ich indeed belongs
to all Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is
the grand theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols
as the Divinity, is a thing they cannot away-with, but have to
denounce continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is the
chief of all the sins they see done under the sun. This is worth
noting. We will not enter here into the theological question about
Idolatry. Idol is _Eidolon_, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God,
but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether any the most
benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did
not think that the poor image his own hands had made _was_ God; but
that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or another.
And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a
worship by Symbols, by _eidola_, or things seen? Whether _seen_,
rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye; or visible
only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: this
makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a
Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan
has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine
things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible
for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that
fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense _eidola_, things
seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:--we
may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only
_more_ idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? some fatal evil must lie in it, or
earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is
Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship
of those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the
Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was
not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of
him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that
worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was
superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a
kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is
still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless _divine_
beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever.
Why should the Prophet so merc