CHRISTIAN travelers in countries where men still bow down to idols of wood and stone, are sure to experience a mingled sense of humiliation and pity in the presence of such a strikingly manifest subjection of intelligence to nonintelligence, of mind to matter, and they have returned to their native shores with a keener realization of what Christianity has accomplished in doing away with the grosser forms of religious superstition.
That the mental attitude behind any type of idolatry is peculiarly degrading and destructive of the moral sense, and thus at war with all true self-interest, is indicated by the fact that the Scripture writers lay so much emphasis upon their condemnation of it. The mandate of the first commandment is blended with practically every word of counsel and appeal found in the Bible. It is made a basic and perpetual requirement to which there can be no exceptions and the neglect of which can never go unpunished.
In this, as in every other manifestation of materiality, the attention of the student of Christian Science is at once directed to the explanatory metaphysical facts. He is reminded that the object idolatrously worshiped is not God, but the devotee's belief about God, and he thus finds the real offense to be the formation or approval of a concept of Deity which is discreditable and weakening. In his ignorance the pagan idolater worships what all intelligent people recognize as the embodiment of an uncouth and distorted sense, and because of the pitiful grossness of his symbol and rites, he appeals to the compassion of many who are in fact doing precisely the same thing,—worshiping a concept of God which has usually been presented to them fully framed by their forbears, and which, while less repulsive than that of the pagan, is nevertheless the very antipode in many respects, perchance, of the God and Father revealed in the teaching of Christ Jesus. They also are worshiping, seeking to adjust themselves to the requirements of a thought of God which is of their own making, in the sense that they have accepted it without protest and often without premeditation. They have never subjected it to the test of conformity to the ideal which the Master so clearly defined.
