ent and scalding tears. Isaiah is remarkable for attacking it
with raillery and sarcasm. He takes his readers into the idol workshop
and details the process of their manufacture. He shows us the workmen,
surrounded with their plates of metal and logs of wood, out of which
the god is to be fashioned, and busy with their files and planes,
their axes and hammers, putting together the helpless thing. The
idolmaker, he says, has a fine ash or oak or cedar-tree, and makes a
pretty idol with it; but with the same wood he lights his fire and
cooks his dinner--"He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part
thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast and is satisfied; yea, he
warmeth himself and saith, Aha, aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire;
and the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image; he
falleth down unto it and worshippeth it and prayeth unto it, and
saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god."

Closely associated with idolatry was Luxury. So successful to our
minds is the polemic of a prophet like Isaiah against idolatry that
the wonder to us is that it was ever necessary; and, indeed, there are
few things more puzzling to the ordinary reader of Scripture than the
constant lapses of the people of God into idolatry. How could they,
knowing the true God, exchange a worship so rational and elevated for
the worship of stocks and stones? The explanation is a simple but a
humiliating one. The worship of these foreign deities was accompanied
with sensual excesses, which appealed to the strongest elementary
passions of human nature. Feasts, dances and drunken orgies formed
part of the worship of Baal and the other Canaanite divinities.
Idolatry in Israel was never due to theoretic changes of opinion; it
was only the way in which an outbreak of laxity and luxury manifested
itself. Its equivalent in our day would be an excessive development of
the passion for amusement and excitement, destroying the dignity and
seriousness of life. The wealthy and fashionable classes led the way,
as they generally do in periods of moral retrogression; and the worst
symptom of all was when the womanhood of the country surrendered
itself to the prevailing tendencies. This last feature of degradation
had developed itself in Isaiah's day; and he attacks it with a strange
combination of humour and moral indignation: "Because the daughters of
Jerusalem are haughty, and walk with outstretched neck and wanton
eyes, walking and mincing as they