feeling to such an excessive degree with the things of sense as to shut out Divine and spiritual things; (3) by sophists, who, by the exercise of a subtle intellect in a presumptuous spirit, shut out God from their ken, and worship the universe, or humanity, or nothing. II. The Jews were also guilty of the kindred sin of worshipping Jehovah under the form of an idol. This was the sin of Aaron's calf, which represented, not any strange god, but Jehovah himself (Exod. xxxii. 6), and this was the case with Jeroboam's two .calves of gold (1 Kings xii. 26-33). This offence is committed by any Christians who adore a representation of the Deity, sculptured or painted, or any sign or symbol of him, of whatever material or appearance it may be. It is the sin of men ,or Churches which have faith to believe that there is a God, but so feeble a faith that ,they require visible symbols of his presence instead of bravely trusting in the Unseen. 'The Israelites said to .Aaron, "Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for ,this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what .is become of him." When they could not see Moses, the servant of God, they required a visible image of God. 'l'hey could not trust him unseen; they required proof of his nearness; and this craving of a feeble faith led them to prefer the symbol of "a calf ,that eateth hay" (Dent. iv. 15) to no similitude at all. "Other nations, surrounding the Jews on every side, had their visible objects of worship, making their tnsk of Divine .duty and faith more easy. But to acquiesce in their unseen God, I am; to obey with- -0ut immediate continual consciousness of his nearness; to trust in his protection at times when they had no sensible aid to help them to realize to their imagination bis .-power; to let loose, as it were, their prayers into the air, without having some repre- sentative figure, or emblem, at the least, at which to point them ;-nil this wns too difficult a task for a feeble faith in things invisible and spiritual n (Moberly, 'The Law .of the Love of God '). The same feebleness of faith has produced the worship of images in the Christian ,Church. It was not till the seventh century that they crept into use for aids in worship, and when they were approved in the eighth century by the second Council ol Nicea, that Council wns at once rejected, and its doctrine of images was repudiated by .ihe Council of Franltfort and the bishops of Charlemagne's empire. In like manner, a feeble faith craves for full light, for demonstration, for infallibility, .where God ha.a only given twilight moral_certainty, and an authority which is not abso- THE BOOK OF LEVITICUS. [cH, XII, 1--.'17.
}uto. It craves for immecliate resolution of spiritual ,lifficulties where God demands i. patient dealing with them ; it asks after a sign where no si"n is to be given• it seeks. out for itself mediators instead of going straight to Q.:id, " ' Not only does the use of images in worship arise from a feeble faith, but it mak«is. that faith fceb_ler and feebler, !nd thus l~ds to ~ateri:\lism. .After a while the symbol becomes substituted for the thing symbolized by 1t, and the affections which the emblem was intended to excite toward an unseen object, do not pallS beyond the external sign. Materialism and weakness of faith are the spiritual efi'ects of worshipping images anci craving after visible symbols. . " A brave contentment with an invisible God, showing itself in faithful and strong- hearted maintenance of piety in the absence (if it should so please God) or the- apparent scantiness of signs, tokens, miracles, and other visible indications of the presence and protection of the Omnipresent and Omnipotent, and a like courageous. and faithful abstinence from making to themselves unauthorized images, symbols, and, emblems of him who communicated with the people without similitude, must be the particular quality or part of Divine love enjoined under the second law, Th& peculiar affection enjoined is the brave, trusting, spiritual faith in God invisible, spiritual, absent to our sense, dim in his tokens, obscure sometimes in his providences, not demonstrable in his evidence~, not invariable in his benefits. . . . Possessed of this- spiritual faith in the Unseen, a man walks along his narrow path of life with a confidence,. security, and cheerfulness which establish at once his comfort and his safety" (Moberly, • The Law of the Love of God'). Vers. 9, 10.-The law of kindness ia a necessary complement to the other laws, to make u11 the perfect character. A stem, just man is not the Christian ideal. The- mercy and loving-kindness of God must be our model, as well as his other qualities. " The quality of mercy . . , is twice blessed ; It blesseth him that gives, and him that t1Lkes."