Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Other Arts Made Subservient to Idolatry. Lawful Means of Gaining a Livelihood Abundant.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter VIII.—Other
Arts Made Subservient to Idolatry. Lawful Means of Gaining a Livelihood
Abundant.
There are also other species of very many arts
which, although they extend not to the making of idols, yet,
with the same criminality, furnish the adjuncts without which
idols have no power. For it matters not whether you erect or equip: if
you have embellished his temple, altar, or niche; if you have pressed
out gold-leaf, or have wrought his insignia, or even his house:
work of that kind, which confers not shape, but
authority, is more important. If the necessity of
maintenance201
| 201 See chaps. v. and
xii. | is urged so much, the arts have other species
withal to afford means of livelihood, without outstepping the path of
discipline, that is, without the confiction of an idol. The plasterer
knows both how to mend roofs, and lay on stuccoes, and polish a
cistern, and trace ogives, and draw in relief on party-walls many other
ornaments beside likenesses. The painter, too, the marble mason, the
bronze-worker, and every graver whatever, knows expansions202
| 202 See chap. ii.,
“The expansiveness of idolatry.” | of his own art, of course much easier of
execution. For how much more easily does he who delineates a statue
overlay a sideboard!203
| 203 Abacum. The word has
various meanings; but this, perhaps, is its most general use: as, for
instance, in Horace and Juvenal. | How much sooner does
he who carves a Mars out of a lime-tree, fasten together a chest!
No art but is either mother or kinswoman of some neighbour204
| 204 Alterius = ἑτέρον which in the New Testament
is = to “neighbour” in Rom. xiii. 8, etc. [Our author must have borne in
mind Cicero’s beautiful words—“Etenim omnes artes
quæ ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune
vinculum,” etc. Pro Archia, i. tom. x. p. 10.
Ed. Paris, 1817.] | art: nothing is independent of its neighbour.
The veins of the arts are many as are the concupiscences of men.
“But there is difference in wages and the rewards of
handicraft;” therefore there is difference, too, in the labour
required. Smaller wages are compensated by more frequent earning. How
many are the party-walls which require statues? How many the temples
and shrines which are built for idols? But houses, and official
residences, and baths, and tenements, how many are they? Shoe-
and slipper-gilding is daily work; not so the gilding of Mercury and
Serapis. Let that suffice for the gain205
| 205 Quæstum. Another
reading is “questum,” which would require us to translate
“plaint.” | of
handicrafts. Luxury and ostentation have more votaries than all
superstition. Ostentation will require dishes and cups more
easily than superstition. Luxury deals in wreaths, also, more than
ceremony. When, therefore, we urge men generally to such kinds of
handicrafts as do not come in contact with an idol indeed and with the
things which are appropriate to an idol; since, moreover, the things
which are common to idols are often common to men too; of this also we
ought to beware that nothing be, with our knowledge, demanded by any
person from our idols’ service. For if we shall have made
that concession, and shall not have had recourse to the remedies so
often used, I think we are not free of the contagion of idolatry, we
whose (not unwitting) hands206
| 206 “Quorum manus non
ignorantium,” i.e., “the hands of whom not
unwitting;” which may be rendered as above, because in English,
as in the Latin, in adjective “unwitting” belongs to the
“whose,” not to the “hands.” | are found busied in
the tendence, or in the honour and service, of
demons.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
