What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts?
Obscenity, foul things, mean things, low things? Is that mystic shrine
within you painted with such figures as were laid bare in some chambers
in Pompeii, where the excavators had to cover up the pictures because
they were so foul? Or, is it like the cells in the convent of San Marco
at Florence, where Fra Angelico's holy and sweet genius has left on the
bare walls, to be looked at, as he fancied, only by one devout brother
in each cell, angel imaginings, and noble, pure celestial faces that
calm and hallow those who gaze upon them? What are you doing, my
brother, in the dark, in your chambers of imagery?

II. Now look with me briefly at the second thought that I draw from this
symbol,--the idolatries of the dark chamber.

All these seventy grey-bearded elders that were bowing there before the
bestial gods which they had portrayed, had, no doubt, often stood in the
courts of the Temple and there made prayers to the God of Israel, with
broad phylacteries, to be seen of men. Their true worship was their
worship in the dark. The other was conscious or unconscious hypocrisy.
And the very chamber in which they were gathered, according to the ideal
representation of our text, was a chamber in, and therefore partaking of
the consecration of, the Temple. So their worship was doubly criminal,
in that it was sacrilege as well as idolatry. Both things are true about
us.

A man's true worship is not the worship which he performs in the public
temple, but that which he offers down in that little private chapel,
where nobody goes but himself. Worship is the attribution of supreme
excellence to, and the entire dependence of the heart upon, a certain
person. And the people or the things to which a man attributes the