le raised by the Supreme
Being to contain the altar of sacrifice to His glory. In the early
periods of society rude and uncultivated men could only be acted upon by
gross and temporal rewards and punishments; severe rites and heavy
discipline were required to keep the mind in order, and the punishment of
the idolatrous nation served as an example for the Jews. When
Christianity took the place of Judaism the ideas of the Supreme Being
became more pure and abstracted, and the visible attributes of Jehovah
and His angels appear to have been less frequently presented to the mind;
yet even for many ages it seemed as if the grossness of our material
senses required some assistance from the eye in fixing or perpetuating
the character of religious instinct, and the Church to which I belong,
and I may say the whole Christian Church in early times, allowed visible
images, pictures, statues, and relics as the means of awakening the
stronger devotional feelings. We have been accused of worshipping merely
inanimate objects, but this is a very false notion of the nature of our
faith; we regard them merely as vivid characters representing spiritual
existences and we no more worship them than the Protestant does his Bible
when he kisses it under a solemn religious adjuration. The past, the
present, and the future being the same to the infinite and divine
Intelligence, and man being created in love for the purposes of
happiness, the moral and religious discipline to which he was submitted
was in strict conformity to his progressive faculties and to the primary
laws of his nature. It is but a rude analogy, yet it is the only one I
can find, that of comparing the Supreme Being to a wise and good father
who, to secure the well-being of his offspring, is obliged to adopt a
system of rewards and punishments in which the senses at first and
afterwards the imagination and reason are concerned; he terrifies them by
the example of others, awakens their love of glory by pointing out the
distinction and the happiness gained by superior men by adopting a
particular line of conduct; he uses at first the rod, and gradually
substitutes for it the fear of immediate shame; and having awakened the
fear of shame and the love of praise or honour with respect to temporary
and immediate actions he extends them to the conduct of the whole of
life, and makes what was a momentary feeling a permanent and immutable
principle. And obedience in the child to the