Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/29

 were representative of holy and heavenly things. And first of all, and above all, they were warned to abstain from the worship of idols; for such worship was representative of everything evil and false: idols made of gold, silver, wood, and stone, representing, in a bad sense, the direst evils and falses; and the worship of such idols represented the love of evils and falses—and such love is hell, and not heaven; and consequently the angels could not be present where such worship existed. A similar representation had the worship of the sun and moon; for the sun, in a bad or perverted sense, signifies self-love; and the moon signifies a false faith: hence such worship, also, represented what was infernal. And in general, the worship of anything except the one Jehovah, represented the loving of self and the world more than of God; which is a principle the very opposite to that of heaven, where love to God is the supreme affection of the soul. Consequently, the tendency of idolatry in any form was to cut off communication with heaven, the effect of which, as before said, would have been to cause the human race to perish. Says the Doctrine of the New Church, "Idolatry was so severely forbidden to the Israelitish nation, because the adoration of other gods, of graven things and images, destroyed everything representative of the church amongst them. For in heaven, Jehovah, that is, the Lord, is the universal reigning principle; his Divine fills all things therein, and constitutes the life of all; so that if anything had been worshiped instead of the Divine, everything representative would