27. The tenor of our next Lecture, then, must be an inquiry into the real nature of Idolatry; that is to say, the invention and service of Idols: and, in the interval, may I commend to your own thoughts this question, not wholly irrelevant, yet which I cannot pursue; namely, whether the God to whom we have so habitually prayed for deliverance "from battle, murder, and sudden death," is indeed, seeing that the present state of Christendom is the result of a thousand years' praying to that effect, "as the gods of the heathen who were but idols;" or whether—(and observe, one or other of these things must be true)—whether our prayers to Him have been, by this much, worse than Idolatry;—that heathen prayer was true prayer to false gods; and our prayers have been false prayers to the True One?
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I had a real plowshare on my lecture-table; but it would interrupt the drift of the statements in the text too long if I attempted here to illustrate by figures the relation of the colter to the share, and of the hard to the soft pieces of metal in the share itself.
[6] A sphere of rock crystal, cut in Japan, enough imaginable by the reader, without a figure.
[7] One of William Hunt's peaches; not, I am afraid, imaginable altogether, but still less representable by figure.
[8] The crystal ball above mentioned.
[9] All grandest effects in moldings may be, and for the most part have been, obtained by rolls and cavettos of circular (segmental) section. More refined sections, as that of the fluting of a Doric shaft, are only of use near the eye and in beautiful stone; and the pursuit of them was one of the many errors of later Gothic. The statement in the text that the moldings, even of best time, "have no real relation to construction," is scarcely strong enough: they in fact contend with, and deny the construction, their principal purpose seeming to be the concealment of the joints of the voussoirs.
[10] Some of the most precious work done for me by my assistant, Mr. Burgess, during the course of these Lectures, consisted in making enlarged drawings from portions of photographs. Plate III. is engraved from a drawing of his, enlarged from the original photograph of which Plate I. is a reduction.