By a scarcely perceptible transition, we pass to Idolatry. A few chips or scratches or daubs of paint suffice to convert the rude post or stone into an idol. Difficulties which complicate the study of stock-and-stone worship disappear in the worship of even the rudest of unequivocal images, which can no longer be mere altars, and if symbols must at least be symbols of a personal being. Idolatry occupies a remarkable district in the history of religion. It hardly belongs to the lowest savagery, which simply seems not to have attained to it, and it hardly belongs to the highest civilization, which has discarded it. Its place is intermediate, ranging from the higher savagery where it first clearly appears, to the middle civilization where it reaches its extreme development, and thenceforward its continuance is in dwindling survival and sometimes expanding revival. The position thus outlined is, however, very difficult to map exactly. Idolatry does not seem to come in uniformly among the higher savages; it belongs, for instance, fully to the Society Islanders, but not to the Tongans and Fijians. Among higher nations, its presence or absence does not necessarily agree with particular national affinities or levels of culture — compare the idol-worshipping Hindu with his ethnic kinsman the idol-hating Parsi, or the idolatrous Phœnician with his ethnic kinsman the Israelite, among whose people the incidental relapse into the proscribed image-worship was a memory of disgrace. Moreover, its tendency to revive is ethnographically embarrassing. The ancient Vedic religion seems not to recognize idolatry, yet the modern Brahmans, professed followers of Vedic doctrine, are among the greatest idolaters of the world. Early Christianity by no means abrogated the Jewish law against image-worship, yet image-worship became and still remains widely spread and deeply rooted in Christendom.
Of Idolatry, so far as its nature is symbolic or representative, I have given some account elsewhere.[1] The old and
- ↑ 'Early Hist, of Mankind,' chap. vi.
