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Rh brought to the city by Ferid Pasha, who governed the vilayet ably for several years, till in 1903 he was appointed Grand Vizier. The sacred buildings, mosques, &c., were patched up (except a few which were quite ruinous) and the walls wholly removed, but an unsightly fragment of a palace-tower still remained in 1906. In 1904–1905 the first two sections of the Bagdad railway, 117 m., to Karaman and Eregli, were built. In the city there is a branch of the Ottoman bank, a government technical school, a French Catholic mission and a school, an Armenian Protestant school for boys, an American mission school for girls, mainly Armenian, and other educational establishments.

The founder of the Mevlevi dancing dervishes, the poet Mahommed Jelal-ed-Din (Rumi), in 1307, though tempted to assume the inheritance along with the empire of the Seljuk sultan Ala ed-dīn Kaikobad III., who died without heirs, preferred to pass on the power to Osman, son of Ertogrul, and with his own hands invested Osman and girt him with the sword: this investiture was the legitimate beginning of the Osmanli authority. The heirs of Jelal-ed-Din (Rumi) were favoured by the Osmanli sultans until 1516, when Selim was on the point of destroying the Mevlevi establishment as hostile to the Osmanli and the faith; and though he did not do so the Mevlevi and their chiefs were deprived of influence and dignity. In 1829 Mahmud II. restored their dignity in part, and in 1889 Abd-ul-Hamid II. confirmed their exemption from military duty. The head of the Mevlevi dervishes (Aziz-Effendi, Hazreti-Mevlana, Mollah-Unkiar, commonly styled simply Chelebi-Effendi) has the right to gird on the sultan’s sword at his investiture, and is master of the considerable revenues of the greatest religious establishment in the empire. He has also the privilege of corresponding direct with the caliph; but otherwise is regarded as rather opposed to the Osmanli administration, and has no real power.

Iconium is distant by rail 466 m. from the Bosporus at Haidar-Pasha, and 389 from Smyrna by way of Afium-Kara-Hissar. It has recently become the seat of a considerable manufacture of carpets, owing to the cheapness of labour. The population was estimated at 44,000 in 1890, and is now probably over 50,000. Mercury mines have begun to be worked; other minerals are known to exist.

ICONOCLASTS (Gr. , image, and  , to break), the name applied particularly to the opponents in the 8th and 9th centuries of the use of images in Christian cult.

As regards the attitude towards religious images assumed by the primitive Christian Church, several questions have often been treated as one which cannot be too carefully kept apart. There can be no doubt that the early Christians were unanimous in condemning heathen image-worship and the various customs, some immoral, with which it was associated. A form of iconolatry specially deprecated in the New Testament was the then prevalent adoration of the images of the reigning emperors (see Rev. xv. 2). It is also tolerably certain that, if for no other reasons besides the Judaism, obscurity, and poverty of the early converts to Christianity, the works of art seen in their meeting-houses cannot at first have been numerous. Along with these reasons would co-operate towards the exclusion of visible aids to devotion, not only the church’s sacramental use of Christ’s name as a name of power, and its living sense of his continued real though unseen presence, but also, during the first years, its constant expectation of his second advent as imminent. It was a common accusation brought against Jews and Christians that they had “no altars, no temples, no known images” (Min. Fel. Oct. c. 10), that “they set up no image or form of any god” (see Arnob. Adv. Gent. vi. I; similarly Celsus); and this charge was never denied; on the contrary Origen gloried in it (c. Celsum, bk. 7, p. 386). At a comparatively early date, indeed, we read of various Gnostic sects calling in the fine arts to aid their worship; thus Irenaeus (Haer. i. 25. 6), speaking of the followers of Marcellina, says that “they possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; and they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among men. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world; that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images after the same manner as the Gentiles” (cf. Aug. De Haer. c. 7). It is also well known that the emperor Alexander Severus found a place for several Scripture characters and even for Christ in his lararium (Lamprid. Vit. Alex. Sev. c. 29). But there is no evidence that such a use of images extended at that period to orthodox Christian circles. The first unmistakable indication of the public use of the painter’s art for directly religious ends does not occur until 306, when the synod of Elvira, Spain, decreed (can. 36) that “pictures ought not to be in a church, lest that which is worshipped and adored be painted on walls.” This canon is proof that the use of sacred pictures in public worship was not at the beginning of the 4th century a thing unknown within the church in Spain; and the presumption is that in other places, about the same period, the custom was looked upon with a more tolerant eye. Indications of the existence of allied forms of sacred Christian art prior to this period are not wholly wanting. It seems possible to trace some of the older and better frescos in the catacombs to a very early age; and Bible manuscripts were often copiously illuminated and illustrated even before the middle of the 4th century. An often-quoted passage from Tertullian (De Pudic. c. 10, cf. c. 7) shows that in his day the communion cup was wont to bear a representation of the Good Shepherd. Clement of Alexandria (Paedag. iii. 11) mentions the dove, fish, ship, lyre, anchor, as suitable devices for Christian signet rings. Origen (c. Celsum, bk. 3) repudiates graven images as only fit for demons.

During the 4th and following centuries the tendency to enlist the fine arts in the service of the church steadily advanced; not, however, so far as appears, with the formal sanction of any regular ecclesiastical authority, and certainly not without strong protests raised by more than one powerful voice. From a passage in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa (Orat. de Laudibus Theodori Martyris, c. 2) it is easy to see how the stories of recent martyrs would offer themselves as tempting subjects for the painter, and at the same time be considered to have received from him their best and most permanent expression; that this feeling was widespread is shown in many places by Paulinus of Nola (ob. 431), from whom we gather that not only martyrdoms and Bible histories, but also symbols of the Trinity were in his day freely represented pictorially. Augustine (De Cons. Ev. i. 10) speaks less approvingly of those who look for Christ and his apostles “on painted walls” rather than in his written word. How far the Christian feeling of the 4th and 5th centuries was from being settled in favour of the employment of the fine arts is shown by such a case as that of Eusebius of Caesarea, who, in reply to a request of Constantia, sister of Constantine, for a picture of Christ, wrote that it was unlawful to possess images pretending to represent the Saviour either in his divine or in his human nature, and added that to avoid the reproach of idolatry he had actually taken away from a lady friend the pictures of Paul and of Christ which she had. Similarly Epiphanius in a letter to John, bishop of Jerusalem, tells how in a church at Anablatha near Bethel he had found a curtain painted with the image “of Christ or of some other saint,” which he had torn down and ordered to be used for the burial of a pauper. The passage, however, reveals not only what Epiphanius thought on the subject, but also that such pictures must have been becoming frequent. Nilus, the disciple and defender of Chrysostom, permitted the symbol of the cross in churches and also pictorial delineations of Old and New Testament history, but deprecated other symbols, pictures of martyrs, and most of all the representation of Christ. In the time of Gregory the Great the Western Church obtained