These observations naturally lead us to the inquiry, whether the suppression of idolatry was a design worthy to engage the care of the divine mind--in other words, whether idolatry was matter of mere harmless speculation, or a fountain of dangerous immoralities, and a prolific source of evils to the human race, whenever and wherever it has prevailed.
The religious sentiment has ever been paramount, either for good or for evil, in its action both upon societies and individual. "Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God; shall I come before him with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil; shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"1 is the piercing cry, which our universal nature has sent up to heaven, in all ages of the world. Let the thirty thousand gods of the Greeks and Romans, the costly temples reared for their worship, and the countless hecatombs that smoked upon their altars; let the long and painful pilgrimages of whole armies of devotees to the shrine of their idolatry, and their innumerable and cruel self-tortures, inflicted in the vain hope of thereby securing the divine favor; above all, let the rivers of human blood, shed to glut the rapacity of some sanguinary deity, which have drenched the soil of every nation under heaven, attest the truth of this observation.
"Religion, says Coleridge, "true or false, is, and ever has been, the center of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves." The sense which mankind have ever entertained of the power of the religious principle in molding human character, plainly appears in the pains taken by the ancient lawgivers to impress upon those for whom they legislated, an idea of their inspiration by some deity. Monos, lawgiver of the Cretans, often retired to a cave, where he boasted of having familiar conversations with Jupiter whose sanction he claimed for his legislation. Mneves and Amasis, renowned legislators of Egypt, attributed their laws to Mercury. Lycurgus claimed the sanction of Apollo for his reformation of the Spartan government. Pythagoras and Zaleucus, who made laws for the Crotoniates and Locrians, ascribed their institutions to Minerva. Zathraustes, lawgiver of the Arimaspians, gave out that he had his ordinances from a goddess adored by that people. Zoraster and Zamolxis boasted to the Bactrians and the Getae of their intimate communications with goddess Vesta. And Numa amused the Romans with his conversations with the nymph Egeria.
These facts demonstrate a universal persuasion of the controlling energy of the religious sentiment over men's minds and practices. It cannot, indeed, be otherwise than that the ideas which men entertain of the gods they worship, should constitute a capital element in the formation of their moral character. Like gods, like worshippers. It is vain to expect that the virtue of the devotee will exceed the virtue of the divinity. The worshippers of a bloody Mars, a thievish Mercury, an incestuous Jupiter, and a voluptuous Venus, could hardly help being sanguinary, dishonest, and licentious.
"Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust," could never become the authors of the opposite virtues in those by whom they were adored. Whatever sanctions they might annex to their laws, their example would always prove more powerful than their terrors.
Plato excluded poets from his republic, dismissing even Homer, with a garland on his head, and with ointment poured upon him. His object, in this otherwise unaccountable rigor, was that they might not corrupt the right notions of God with their fables. If we consider the absurdity, as well as the immorality, of their fictions, we shall hardly be disposed to blame him. They distinguished the gods in their places and ways of living, in the same manner as they would different sorts of animals. Some they placed under the earth, some in the sea, some in woods and rivers; and the most ancient of them all they bound in hell. Some are set to trades; one is a smith, another is a weaver, one is a warrior and fights with men; others are harpers; and others, still, delight in archery and the chase. Gods of the sea, the rivers, the woods, the hills, and the valleys; gods of smithery, music, and the chase; gods of wine, war, and love--what more besotted could be imagined? The father of the gods himself is fast bound by the fates, so that he cannot, contrary to their decrees, save his own offspring. Not seldom does he resort to policy and craft, nay to the basest disguises and hypocrisies, to accomplish his purposes, which are often of the most shameful nature. Storm, darkness, fear, rage, madness, fraud, and the vilest passions were invested with divinity. Unbounded lusts and disgraceful amours were ascribed by the poets to almost all the gods. There was scarcely a member of the Olympian senate who would now be admitted to decent society among mortals. No wonder that Plato shut out from his commonwealth a class of writers whose extravagant and teeming fancy he regarded as the source of these monstrosities.
