CH. I THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE 35

similar honours paid. The probability, in our times, of fellowship with the feelings of the idolatrous Romanist is absolutely as nothing, compared with the danger to the Israelite of a sympathy with the idolatrous Egyptian;¹ no speculative, no unproved danger; but proved fatally by their fall during a month’s abandonment to their own will; a fall into the most servile idolatry; yet marked by such offerings to their idol as their leader was, in the close sequel, instructed to bid them offer to God. This danger was imminent, perpetual, and of the most awful kind: it was the one against which God made provision, not only by commandments, by threatenings, by promises, the most urgent, repeated, and impressive; but by temporary ordinances of a severity so terrible as almost to dim for a time, in the eyes of His people, His attribute of mercy. The principal object of every instituted law of that Theocracy, of every judgment sent forth in its vindication, was to mark to the people His hatred of idolatry; a hatred written under their advancing steps, in the blood of the Canaanite, and more sternly still in the darkness of their own desolation, when the children and the sucklings swooned in the streets of Jerusalem, and the lion tracked his prey in the desert of Samaria.* Yet, against this mortal danger, provision was not made in one way, (to man’s thoughts the simplest, the most natural, the most effective,) by withdrawing from the worship of the Divine Being whatever could delight the sense, or shape the imagination,² or limit the idea of Deity to place. This one way God refused, demanding for Himself such honours, and accepting for Himself such local dwelling, as had been paid and dedicated to idol gods by heathen worshippers. And for what reason? Was the glory of the tabernacle necessary to set forth or image His divine glory to the minds of His people? What! purple or scarlet necessary, to the people who had seen the great river of Egypt run scarlet to the sea, under His

* Lam. ii. 11. 2 Kings xvii. 25.

¹ [See the author’s note at the end of the text, p. 267.]

² [The MS. reads: “or excite the carnal imagination.”]

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