estant Church by
a gulf across which we must not look to our fellow-Christians but with
utter reprobation and disdain. The Church of Rome does indeed
distinctively violate the _second_ commandment; but the true force and
weight of the sin of idolatry are in the violation of the first, of
which we are all of us guilty, in probably a very equal degree,
considered only as members of this or that communion, and not as
Christians or unbelievers. Idolatry is, both literally and verily, not
the mere bowing down before sculptures, but the serving or becoming the
slave of any images or imaginations which stand between us and God, and
it is otherwise expressed in Scripture as "walking after the
_Imagination_" of our own hearts. And observe also that while, at least
on one occasion, we find in the Bible an indulgence granted to the mere
external and literal violation of the second commandment, "When I bow
myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this
thing," we find no indulgence in any instance, or in the slightest
degree, granted to "covetousness, which is idolatry" (Col. iii. 5; no
casual association of terms, observe, but again energetically repeated
in Ephesians, v. 5, "No covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any
inheritance in the kingdom of Christ"); nor any to that denial of God,
idolatry in one of its most subtle forms, following so often on the
possession of that wealth against which Agur prayed so earnestly, "Give
me neither poverty nor riches, lest I be full and deny thee, and say,
'Who is the Lord?'"

And in this sense, which of us is not an idolater? Which of us has the
right, in the fulness of that better knowledge, in spite of which he
nevertheless is not yet separated from the service of this world, to
speak scornfully of any of his brethren, because, in a guiltless
ignorance, they have been accustomed to bow their knees before a statue?
Which of us shall say that there may not be a spiritual worship in their
apparent idolatry, or that there is not a spiritual idolatry in our own
apparent worship?

For indeed it is utterly impossible for one man to judge of the feeling
with which another bows down before an image. From that pure reverence
in which Sir Thomas Brown wrote, "I can dispense with my hat at the
sight of a cross, but not with a thought of my Redeemer," to the worst
superstition of the most ignorant Romanist, there is an infinite series
of subtle transitions; and the point where s