Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

people said, "These are thy gods, O Israel";*(2) and where the
images of Laban are called his gods.*(3) And we see daily by
experience in all sorts of people that such men as study nothing but
their food and ease are content to believe any absurdity, rather
than to trouble themselves to examine it, holding their faith as it
were by entail unalienable, except by an express and new law.
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* II Kings, 18. 4
*(2) Exodus, 32
*(3) Genesis, 31. 30
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But they infer from some other places that it is lawful to paint
angels, and also God Himself: as from God's walking in the garden;
from Jacob's seeing God at the top of the ladder; and from other
visions and dreams. But visions and dreams, whether natural or
supernatural, are but phantasms: and he that painteth an image of
any of them, maketh not an image of God, but of his own phantasm,
which is making of an idol. I say not, that to draw a picture after
a fancy is a sin; but when it is drawn, to hold it for a
representation of God is against the second Commandment and can be
of no use but to worship. And the same may be said of the images of
angels, and of men dead; unless as monuments of friends, or of men
worthy remembrance: for such use of an image is not worship of the
image, but a civil honouring of the person; not that is, but that was:
but when it is done to the image which we make of a saint, for no
other reason but that we think he heareth our prayers, and is
pleased with the honour we do him, when dead and without sense, we
attribute to him more than human power, and therefore it is idolatry.
Seeing therefore there is no authority, neither in the Law of
Moses nor in the Gospel, for the religious worship of images or
other representations of God which men set up to themselves, or for
the worship of the image of any creature in heaven, or earth, or under
the earth; and whereas Christian kings, who are living representants
of God, are not to be worshipped by their subjects by any act that
signifieth a greater esteem of his power than the nature of mortal man
is capable of; it cannot be imagined that the religious worship now in
use was brought into the Church by misunderstanding of the
Scripture. It resteth therefore that it was left in it by not
destroying the images themselves in the conversion of the Gentiles
that worshipped them.
The cause whereof was the immoderate esteem and prices set upon
the workmanship of them, which made the owners, though converted
from worshipping them as they had done religiously for demons, to
retain them still in their houses, upon pretence of doing it in the
honor of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of the Apostles, and other
the pastors of the primitive Church; as being easy, by giving them new
names, to make that an image of the Virgin Mary and of her Son our
Saviour, which before perhaps was called the image of Venus and Cupid;
and so of a Jupiter to make a Barnabas, and of Mercury, a Paul, and
the like. And as worldly ambition, creeping by degrees into the
pastors, drew them to an endeavour of pleasing the new-made
Christians; and also to a liking of this kind of honour, which they
also might hope for after their decease, as well as those that had
already gained it: so the worshipping of the images of Christ and
his Apostles grew more and more idolatrous; save that somewhat after
the time of Constantine diverse emperors, and bishops, and general
councils observed and opposed the unlawfulness thereof, but too late