It was a principle of polytheism that the supreme God, after he had made the world, retreating, as it were, wholly into himself, had committed the government of it to subordinate deities, and did not interfere in the regulation of human affairs. Thus the temporal blessing of health, long life, fruitful seasons, plenty, safety, victory over enemies, and such like advantages, were to be sought from these demons, or idols. And these blessings were to be obtained, and the opposite evils averted, not by the practice of virtue and beneficence, but by the use of some magical ceremonies, or by the performance of certain senseless and barbarous rites of worship. That this was a fundamental doctrine of idolatry we have undoubted proofs, both from sacred and profane writers. King Ahaz, in 2 Chronicles2, says, "Because the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me." The Prophet Hosea3 represents the Jews of his time as saying, "I will go after my lovers (the idol gods), that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink." To a reproof from Jeremiah for their idolatry, they replied, "As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well and saw no evil. But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine."4 Here they aver, in substance, that as long as they had worshipped the queen of heaven, all had gone well with them, and her, therefore, they would worship, and to her sacrifice, in spite of his admonitions. To the like purport is the declaration of Plato. In his work De Anima Mundi, speaking of the punishment of wicked men, he says, "All these things hath Nemesis decreed to be executed in the second period by the ministry of vindictive terrestrial demons, who are overseers of human affairs, to which demons the supreme God hath committed the government of this world."
But was not this a harmless philosophical dogma? By no means. It was a doctrine, not more false in point of fact, than pernicious in its results. It was a denial of the providence of God. The disbelief of this great truth gave plausibility, attractiveness, and energy to the whole system of idolatry. The supreme being was thought to be too exalted in his dignity to take any concern in human conduct, too remote from this sublunary scene to regard its vicissitude with any interest, too much absorbed in the contemplation of his own infinite perfections to care for the perfection of inferior beings, too much engrossed in the enjoyment of his own independent happiness to feel any desire for the happiness of creatures. Hence his existence came to be, either totally forgotten, or regarded with indifference. However the case might have been with a few philosophic and contemplative minds, to the generality of mankind the true God was as though he were not. They referred not their conduct to his direction, for his power had nothing to do with their happiness or misery. He had delegated to demons the government of this world. The agency of these inferior beings controlled its affairs; their will determined the blessings or calamities of life. While, therefore, it was wise and safe to neglect the supreme being, it was unwise and unsafe to treat with a like indifference the subordinate deities, to whom he had committed the administration of human affairs. Thus men came to think that they were not to expect the blessings of life from the favor of the one true God, by imitating his purity and goodness, but from a Jupiter, stained with crimes that would doom a mortal to the gibbet or the penitentiary; from a Mercury, a thief and a patron of thieves; from a Bacchus, the god of drunkenness; from a Mars, the instigator of war and bloodshed; or from a Venus, the patroness of all manner of voluptuousness and debauchery. Hence they became, almost necessarily, as corrupt in practice, as they were erroneous and groveling in their opinions. The principles of moral goodness were well-nigh extinguished in the human heart, and the practice of the moral virtues had almost disappeared from the earth. And intemperance, ferocity, lust, fraud, and violence might have brought a second deluge upon the race, had not the truth of God stood pledged against the repetition of so dire a calamity.
But further, and worse. Idolatry did not simply lead to vicious practices, it even consecrated vice in its sacred rites. Incredible as it may seem, uncleanness formed a part of the religious worship paid to the gods. Persons of both sexes prostituted themselves in honor of Venus, Priapus, Astarte, Baal-peor, and other filthy and loathsome deities. Of these obscene rites, as constituting a part of the religion of idolaters, we have the clearest proofs in authors of undoubted credit. Strabo informs us that a single temple at Corinth maintained more than a thousand religious prostitutes. Herodotus tells us that women of this description abounded among the Phenicians, Babylonians, and other eastern nations. He even says, that by an express law, founded on an oracle, it was ordained that all the women of Babylon should, at least once in their lives, repair to the temple of Venus, and prostitute themselves to strangers. Strangely enough as it seems to me, an eminent and for the most part judicious author, has labored to prove that this custom must have been conducive to the virtue of chastity. Facts, however, contradict the theory of this learned writer. Babylon, by the testimony of both sacred and profane authors, was one vast sink of pollution. Its inhabitants made a particular study of all that could delight the senses, and excite and gratify the most shameless passions. The women of Cyprus sacrificed their chastity before marriage, to Venus. The Egyptians had religious prostitutes, who were consecrated to Isis. The Isiac rites, transported to Rome, became a mere cloak for licentiousness. Tiberius caused the images of Isis to be thrown into the Tiber. But her worship was too alluring to be suffered to die out and disappear. It was, therefore, subsequently revived in full force, and Juvenal speaks of it in an indignant strain. Selden, De Diis Syriis, has fully shown the impurities of the ancient idolatrous worship. Baccus, Osiris, and Ceres were adored with rites which modesty forbids to explain. That these religious obscenities were practiced in the days of Moses, is manifest from the history of the Israelites, who committed fornication with the daughters of Moab.5 The immorality was perpetrated at a sacrificial festival, the Moabitish women exposing themselves in honor of Baal-peor, who was the same as the Prapus of the Romans. It is further evident from a law of Moses, forbidding a father to prostitute his daughter, "to cause her to be a whore."6 This law must be understood as prohibiting the exposure of a daughter as an act of religion, for surely no man, not even the vilest and most abandoned, could prostitute a child to purposes of common whoredom.
