Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/217

Rh into the history of the whole question in order to understand the emperor's reasons for his revolutionary policy. More than a century before this, Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, flung all the pictures out of his church, an act of vandalism which drew down upon his head a letter of mild rebuke from Gregory the Great. The pope then took occasion to explain the use of pictures and to guard against the idolatrous abuse of them. "You ought not to have broken what was put up in the churches, not for adoration," he says, "but merely for the promotion of reverence. It is one thing to worship an image, and another to learn represented in the image what we ought to worship. For what the Scriptures are for those who can read, that a picture is for those who are unable to read; for in this also the uneducated see in what way they have to walk. In it they read who are not acquainted with the Scriptures."

No statement of the case could be more unexceptionable. The stiffest Puritan would be hard put to it to answer such an argument. Not only stained-glass windows, but illustrated Bibles and lantern services are justified to-day on similar grounds. But the pope's argument is one thing, and the people's practice another. In point of fact, throughout the East at the time of Leo the pictures were worshipped. The physical act of kissing them was called worship, and this act was made illegal by the iconoclastic emperors. But over and above that, pictures and relics were often treated as fetishes and venerated for their supposed miraculous cures. No doubt there would be all gradations from the aesthetic pursuit of art among the cultured and the simple contemplation of pictorial lessons on the part of the devout, to the grossest idolatry and magic-mongery among the more degraded and superstitious. It was against the popular adoration of the images that Leo was fighting.

We must remember that at this very time the emperor's great rival was the caliph, and the standing