The Jews were reconstituted as a religious community after the fall of Babylon and the rise of Persia to be a great power. There was now one little people amongst the nations of the earth declaring that practically all the rest of the world were chargeable with ludicrous and disgusting folly in offering homage to images. The idolatry attacked by the earlier prophets had been idolatry practised amongst their own people; the idolatry attacked by the Jews after the exile was that practised by the surrounding heathen. The heathen on their side were puzzled by a religious worship in which there was no visible object of devotion-the strange blank emptiness in the place which would normally have been occupied by a concrete form-and they pressed the Jews with the question where their god was. The question, and the Jewish answer, are given in the 115th Psalm : Our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he pleased. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not; they have hands, but they handle not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throat. They that make them shall be like unto them; yea, every one that trusteth in them. O Israel, trust thou in the Lord. One hears a note of irony and satire, somewhat strange in the Old Testament, wherever image-worship is the subject. The second "Isaiah," writing when the new Persian power was rising on the horizon, describes the hurried fabrication of gods in whom the alarmed Babylonians put their trust. They helped everyone his neighbour; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage. So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smiteth the anvil, saying of the soldering, It is good; and he fastened it with nails that it should not be moved (Isaiah xli, 6-7). The carpenter stretcheth out a line; he marketh it out with a pencil; he shapeth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compasses and shapeth it after the figure of a man, to dwell in the house. He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the holm tree and the oak, and strengtheneth for himself one of the trees of the forest; he planteth a fir tree, and the rain doth nourish it that it may be for a man to burn. He taketh part thereof and warmeth himself; yea he kindleth it and baketh bread; also of part he maketh a god, and worshippeth it. He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast and is satisfied; he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire; and the residue thereof he maketh a god (Isaiah xliv, 13-17). A curious parallel to this fierce ridicule is offered by the more playful irony of the Roman poet centuries later, who makes his image of the god Priapus say: "Erstwhile I was a trunk of figwood, a piece of useless timber, when the carpenter, after doubting whether to make a stool or a Priapus, made his choice for the god. And so a god I am " (Horace, Satires, I, 8, 1 f). The satire of the second Isaiah is expanded and elaborated in the apocryphal "Epistle of Jeremy," which in our Bibles forms the end of the book of Baruch and was written, according to Mr. Ball's conjecture, towards the end of the fourth century B.C. The Babylonian gods were made by workmen; they cannot move unless they are carried; they cannot speak; they cannot save themselves from moth or rust, or wipe the dust of the temples from their faces. And yet the Babylonians worship them as if they were alive, or dress them up and put crowns on their heads, as if they were virgins who love to go gay. And so on at length; for if you once take for granted the absolute identity of the deity worshipped with the material image, if the material image is a mere block of wood or stone and nothing more, the absurdities involved in imageworship are so obvious that a satirist has an easy task; he can go on indefinitely; mockery is almost too cheap in such a case to offer a worthy exercise for wit. The Christian Church has not followed Judaism in banning images. Even the Jews of the Dispersion did not always observe the rule which held good at Jerusalem. A certain number of Jewish catacombs of the early Christian centuries have been discovered, which have pictorial representations of animals and human figures.† Christian catacombs from the second century onwards were adorned with pictures of Christ and of saints. But we have no reason for supposing that these pictures were anything but decorative or instructive: we hear of no homage offered to them. Saint Augustine speaks of some Christians as "sepulcrorum et picturarum adoratores," but he speaks of them as unworthy members of the community on a par with sensualists and worldlings. In the fourth century there was a division of *See Canon Charles's "The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament," Vol. I, p. 596. +Cath. Encl., " Images," p. 665. 2 opinion amongst the Christian leaders as to whether pictures in churches were permissible. Epiphanius, the writer of the great work against Heresies, tore down a curtain because it had a sacred figure on it. The Council of Elvira, about 300 A.D., promulgated a canon that there were to be no pictures in churches," so that that which is worshipped and adored shall not be painted on walls." The Christian Church till after the time of Constantine seems, quite naturally, to have been more shy of sculptured images in the round than of paintings. The first sculptured images of Christ, of which we hear, were made by heretics; the Carpocratians, according to Irenaeus, had images of the Lord in glass, gold or silver, together with images of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Even amongst the Catholics, however, the practice of putting up statues of the Good Shepherd-a young man, beardless, carrying a lamb or sheep on his shoulders, after the ancient Greek type of Hermes Criophorus-seems to have come in by 200 A.D. The finest example of this type, in the Lateran Museum, is said by Kraus to belong to the beginning of the third century. This is perhaps the earliest piece of Christian sculpture now extant. In the four centuries which followed the accession of Constantine, the worship of pictures, eikóves, ikons, came in with a flood throughout the