The necessary consequences of religious doctrines and ceremonies, like those described in the preceding paragraph, was the extinction of all true religious principle, and even of all the principles of moral virtue and goodness. They gave intensity to the depraved appetites of human nature. They put the bridle upon the neck of lust, and caused men to run riot in every species of impurity.
But the ancient mythologists represented their deities under, if possible, a still more malign and repulsive light. The learned professor Meiners says that the more ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be envious of human felicity. Whenever any extraordinary success attended them, they were filled with terror, lest the gods should bring upon them some dreadful evil. Herodotus attributes to Solon, in his interview with Croesus, the formal declaration, "The gods envy the happiness of men." The Egyptian monarch Amasis grounds the withdrawment of his friendship from Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, on the notoriously envious nature of the divine being. The sage Artabanus warns Xerxes that even the blessing which the gods bestow, are derived from an envious motive. A similar doctrine prevailed at Rome, agreeably to which the great Fabius, as Livy informs us, remonstrated with the Roman people against an election to the consulship in his old age, urging, among other reasons, that some divinity might think his past successes too great for mortal, and turn the tide of fortune against him. In accordance with this doctrine, we find even the reflecting Tacitus expressing the opinion that the gods interfere in human affairs but to punish.
As a necessary consequence, almost the whole of the religion of the ancient pagan world consisted in rites of deprecation. Fear was the leading feature of their religious impressions. Hence arose that most horrid of all religious ceremonies--the rite of human sacrifice. Of this savage custom, Archbishop Magee, in one of the notes appended to his discourses on Atonement and Sacrifice, asserts and proves that there is no nation mentioned in history, which we cannot reproach with having, more than once, made the blood of its citizens to stream forth, in holy and pious ceremonies, to appease the divinity, when he appeared angry, or to move him, when he appeared indolent.
"Conformably with this character of their gods," adds the same learned prelate, "we find the worship of many of the heathen nations to consist in suffering and mortification, in cutting their flesh with knives, and scorching their limbs with fire. The cruel austerities of the gymnosophists, both of Africa and India; the dreadful sufferings of the initiated votaries of Mithra and Elersis; the frantic and savage rites of Bellona; and the horrid self-mutilations of the worshippers of Cybele, but too clearly evince the dreadful views entertained by the ancient heathens of the nature of their gods."
Undoubtedly, then, it became the wisdom, the justice, and the goodness of the one true God to check these spreading and direful evils, to bring men back from their polytheistic follies to the belief and worship of himself, and to let them know that he had not parted with the administration of providence, nor given over the disposal of temporal blessings to any subordinate beings whatsoever, so that health, plenty, and all kinds of prosperity were to be sought from him alone and expected as the sole gift of his sovereign bounty. And here we may take notice, in passing, of an opinion of Origen, in which Spencer and others of the learned concur that it was a very wise procedure in Moses to enforce the observance of his laws by the hope of temporal good and the fear of temporal evil. Such hopes and fears were, if not a source of idolatry, at least a means of strengthening it. The Hebrew lawgiver turned this battery, if I may be allowed the expression, against the enemy. In the name of Jehovah, Israel's divine king, he promised temporal blessings to the obedient, and threatened temporal calamities to the disobedient. Thus the very things which before had been motives to idolatry now became motives and aids to true religion. It may be said without irreverence that a story of necessity was laid upon the true God to proceed in this manner. How could he effectually check the propensity to idolatry; how could he show that he had not delegated to demons the government of the world; how could he vindicate his own incommunicable sovereignty and omnipotence, but by doing, in reality, what the false gods pretended to do?
Upon the same principle it was, I think, that prophecy, in the more restricted sense of foretelling future events, was so much employed under the Hebrew government. The ability to peer into the future was claimed by the ministers of the ancient idolatrous worship, and the people, confiding in their pretensions, consulted them upon all occasions. To meet and overcome the power of superstition in that direction, it would seem natural, and, indeed, almost necessary, that the true God should show, by infallible tokens, that the past, the present, and the future were all one to him.
But the pestilent virus of idolatry was too deeply seated to be eradicated by such agencies as these. The question, then, naturally arises: What just and rational means were adequate to the suppression of it? Opinions are not to be bound by legal enactments; and to enforce mere theological dogmas by the arm of the civil law, would be a gross breach of civil liberty. It would be strange indeed, if a code, to which the world is indebted for most of the true principles of civil freedom, violated that freedom, in a fundamental article of it. And, in truth, however certain ignorant or prejudiced writers may have represented the matter, the constitution of Moses is chargeable with no such inconsistency.
