onal do they become, so that the priest has always
a pecuniary interest in the ignorance of the people, and if he makes
any effort toward their enlightenment, it is an effort made directly
against his own pecuniary interests and the income of his office.

WORSHIP OF IMAGES.

The most ancient anti-Catholic, I might with propriety say, Protestant
sect, whose form of synagogue worship is congregational, and who are
republican at heart, though too often submitting to a despotism, are
the Jews. Between these two, the Jew and the Catholic, there exists an
unmitigated hostility. The Catholic reviles the Jew with a sin of
which, most likely, his own ancestors were not guilty,[67] and the Jew
curses the Nazarene for the idolatry of his worshipers. He will make no
allowances for the nice distinction between adoration and worship, and
insists that the making the likeness of any _thing_ to be set up in a
place of worship is idolatry, and that the image of the cross is as
much an image as the image of Him who hung thereon. And in all this the
Jew is right, if we are to obey the commandment of God. Yet the Jew
forgets that a thousand years of trial were requisite to cure his
ancestors of their proneness to idols. After their first mission,
accomplished in the birth of Christ, God has preserved them a perpetual
witness against paganism. But so subtle is this sin, that we find
ourselves setting up sensuous representations, while we point the
finger of scorn at the Catholic, who ascribes miraculous power to an
image of the Virgin. And what is the difference, the Almighty himself
being judge, between setting up a cross in a place of worship or
ascribing miraculous power to an image, or, as is the fashion to say,
some spirit acting through the image? Are they not different stages of
the same disease, and each equally calculated to provoke the Almighty
to jealousy.

SUMMARY OF EVILS.

Image worship has another curious aspect. It is a very tolerable
thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan
Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry;
but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and
the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas
of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic
miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism.
It is curious to witness how exactly it takes on the same form in
diff