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Since the Jews, by this time, through the medium of the pure Persian doctrine, recognized in their Jehovah, not simply the greatest of all national deities, but GOD; and since they could, the more readily find Him and indicate Him to others in their sacred writings, inasmuch as He was really in them; and since they manifested as great an aversion for sensuous representations, or at all events, were instructed in these Scriptures, to have an aversion to them as great as the Persians had always felt; what wonder that they found favor in the eyes of Cyrus, with a Divine Worship which he recognized as being, no doubt, far below pure Sabeism, but yet far above the rude idolatries which in its stead had taken possession of the forsaken land of the Jews.
The right of private judgment, which our ancestors wrung from the church, remains to be claimed from this dictator of our habits. Or, as before said, to free us from these idolatries and superstitious conformities, there has still to come a protestanism in social usages. Parallel, therefore, as is the change to be wrought out, it seems not improbable that it may be wrought out in an analogous way.
And the result is to show that it was negative rather than positive; that the regulations of the Mosaic Code were directed to preventing the people from returning to Egypt and its idolatries by suppressing all reference to Egyptian beliefs and customs, and silently contradicting its ideas and practices.
The church of the island had risen near the foundations of the Pagan temple, and a Christian emanation from the former might be wrathfully torturing him through the very false gods to whom he had devoted himself both in his craft, like Demetrius of Ephesus, and in his heart. Perhaps Divine punishment for his idolatries had come.
Potiphar says that may be all very true, but he knows perfectly well that he has a hankering for artificial flowers, and that, for his part, he prefers the Doctor to any preacher he ever heard "because," he says, "I can go quietly to sleep, confident that he will say nothing that might not be preached from every well-regulated pulpit; whereas, if we should let Cream Cheese into the desk, I should have to keep awake to be on the look-out for some of these new-fangled idolatries: and, Polly Potiphar, I, for one, am determined to have nothing to do with the Scarlet Woman."
The "Virtues" were elevated into beings to whom disobedience could be punished as a crime, and the superstitious fears which run so often into mischievous idolatries were enlisted with conscience in the direct service of right action. On the same principle the Romans chose the heroes and heroines of their national history.
"What, sir!" cried my father, "don't you see that from those irruptions on demoralized Rome came the regeneration of manhood, the re-baptism of earth from the last soils of paganism, and the remote origin of whatever of Christianity yet exists free from the idolatries with which Rome contaminated the faith?" Squills held up his hands and made a splutter. Down came Charlemagne, paladins and all!
Yet had that leader rescued his brethren in spite of themselves; nor had he shrunk from making terrible examples of those who contemned the proffered freedom, and pined for the fleshpots, the taskmasters, and the idolatries of Egypt. The object of the warlike saints who surrounded Cromwell was the settlement of a free and pious commonwealth.
And wherever we look with adequate knowledge over the many idolatries of English life, we see similar processes at work on character.
How unsatisfactory and mournful the friendship between Voltaire and Frederic the Great, with all their brilliant qualities and mutual flatteries! How unmeaning would have been a friendship between Chesterfield and Dr. Johnson, even had the latter stooped to all the arts of sycophancy! The world can only inspire its votaries with its own idolatries. Whatever is born of vanity will end in vanity.
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