How, then, was Moses able to suppress idolatry, without infringing the principle here announced? By the introduction of the theocratic system into his inspired legislation. "One God only shalt thou serve," was the first great principle of the Hebrew polity. To the end that this fundamental truth of religion might become a vital element of Hebrew thought, faith, and manners, the one true God became also the covenanted king, the civil head of the Hebrew state. Thus to the Israelite the Deity was both a celestial and a terrestrial sovereign, his God and his king. Viewed as to a main design of it, then, the theocracy was a divine institution, employed the more effectually to supplant idolatry, without a violation of that precious principle of civil liberty, that mere opinions, whether theological, ethical, or political, were not to be cramped and restrained by the pains and penalties of the civil law.
"The records of the Hebrew polity," observes Coleridge, with a just discrimination, "are rendered far less instructive as lessons of political wisdom by the disposition to regard the Jehovah in that universal and spiritual acceptation, in which we use the word as Christians; for relatively to the Jewish polity the Jehovah was their covenanted king."
What, then, was the theocracy? God condescended to assume the title and relation to the Hebrew people of chief civil ruler. He established a civil sovereignty over them. He issued his edicts as a civil magistrate. the manner in which the compact, giving reality to this relationship, was formed, deserves particular notice. It is detailed in the nineteenth chapter of Exodus. Moses, acting under a divine commission, proposed to the nation the question, whether they would receive Jehovah for their king, and submit to his laws. The suffrage of the people appears to have been entirely free in this matter. By their own voluntary consent Moses made God their king. Thus idolatry and everything leading to idolatry or growing out of it, became a crime against the state--became, in fact, "crimen laesai majestatis," high treason, or rebellion. As such, it was justly punishable with death--all governments agreeing in this, that treason is the highest of civil crimes. The punishment of idolatry by law had, then, plainly, this capital quality of justice, that it was punishing the act of those who had chosen the government under which they lived, when freely proposed to them. Their own suffrages had made it a political offense. Hence idolatry is called by the Hebrew writers "the transgression of the covenant." It was a breach of the fundamental compact between the Hebrew people and their chosen king. The theocracy made religious apostasy a state crime, which it could not be, without infringing liberty, under any other constitution.
It is a material consideration that Moses nowhere deduces God's right to give laws to the Hebrew nation from his being the one only God, but from his having by miraculous interpositions and works of power, laid the foundation of their state. In confirmation of this view, the reader's attention is invited to a remarkable passage in Deuteronomy.7 I give the passage, as translated by Michaelis: "When thy son asketh thee in after times, whence come all the statutes and laws, which Jehovah thy God hath given thee? thou shalt say to him, we were in Egypt slaves to the king; but Jehovah, with a strong hand brought us out of Egypt, and did before our eyes great miracles whereby he punished the Egyptians, and Pharaoh and his house; and he brought us out, to give us the land, which he had by oath promised to our fathers: Therefore he commanded us to keep all these laws." Here the right of legislating for the Hebrews is, in express terms, grounded on the favors which God had bestowed upon them, and not upon his absolute sovereignty as creator and universal lord.
What God says to the Israelites in Exodus 20:2-3, is to the same effect: "I am Jehovah, thy God, which have brought thee out of Egyptian bondage; thou shalt have no gods before me." It would have been quite consonant with sound theology to say, "I Jehovah am God alone; therefore thou shalt have no gods but me." This fundamental article of religion is taught in many parts of the Mosaic writings. But the opinions of the Israelites were not to be fettered by legal enactments, and yet idolatry must be prohibited on pain of civil punishment. God, therefore, as Michaelis has observed, addressed a people strangely prone to polytheism, to this effect: "Lest you should absurdly suppose, that there are many gods, who can hear your prayers and recompense your offerings, know that I alone have delivered you from Egyptian tyranny, have made you a people, and am the author and founder of your state: Therefore let no gods but me be worshipped among you."
