The Rev. Thomas C. Price, Vicar of St. Augustine the
Less, Bristol, is much exercised in spirit because the Freemasons have been allowed to put up in Gloucester Cathedral a reredos filled with "images," of which the principal one is "a repre- sentation of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, God and Man," and because the Bishop is to take part in the solemnity of unveiling it. Mr. Price, in a letter to the Bishop, quoted the homily Against Peril of Idolatry, and entreated the Bishop to hold himself free "from all complicity in such a flagrant violation of the Second Commandment." The Bishop replied speedily and tersely-, ex- pressing his disapproval of all idolatry, but intimating his belief that neither the Dean and Chapter, nor even the Freemasons had the least intention of " worshipping or honouring" the statuary to which Mr. Price alludes ; and next, that the figures will not, in all probability, be "provocative of idolatry in others " ; so that, while fully recognisiug Mr. Price's sensitive appreciation of "the sinfulness of image-worship," he sees no harm in taking a part in the unveiling of the reredos. Not a bad reply to a silly letter. But why do our religious teachers so seldom explain what the idolatry is, against which the Second Commandment is directed in our own days, since the worship of graven images it certainly is not,—if it ever was ? We take the real sin of idolatry to have been the merging of the moral and spiritual attributes of God in those physical, sensuous, or sensual qualities of which all ancient, and especially all Oriental sculpture, was most likely to preserve the traces. The Israelites doubtless did not look upon the golden calf at all less exclusively as a symbol, than the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester Cathedral look upon the statuary of the new reredos ; but then it was a symbol of what? A symbol probably of Nature's physical bounty and mystery, of the harmless life which yields milk without preying on any other life. It was a symbol not of mind and spirit at the sources of physical life, but of physical life at the sources of mind and spirit. Are we not guilty of many similar idolatries in our day ?
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