ther directing their
destruction, and the whitewashing of the walls of churches ornamented
with them. Hereupon the clergy and the monks rebelled; the emperor was
denounced as a Mohammedan and a Jew. He ordered that a statue of the
Saviour in that part of the city called Chalcopratia should be removed,
and a riot was the consequence. One of his officers mounted a ladder and
struck the idol with an axe upon its face; it was an incident like that
enacted centuries before in the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. The
sacred image, which had often arrested the course of Nature and worked
many miracles, was now found to be unable to protect or to avenge its
own honour. A rabble of women interfered in its behalf; they threw down
the ladder and killed the officer; nor was the riot ended until the
troops were called in and a great massacre perpetrated. The monks spread
the sedition in all parts of the empire; they even attempted to proclaim
a new emperor. Leo was everywhere denounced as a Mohammedan infidel, an
enemy of the Mother of God; but with inflexible resolution he persisted
in his determination as long as he lived.

[Sidenote: They accuse the emperor of atheism.]

His son and successor, Constantine, pursued the same iconoclastic
policy. From the circumstance of his accidentally defiling the font at
which he was being baptized, he had received the suggestive name of
Copronymus. His subsequent career was asserted by the monks to have been
foreshadowed by his sacrilegious beginnings. It was publicly asserted
that he was an atheist. In truth, his biography, in many respects,
proves that the higher classes in Constantinople were largely infected
with infidelity. The patriarch deposed upon oath that Copronymus had
made the most irreligious confessions to him, as that our Saviour, far
from being the Son of God, was, in his opinion, a mere man, born of his
mother in the common way. The truth of these accusations was perhaps, in
a measure, sustained by the revenge that the emperor took on the
patriarch for his indiscreet revelations. He seized him, put out his
eyes, caused him to be led through the city mounted on an ass, with his
face to the tail, and then, as if to show his unutterable contempt for
all religion, with an exquisite malice, appointed him to his office
again.

[Sidenote: Council of Constantinople prohibits image-worship.]

If such was the religious condition of the emperor, the higher clergy
were but little bette