Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/225

Rh godless art of painting," and ordered all who made crucifixes or pictures for worship in the churches to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State. Two years later image worship was proscribed with greater severity than ever, and so were both the use of relics and the practice of praying to the saints. Many monks and clergy were banished for their disobedience to these orders; some were flogged, tortured, and mutilated.

The most popular defender of image worship was the abbot, who has been so highly honoured in the Greek Church as a saint and martyr that he bears the name of "Stephen the younger" by comparison with the protomartyr. According to the story of his life written half a century later, in the year 763 Constantine Copronicus sent an order to this monk, who was resident at Mount St. Auxentius, to sign the decree of the Constantinople council. On his refusal he was dragged by soldiers from his cave and imprisoned with some other monks for six days without food. Liberated for a time, he was seized again on libellous charges, dragged once more from his cave, beaten, tortured, and banished to the island of Proconnesus in the Propontis. Here a number of monks, driven from their cells by the persecution, gathered round their hero and leader. Thus his place of exile was becoming a rallying point for the forces of opposition to the government policy, or, as it would be regarded at headquarters, a nest of sedition. So Stephen was arrested a third time, bound hand and foot, and carried off to Constantinople, where he was flung into the great prison of the Prætorium, together with 342 mutilated monks, some of whom had had their ears, noses, or hands cut off, their eyes gouged out, or their beards smeared with pitch and fired. The saint turned the prison into a monastery for worship and meditation. He was put on his trial and condemned to death. A saying attributed to Constantine may help to account for the vindictive fury with which Stephen was treated. Seeing how popular the monk was and how obstinately he maintained his cause, Constantine is reported to have declared that Stephen was