primitive doctors whom thy church hears, is forced to acknowledge that this twofold kind of adoration of which thou speakest, has no support in scripture; and that another doctor, not in less repute, confesses that this distinction has been altogether unknown to the apostolical fathers.

Abjure it, then, for it is not in the word of the Lord. But what is there is thy condemnation. I see there, myself, two things which speak against thee: one, that thou oughtest to add nothing to the words of the Lord, nor to take anything from them; the other, that there is there a commandment which expressly curses all the service of images. Hear it!

THE CHURCH OF ROME CONCEALS FROM THE PEOPLE THE SECOND COMMANDMENT.

'The Eternal has said with his own mouth: Thou shalt not make any graven image, nor any representation of things which are on high in the heavens, nor here below upon the earth, nor in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not prostrate thyself before them, and thou shalt not serve them: for I am the Lord thy God, the mighty God, and jealous, punishing the iniquity of the fathers in the children, even unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and shewing mercy even unto a thousand generations, to them that love me and that keep my commandments.

Answer, priest of the church of Rome! What hast thou done with this commandment? I see it no more, neither in the catechisms of the people, nor in the teachings of thy church.1

1 The translator has himself seen, in the Chapel Royal at Versailles, as restored and beautified since the restoration of the Bourbons, a table of stone, purporting to be a fac simile of the Decalogue, attached to one of the pillars, and near to the great altar, upon which there are cut, in Hebrew characters, just nine commandments, and

• The child who learns thy catechism has not even an idea of it; he knows not that God has pronounced it. Let one ask of him, What is the second commandment? he answers by reciting the third.

no more. The second is entirely left out, and no attempt whatever is made to divide the tenth into two! It is given just as we have it"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house," &c.

So entirely do the Romish priesthood in France rely upon the profound ignorance upon the subject of religion, or the profound indifference of the generality of Frenchmen, including the court and the royal family.

The allegation of the shameless apologists for the apostate Roman church, with respect to this foul mutilation is, that this is all one sin, the worshipping another God and worshipping a graven image; or at least that they differ the one from the other only in degree therefore the commandment concerning it can be but one.

and

But this is altogether false: the sins though frequently or most generally committed together, are essentially different in their kind. The first commandment forbids, not the turning from the true to a false Supreme God, (a thing which even the heathen never professed to do, or to contemplate,) but the having and adoring of strange little gods, before his face. This sin was first introduced into Israel by Ahab, who, together with his Sidonian wife, imported into his kingdom the worship of these Baalim, or "lords many," whom the Greeks afterwards distinguished by the name of Dæmons, or Daimonia, (little demons.)

But the sin forbidden in the second commandment is the offering of relation worship to an idol, or image. By relation worship, in Roman Catholic divinity, is meant a worship that does not terminate in that image, or idol (for an image, and an idol, are all the same) but which ultimately refers to, and terminates in its real, or supposed architype, the being, or spirit, which it is intended to represent. And the being, or spirit, whose symbol, or visible representation, the image, or idol, is intended to be, may be, and in the contemplation of the second commandment actually is no other than God himself. The children of Israel and Aaron intended no departure from the God of their fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, when they made the calf; and therefore when the idol was finished, Aaron made proclamation to that effect (as did Jeroboam afterwards): and the main. tainers of image-worship in the Christian church of the middle ages (at least at the first) did the same. The symbol, or idol, which they made, was that of the cherubic Man God upon the cross, the times of the worship of the cherubic calf, or ox, having gone out with the incarnation of the eternal word, and the shewing of him to the world. The apology then for image-worship in the church of Rome being founded in an allegation which is manifestly untrue, is wholly vain,

'The man come to maturity is just as ignorant of it, and he has no suspicion even that he is transgressing the law of God, when he bows himself before an image.

and falls to the ground. It is true that the idolater may bow down before, and adore an image of that which is not God, but is only a creature-a saint, or an angel. And then the first and second commandment are both broken together, as they were by the heathen, when they worshipped the images of the lesser gods and goddesses.

But this is not necessary to constitute the sin of idolatry. Idolatry may, and does degenerate lower than the first step in that provoking sin which, blinding the eyes of them who are the subjects of it, must therefore be always deadly or damning in its effect. Yea, it may, and does descend even to the lowest degree in its kind, ending, as at last it does, at least with the vulgar, who are the people, in the worship of the image itself, as having a divinity residing in it, and being that very divinity.

