Idolatry

But in his soul he was pressed by the utmost poverty and choked by many evils, for he belonged to the Greek party and was greatly excited about the superstitious error of the idols.

Now when he had departed, the king, more angered, plotted a fiercer persecution against the monastic order, and counted the worshippers and temple-keepers of the idols worthy of still greater honour.

In ancient times it was darkened by the gloom of idol-madness, barbarous in the extreme and given over to lawless practices.

So this wicked tyrant and serpent, having bound whomever he can master from birth to stones and timber and statues and such like idols by the wretched chain of superstition, has, as the saying goes, carried the living off and buried them with the dead, until they too perish together.

indeed, they built up the rudeness of the custom out of stones and timber — that is, out of statues and painted images;

"And the foolish learns by suffering" that superstition destroys and piety saves.

And again Menander, paraphrasing that Scripture, "Sacrifice a sacrifice of righteousness, and hope upon the Lord," writes somewhat thus:

But we mortals, many, wandering in heart, set up for ourselves a comfort in our pains — images of the gods made of stones, or of bronze, or of figures wrought of gold or ivory;

Well, then, does Philemon the comic poet also cut down idolatry, by these words:

From this it is proved that they were always marked out as guilty of the crime of idolatry, by the testimony of the divine Scriptures.

For the East had Magi too as something like kings, and Damascus was once reckoned to Arabia, before it was transcribed into Syrophoenicia by the division of the Syrias, whose power Christ then received in receiving its insignia — namely gold and perfumes — but the spoils of Samaria are the very Magi, who, when they had recognized him and honoured him with gifts and adored him on bended knee as Lor …

and he brought me to the threshold of the gate of the house of the Lord that looks to the north, and behold, there women sitting and weeping for Tammuz;

After such crimes, so destructive, so devouring of salvation, the other sins also—disposed in some measure and separately—nonetheless represent their condition within idolatry.

Grant now that there is some honest gain, secure as to the observance of covetousness and falsehood—I think that it offends into the crime of idolatry, which pertains to the very soul and spirit of idols, which fattens every demon.

We observe among the arts also certain professions liable to idolatry.

And of course no importance remains in what they have mentioned of the worship of animals that was widespread in the Age of Ignorance — which in truth is not of the order of totemic animal-worship at all, but is the worship of idols, the fewer of them in the shape of certain animals and the greater part of them in other shapes.

So he set about searching for its remaining conditions, and saw that some tribes worshipped idols in the shape of certain animals;

The idols of the Arabs

But the "spoils of Samaria" are the Magi themselves, who, when they had recognized him and honoured him with gifts and adored him on bended knee as god and king, under the testimony of the star their guide and leader, were made the spoils of Samaria, that is, of idolatry, believing, namely, in Christ.

just as a Christian may not therefore commit idolatry with impunity, because the creation of God is both incense and wine and the fire that feeds, and the animals that become victims, since the very material that is adored is God's.

For idolatry too, often upbraided to the people under the name of adultery and fornication, will be joined with it by lot, as also by sequence;

For in vain has the law been built up over them, condemning the very origins of offences — that is, lusts and wishes — no less than deeds, if for that reason pardon is to be granted to adultery today, because it was once granted.

We have, I think, sufficiently fulfilled the order—how many ways and by what means the spectacles commit idolatry, from origins, from titles, from apparatus, from places, from crafts—that we may be certain that they in no part befit us, who twice renounce idols.

Therefore, if it shall be established that the whole apparatus of the spectacles consists of idolatry, it will undoubtedly be prejudged that the testimony of our renunciation in the laver pertains to the spectacles also, which are made over to the devil and his pomp and his angels, namely, through idolatry.

that the demons, foreseeing for themselves from the beginning, among the other defilements of idolatry, those also of the spectacles, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honour, inspired also the talents of arts of this kind.

But we, contending about God elsewhere, and about the rest of the body of every heretical doctrine, now, in this one species of engagement, draw certain lines beforehand, defending — as the will of no other God than the God of Israel — that will which made room for martyrdoms, as much from the precepts forbidding idolatry always, as from the judgments punishing it.

" And thus, through almost all the annals of the Judges, and thereafter of the Kings, the strength of the surrounding nations being reserved, by war and captivity and the yoke of the foreigners did Israel dispense the wrath of God, as often as it strayed away from him most of all into idolatry.

and you shall dig up their altars, overturn and break to pieces their little standing images, and cut down their groves, and burn with fire the graven images of those gods, and destroy their name out of that place.

And when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of Kings, he need not wonder that the Almighty ever jealous of his honor, should disapprove of a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of Heaven.

The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased Kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.