such worship can elude his eye, and you must not put it before his face. II. The second command prohibits the making and worshiping of images designed to represent idol gods――imaginary powers, supposed to have more or less control over human welfare. It equally prohibits images designed to represent the true God. All such sensuous conceptions of God are necessarily debasing. They rest on false views of God; tend to fearful and fatal degeneracy; and must therefore be forbidden under most stringent penalties. The whole history of our race witnesses to the infinite mischief wrought by such sensuous conceptions of God, as well as by the notion of subordinate powers, lower than the one supreme yet more than human. This has been one of Satan’s devices to rule God out of his universe and transfer to other objects the worship due to God alone. This prohibition as it stands here is not enforced by specific penalties, but in a way far more impressive it bears us back to the very heart of God, revealing his holy _jealousy_ of any rival to his throne who would wrest and steal away from him the supreme love and homage of his creatures, and give it to supposed gods that are no Gods at all. “For I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”――――By the very law of the family relation, the great sins of the father send their curse down upon his children. He makes them heirs to an inheritance of shame and sorrow. He entails calamity upon his offspring. Godless and idolatrous himself, he makes his family also godless and idolatrous. The influence of his sin will naturally and almost inevitably blight the morals and the souls of his children after him, and of his children’s children. Let this fact throw its shield like a wall of fire around him and his family, so that, if not for his own sake, at least for the sake of his unborn offspring, he will most sacredly obey this command and abstain from the least infringement of it in spirit or in letter.