and prayers, and that
is all. The worshipper at the temple may be a tyrant at home, a
profligate in the city, a bad man everywhere, and yet none the less a
true worshipper. May God save the religion of Christ from such
corruption! Yet is the beginning to be discerned. A decline has already
begun. Rank and power are already sought with an insane ambition, even
by ministers of Christ. They are seeking to transfer to Christianity the
same outward splendor, and the same gilded trappings, which, in the
rites and ceremonies of the popular faith, they see so to subdue the
imagination, and lead men captive. Hence, Piso and Demetrius, the golden
chair of Felix, and his robes of audience, on which there is more gold,
as I believe, than would gild all these cups and pitchers; hence, too,
the finery of the table, the picture behind it, and, in some churches,
the statues of Christ, of Paul, and Peter. These golden vessels for the
supper of Christ's love, I can forgive--I can welcome them--but in the
rest that has come, and is coming, I see signs of danger.'

'But, most excellent Probus,' said the younger Demetrius, 'I like not
to hear the arts assailed and represented dangerous. I have just been
telling Piso, that you are a people to be respected, for you were
beginning to honor the arts. Yet here now you are denouncing them. But,
let me ask, what harm could it do any good man among you, to come and
look at this figure of Apollo, or a statue of your Paul or Peter, as you
name them--supposing they were just men and benefactors of their race?'

'There ought to be none,' Probus replied. 'It ought to be a source of
innocent pleasure, if not of wholesome instruction, to gaze upon the
imitated form of a good man--of a reformer, a benefactor, a prophet. But
man is so prone to religion,--it is an honorable instinct--that you can
scarce place before him an object of reverence but he will straightway
worship it. What were your gods but once men, first revered, then
worshipped, and now their stone images deemed to be the very gods
themselves? Thus the original idea--the effect, we may believe, of an
early revelation--of one supreme Deity has been almost lost out of the
world. Let the figure of Christ be everywhere set before the people in
stone or metal, and, what with the natural tendency of the mind to
idolatry, and the force of example in the common religion, I fear it
would not be long before he, whom we now revere as a prophet, would soo