APPENDIX, 10 451

disdain. The Church of Rome does indeed distinctively violate the second commandment; but the true force and weight of the sin of idolatry are in the violation of the first, of which we are all of us guilty, in probably a very equal degree, considered only as members of this or that communion, and not as Christians or unbelievers. Idolatry is, both literally and verily, not the mere bowing down before sculptures, but the serving or becoming the slave of any images or imaginations which stand between us and God, and it is otherwise expressed in Scripture as “walking after the Imagination” of our own hearts.¹ And observe also that while, at least on one occasion, we find in the Bible an indulgence granted to the mere external and literal violation of the second commandment, “When I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing,” we find no indulgence in any instance, or in the slightest degree, granted to “covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. iii. 5; no casual association of terms, observe, but again energetically repeated in Ephesians v. 5, “No covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ”): nor any to that denial of God, idolatry in one of its most subtle forms, following so often on the possession of that wealth against which Agur prayed so earnestly, “Give me neither poverty nor riches, lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord?”

And in this sense, which of us is not an idolater? Which of us has the right, in the fulness of that better knowledge, in spite of which he nevertheless is not yet separated from the service of this world, to speak scornfully of any of his brethren, because, in a guiltless ignorance, they have been accustomed to bow their knees before a statue? Which of us shall say that there may not be a spiritual worship in their apparent idolatry, or that there is not a spiritual idolatry in our own apparent worship?

For indeed it is utterly impossible for one man to judge of the feeling with which another bows down before an image. From that pure reverence in which Sir Thomas Browne wrote,² “I can dispense with my hat at the sight of a cross, but not with a thought of my Redeemer,” to the worst superstition of the most ignorant Romanist, there is an infinite series of subtle transitions; and the point where simple reverence and the use of the image merely to render conception more vivid, and feeling more intense, change into definite idolatry by the attribution of Power to the image itself, is so difficulty determinable that we cannot be too cautious in asserting that such a change has actually taken place in the case of any individual. Even when it is definite and certain, we shall oftener find it the consequence of dulness of intellect than of real alienation of heart from God; and I have no manner of doubt that half of the poor and untaught Christians who are this day lying prostrate before crucifixes, Bambinos, and Volto Santos,³ are finding more acceptance

¹ [Jeremiah xxiii. 17. The following references are 2 Kings v. 18 and Proverbs xxx. 8.]

² [“At the sight of a cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour” (Religio Medici, part i. § 3).]

³ [Ruskin was no doubt thinking more especially of the Volto Santo which is preserved in the Duomo of Lucca and exposed to view three times a year. It was this wooden image of our Lord-reputed to have been begun by Nicodemus and to have been miraculously finished, but really a work of the eleventh century-which furnished William Rufus with his favourite oath-Per vultum de Lucca, and it is alluded to by Dante (Inferno, xxi. 48).]

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