The apostle Paul, treating (Rom. i.) of the defection of men to idolatry, says, "they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things:" meaning, it is presumed, that they ascribed to the images of those creatures--which they made and served as representatives of the created intelligence whom they worshipped--the attributes, perfections, and prerogatives which he had conspicuously and gloriously manifested in his works of creation and providence. Whether the formation of such images was coëval with the earliest practice of idolatrous rites or not, may be a question. But in the selection of men, birds, and four-footed beasts as models of the forms of the images earliest employed in their idolatry, there is ground to presume that they copied or simulated the cherubic figures so familiar to the Israelites under the Levitical economy, and probably to the Church at all previous times, as a constituent of the instituted system of manifestation and instruction, from the appearance of the cherubim at the gate of Eden. That primeval appearance demonstrates that they were not borrowed from any institution or example of the idolaters; and in so capital a point as that of instituting representative images in their antagonist system, they would be sure to counterfeit, and to pervert from its office and meaning in the true system, whatever would serve the purpose of craft and deception. In respect to "creeping things," they had in the serpent a prototype altogether their own, which, when the images previously mentioned had been adopted, and impiously consecrated to idolatry, might easily be brought into use. Pankhurst, under the word Cherubim, in his Hebrew Lexicon, describes no less than sixty examples in which heads or other parts resembling the cherubic figures are incorporated in the objects of idolatrous homage of different heathen nations. Maimonides, as quoted by Parkhurst, says that the first idolaters regarded the heavenly bodies as messengers or mediators of a supreme, infinite, invisible Being. In the worship of those bodies, or rather of the mediating intelligence supposed to reside in them, either because they were often out of sight, or for other reasons, they selected representative creatures, chiefly of the species comprised in the four-faced cherubim, but sometimes of other species, and among them of the serpent, and at length of mineral and metallic images of such creatures.