the
divinest workmanship and passionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and
Mediaeval Christendom.

63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of
worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly
Idolatry which are now all but universal in England.

The first of these is the worship of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth;
worship of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th
paragraph of my _Munera Pulveris_; but which is briefly to be defined as
the servile apprehension of an active power in Money, and the submission
to it as the God of our life.

64. The second elementary cause of the loss of our nobly imaginative
faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we
chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the
apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book
whose primal commands we refuse to obey.

No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful
idolatry, than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority
of English religious persons, that the Word of God, by which the heavens
were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the
water,--the Word of God which came to the prophets, and comes still for
ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which,
called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies
of heaven,--that this "Word of God" may yet be bound at our pleasure in
morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with tasselled
ribands to mark the passages she most approves of.

65. Gentlemen, there has hitherto been seen no instance, and England is
little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful
in the noble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens
falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity.
Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever
shape one statue that may stand nobly against the sky; not from all the
treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for
their own descendants, any inheritance but shame.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] Glance forward at once to Sec. 75, read it, and return to this.

[114] There is a primary and vulgar sense of "exhibited" in Lucian's
mind; but the higher meaning is involved in it.

[115] In the Greek, "ambrosial." Recollect always that ambrosia, as food
of gods, is the contin