John Calvin: The Human Heart Is A Factory of Idols - The Context

You have heard me mention that statement attributed to John Calvin.  It is important enough and I point to it often enough that I wanted to provide ore context.

It is a statement from Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion found in:

• BOOK ONE - The Knowledge of God the Creator 
• CHAPTER XI - It It Unlawful To Attribute a Visible Form To God, And Generally Whoever Sets Up Idols Revolts Against The True God 
• SECTION 8 -  The Origin of Images: Man’s Desire for a Tangible Deity

  and here is the statement with surrounding context:

   .  .  .  From this we may gather that man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. .  .  . 

.  .  .  Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.

To these evils a new wickedness joins itself, that man tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth. The example of the Israelites shows the origin of idolatry to be that men do not believe God is with them unless he shows himself physically present. .  .  .

.  .  .  Daily experience teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace as in an image of God. In almost every age since the beginning of the world, men, in order that they might obey this blind desire, have set up symbols in which they believed God appeared before their bodily eyes.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion & 2, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 108–109.