But you are not left to spontaneity. When God chose for Himself a people to honour and serve Him, to be witnesses for His honour, to bring in due time all nations to serve and worship Him, He taught that people what kind of House they should build Him, and with what kind of ritual they should serve Him; treating the matter of such importance as actually to inspire the architects, to prescribe each article of furniture and every detail of ornament, to appoint precisely the ceremonies and observances. And what did He require? That the material of house and ornament should be of the best and costliest and most splendid; that every act, every feeling of worship should have its corresponding sign in some ritualistic observance; that among the accessories of worship should be attractions for means of enlisting men’s various senses; colour, and pattern and ornament for the eye, music for the ear, fragrant perfume for the scent. This is God’s pattern of what is decorous: His prescription of order. But you object: “No, this _was_ God’s pattern and order: but it was all appointed under a different dispensation from Christianity, for a rude and childish people, as pictures and types and carnal ordinances, to be exchanged when men were fit, when the Messiah should come, for inward and invisible realities, for purely spiritual things, which heart and mind alone could apprehend, which outward sense would rather obscure than discover.” Now, of course, Judaism was in some respects a different dispensation from Christianity, and some even of its divinely appointed observances were merely temporary, and had a significance and use for Jews which they would not have for us. But it is quite an error to suppose that these Jews were a rude and childish people; they were rather the civilised and cultivated and most spiritual of the earth. Albeit, if we might dare to say so, for them more than for us, or for any other people whom God has since drawn near to Himself, an elaborate outward and sensuous worship (if it were not the right, the necessary, the permanent accompaniment of inward realities) was unsuitable and fraught with danger. They had just come out from the home of idolatry; they were going to dwell among the observers of carnal and idolatrous rites; they were themselves hankering after visible objects of worship; they would again and again make stumbling blocks for themselves out of the very things which God appointed for their edification in His worship. Now ascribing to God, as we must always do, perfect wisdom and clearest foresight, is it presumptuous to say that He would have kept these snares from the Jews, that he would have drawn off their minds from the external and the naturally magnificent, and rather would have _forbidden_ than _enforced_ minute ritual and much worship of the body, as things through which they were sure to err, unless there were in the things themselves intrinsic