degradation of the priest who had celebrated the obnoxious marriage.
But another storm darkened the sky, when Leo V., the Armenian, in 813,
renewed the war against eikons. Theodore threw himself into the
struggle with all the force of his being as their defender. He
challenged the right of the imperial power to interfere with religious
questions; he refused to keep silence on the subject; and on Palm
Sunday, in 815, led a procession of his monks carrying eikons in their
hands in triumph round the monastery grounds. Again he was scourged
and banished. But he could not be subdued. By means of a large and
active correspondence he continued an incessant and powerful agitation
against the iconoclasts of the day. Nor would he come to terms with
Michael II., who had married a nun, and who allowed the use of eikons
only outside the capital. So Theodore retired, apparently a defeated
man, to the monastery of Acritas[53]; and there, 'on Sunday, 11
November 826, and about noon, feeling his strength fail, he bade them
light candles and sing the 119th psalm, which seems to have been sung
at funerals. At the words: "I will never forget Thy commandments, for
with them Thou hast quickened me," he passed away.' He was buried on
the island of Prinkipo, but eighteen years later, when eikons were
finally restored in the worship of the Orthodox Church, his body was
transferred to the Studion, and laid with great ceremony in the
presence of the Empress Theodora beside the graves of his uncle Plato
and his brother Joseph, in sign that after all he had conquered.[54]
_Tandem hic quiescit._

NOTE

His remains were interred at the east end of the southern aisle,
where his uncle Plato and his brother Joseph had been buried before
him, and where Naucratius and Nicholas, his successors as abbots of
the Studion, were laid to rest after him. [Greek: pros to dexio merei
en to kat' anatolas tou Prodromikou temenous pandoxo kai hiero ton
martyron seko, entha de kai tou hosiou patros hemon Theodorou he
paneuklees kai pansebastos timia theke kathidrytai] (_Vita S. Nicolai
Studitae_, Migne, _P.G._ tome 105).

There, in fact, during the recent Russian exploration of the
church, three coffins were discovered: one containing a single body,
another four bodies, and another three bodies. The grave had
evidently been disturbed at some time, for some of the bodies had no
head, and all the coffins lay under the same bed of morta