Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to worship, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form, but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts. We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair fantasms, to which we once sought for succor;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honor in the fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands of them that love Him, and keep His Commandments. FOOTNOTES: [16] I shall be obliged in future Lectures, as hitherto in my other writings, to use the terms Idolatry and Imagination in a more comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience' sake, limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms noble and ignoble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception. [17] "And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the molded things to have soul (psyche) in them."--LUCIAN, _Prometheus._ [18] His relations with the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne, belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long withdraws and disguises herself. [19] _Ante_, Sec. 30. [20] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates. [21] _Ante_, Sec. 44. [22] "Lectures on Art," Sec. 95. [23] "Ethics of the Dust," Lecture X. [24] The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of representing either a man, a horse, or a lion. LECTURE IV. LIKENESS. _November, 1870._