Whilst God was elaborating a system of worship of such mystic beauties and splendors that angels desired to look into it, those for whom it was being designed prepared a system for themselves, gross and bestial, on the plain below. The incense is ever the climax: the golden calf the anticlimax.
Men are constructed so that they must worship. If they do not worship the true God, they will inevitably worship some false god. I say “inevitably” because, though there are some who profess not to believe in any God at all, yet even these are found to be worshippers of something or other that occupies the position of deity towards them. Sometimes it is Nature or as the ancients called him Pan; or Humanity with a capital H, or Ignorance, re-christened Agnosticism to make it seem more learned (but all its dignity fades into vulgarity when you give it the English name—that is often the case with the deities and theories). Sometimes, says the apostle, their god is their belly. “Belial comes last, than whom a spirit more lewd Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love Vice for itself.”
Even to Christians it was necessary that the apostle should write, “Little children keep yourselves from idols!” In general we may say that any person, or thing, or theory—such as I call “principle” when I hold it myself, and “fad” when somebody else holds it—that we allow to take that position in relation to us, to exercise that authority over us, and exact that devotion from us which rightly belong to our Creator, is a false god that we are serving, no matter by what euphemistic name so ever it may be called. As in a benign sense, so in a malign sense, the outward forms and physical symbols pass away, but the spiritual and essential meanings abide and become more developed. In the worship of the true God the types of outward form have passed away with the childhood of the race; and they that worship do so “in spirit and in truth.” So the gross outward forms of idolatry pass also; but they that worship the false gods still worship in spirit and in fact. Men do not, it is true, worship a physical Apollo, or a visible Aphrodite, or a material Bacchus, but they are often devoting their most precious possessions to the principles represented by these names, whether it be the refined dissipations typified by the first, or the grosser license and debaucheries of the others. They do not offer Apollo a hawk, but will devote years of valuable time to some phase of artificial culture that, beyond a slight and questionable service as a recreation, is of no real use to anyone in the world, where people's bodies are starving and their souls dying. They do not offer Aphrodite a dove or Bacchus a pig; but to the principles that these names suggest there are thousands every day sacrificing health, strength, reputation, home, family, body, soul and spirit. There are those more innocent deities too that receive the service due to Jehovah, Hercules for instance, or Fame, “the sister of the giants.” We don't worship beetles now; but we hear it commended as a virtue to pass a lifetime dissecting the antennae of some minute insect with no object on earth except to be able to state that the Melitta is or is not the larva of the Melue.
All this is widespread, not to speak of those services of the fouler deities, the worship of “Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell,” of “Moloch, the horrid king besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parents' tears;” of the worship of the Lords of Malebolge, and of the viler creeping things, obscene as Chemosh, horrible as Kalee. How many offer their most precious gifts to such principles as these! as they said Titania twined her garlands round the coarse and brutal ears of her ass-headed lord. When the eyes are touched with the eye-salve, what an awakening! “There lies your love.” “Oh, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!”
The worship of the calf was not however so degraded as this. It was taken from their old masters the Egyptians; and that remarkable people was generally cleanly even in their idolatry. Apis, the bull, representing Osiris, was adopted by Israel, too, and to say the truth, at first view there seems little harm in it. More respectable people than they had worshipped at his shrine for centuries without apparent disadvantage. Where was the sin? Aaron might think. It was a clean and useful animal, and represented the valuable principle of Prosperity. Yet God looks down out of the heavens full of anger and goes near to destroy them off the face of the earth. We soon find that He deals in a different way with His own people from that in which He deals with the rest of the world. He says, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: THEREFORE will I punish you for all your iniquities.” It is not safe to presume because of the immunity of others. Is He going to allow this stupendous insult, that His own redeemed people dethrone Him in favor of a calf!
See how evil communications corrupt, though the effect of the contagion perhaps does not show till long afterward, when the disease has had time for incubation and the weak state of the constitution gives it opportunity to develop. Moreover, one often takes the disease in a malignant form from another who has it only mildly. The calf idolatry in Egypt had been comparatively decent and cleanly: in Israel it developed at once into horrible orgies.
“ Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” J.B.