Ver. 16. Lest ye corrupt yourselves— God having a just title to their highest love, and religious veneration, their suffering any object whatever to come in competition with him, was a corrupting of themselves; a depravation and perfidious alienation of their affections from that God, whose they were, and whom they were to serve. The Jews have so well understood the force of this exhortation, that, to this day, they found the third article of their Creed upon the immateriality of God. Indeed, we must acknowledge, that the most ancient legislators, and the wisest of the philosophers, agreed with Moses in condemning all representations of the Deity by any image or sensible object whatever. Among other excellent institutions of religion, Numa taught the Romans to abstain from all use of images in the worship of the gods; a doctrine, which he is said to have derived from Pythagoras, whom Clemens Alexandrinus alleges to have been beholden for it to Moses's writings. Porphyry, in the life of Pythagoras, tells us, that he had travelled into Judea, as well as into Egypt, in order to improve himself in wisdom and knowledge. But let us hear Plutarch on the subject: "Pythagoras," says he, "supposed that the Supreme Being was not an object of sense, or capable of any suffering or infirmity; but was incorruptible, invisible, and to be comprehended only by the mind. Numa forbad the Romans to represent God in the form of man or beast; nor was there any picture or statue of a deity admitted among them formerly: for, during the space of the first hundred and seventy years, they built temples, and erected chapels, but made no images, thinking that it was a great impiety to represent the most excellent Beings by things so base and unworthy; and that it was by the understanding only, that men could form any conception of the Deity." Life of Numa, p. 166. Similar hereto, and very strong upon the subject, is the following passage from Sophocles: "There is one God; there is in truth but one; who formed the heaven and the earth, the sea and air; but many of us mortals, wandering in the paths of error, have devised, for our own solace, various forms and divinities, made of stone or brass, of gold or ivory; and when we offer sacrifices to these, and celebrate public festivals in their honour, we would be thought religious." Their refined apprehension of the Deity made the ancient Persians reject, not only images, statues, and pictures, but also temples, altars, and sacrifices, conceiving them all to be unsuitable to the spiritual nature of the Supreme Being. See Herodot. lib. 2: cap. 131. The Phenicians too, in the earliest ages, were without images, as appears from the description of the temple which they had built to Hercules at Gades.
———Nulla effigies, simulachraque nota deorum, Majestate locum et sacro implevere timore. SIL. ITAL. lib. 3:
No representation or well known images of the gods filled the temple with majesty and sacred fear.
Tacitus tells us the same of the Germans, de Morib. German. c. ix. The learned reader will find a variety of passages to the same purpose in Grotius and Le Clerc, to whom we are indebted for the above collection; and the latter of whom observes, that all these, in his opinion, are the remains of that religion which Noah taught his children, and which was propagated by them over the earth. So that Moses herein seems not so much to have founded a new institution, as to have revived the old, which had been corrupted: an opinion, the reader will recollect, which we have endeavoured to support throughout this comment. It should, however, be observed, that though these sound notions of religion were early found among some of the wisest, a general corruption soon ensued, and the most debasing ideas of the Deity generally prevailed.