Image-Worship.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graben image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven abobe, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serbe them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, bisiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that lobe me, and keep my commandments.

I.

GOD is a Spirit, and should be adored
In spirit and in truth; but, lost to good,
The soul yields not such worship to its Lord:
From upas-trees may myrrh or balm exude?
The pool whose waters long have lifeless stood,
Black and polluted, stirr'd not by the wing
Of bird or breeze, reflects, from its dull flood,

No gleam of heaven; though morn its glories bring, Or night its diamond wealth, with lavish bounty,

fling.

II.

Conscious of fluttering, like a wither'd leaf,
Upon the breath of some mysterious fate,
Trembling with weakness, and subdued by grief,
Man would, with prayers, that power propitiate.
So prone his soul, in this his fallen state,

He downward looks for God: but should some ray
Uplift his brow, he shrinks, in fear or hate,

From the pure radiance of the sky away,

To gods more like himself, and hails his kindred clay.

III.

'Tis first, perchance, the medium of his prayer,

Or likeness of Him who no likeness hath

In heaven nor earth, in water nor in air,

Th' Unseen and Unconceived! whose righteous

wrath

Sweepeth the mockers from its whirlwind path:

But soon, no more a type,-'tis Deity!

They bend before it, with a sottish faith,

Whether the sun or stars, the earth or sea,

Reptile, beast, bird,—no thing too base a god to be!

IV.

To draw near unto God is to retrace

Man's wanderings from primeval bliss: To bow
To earth-made idols than himself more base,

Is with a deadlier curse to brand his brow,
And sink his nature that of fiends below;
For they believe and tremble. Hence God's first
And fearfullest threats of vengeance and of woe
Upon the grovellers and their offspring burst,
Who make them mimic gods, and bow to earth
accurst.

ব

The heart of man! it is a fearful thing;

A soil whose germs, though warm'd by Heaven's

pure sun,

And water'd by Truth's never-tainted spring,

Ripen to fruitage for the evil one!

Alas, the frailty of a race undone !

That, from a faith so holy and so high,

Could, when their round six centuries had run,
Lapse back to idols fashion'd for the eye,

To wood and stone and paint-dark iconolatry!

VI.

What was the spirit-was it good or ill?—
That bade Irene, for her king and mate,

With the death-draught the treacherous chalice fill,
And o'er his blacken'd corse, with bigot hate,
Hasten the edict of her people's fate,—

Death to all those who worshipp'd God alone?

And what were they-or saints or fiends?-who sate At Nice, to seal that deed of horror done,

And bathe with martyr-blood their blocks of wood and stone?1

VII.

But Murder paled; for lived their prince, her son: Must he too die? The tigress dooms her child! Woo'd to the breast that nursed him, he is won,And lost! by Nature's holiest plea beguiled. Upon his birth-couch, as he, slumbering, smiled, She guides the assassin's daggers to his eyes; His shrieks the arch'd roof echoes wide and wild : Stony and stern, the murd'ress mocks his cries; Though horror shakes the earth and shrouds the startled skies!

VIII.

And thus, o'er trampled Nature, madly driven,
By monkish monsters and by demons led,
To tear their Maker from His throne in heaven,
And raise their graven mockeries in His stead,
Women unsex'd, the earth to faintness bled.
Irene, Theodora, murder-hued,

(The savage sorceress rose a saint, when dead!)
Peopled the skies with deities of wood;

While monks their idol-rites with guiltless blood embrued.

IX.

Dark is the curse a jealous God hath spoken;

And darkly in the spirit's awful night,

In vice and war and woe, that curse hath broken!

Idolatry and Ignorance unite

The race to crush and curse, debase and blight;

The other each reflecting, as the wave

The storm-rent sky. Their reign is death's. They

smite

Th' unborn, and make God's earth a wolfy cave,

A lair where dark lusts lurk, and maniac passions rave.