Page images
PDF
EPUB

and root them out? There could be no greater folly on the part of the Israelites than to venerate the gods of Egypt. If the gods whose aid the Egyptians invoked had been else than "vanity," the Hebrews had still been slaves; and yet so prone were they to idolatry, that they set up a golden calf at the very foot of Sinai. Again, the grass was hardly green on David's grave, when his son, forfeiting his title of the wisest of men, allowed himself to be seduced by heathen women to lend his countenance to heathen idolatry; the abomination of Moab stood in front of the temple, and Ashtaroth, enthroned on Olivet, looked down with haughty contempt on the courts of Zion. Again, when the kingdom was broken up through the insane folly of Rehoboam, see how the ten tribes, like a bark parted from her anchors, and borne by a strong tide on a fatal reef, drifted on idolatry. A few years suffice to engulf the whole nation into the deepest, grossest, paganism. Ere one half century has passed, Elijah stands alone; faithful among the faithless; he only by any public act protesting against the universal idolatry; he cries, I, even I only, am left. Thus rapidly, when abandoned by God to the power of their pas sions, do both men and nations sink. As the history of many still proves, nothing is so easy as the descent into hell. Then,

3. We find evidence of this propensity to idolatry even in the Christian church. We have not to rake up the ashes of Jewish history, nor disturb the graves of ancient Nimrods and Pharaohs, nor import their rude idols from Polynesian shores, to prove the deep longing that there is in our nature for a God whom our senses may embrace. How deeply has Christianity herself

suffered from this cause? Look to the church of Rome! Her temples are crowded with images. Fancy some old Roman, rising from his grave on the banks of the Tiber. Looking on the sensuous worship of modern Rome, the honors paid to a doll decked out to represent Christ's mother-multitudes prostrate at the feet of stone apostles-the incense and prayers offered to the lifeless effigy of a man, here hanging in weakness on a cross, or there sitting in triumph on the globe. where he sways a sceptre, and treads a serpent beneath his feet, what could he suppose but that the "eternal city" had changed her idols-nor ceased from her idolatry; and, by some strange turn of fortune, had given to one Jesus the old throne of Jupiter, and assigned the crown which Juno wore in his days to another queen of heaven? In that bestial form at the foot of Sinai, with the shameless, naked, frantic crowd singing and dancing and shouting around it, the scene which filled Moses with great indignation, strikes us with great astonishment. How, we ask, with God thundering above their heads, could they fall into such gross idolatry? And yet have we not stood astonished to see a rational creature bending head and knee to a tinselled image, amid circumstances, too, which made the act appear peculiarly surprising and degrading? There, the worship of a creature insulted the glory of God's grandest works; nor did Popery ever seem to us more hateful, more dishonoring, and more debasing, than amid scenes whose magnificence raised the soul to God, as on eagles' wings. There, a blind leader of the blind, she was turning away the faith, and love, and worship of his creatures from him whose voice was heard in the roar of the Alpine cataract, whose mighty hand was seen in mountains that stood piled to heaven,

crowned with their eternal snows, and of whose great white throne of judgment one fancied they saw a solemn image in that pure, lofty, majestic, snowy dome, which glistened in sunbeams, high over mountains and valleys already wrapped in evening gloom.

Now, in what way are we to account for this universal tendency to idolatry. It is not enough to call it folly. I ask, what led to such folly, and led all men to it?---philosophers with fools, the wisest with the weakest, of the heathen? It admits of but one explanation-the feeling from which idolatry springs are deeply rooted in our nature.

You tell me that God is invisible, infinite, incomprehensible. You teach me that neither in wood, nor stone, nor colors, nor even in my mind's fancy, may I impart to him form or figure; neither features to express his emotions, nor hands to do his work; neither eyes, although they beam, nor a heart, although it beat with love; and you warn me, moreover, that, even in imagination, to clothe the Divine Being in a form the most venerable and august, is to be guilty of a species of idolatry. But it seems as difficult for me to make such a being the object of my affections, as to grasp a sound, or to detain a shadow. This heart craves something more congenial to my nature, and seeks in God a palpable object for its affections to cling to. That is our want. And now see how that want is met by the gospel, and is provided for by him who "knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust."

Nothing appears to me more remarkable in providence, or more clearly to attest the being and attributes of an all-presiding God, than the perfect adaptation of creatures to the circumstances in which they are placed. See how the summer, that brings back the swallows

to our door, in myriads of insects produces their food; how those creatures that burrow in the soil have bodies shaped like a wedge, and fore-feet so formed as to do the work of a spade; how the animals that inhabit arctic climes are wrapped in furs. which man, for the sake of their warmth, is glad to borrow, and to which God, for the protection of their lives, has given the color of snow; how, furnished with hollow bones and downy feathers, birds are adapted to float in an atmosphere of thin transparent air; and how other creatures, slow of motion, and unarmed for battle, and thus helplessly exposed to their enemies, carry a strong castle on their backs-retiring within their shell, as men into a fortalice, safe from all attack. The student of nature thus recognizes, with adoring wonder, the harmony which God has established between his creatures and their circumstances. Now the divinity of our faith is not less conspicuous to the believer's eye, in respect of its perfect adaptation to the peculiarities, or, if you will call them so, to the infirmities of our nature. In his incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, God presents himself to me in a form which meets my wants. The Infinite is brought within the limits of my narrow understanding; the Invisible is revealed to my sight; I can touch him, hear him, see him, speak to him. In the hand which he holds out to save me, I have what my own can grasp. In that eye bent on me, whether bedewed with tears, or beaming with affection, I see divine love in a form I feel, and can understand. God addresses me in human tones; God stands before me in the fashion of a man; and, paradox as it appears, when I fall at his feet to say with Thomas, My Lord and my God, I am an image-worshipper, yet no idolater; for the Being before whom I bend is not a mere man,

nor a graven image, nor a dead thing, but the living. loving, eternal, "express image" of the "invisible God."

66

II. Consider in what sense Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God."

This term, image, is to be taken here in its widest, most comprehensive sense. It means much more than a mere resemblance; it conveys the idea of shadow less than that of substance; and is to be understood in the sense in which Paul employs it, when he says of the Mosaic institutions--"The law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image," or substance, "of the things." An image may be moulded in clay, or cut in marble, or struck in metal, or so formed on the watery mirror, that, when blustering winds were hushed, and no ripple disturbed the lake, we have lain over our boat to see the starry firmament imaged in its crystal depths, and wish it were thus in our bosom a heaven above repeated in a heaven below. Then there are living as well as dead images. And as a Christian's life, without any occasion for his lips telling it, should proclaim him to the world a child of God, so I have known an infant bear such striking resemblance to his father, that what his tongue could not tell, his face did; and people, struck by the likeness, remarked of the nursling, He is the very image of his father. Such was Adam in his state of innɔcence. Endowing him with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, God made good his words, Let us make man in our own image.

Now it may be said that, as our Lord, like the first Adam, was a pure and holy creature, "harmless," and "undefiled," he is therefore called the image of God.

« PreviousContinue »