ble spirit of the Catholics insensibly cast him
into the opposite scale. His moderation was guarded by timidity; but his
son Theophilus, alike ignorant of fear and pity, was the last and most
cruel of the Iconoclasts. The enthusiasm of the times ran strongly
against them; and the emperors who stemmed the torrent were exasperated
and punished by the public hatred. After the death of Theophilus, the
final victory of the images was achieved by a second female, his widow
Theodora, whom he left the guardian of the empire. Her measures were
bold and decisive. The fiction of a tardy repentance absolved the fame
and the soul of her deceased husband; the sentence of the Iconoclast
patriarch was commuted from the loss of his eyes to a whipping of
two hundred lashes: the bishops trembled, the monks shouted, and the
festival of orthodoxy preserves the annual memory of the triumph of the
images. A single question yet remained, whether they are endowed with
any proper and inherent sanctity; it was agitated by the Greeks of
the eleventh century; [81] and as this opinion has the strongest
recommendation of absurdity, I am surprised that it was not more
explicitly decided in the affirmative. In the West, Pope Adrian the
First accepted and announced the decrees of the Nicene assembly, which
is now revered by the Catholics as the seventh in rank of the general
councils. Rome and Italy were docile to the voice of their father; but
the greatest part of the Latin Christians were far behind in the race
of superstition. The churches of France, Germany, England, and Spain,
steered a middle course between the adoration and the destruction
of images, which they admitted into their temples, not as objects of
worship, but as lively and useful memorials of faith and history. An
angry book of controversy was composed and published in the name of
Charlemagne: [82] under his authority a synod of three hundred
bishops was assembled at Frankfort: [83] they blamed the fury of the
Iconoclasts, but they pronounced a more severe censure against the
superstition of the Greeks, and the decrees of their pretended council,
which was long despised by the Barbarians of the West. [84] Among them
the worship of images advanced with a silent and insensible progress;
but a large atonement is made for their hesitation and delay, by the
gross idolatry of the ages which precede the reformation, and of the
countries, both in Europe and America, which are still immersed in t