Article July 31, 1920 Issue

"Idolatry," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 307 of her book...

The Christian Science Monitor

"Idolatry," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 307 of her book "Miscellaneous Writings," "is an easily-besetting sin of all peoples." In nothing, perhaps, is the truth of this statement so evident as in the almost universal tendency, in many religions, to endow certain places with special sanctity. The Muhammedan has his Mecca, the Hindu his Benares, the Thibetan his Lhasa, whilst the world as a whole is filled with lesser shrines of varying degrees of sanctity. All through its long history this form of idolatry was one of the besetting sins of Israel. The evil which so many of her kings did in the sight of God was in building up the "high places" of the heathen. So deep-rooted, indeed, was this demand for a holy place, for some visible abode of Deity, that neither Moses nor his successors made any attempt to abolish it altogether. Just as the law of an "eye for an eye" sought to curb revenge and not to abolish it, so in the tabernacle in the wilderness and the temple at Jerusalem is to be seen an effort to give to the people a purified symbol, which, in time, if regarded aright, would, as it did in Jesus of Nazareth, give place to a wholly spiritual concept.

Every now and again, the great spiritual seers in Israel caught something more than a glimpse of what it all meant, as, for instance, when Solomon, at the dedication of the temple, broke through the mesmerism of material glory that surrounded him to the great spiritual fact in the words, "Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?" Nevertheless, the question of a holy place remained one of the great problems in Israel, so much so that one of the first questions asked of Jesus by the Samaritan woman as she stood talking with him by the well at Sychar was one as to the supremacy of Jerusalem as a place of worship. She had perceived that he was a prophet, and here was an opportunity which she must not let pass to have had opinion on so great an issue. The fathers of her people had worshiped "in this mountain," but the Jews insisted that Jerusalem was the place where men ought to worship. What did Jesus think of it? And Jesus did not hesitate. He told her plainly that the hour was coming when neither at Jerusalem nor yet in that mountain men should worship the Father. For the hour was not only coming, but had already come, when the true worshipers of God should worship Him "in spirit and in truth." And then he added the words, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

Christ Jesus himself, of course, worshiped God in every place. He taught impartially in the temple court, in the village synagogue, in the house at Capernaum, from a boat thrust out a little way from the shore, and when the day's work was over he went up alone into the Mount of Olives. When the disciples came to him to point out to him the beauties of the temple, he told them that the day would come when there should not be one stone left on another that should not be one stone left on another that not be thrown down. To Jesus of Nazareth there were obviously no such things as holy places, for all places were holy; whilst, as to holiness, he found it in the spiritual perception of a Roman centurion on the shores of Galilee, in the heart of a Syrophoenician woman on the road to Tyre and Sidon, or in a cottage at Bethany.

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