ject of adoration to the senses.

The higher and more subtle idolatries do not conceive that wood or gold
is actually transformed into their deities; but only that the deities
are locally present in the images, which express their attributes--power
in a hundred hands, beneficence in a hundred breasts. But in thus
expressing, they degrade and cramp the conception.

They may perhaps evade the reproach of Isaiah that they warm themselves
with a portion of timber, and roast meat with another portion, and make
the remainder a god (Isa. xliv. 15-17), by urging that the timber is not
the god, but an abode which he chooses because it expresses his specific
qualities. But they cannot evade the reproach of St. Paul, that being
ourselves the offspring of God, we ought not to compare Him to the
workmanship of our hands, graven with art and man's device (Acts xvii.
29).

A truly spiritual worship is intellectually as well as morally the most
elevating exercise of the soul, which it leads onward and upward, making
of all that it knows and thinks a vestibule, beyond which lie higher
knowledge and deeper feeling as yet unattained.

Why is Gothic architecture better adapted for religious buildings than
any Grecian or Oriental style? Because its long aisles, vaulted roofs
and pointed arches, leading the vision up to the unseen, tell of
mystery, and draw the mind away beyond the visible and concrete to
something greater which it hints; while rounded arches and definite
proportions shut in at once the vision and the mind. The difference is
the same as between poetry and logic.

And so it is with worship. We fetter and cramp our thoughts of deity
when we bind them to even the loftiest conceptions which have ever been
shut up in marble or upon canvas. The best image that ever took shape is
inferior to the poorest spiritual conception of God, in this respect if
in no other--that it has no expansiveness, it cannot grow. And in
connecting our prayers with it, we virtually say, 'This satisfies my
conception of God.'

It is not to be condemned merely as inadequate, for so are all our
highest thoughts of deity; nor only because average humanity (which is
supposed to stand most in need of the help and suggestion of art) will
never learn the fine distinctions by which subtle intellects withhold
from the image itself the worship which it evokes, and which goes out in
its direction. It is still more mischievous because, even for the
trained the