Eastern, Greek-speaking half of Christendom. In the Latin West, although pictures were common in churches, the adoration of pictures does not seem to have been practised as it was practised in Eastern Christianity. But no doubt the feeling against ikon-worship remained alive in certain circles, and it suddenly burst out in the earlier part of the eighth century, when the iconoclastic (ikon-smashing) emperors of Constantinople tried to suppress the practice by force. It was probably the influence of Islam, newly established in Syria, which awoke the old feeling against image-worship into violent action at the Byzantine court. The iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries was quite different from the disagreement as to image-worship between the Roman and the Orthodox communions to-day. The Orthodox Church to-day considers it idolatrous to offer homage to images in the round, but not to do so to flat images, pictures, or images slightly raised, bas-reliefs. The Roman communion offers homage to statues and pictures alike. But in the eighth century it was the adoration of images of any kind which the Isaurian Emperors tried to stamp out. The attempt ultimately failed. Even the compromise suggested by the Emperor Michael the Stammerer, that ikons should be suffered to remain in the churches, but hung safely out of reach of the worshippers' hands and lips, was not accepted. In 842, after the controversy had raged for more than a century, the party of the "friends of the ikons" finally triumphed and the adoration of ikons has remained till to-day a prominent feature of Eastern Christianity. In the West, as we well know, a vehement protest against the offering of homage to images was an essential part of the Protestant Reformation. The Anglican Church in this, as in so many other things, took the line of judicious compromise. It allowed sculptured images to remain as part of the decoration of churches; it allowed the pictorial representations in stained glass windows, but it ceased to set up images as objects of ritual homage. The more decidedly Protestant bodies cleared all pictorial representation out of the places of worship. The headless and mutilated statues on many English cathedrals and churches attest the zeal of Cromwell's Puritans. When we look into the substance of this controversy, extending through the ages, we must note the different theories as to the significance of images in worship-theories either consciously formulated or implied in the practice. There is, first, the theory of the actual identity of the material image and the divine being-the idol is the god. The idol itself hears prayers and does things. All the mockery of idol worship above quoted from the old Hebrew prophets and writers goes upon the assumption that this is the theory held. Apart from this assumption the mockery would have no point. Was this assumption true? With regard to a large number of worshippers I think we must believe that it was. The Hebrew reformers, remember, who started the protest were dealing with a practice prevalent amongst their own people; they must have had many relations and friends who worshipped idols; perhaps they may have worshipped idols themselves at an earlier time in their lives. And the later Jewish writers, who satirised the image-worship of the Gentiles, were speaking of something with which they were in close contact in the countries where they themselves lived. It would be strange if they could assert that the heathen supposed the actual image of wood or stone to be a god unless they had some good reason for saying so. If we turn from the image-worship of the ancient Babylonians to that of modern India, we have unexceptionable testimony that the god is really identified with the material image--the testimony not of missionaries but of those who come from the bosom of Hinduism itself. The great reforming sect of the Arya Somaj, which numbers a quarter of a million adherents in North-Western India, was founded in the last century by Swami Dayananda, and makes a protest against the popular image-worship a chief element in its programme. The founder was himself a Brahmin, who as a boy had undergone systematic instruction in this religion. He was aroused to independent thinking by seeing one night a mouse run over the image of Siva. The Nationalist leader, Mr. Lajpat Rai, himself a prominent member of the Arya Somaj, describes the incident in his book about the community. The boy Dayananda, he says, had been told that the image ... was God Himself; and that it had the power of blessing or cursing men. What he saw, however, was quite inconsistent with these things. The image was evidently a helpless inanimate object, which could not protect itself even from the impertinence of a mouse. This, then, could not be the right way to worship, and the image could not be Siva himself, as was taught by the priesthood (p. 8). Those who ridicule the theory that the idol is the god lay stress upon one or other of two characteristics of the idol: (1) its powerlessness (it has ears and cannot hear, it cannot wipe the dust from its forehead, it cannot move, it cannot keep away a mouse); and (2) its origin from a material substance-wood or stone-by the work of human hands. Of these two arguments the first seems more damaging from the point of view of the idol-worshipper than the second. For even the worshipper who identifies the image with the deity does so only in the sense in which we identify a man's body with himself. No worshipper supposes that the mere material substance of the idol is identical with the deity; the idea is that the deity resides within it and uses it as his organ for perception and action, just as a man uses his body. We should not try to show the absurdity of our ordinary dealings with our neighbour by proving that our neighbour's body was a chemical compound of a certain kind with material antecedents. The only difference from the idol-worshipper's point of view is that whereas the neighbour's body was animate from the moment that it was a body at all, the idol was once an inanimate bit of matter into which the deity has subsequently entered. Logically, it need not trouble |