But, I repeat it, he is an idolater in the proper sense of the word, and in the primary view of the second commandment, who uses an image, an idol, to aid him in his devotions, when professing to worship, and to worship alone, the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. It is not then necessary that the Virgin Mary should be worshipped, through an image representing her holding her son in her arms, or without her son, in order that idolatry should be committed: it is enough that THAT image should be set up, which we always see over the high altar in Roman Catholic churches, and that is no other than the visible representation of the human nature of Him who once suffered for our redemption, and in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

The children of Israel made a calf at Horeb: they "sat down to eat and drink before the idol, and rose up to play." And God, displeased at this, turned, (as Stephen reminded their children, Acts vii.) and gave them over to worship the host of heaven; and for these two sins committed together, the breach of the first commandment and of the second, he sent them in captivity to Babylon.

Here the worship of the host of heaven is spoken of as a greater and more degrading sin-as a greater bathos in apostacy; which, because of the sin of idolatry which they had committed before, and not repented of, God gave his people over to commit. But the material host of heaven, the sun, moon, and stars, or the spirits, which in heaven behold the face of God, are surely nobler objects of false worship, if false worship be to be committed, than a block, or a piece of metal, fashioned by art and man's device. The sin of Ahab, whom Jezebel his wife stirred up, was greater than that of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. Idolatry, then, simply considered, cannot be (as the Papists vainly contend) the making an

'Thou tellest him nothing more of it in thy discourses; and if your books speak of it, it is en passant, and as of an addition, now useless, to the first commandment, and which contains not another ordonnance. Or rather, by an unheard-of interpretation, thou declarest that the menace which ends the second commandment is a clause which attaches itself to each of the ten!

I well know that thou wilt say to me, that, nevertheless thy church hath the ten commandments.

'But first of all, by what name shall I call this alteration of the seventh (which thou callest the sixth), which forbids adultery, and which thou makest to forbid only lust? Then, in the second place, what shall I say of this division of the tenth into two, and in which is named, in the first place, the coveting of one's neighbour's wife, then, in the second place, the coveting of his goods?

'Wouldest thou not have been aware, if thou hadst read scripture, that God hath given the tenth commandment in these terms: Thou shalt not covet the house of thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet the wife of thy neighbour, nor his man-servant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.

image of a false God, and falling down and worshipping it: it con. sists mainly in caricaturing Jehovah himself, by likening him to something that he has created. See Deut. iv. 10-18.

Either, then, the church of Rome, in confounding together the first and second commandment, and taking away the second on pretence of its being but a part of the first, has shewn herself incapable of distinguishing between things that differ (which destroys her assumption of infallibility;) or else, in attempting to blot out one of the ten words of the holy law of the Lord, she confesses that she cannot stand to be judged by it; and that for this act of most awful sacrilege she has merited her sentence, to be blotted out, like Amalek of old, from under heaven.

"Thou wouldest have known then, that from the wife of a neighbour to his man-servant, his maidservant, &c. they constitute his house, that is to say, his goods, and that thus it is only by a boldness, or a subtlety, that God alone will judge that thou hast changed the order of the words of the Supreme, and that thou hast separated that which he has united.

'But it is only one abyss drawing on another abyss, and that it was necessary in order that idols and images might enter into thy church, that the commandment which proscribes them, and which denounces the service of them, should first be taken away; and a hand which I dare not give a name to, has consummated this work.

'But the word of God, for this is not less sure, although thou tearest off a portion of it-although thou pleadest against it, and that in shewing the idol which the workman has made with the rule and the square, as said the prophet, or that he has formed with the hammer, and that he has painted afterwards, or covered with gold, thou sayest: Behold such a saint, behold the Virgin, behold Jesus, behold the Holy Spirit, and even behold the eternal Father.' Yes, always this word of God cries unto thee: Woe! woe unto the idolator! Thy image teacheth nothing but lies.

'And if thou sayest to me, in spite of that, that the Virgin Mary, the angels and the saints are worthy that they should be honoured; that the Virgin, especially, is far elevated above every creature, and that in serving her God is served by her. I demand of thee again, from whence knowest thou this?

'I see, according to the scripture, that all ages shall call her blessed; and also I regard her as the