But it ought never to be forgotten that, although God, by what he wrought for the Israelites, had acquired all the right to be their sovereign, that any man could possibly have, still he neither claimed nor exercised that right in an arbitrary and despotic way. Moses, by his direction, permitted the people freely to choose whether they would accept Jehovah as their king, and obey the laws which he might give them. When they had formally assented to this, God was considered as the king, but not before. The whole world, indeed, was under his moral rule; his dominion as creator embraced all the tribes of earth, but Israel was his peculiar property, whose people had chosen him for their king. The passages of scripture to this effect are surprisingly pointed and striking. The history of the election by the Israelites of Jehovah to be the head of their state, contained in the nineteenth chapter of Exodus, has been before explained and commented on at length. Other passages are no less remarkable. Thus, in Deuteronomy 33:5, it is said, "God was king in Jeshurun, when the heads of the people, and the tribes of Israel were gathered together." This seems a plain reference to the account in Exodus, and a plain an intimation, that God was made king by the vote of the assembled nation. So when the Israelites first desired a man for a king, God said to Samuel, "They have not rejected thee, they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them."8 Again, when they were to receive this king, the record is: "Thus saith Jehovah, God of Israel, I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of all kingdoms, and of them that oppressed you; and ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulations, and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us."9
What is the issue? We have seen the monstrous doctrines, pollutions, and crimes of idolatry. We have seen the justice, wisdom, and goodness of the purpose to put a stop to such dreadful evils. We have seen the nature and ground of God's claim to the sovereignty of the Hebrew state. We have seen that the government was a voluntary compact between the sovereign and the citizens. We have seen that idolatry under this constitution was a state crime, was in fact high treason. We have seen that the whole scope and hinge of the Hebrew polity was the overthrow of idolatry, and that the theocratic element was introduced into it expressly to further that design. Let the reader consider and weigh these things, and, if he be candid and unbiased, if his mental vision be not warped and clouded by prejudice, he will own, that to have imposed the penalty of death upon the worship of false gods can no longer appear in the light of inquisitorial tyranny.
It will be proper to conclude this chapter with a brief sketch of the religious and moral doctrines of Judaism.
There is one God, says the Jewish lawgiver, and there is none besides him. He is the sole object of religious trust and worship, Himself the supreme being, and the necessary source of all other beings; there is no other that can be compared with him. A spirit, pure, immense, infinite--no material form can be a fit symbol of his nature. He framed the universe by his power; he governs it by his wisdom; he regulates it by his providence. Nothing escapes his omniscient glance; nothing can resist his almighty power. The good and evil of life are alike dispensed by his righteous hand.
A public worship of this God is instituted. Ministers to preside over it are appointed. Sacrifices and offering and a splendid ceremonial are established. But all this pomp is nothing in his eyes, unless prompted and animated by the sentiments of the heart. The worship which he demands, before all and above all, is the acknowledgment of our absolute dependence and of his supreme dominion, gratitude for his benefits, trust in his mercy, reverence for his authority, love towards his excellence, and submission to his law.
What purity and beauty in the moral doctrines of this code! Equity, probity, fidelity, industry, compassion, charity, beneficence--in a word, everything that makes men respectable in their own eyes, everything that can endear them to their fellows, everything that can assure the repose and happiness of society--are placed among the number of human duties.
Where else, in all antiquity, are to be found ideas of God and his worship so just and sublime, religious institutions so pure and spiritual, ethical doctrines so conformable to the sentiments of nature and the light of reason? Recall the picture, presented in a former part of this chapter, of the religious and moral condition of the ancient world. What false and grotesque notions of the divine nature! What extravagant, impure, and cruel rites! What objects of adoration! From the heavenly orbs to the meanest plant, from the man distinguished for his talents or his crimes to the vilest reptile--everything has its worshippers. Here, chastity is sacrificed in the temples. There, human blood flows upon the altars, and the dearest victims expire amid flames, kindled by superstition. Again, nature is outraged by beastly amours, and humanity brutalized by vices that cannot be named without offense. Everywhere the people are plunged into a frightful ignorance, and the philosophers themselves grope in doubt and uncertainty.
Wherefore this difference? But one cause, adequate to the result, can be assigned. All the pagan nations had for their guide only the feeble and tremulous light of human reason. Among the Hebrews, a higher, even the pure and eternal reason, had pierced the darkness, scattered its shades, and poured a divine illumination into the mind of prophet, priest, lawgiver, judge, and king. Thus was the intellect of the nation enlightened, and its heart purified. Thus were its manners humanized, its morals elevated, its institutions liberalized. Thus was the nation educated for its great mission of guidance and of blessing to all the nations of the earth, in all the periods of their history.
The Hebrew government was a government of tutelage. No form of polity has ever approached it in grandeur, purity, simplicity, and beneficence. Had men been more perfect, it would have stood forever. But human inconstancy wearied even of a perfect government; mortal passions corrupted even a divine institution; and the commonwealth of Israel, like the empire of Rome, at length fell beneath the weight of its own vices, and disappeared from the brotherhood of nations. It lives only in history, a monument at once of the divine goodness and equity.
