So that, finally, wealth is not the accidental object of a morbid desire, but the constant object of a legitimate one.[70] By the fury of ignorance, and fitfulness of caprice, large interests may be continually attached to things unserviceable or hurtful; if their nature could be altered by our passions, the science of Political Economy would be but as the weighing of clouds, and the portioning out of shadows. But of ignorance there is no science; and of caprice no law. Their disturbing forces interfere with the operations of economy, but have nothing in common with them; the calm arbiter of national destiny regards only essential power for good in all it accumulates, and alike disdains the wanderings of imagination and the thirsts of disease. [70] Few passages of the Book which at least some part of the nations at present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is said to have "seen good" in creating, are in this their eternal goodness always called Helpful or Holy: and the sweep and range of idolatry extend to the rejection of all or any of these, "calling evil good, or good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter," so betraying the first of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite loyalty serving our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the dwelling, but of the Grave (otherwise called the law of error; or "mark missing," which we translate law of "Sin"), these "two masters," between whose services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and "Mammon," which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of money only, is in truth the great evil spirit of false and fond desire, or "Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that Iconoclasm--image or likeness-breaking--is easy; but an idol cannot be broken--it must be forsaken, and this is not so easy, either in resolution or persuasion. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image, but not of the emptiness of a phantasm.