I do not dwell upon that, but I wish to drop one very earnest caution and beseeching entreaty, especially to the younger members of my congregation now.  You, young men and women, especially you young men, mind what you paint upon those mystic walls!  Foul things, as my text says, ‘creeping things and abominable beasts,’ only too many of you are tracing there.  Take care, for these figures are ineffaceable.  No repentance will obliterate them.  I do not know whether even Heaven can blot them out.  What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you are photographing on the walls of your immortal soul.  And just as to-day, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the dust, we may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their walls, in all the freshness of their first colouring, as if the painter had but laid down his pencil a moment ago; so, on your hearts, youthful evils, the sins of your boyhood, the pruriences of your earliest days, may live in ugly shapes, that no tears and no repentance will ever wipe out.  Nothing can do away with ‘the marks of that which once hath been.’  What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts?  Obscenity, foul things, mean things, low things?  Is that mystic shrine within you painted with such figures as were laid bare in some chambers in Pompeii, where the excavators had to cover up the pictures because they were so foul?  Or, is it like the cells in the convent of San Marco at Florence, where Fra Angelico’s holy and sweet genius has left on the bare walls, to be looked at, as he fancied, only by one devout brother in each cell, angel imaginings, and noble, pure celestial faces that calm and hallow those who gaze upon them?  What are you doing, my brother, in the dark, in your chambers of imagery?

II.  Now look with me briefly at the second thought that I draw from this symbol,—­the idolatries of the dark chamber.

All these seventy grey-bearded elders that were bowing there before the bestial gods which they had portrayed, had, no doubt, often stood in the courts of the Temple and there made prayers to the God of Israel, with broad phylacteries, to be seen of men.  Their true worship was their worship in the dark.  The other was conscious or unconscious hypocrisy.  And the very chamber in which they were gathered, according to the ideal representation of our text, was a chamber in, and therefore partaking of the consecration of, the Temple.  So their worship was doubly criminal, in that it was sacrilege as well as idolatry.  Both things are true about us.

A man’s true worship is not the worship which he performs in the public temple, but that which he offers down in that little private chapel, where nobody goes but himself.  Worship is the attribution of supreme excellence to, and the entire dependence of the heart upon, a certain person.  And the people or the things to which a man attributes the highest excellence, and on which he hangs his happiness and