against the iconoclasts, as atheists, Jews, and enemies of the truth; and when a proposal was made to call them Saracens, it was answered that the name was too good for them.i

According to the usual practice of councils, authorities were cited in behalf of images, and the opposition to them was paralleled or connected with all sorts of heresies. The extracts produced from the earlier Fathers are really irrelevant; for the images of which they speak were either scenes from sacred history, or memorial portraits (like that of Meletius of Antioch, which is mentioned by St. Chrysostom m), and they afford no sanction for the practices which were in question before the council." large portion of the quotations consisted of extracts from legendary biographies, and of tales of miracles wrought by images, to which some of the bishops were able to add similar marvels from their own experience. From time to time the reading of these testimonies was interrupted by curious commentaries from the hearers. Thus, after a passage from Gregory of Nyssa, in which he spoke of himself as having been affected to tears by a picture of the sacrifice of Isaac, a bishop observed, “The father had often read the history, but perhaps without ever weeping; yet, as soon as he saw the picture, he wept." "If," said another, so great a doctor was edified and moved even to tears by a picture, how much more would it affect lay and unlearned people!" Many exclaimed that they had seen such pictures of Abraham as that which Gregory described, although it does not appear whether they had experienced the same emotion at the sight. "If Gregory wept at a painting of Abraham," said Theodore, bishop of Catana, "what should we do at one of the incarnate Saviour ?" "Should not we too weep," asked Tarasius, "if we saw a picture of the crucifixion?" and his words were received with general applause.p

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A famous story, which had already served the uses both of controversial and of devotional writers, was twice read." q An aged monk on the Mount of Olives, it was said, was greatly tempted by a spirit of uncleanness. One day the demon appeared to him, and, after having sworn him to secrecy, offered to discontinue his assaults if the monk would give up worshipping a picture of the Blessed Virgin and the infant Saviour which hung in his

cell. The old man asked time to consider the proposal, and, notwithstanding his oath, applied for advice to an abbot of renowned sanctity, who blamed him for having allowed himself to be so far deluded as to swear to the devil, but told him that he had yet done well in laying open the matter, and that it would be better to visit every brothel in Jerusalem than to refrain from adoring the Saviour and His mother in the picture. From this edifying tale, a twofold moral was drawn with general consent,-that reverence for images would warrant not only unchastity, but breach of oaths; and that those who had formerly sworn to the iconoclast heresy were no longer bound by their obligations."

At the fifth session, the Roman legates proposed that an image. should be brought in and should receive the adoration of the assembly. This was solemnly done next day; and at the same session the conclusions of the iconoclastic synod of 754 were read, each paragraph being followed by the corresponding part of a long refutation, which was declared to have been evidently dictated by the Holy Ghost."

At the seventh session, the decree of the council was read and subscribed. It determined that, even as the figure of the cross was honoured, so images of the Saviour and the Blessed Virgin, of angels and of saints, whether painted or mosaic or of any other suitable material, are to be set up for kissing and honourable reverence (goσnúvno), but not for that real service (λarptíαv) which belongs to the Divine nature alone. Incense and lights are to be offered to them, as to the cross, the Gospels, and other holy memorials, "forasmuch as the honour paid to the image passes on to the original, and he who adores an image adores in it the person of him whom it represents." An anathema was pronounced against all opponents of images, and the signing of the decree was followed by many acclamations in honour of the new Constantine and Helena, with curses against iconomachists and heretics of every kind. These outcries were repeated at the eighth session, when the members of the council appeared at one of the palaces of Constantinople, and both the emperor and his mother subscribed the decree. The council, which after a time came to be regarded

Hard. iv. 209.

t Ib. 321.

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Ib. 325; Schröckh, xx. 578-9. * Hard. iv. 456. "We have," as Dean Milman remarks (ii. 126), no word to distinguish between poσkúvnois and λατρεία. One of the council's arguments had been drawn from our

Lord's answer to the tempter-"Thou shalt worship (προσκυνήσεις) the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve (λaтpeúσeis).” Service, it was said, is here restricted to God only, but not so worship! Hard. iv. 204.

y Ib. 469-472.

z Ib. 481-5.

both by the Greeks and by the Latins as the seventh General Council, also passed twenty-two canons, chiefly relating to ecclesiastical and monastic discipline. It is to be observed that the images sanctioned at Nicæa were not works of sculpture, but paintings and other representations on a flat surface-a limitation to which the Greek Church has ever since adhered; and that there is as yet no mention of representing under visible forms the Trinity, the Almighty Father, or the Holy Spirit.d

A.D. 781.

Constantine VI. grew up in the society of women and eunuchs, and in entire subjection to his mother. With the view, perhaps, of cutting off from the iconoclasts the hope of assistance from the west, she had negotiated for him a marriage with one of Charlemagne's daughters; but, soon after the Nicene synod, as the iconoclasts were no longer formidable, while she may have feared that such a connexion might endanger her own ascendancy, she broke off the engagement, greatly to the indignation of the Frankish king, and compelled her son against his will to marry an Armenian princess named Marina or Mary." Instigated, it is said, by some persons who professed to have discovered by magic that the empire was to be her own, she paved the way for a change by encouraging her son in cruelties and debaucheries, which rendered him odious to his subjects, and especially to the powerful monastic party. At the age of twenty, Constantine resolved to throw off the yoke of his mother and her ministers; he succeeded in possessing himself of the government, and for some years the empire was distracted by revolutions, carried on with all the perfidy and atrocity which were characteristic of the later Greeks. Constantine was at length persuaded to readmit his mother to a share of power, and she pursued towards him the same policy as before. He fell in love with a lady of her court, Theodote, and resolved to divorce his wife and to marry the object of his new attachment. The patriarch Tarasius at first opposed

