For the time being the great British interest is to carry out as harmoniously as may be the gigantic task of restoration in which the Belgians and the French must perforce be our nearest partners. Everything else is subordinate to that. It is, indeed, possible for the Flemings to appeal for British sympathy if not for British aid; but the call cannot be made in the same terms in which they address themselves to the Dutch. The Great Netherlands idea is possible because the Great Netherlands fact exists already as a fact of speech and ways of life and thought. The possibilities of sympathy between individual Englishmen and the Flemish movement are such as always bind those who value freedom to those who cry for it. But from British governments the Flemings cannot hope for any direct assistance. The only circumstances in which they could ask for it with any chance of success are, in the first place, hypothetical circumstances which there is no ground to expect; and, in the second place, circumstances in which the giving would be an act not of generosity but of selfprotection. It is not for that sort of help that a national movement ought to scheme. Ultimately that help is strongest which, like that of the Dutch Great Netherlanders, is in the main disinterested. The Flemish national struggle has got into a stage of harder weapons than wishes and arguments; but it cannot, for the British peoples, be anything else than a matter for observation and private sympathy.

G. N. CLARK

2

IDOLATRY

1. Der Bilderstreit. By A. F. K. SCHWARZLOSE. Gotha. 1890.

2. The Arya Somaj. By LAJPAT RAI. Longmans, Green. 1915.

3. The Catholic Encyclopædia. Vol. VII. Article on IMAGES." New York. 1910.

4. Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. Edited by JAMES HASTINGS. Vol. VII. Article on IMAGES AND IDOLS." T. & T. Clark.

5, Hermetica. By W. SCOTT. Vols. I. and II. 6. The Decalogue (The Warburton Lectures). D.Litt., LL.D., Archdeacon of Westminster.

S°

1914.

Clarendon Press. 1924.

By R. H. CHARLES, D.D.,
T. & T. Clark. 1923.

In vain, with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness

Bows down to wood and stone.

I

O wrote the good Bishop Heber in a well-known hymn. have met superior people who, believing themselves to possess a peculiar acquaintance and sympathy with the "Oriental mind," inveigh against such assertions as showing how the Western missionary in his narrow-minded intolerance misconstrues the religious practices of people he calls heathen. He ought to have known, they say, that it is not the material wood and stone which are worshipped, but the Divine Power they symbolise. But whether the missionary is right or wrong in holding that to bow down to images is a blind delusion, such superior people, I am afraid, are quite wrong in supposing that you have here a disagreement between East and West. The controversy is one which began in the East itself, very long ago, and which goes on still in the East to-day-one of the oldest controversies in the world.

Whilst a large number of peoples, both in the East and the West, have for long ages made images or pictures of the divine beings they worship, and performed acts of homage to these material representations, there arose, centuries before Christ, in one particular line of religious tradition-the Hebrew-a vehement protest against this practice as something peculiarly offensive to God. This protest is embodied in our own condemnatory term idolatry." From the Hebrews the protest passed to Christianity and to Islam. A similar protest is found, indeed, outside the line

of Hebraic tradition in Persian Zoroastrianism, and in certain modern forms of Hinduism, but in the case of the last it is probably a consequence of Christian or Mohammedan influence. When did this controversy begin?

If we hold to the traditional view, we must say that God Himself in the year 1491 B.C. wrote on tables of stone, as the second of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them." That seems quite plain, and if we accept the narrative of Exodus as literal history, we have not only the controversy between Israel and the nations as to image-worship carried back to an early date in time, but we have no less an authority than the Almighty Himself behind the judgment expressed in Bishop Heber's hymn. If, on the other hand, we accept the view generally held by modern scholars, we must recognise that the Decalogue, in its present form at any rate, many centuries later than Moses.

is

Certainly the ancient Hebrews during the greater part of the old Israelite monarchy made images of Jehovah or of other divine beings and offered them ritual homage. In the Northern Israelite kingdom, as the Bible tells us, the State worship was addressed to images in the form of a calf set up at different places to represent the national God. In the kingdom of Judah, when Hezekiah came to the throne (in the latter part of the eighth century B.C.) the image of a serpent in bronze, said to have been originally set up by Moses, was publicly worshipped with the burning of incense. Canon Kennett affirms that this image also represented Jehovah* but, it seems to me, without conclusive evidence. At an earlier time, Gideon made an "ephod" out of the golden ear-rings taken as spoil from the Midianites, and it became an object of worship for "all Israel" (Judges 8, 27). What an "ephod" precisely was, nobody knows and probably nobody ever will know. The word is Hebrew, and sometimes means a kind of garment, worn by priests; but sometimes it seems to mean an image or a sacred object of metal to which homage was paid. We hear again of a shrine at Dan in the extreme north of the land of Israel where there were images, together with an ephod,

