the things which are made--God, in whom, as St. Paul told the
heathen, they lived and moved, and had their being, and were the
offspring of God. This--that man is the offspring of God, and has a
Father in heaven--is the great truth which the Devil has been trying
to hide from men in every age, and by a hundred different devices.
By making them forget this, he tempted them to worship the creature
instead of the Creator; to pray to sun and moon and stars, to send
them fair weather, good crops, prosperous fortune: to look up to
the heaven above them, and down to the earth beneath their feet, in
slavish dread and anxiety: and pray to the sun, not to blast them
to the seas, not to sweep them away; to the rivers and springs, not
to let them perish from drought; to earthquakes, not to swallow them
up; ay, even to try to appease those dark fierce powers, with whom
they thought the great awful world was filled, by cruel sacrifices
of human beings; so that they offered their sons and their daughters
to devils, and burned their own children in the fire to Moloch, the
cruel angry Fire King, whom they fancied was lord of the earthquakes
and the burning mountains. So did the Canaanites of old, and so did
the Jews after them; whensoever they had forgotten that God was
their Father, who had bought them, and that the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, throughout heaven and earth, were His, then at
once they began to be afraid of heaven and earth, and worshipped
Baalim, and Astaroth, and the Host of Heaven, which were the sun and
moon and stars, and Moloch the Fire King, and Thammuz the Lord of
the Spring-time, and with forms of worship which showed plainly
enough, either by their cruelty or their filthy profligacy, who was
the author of them, and that man, when he forgets that heaven and
earth belong to his Father, is in danger of becoming a slave to his
own lowest lusts and passions.