On the history of its reception see Palmer on the Church, ii. 201, seqq. ed. 1.

b See Hard. iv. 485, seqq.

e Basnage, 1364. The appearance of relief is, however, given to many of them by the covers of silver or other metal in which they are enshrined-the nimbi (or glories) and the dresses being wrought in the metal, which has openings for displaying the faces and hands of the picture. Professor Stanley informs me that in Russia these covers are peculiar to pictures of historical or miraculous fame. A specimen may be

seen in the Hôtel Cluny, at Paris.

d Mabill. V. xiv. Raoul-Rochette refers the first personal representations of the Almighty Father to the 9th century; Didron, to the 12th. Lindsay on Christian Art, i. 75.

Schlosser, 305; Finlay, ii. 93.

f Theophan. 705, 718; Einhard, A.D. 786; Paul. Warnefr. Hist. Miscella. 23 (Patrol. xcv. 1118); Murat. IV. ii. 133, 162; Schlosser, 300. Einhard says that Charlemagne refused to give his daughter, A.D. 788.

Theophan. 719; Walch, x. 503. h Theophan. 720-5; Finlay, ii, 94.

the scheme, but Constantine, it is said, threatened that, if the Church refused to indulge him, he would restore idolatry;1 and Tarasius no longer ventured to resist. Marina was shut up in a convent, and the second nuptials were magnificently celebrated in September 795. Some monks, who vehemently objected to these proceedings, and went so far as to excommunicate the emperor, were treated with great cruelty." It has been supposed that Irene even contrived the temptation to which her son yielded; she at least beheld his errors with malicious satisfaction, and fomented the general discontent which they produced. By degrees she secured to her own interest all the persons who were immediately around him; and at length, when her scheme appeared to be matured, he was by her command seized at his devotions, was carried into the purple chamber in which he had been born, and was deprived of his eyesight with such violence that the operation almost cost him his life. Immediately after this, a fog of extraordinary thickness obscured the air and hid the sun for seventeen days. By the people of Constantinople it was regarded as declaring the sympathy of heaven with the horror generally felt at the unnatural deed by which Irene obtained the empire.

Irene reigned six years after the dethronement of her son. According to the Greek writers, (whose testimony, however, is unsupported by those of the west,) she was engaged in a project for

Schlosser (327-330), and Finlay (ii. 100) show that he long survived. Cf. Theoph. contin. ii. 10; G. Hamart. cclix. 5; cclxvii. 28.

I G. Hamart. cclvii. 18. On the disgraceful manner in which writers favourable to the cause of images have attempted to palliate Irene's guilt, see Walch, x. 589; Milman, ii. 131. The words of Baronius are well known, but must be quoted here:-" Scelus plane execrandum, nisi justitiæ zelus ad id faciendum excitasset. . . . Si enim regnandi cupidine Irene in filium molita esset insidias, detestabilior Agrippina, Neronis matre, fuisset, cum illa suæ quoque vitæ dispendio filium imperare maluisset. Contra vero, quod ista religionis causa, amore justitiæ, in filium perpetrata creduntur, ab orientalibus nonnullis, qui facto aderant, viris sanctissimis eadem post hæc meruit præconio celebrari." (796. 8.) Our own contemporary, the Abbé Rohrbacher, is little short of Baronius. (xi. 220-1.) Irene was canonised by the Greeks. Finlay, ii. 102.

reuniting the empires by a marriage with Charlemagne, when, in October 802, she was deposed by the secretary Nicephorus, and was banished to Lesbos, where she died within a few months.*

Nicephorus, who is described as having surpassed all his predecessors in rapacity, lust and cruelty," was bent on subjecting the hierarchy to the imperial power. He forbade the patriarch to correspond with the pope, whom he considered as a tool of Charlemagne; and he earned the detestation of the clergy by heavily taxing monastic and ecclesiastical property which had until then been exempt, by seizing the ornaments of churches, by stabling his horses in monasteries, and by extending a general toleration to iconoclasts and sectaries. In 811, Nicephorus was killed in a war with the Bulgarians, and his son Stauracius, after a reign of little more than two months, was thrust into a monastery, where he soon after died of wounds received before his accession." On the deposition of Stauracius, his brother-in-law, Michael Rhangabe, was compelled to accept the empire, and images were again restored to honour. The iconoclastic party, however, continued to exist. An attempt was made by some of its members to set a blinded son of Constantine Copronymus on the throne;" and on the alarm of a Bulgarian invasion, soon after the elevation of Michael, a very remarkable display of its spirit took place. While the clergy, the monks, and vast numbers of the people, were deprecating the danger by processions and prayers, some iconoclastic soldiers broke open the mausoleum of the emperors, prostrated themselves on the tomb of Copronymus, and entreated him to save the state; and they asserted that, in answer to their prayers, he had appeared to them on horseback, and had gone forth against the barbarians; "whereas," says Theophanes, "he dwells in hell with devils." Although the motive of these men was more probably fraud than fanaticism-(for, besides the story of the apparition, they pretended that the mausoleum had been opened by miracle)—we may infer the existence of a strong attachment to the memory of Constantine among the party to which such an imposture could be addressed with any hope of finding believers.

b