ping 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 other. 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 mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish,
while his heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and
avoid