Needless to say, brass is a pitiful substitute for the precious metal which we call gold. If it is kept in a shining condition, at first glance brass may have some resemblance to the nobler metal, but it quickly tarnishes and its glitter fades. For this reason, the targets and shields of brass were stored in the house of the guard. At the hour when the king came to the temple to pray, the guard polished these ridiculous substitutes and hung them in their places so that the king might delude himself by the glitter and shine, and thus have some balm for his troubled spirit. There is, of course, an element of humour in this tragic record! The moral lessons are almost innumerable and would provide a minister with sermon material for days on end. We are faced with a somewhat similar situation in Christendom today. Upon the walls of the House of Faith, our believing fathers hung the golden shields that constitute the doctrines of Christianity. The brilliant glory of those foundational treasures was never threatened as long as the church was true to God. But we in our generation, alas, have allowed an enemy to come in and rob us of many of those golden shields. We cannot over-emphasize the fact that it is always an enemy who seeks thus to despoil the House of our Faith. Though he may come in the guise of a friend, or even of a relative, as in the case of Shishak, the man who robs us of our golden shields is an enemy at heart and in purpose. May we illustrate this suggestion by saying, for instance, that our fathers believed in the golden fact of the deity of Jesus Christ. They held as a basic fact of Christianity that in the person of our Saviour, Almighty God was incarnated to be the Redeemer of mankind. Satan, in the person of many of his charming and well-mannered cohorts, has stolen that shield from many a temple of prayer. Men speak now of the “divinity” of Jesus instead of the “deity.” Having established this premise, they then continue with the statement that we are _all_ divine and have this same spark of divinity within our spirits, to a greater or lesser extent. When the golden shield of the deity of Christ disappeared from the walls of many churches that had once been Christian, the worshippers made a beautiful substitute with the brazen replica of Unitarianism. The tarnished brass of that un-Christian doctrine is a miserable substitute indeed for the blessed assurance that is resident in the fact of the deity of the Saviour.