r. A council was summoned by Constantine, A.D. 754,
at Constantinople, which was attended by 388 bishops. It asserted for
itself the position of the seventh general council. It unanimously
decreed that all visible symbols of Christ, except in the Eucharist, are
blasphemous or heretical; that image-worship is a corruption of
Christianity and a renewed form of paganism; it directed all statues and
paintings to be removed from the churches and destroyed, it degraded
every ecclesiastic and excommunicated every layman who should be
concerned in setting them up again. It concluded its labours with
prayers for the emperor who had extirpated idolatry and given peace to
the Church.

[Sidenote: Uproar among the monks.]

[Sidenote: The emperor retaliates.]

But this decision was by no means quietly received. The monks rose in an
uproar; some raised a clamour in their caves, some from the tops of
their pillars; one, in the church of St. Mammas, insulted the emperor to
his face, denouncing him as a second apostate Julian. Nor could he
deliver himself from them by the scourging, strangling, and drowning of
individuals. In his wrath, Copronymus, plainly discerning that it was
the monks on one side and the government on the other, determined to
strike at the root of the evil, and to destroy monasticism itself. He
drove the holy men out of their cells and cloisters; made the
consecrated virgins marry; gave up the buildings for civil uses; burnt
pictures, idols, and all kinds of relics; degraded the patriarch from
his office, scourged him, shaved off his eyebrows, set him for public
derision in the circus in a sleeveless shirt, and then beheaded him.
Already he had consecrated a eunuch in his stead. Doubtless these
atrocities strengthened the bishops of Rome in their resolve to seek a
protector from such a master among the barbarian kings of the West.

[Sidenote: Re-establishment of image-worship by Irene the murderess.]

Constantine Copronymus was succeeded by his son, Leo the Chazar, who,
during a short reign of five years, continued the iconoclastic policy.
On his death his wife Irene seized the government, ostensibly in behalf
of her son. This woman, pre-eminently wicked and superstitious beyond
her times, undertook the restoration of images. She caused the patriarch
to retire from his dignity, appointed one of her creatures, Tarasius, in
his stead, and summoned another council. In this second Council of Nicea
that of Constantin