sense _eidola_, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:--we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only _more_ idolatrous. Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of those poor wooden symbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet, and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets: recognition of a certain endless _divine_ beauty and significance in stars and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly condemn him? The poorest mortal worshipping his Fetish, while his heart is full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you will; but cannot surely be an object of hatred. Let his heart _be_ honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated thereby; in one word, let him entirely _believe_ in his Fetish,--it will then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there.