*Hastings, E. R. E., " Israel," p. 445, note.

served by a family of priests which traced its genealogy to Moses (Judges 18, 30). Besides the objects of public worship, it seems to have been the practice of the ancient Israelites to have household images, called in our Bibles "teraphim," for domestic worship. They must have been, sometimes at any rate, in more or less human form, for we are told that when Saul's emissaries tried to arrest David in his house, his wife, after he had escaped, put the family image into his bed and covered it with the bed-clothes to delude the pursuers into thinking that David was still there (I Samuel 19, 12-14).

Whilst, however, the earlier prophets-Amos, Hosea, Isaiah— show no knowledge of the Second Commandment, with Hosea we already get a condemnation of image-worship :

Of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, unto their own destruction. Jehovah hath cast off thy Calf, O Samaria... For from Israel is this thing; the workman made it, and it is no god; yea, the Calf of Samaria shall be broken in pieces (Hosea viii, 4-6). They sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, even idols according to their own understanding, all of them the work of the craftsmen; unto these do they speak; men that sacrifice kiss calves (Hosea xiii, 2).*

Perhaps this does not amount to what came later-the doctrine that it was in itself a sin to make an image of Jehovah or offer any form of homage to an image, whether of Jehovah or of a strange god-it is rather part of the contempt which the reforming prophets poured upon the whole apparatus of the popular religion -temples, sacrifice, priests, diviners. When Amos and Isaiah spoke with wrathful depreciation of sacrifices and music, new moons and oblations, it did not necessarily mean that they thought all ritual absurd or wrong, but that they thought ritual absurd and wrong when it was separated from righteousness and mercy. Later Judaism so understood the prophets. It retained, from the old popular religion, sacrifices and music and new moons and oblations and priests; but one element in the old popular religion it sternly excised-images of the Deity.

Henceforth the protest against image-worship became a regular feature in the message of the reforming prophets. About a century after Isaiah, Jeremiah wrote of the house of Israel that they, their kings, their princes and their priests and their

*The text of the Authorised Version has been slightly modified, in accordance with Wellhausen's translation into German.

prophets "—that is, of course, not the prophets of the new school, but the diviners attached to the popular cults-" say to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth. But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? Let them arise, if they can save thee in the time of thy trouble, for according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah " (Jeremiah 2, 26-28).

At the time of Jeremiah the programme of the reformers had already been embodied in the Book of Deuteronomy. This book expresses the conviction, common to movements of reform, that the ideal of the reformers is not a new thing, but the actual original tradition which needs only to be freed from later impure admixtures. Just so the reforming Arya Somaj movement in India, which opened war on image-worship, made its watchword Back to the Vedas." The Book of Deuteronomy is a manifesto of the prophetic reforming party with the significance " Back to Moses."

Amongst the documents incorporated in the Book of Deuteronomy we find the Ten Commandments. From henceforth therefore, at any rate, there was a fervent section of the Jewish people which believed that image-worship had been condemned in a law written by the very finger of God. And in the Jewish community which survived the Babylonian captivity this belief came to be universal.

When Ezekiel, Jeremiah's younger contemporary, wrote his book, before the destruction of Jerusalem, idolatry had not ceased in Judah. But it had apparently been driven underground. Ezekiel describes idolatrous rites as practised in the Temple, with the horror of dark secrecy about them. He is shown in a vision a hole in the wall :

Then said Jehovah unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall: and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door. And he said unto me," Go in, and see the wicked abominations that they do here." So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, pourtrayed upon the wall round about. And there stood before them seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel . . . with every man his censer in his hand; and the odour of the cloud of incense went up. Then said he unto me," Son of man, hast thou seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in his chambers of imagery?" (Ezekiel viii, 8-12). Revised Version.