These gods are, as a rule, human beings or the products of their mind in some form,--once again to-day, as in the period of the so-called Renaissance, preëminently in the form of art. Great crudeness of morals and the absence indeed of all ethical conceptions may go hand in hand with the finest and highest culture in this special direction, thus showing that art can not be the highest goal men can strive for and attain. We ought not to have had to experience this for the second time, though it is often to be feared that we are now doing so. We should never make idols for ourselves of even the dearest and best men, not to speak of those who are highly gifted or hold a high place in the world’s esteem. Not only the New Testament, but even the Old, lays down in a very practical way the proper and easily recognized limit; for they prescribe that we are to love God “above all,” and men “as ourselves,” no more and no less. Even the simplest person can easily compute this; and if in certain exuberant, “heavenly” moments of life it seems too little, yet, taking one’s whole life into account, it is really more than any of us perform, and at any rate is much more salutary for our neighbor. The opposite quality to “reliance upon men” is (what at first seems unlikely) sympathetic compassion; when reliance departs, compassion enters to heal. This is something quite different from what is ordinarily called “love to men,” and is much more. It is something, too, that does not naturally lie within us; we have to learn it, usually late in life and through troublous paths. But when a man has it, then it is henceforth sure that he is “fit for the Kingdom of God.” If it is not men and their works, then it is possessions, ambition, or the continuous search for enjoyment that stands most in the way of that sincere union of the human soul with the divine spirit which necessarily forms the foundation of all Christianity;--above all, it is the “deceitfulness of riches,” as the Gospel well calls it, the very common delusion that possession and happiness are identical, a delusion from which the man first awakes when he holds in his hands that for which he was striving and for which he had often sacrificed body and soul; and now for the first he discovers that, looked at closely, it was not, even on the best interpretation, worth all this exertion.