MODERN IDOLATRY | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 30, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 26.

MODERN IDOLATRY.

Civilization, so called, is far advanced, but superstition is as rife as ever. The form has changed, but the fact is here. Nearly every baseball nine and football eleven must have its mascot, as does every pugilistic bruiser and many a politician. The dog, or monkey, or ring, or rabbit’s foot is a potent force in success! Men worship, revere, adore, the symbols not the things symbolized. This is very forcibly, tho almost profanely, put by the noted writer and master of English, Ambrose Bierce, staff officer, by the way, in the Civil War. He says in the Examiner of June 19:—

“Says an esteemed tho local contemporary:—

“‘The American flag is an emblem not only of freedom but of civilization; and as such, it ought to be beloved and worshiped by all who live under it or who in anywise receive the benefit which it confers on mankind.’

“That is a pretty fair sample of the stuff that one can be brought to write by indulgence of the awful human propensity for confusing things. Human nature presents no more striking characteristic than the tendency to neglect the substance and consider the shadow; to forget the end in contemplation and approval of the means; to substitute principle for action and ceremony for principle; to attribute to the symbol the virtues of the thing symbolized. It evidently did not occur to the patriotic gentleman who wrote the quoted sentence, and much else in the same spirit, that the flag, being only an ‘emblem’ of freedom and civilization [our kind of freedom and civilization, by the way] is not at all entitled to the love and worship that he solicits for it; these should go, not to the flag, but to the things of which it is an emblem,—to freedom, to civilization. His idolatrous tendency and his truly heathenish confusion of mind are still further shown in his reference of ‘the benefit which it [the flag, observe] confers on mankind.’ His is a typical utterance: the vestigial idolatry of the cave-dweller and the sylvan nomad is still strong in the race, and flag-worship is one of its most reasonless manifestations. Everywhere and always in these days of war we hear and read words about the flag which a thinking human being would be ashamed to utter of an actual beneficent deity.

“There is no room whatever for doubt that what the average patriot acclaims and honors is the actual colored silk or bunting, not the abstractions that it represents. To the conception of abstractions he comes unfitly equipped, but he can see a tinted rag. I do not know that any harm comes of his idolatry; it is noted here merely as an interesting and significant phenomenon—one of a thousand proving the brevity of our advance along the line of progress toward the light. It is of a piece with the average human being’s more or less sincere respect for truth, justice, chastity, and so forth, not as practicable means to the end of human happiness, but as things creditable and desirable in themselves, even when subversive of their actual purpose by promoting misery. Let the flag flap, and let ‘our ill-starred fellow-citizens’ who are unable to get a firm, mental grasp on what it stands for, knuckle down upon their knees before it and lift the voice. But, God bless them, how they would be shocked to observe the indifference with which it is regarded by soldiers in battle! One of the sharpest and most righteous rebukes I ever got from high authority was for permitting my color-sergeant to flaunt his gaudy symbol in the face of a battery. To civilian orators and poets the flag is sacred; to the soldier it is useful.”