One other turpitude the Asiatic idolatry added to the Greek and Roman forms. By consecrating the sexual relations themselves in one male and one female god, they effected this crowning connection of idolatry with immorality that unchaste acts became themselves acts of sacrifice, and so of worship.(23) This is the strange perversion borne witness to by Herodotus, and corroborated by the prophet Jeremiah. A great seat of this worship was the city of Hierapolis, in Syria, where was one of the most magnificent temples of the ancient world, dedicated to Derketo, and rich with the offerings of Arabians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, and all nations of the Semitic tongue. Nor was this worship confined to the East, for hence, as from a centre, the adherents of the Syrian goddess spread themselves in begging troops over the provinces of the empire. And the worship of Venus at Eryx, and other places in the West, with the thousands of female priestesses dedicated to it, reproduced the same abomination. As the great result of all that we have said, we find the notion of sanctifying the human will absent from the religious rites of the polytheistic idolatry in all its forms. To this corresponded the absence of the notion of holiness in the gods. And this leads us finally to the remarkable character which defines it as a whole. This worship was throughout a corruption,(24) the spoiling, that is, of something good; a turning away from the better to the worse. The worship itself had been originally good. The corruption lay in the alteration of the quality and the object of the worship. Worship had been implanted in man, and prescribed to him. It was at once the need of his nature and the command of Him who gave that nature. It had for it, first, positive institution, and then tradition and custom, and throughout, the conscience, the reason, and the heart of man. The reason of man ever bore powerful witness to the unity of the Godhead; the breaking up of that unity, as exhibited by this idolatrous polytheism, in contradiction to the original prompting and continued witness of the reason, is a very strong proof of that moral corruption in the will which first generated it, which continued its existence, and which, while multiplying, degraded its forms from age to age. But man was free to decline from the good in which he had been placed. The corruption which was left in his power he exerted; he changed the quality of the service, and the person served. The productive cause of idolatry on the part of man was the soul of man turning away from the notion of a good and holy Creator, the contemplation of whom was its present support and future reward, to visible things. Of these things the chief were bodily pleasures. Thus this corruption of the soul, in process of time, and continually becoming worse, produced this whole pantheon of gods, originally the creation of its own lusts, and subsisting as a