Deuteronomy 5:8-10 You shall not make you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath… We sometimes wonder what to us instructed Christians, who cannot conceive ourselves, even in imagination, bowing down to a graven image, what can be any longer the lesson of the Second Commandment. What is the use of repeating it? Can we even imagine the temptation to do so? But are there no other things, the idols of refined and civilised men, no other "likenesses" than were known in old time, "of things that are in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth," to which worship is done, subtle, profound, and absorbing, — idols which occupy the place of God, or perhaps profess to represent Him, — idols which meet us at every turn, and which need and justify the reiterated command, "Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them"? 1. For instance, God is all-powerful, almighty, and we worship Him who is the Maker and Ruler of all things. But the world, as we know it and have to do with it, is full of forces and necessities, whose origin and law is lost in darkness, which we cannot trace beyond a little way back, which seem self-originated and self-acting. They are awful, tremendous, irresistible, irreversible. They seem blind and aimless. We are powerless in their grasp if we oppose them; if we can use and direct them, it is still as blind and deaf and unchangeable and senseless forces. They bind us fast in their chain; they cut across the field of human will and feeling and purpose, reckless of the havoc they make, of the hopes they disappoint. In the onward roll and tide of what seems a boundless ocean, comprehending all things, from the hypothetic atom or the microscopic cell and germ to the farthest sun, the moral world, as we know it, seems swamped and lost. They care neither for good nor bad. They bind us with bonds which oppress and crush us. This tremendous side of nature is an idea which enlarging knowledge has brought home to our generation with a sharpness and definiteness never recognised before. It fills and occupies minds, till even the consciousness of will becomes overshadowed and cast into the background, a phenomenon or a doubt. And with this dread linage before men's minds there grows up a terrible religion of despair. Nature, in its garb of fate and necessity, has shut out God. 2. There is a religion of literature. Literature, the record and image of the thoughts, impressions, and feelings of men, in the most diversified conditions and in the most diversified expression, is one of the gifts which have been made to our time: a gift, a real and inestimable gift it is; a strange and new one, distributing without stint to the many what used to be the prerogative and treasure of the few; opening more and more the inexhaustible wonders of the intellect and the character of man; placing within increasing range access to all that is loftiest and wisest, most perfect and noblest in what men now and before us have thought and said; leaving us utterly without excuse if, with the very highest placed within our reach, we choose the refuse and the vile. But it is a dazzling gift, a gift which makes men think that there can he nothing to match it, nothing beyond it. Is not this enough for the heart and soul of man, of man at least, cultivated, civilised, instructed, enlightened! Is it not enough for his meditations, his aspirations, his secret acts of devout homage and devout uplifting of the spirit? Will not the religion of great books and great thinkers, the religion of genius and poetic truth, be a sufficient religion! 3. There is a mysterious power in the world, a mysterious endowment given to man, one of the most wonderful and lofty of all his prerogatives — the sense of beauty. Is it surprising that art should almost become a religion — a worship and an enthusiasm in which the wondrous shadows of God's glory take the place of God Himself, in His holiness, His righteousness, His awful love? It is not surprising; but alas for us, if we yield to the temptation! The love of beauty, in work and speech and person, was the master passion of the reviving intelligence of Italy: it attracted, it dominated all who wrote, all who sang, all who painted and moulded form. Out of it arose, austere and magnificent indeed, yet alive with all instincts of beauty, the Divina Commedia, the mighty thought of Leonardo and Michael Angelo, the pathetic devotion and deep peace of the Lombard, Tuscan, Umbrian schools; but to whole generations of that wonderful people — from the fresh sonnet writers and story tellers of the closing middle-age, Guido Cavalcanti and Boccaccio, to the completed refinement of the days of the great Venetian masters and Ariosto — the worship of the beautiful, as the noblest, worthiest devotion, stood in the place of truth, of morality, of goodness, of Christian life. This idolatry of beauty brought its own punishment, the degeneracy and deep degradation both of art and character. 4. Yes; the world in which we now pass our days is full of great powers. Nature is great in its bounty, in its sternness, in its unbroken uniformity; literature, art, are great in what they have created for us; beauty is great in its infinite expressions: but these are not the powers for man — man, the responsible, man, the sinner and the penitent, who may be the saint — to fall down and worship. They are to pass with the world in which we have known them, the world of which they are part; but man remains, remains what he is in soul and character and affections. They at least feel this who are drawing near to the unseen and unknown beyond; they to whom, it may be, these great gifts of God, the spell and wonder of art and of literature, the glory and sweet tenderness of nature, have been the brightness and joy of days that are now fast ending — they feel that there is yet an utter want of what these things cannot give: that soul and heart want something yet deeper, something more lovely, something more Divine, that which will realise man's ideals, that which will complete and fulfil his incompleteness and his helplessness, — yes; the real likeness in thought and will and character to the goodness of Jesus Christ. "My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever." Man has that within him which tells him in presage and parable of greater and more. awful, things than anything he can admire and delight in yet: he has that without him which certifies him that his hopes and aspirations are justified; that when these precious things of the present must pass with the world to which they belong there is laid up for him what "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, what God hath prepared for them that love Him," — sinlessness, strength, peace, the vision of God. (Dean Church.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: |
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