dreds of years, have drunk in Bible thoughts, as it were, with our
mother's milk; till much that we have really learnt from the Bible we
take as a matter of course, as self-evident truths which we have found
out for ourselves by common sense.

And yet, so far from that being the case, if it had not been for the
Bible, we might be believing at this moment, that one god made one tree,
and another another; that one tree was sacred to one god, and another
flower to another goddess, as the old Greeks believed; and that the wheat
and barley were the gift, and therefore the property, of some special
deity; and be crying now in fear and trembling to the sun-god, or the
rain-god, or some other deified power of nature, because we fancied that
they were angry with us, and had therefore sent us too much rain and a
short harvest.

It is difficult, now-a-days, to make even cultivated people understand
the follies of those who, like the heathen round the Jews, worshipped
many gods: and all the more because our modern folly runs in a different
channel; because we are tempted, not to believe in many gods, but in no
God at all; to believe not that one god made one thing and another
another, but that all things have made themselves.

When Hiram, king of Tyre, sent down timber cut from the cedars of
Lebanon, to build the temple of God for Solomon; his heathen workmen,
probably, were angry and terrified at what they were doing. They said
among themselves--"These cedars belong to Baal, or to Melkart, the gods
of Tyre. Our king has no right to send them to build the temple of
Jehovah, the God of the Jews. It is a robbery, and a sacrilege; and Baal
will be angry with us; and curse us with drought and blight."

But now-a-days men say--"The cedars of Lebanon are not God's trees, nor
are any other trees. They belong to nature." Now I believe in nature no
more than I do in Baal. Nature is merely things--a great many things it
is true, but only things--and when I add them all up together, and call
them nature, as if they were one thing, I make an abstraction of them.
There is no harm in that: but if I treat that abstraction as if it really
existed, and did anything, then I make of it an idol, the which I have no
mind to do. I believe, I say, in nature no more than I do in Baal. Both
words were at first symbols; and both have become in due course of time
mere idols. But those who worship nature and not God, say now--God did
not make tree