As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.
Ver. 4. Is nothing in the world] A mere fiction it is, that the idol representeth a brat of man's brain. We may well say of it, as one doth of Scaliger's doctrine De emendatione temporum, Concerning the correction of times, that it is in a manner wholly fictitious, and founded upon the confines of nothing. Nothing the idol is, in respect of the divinity ascribed unto it, as the foIlowing words show. Or nothing, that is, of no virtue or value. "Shall I bow down to yonder jackanapes?" a said that martyr (Julius Palmer), pointing to the rood (crucifix) in Paul's.
None other God but one] This the wiser heathen also acknowledged, and for opposing the multitude of gods Socrates suffered. Cicero in his books of the Nature of the Gods, takes pains to show the vanity of heathen deities. And after all, wisheth that he were as well able to find out the true God as to discover the false.
a Applied contemptuously to a crucifix. Obs. OED