from God alone is like the sin of these men in our text, in that it is
sacrilege. They had taken a chamber in the very Temple, and turned it
into a temple of the false gods. Whom is your heart made to enshrine?
Why! every stone, if I may so say, of the fabric of our being bears
marked upon it that it was laid in order to make a dwelling-place for
God. Whom are you meant to worship, by the witness of the very
constitution of your nature and make of your spirits? Is there anybody
but One who is worthy to receive the priceless gift of human love
absolute and entire? Is there any but One to whom it is aught but
degradation and blasphemy for a man to bow down? Is there any being but
One that can still the tumult of my spirit, and satisfy the immortal
yearnings of my soul? We were made for God, and whensoever we turn the
hopes, the desires, the affections, the obedience, and that which is
the root of them all, the confidence that ought to fix and fasten upon
Him, to other creatures, we are guilty not only of idolatry but of
sacrilege. We commit the sin of which that wild reveller in Babylon was
guilty, when, at his great feast, in the very madness of his presumption
he bade them bring forth the sacred vessels from the Temple at
Jerusalem; 'and the king and his princes and his concubines drank in
them and praised the gods.' So we take the sacred chalice of the human
heart, on which there is marked the sign manual of Heaven, claiming it
for God's, and fill it with the spiced and drugged draught of our own
sensualities and evils, and pour out libations to vain and false gods.
Brethren! Render unto Him that which is His; and see even upon the walls
scrabbled all over with the deformities that we have painted there,
lingering traces, like those of some dropping fresco in a roofless
Italian church, which suggest the serene and perfect beauty of the image
of the One whose likeness was originally traced there, and for whose
worship it was all built.