THE WORSHIP OF IMAGES by Hugh Miller Thompson

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 6, 1878

THE WORSHIP OF IMAGES.

By Hugh Miller Thompson

It was not without design that the Lord left no image or picture of his holy person behind him. He put the question of worshiping an image of himself out of sight by leaving no image. There is not even the shadow of authenticity upon any reputed relic. We are not even sure of the site of Calvary or Gethsemane, the place of his crucifixion or his burial. Even the mount of his ascension is not known or named. The “fragments of the true cross,” the “holy coats,” etc., are all impostures. Nobody but the most superstitious and ignorant Romanists believes that there is on earth one genuine relic of the Lord, or of his mother, or indeed of any early saint.

There was a design in this. Considering all things,—the reverence and love of the apostles, for instance,—it is very strange that there is no word for ages of any relic of our Lord’s early life, and that “the discovery of the true cross,” in the fourth century, by Helena, should have been so suspiciously a cooked-up thing.

No picture and no relic, whose genuineness is even probable, exists of our Lord, or of his apostles, or indeed of any early Christian worthy. One cannot help connecting the strange fact with that second commandment which our Roman Catholic brethren are in the habit of omitting from their list, and with the petition in the Lord’s prayer.

The pictures, so-called, of the Virgin—there are scores of them, in all positions, and they are highly reverenced by our Romish friends, and dilettanteized and sentimentalized over by many of our Protestant friends—are, we all know, when we think, only portraits of women by no means always reputable, the mistress of the artist, painted as the Madonna in one picture and as Venus in another.

The pictures, so-called, of our blessed Lord are more shocking still. An Italian beggar man or thief, with a picturesque beard and hair, is painted, and the painting labeled with the holiest name!

The pictures of the apostles are conventional. A monk with a lion is St. Mark, a monk with an eagle is St. John, a monk with a sword is St. Paul, and one with a big key is St. Peter. They are merely pictures of the most picturesque old loafers the painter could find for his model.

Here, then, is where the Romish argument fails to reach us. We have heard it a score of times, and expect to a score or two more. We admit, in one way, its force. We do venerate the pictures of great men. We do love, and might perhaps “salute,” the picture of a very dear friend. We are free to acknowledge we should deeply venerate the picture of our Lord, or of one of his apostles. But when our Romish friend puts us in front of a dime lithograph, manufactured in Ann street, and tells us that is our Lord’s picture, we beg leave to retire before our disgust gets the better of us. Or, when he soars a step higher, and shows us the picture of a picturesque Italian bandit, and says that is Christ’s, and we should salute it and kneel before it, we respectfully decline so stultifying ourselves and insulting our Master. Or, again, when he presents us to the portrait of a young woman of questionable life, with an infant in her lap, and demands that we shall reverence this picture as that of the Virgin Mother and her child, we might beg that he will please to go no further. The thing is getting unbearable. His anxiety to reverence “sacred pictures” is rapidly carrying him beyond Christian decency. —From Dr. Hugh Miller Thompson’s “Copy.”