Saturdays with Calvin #12

Let it suffice to remember, that whatever offices of piety are bestowed anywhere else than on God alone, are of the nature of sacrilege. First, superstition attached divine honors to the sun and starts, or to idols: afterward ambition followed - ambition which, decking man in the spoils of God, dared to profane all that was sacred. And though the principle of worshiping a supreme deity continued to be held, still the practice was to sacrifice promiscuously to genii and minor gods, or departed heroes; so prone is the descent to this vice of communicating to a crowd that which God strictly claims as his own peculiar right!

Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.123, John Calvin, translated by Henry Beveridge, Hendrickson, pg. 63.