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During and after the Reformation this now popular festival had to bear a great deal of opposition, for authors and preachers alike agreed that it was a foolish feast, and led to superstition and idolatry. Hence the decree was issued, in the year 1622, that no cakes might be baked and no Kermis held, and even the children were forbidden to put out their shoes as they were accustomed to do.
At the time of the Reformation many valuable examples of Church plate were cast aside by order of the Commissioners, by which "all monuments of feyned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition," were to be destroyed.
Greg. Epist. lib. 9. He governed the kingdom of Kent fifty years, and dying in 616, left the succession to his son, Eadbald. This prince, seduced by a passion for his mother-in-law, deserted for some time the Christian faith, which permitted not these incestuous marriages: his whole people immediately returned with him to idolatry.
But we may be sure of this, that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage, in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. The controversy about Pope and the opposite school in our own poetry comes to much the same thing.
And this is said with a curious air of cynical superiority, as of one who has experienced all these things and is superbly tolerant of the shallow mind that can still admire Tusitala. For these artists, each in his due place, we have only the most genial respect. But when the passion of our youth is impugned as "idolatry" we feel in our spirit an intense weariness.
Though all this were true, yet forasmuch as they have been abused by the Papists unto idolatry and superstition, and are monuments of Popery, the trophies of Antichrist, and the relics of Rome’s whorish bravery,—they must be granted, at least for this respect, to be more than manifest appearances of evil, and so scandalous.
Those gifts were very useful at that day, and in that city, which was filled with idolatry, and almost the headquarters of paganism; but to the possessor they were of less value than Christian graces "Covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way" Namely, the charity described in the following chapter, of which we have been treating above.
It must be borne in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees, "presumptuous sabbath-breaking," and cursing or smiting one's parents.
The stage of civilisation partly accounts for the strange fascination of idolatry over the Israelites.
Utilitarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry of the flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, are they to be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors of our race? I do not believe it. The ideal of humanity is something different and higher.
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