IMAGES AND NAMES. 121 



Till life is ttus given to them, they may not be worshipped.^ 

 But the mere making of the im.age of a living creature is very 

 commonly sufficient to set up at once its connexion with life, 

 among races who have not thoroughly passed out of the state 

 of mind to which these practices belong. Looking at the matter 

 from a very different point of view, and yet with the same 

 feeling of a necessary connexion between life and the image 

 of the living creature, the Moslem holds that he who makes 

 an image in this world will have it set before him on the day 

 of judgment, and will be called upon to give it life, but he will 

 fail to finish the work he has thus left half done, and will be 

 sent to expiate his offence in hell. 



With such illustrations to show how widely spread and 

 deeply rooted is the belief that there is a real connexion be- 

 tween the object and its image, we can see how almost in- 

 evitable it is, that the man at a low stage of education should 

 come to confound the image with that which it was made to 

 represent. The strong craving of the human mind for a ma- 

 terial support to the religious sentiment, has produced idols 

 and fetishes over most parts of the world, and at most periods 

 in its history ; and while the more intelligent, even among many 

 low tribes, have often seen clearly enough that the images were 

 mere symbols of superhuman beings, the vulgar have com- 

 monly believed that the idols themselves had life and super- 

 natural powers. Missionaries have remarked this difference in 

 the views of more and less intelligent members of the same 

 tribe ; and it is emphatically true of a large part of Christen- 

 dom, that the images and pictures, which, to the more in- 

 structed, serve merely as a help to realize religious ideas and to 

 suggest devotional thoughts, are( looked upon by the unedu- 

 cated and superstitious crov^d, as beings endowed not only with 

 a sort of life, but with miraculous influences. 



The line between the cases in which the connexion between 

 object and figure is supposed to be real, and those in which it 

 is known to be imaginary, is often very difficult to draw. Thus 

 idols and figures of saints are beaten and abused for not grant- 

 ing the prayers of their worshippers, which may be a mere 

 ' Coleman, ' The Mythology of the Hmdus ;' London, 1832, p. 83. 



