"Strange gods, we have often said and say again, are not only an external idol but much rather an erring notion or conscience devised about the true God. For as the conscience is, so is God. If you believe that God is worshiped by sacrifices of this or that kind, in this or that place, and that without a Word of God, then you have already lost the true God; and that notion concerning sacrifice to which you cling under the name of the true God is your god. If you believe that God is worshiped through cap and tonsure, poverty, obedience, fasting, food, or drink (since here you do not have a Word of God), then cap and tonsure, or that notion about cap and tonsure, is your god. Therefore just as you have an inner assumption about the cap in place of God, so you extend this outwardly and set up, wear, honor, worship, and value the cap as an external idol according to the likeness of the inner notion.
See, this is what it means to make and follow other gods; it means to worship gods whom you do not know, because you do not feel or understand that in the place of the true God you worship a notion and an idol. Nor do you notice how uncertain you are in that worship, and how you think or know nothing concerning the true God, since you think about Him without His Word. But He cannot be known or thought of except through His Word. So you see that every way of inventing and worshiping strange gods is nothing else than that godless notion by which we choose and believe that we can please God without the Word of God, by this or that work, at this or that place, by this or that rite, when He is not of that sort and yet under His name another is falsely concocted in the heart. From this follow various names just like those of the idols. Thus one is called Baal, another Ashtaroth, another Dagon, another Moloch, Peor, Camos; and there are other names. Just so our monks are named, one from white clothing, another from black; and by his name and work each is outwardly different from the others. These all are prophets whom their dreams deceive. They say: “Let us go and worship strange gods.” That is, “Let us choose new rites without the Word, under the name of the true God.”
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