In relation to modern idolatry, the world is full of living witnesses of its corrupting tendency. We will cite, in illustration, a single case or two. The following is extracted from a public document, laid before Parliament by H. Oakley, Esq., a magistrate in Lower Bengal. Speaking of the influence of idolatry in India, he says of the worship of Kalé, one of the most popular idols, 'The murderer, the robber, and the prostitute, all aim to propitiate a being whose worship is obscenity, and who delights in the blood of man and beast; and without imploring whose aid no act of wickedness is committed. The worship of Kalé must harden the hearts of her followers; and to them scenes of blood and crime must become familiar.' In China, according to Medhurst, the priests of Buddha understand and teach the doctrine of the assimilation of the worshipper to the object worshipped. They say--'Think of Buddha and you will be transformed into Buddha. If men pray to Buddha and do not become Buddha, it is because the mouth prays, and not the mind.'[3] [3] For a succinct statement of the universal prevalence of false religions, and their corrupting influence, see Ryan on the Effect of Religion upon Mankind, _passim_. Two facts, then, are philosophically and historically true: First--Man is a religious animal, and will worship something as a superior being. Second--By worshipping he becomes assimilated to the moral character of the object which he worships. And (the God of the Bible out of view for the present) those objects have always had a defective and unholy character. Here, then, is one great source which has developed the corruption of the family of man. We inquire not in this place concerning the origin of idolatry; whatever or wherever was its origin, its influence has been uniformly the same. As no object of idolatrous worship was ever conceived to be perfectly just and benevolent, but most of them no better than the apotheosis of heroes, or the deification of the imperfect faculties and impure passions of human or brute nature, the result followed, with a certainty as unerring as cause and effect, that man, by following his instinct to worship, would becloud his intellect and corrupt his heart. Notice how inevitable, from the circumstances of the case, was the corruption of man's powers:--He was led to worship by an instinct over which he had no control:--The objects of his worship were, whether he originated them or not, all of them of a character that corrupted his heart; thus the gratification of his instinctive propensities inevitably strengthened the corruption of his nature.