it us by his venerable image; He who is
seated on the cherubim, visits us this day by a picture, which the
Father has delineated with his immaculate hand, which he has formed in
an ineffable manner, and which we sanctify by adoring it with fear and
love." Before the end of the sixth century, these images, _made without
hands_, (in Greek it is a single word, ) were propagated in the camps
and cities of the Eastern empire: they were the objects of worship, and
the instruments of miracles; and in the hour of danger or tumult, their
venerable presence could revive the hope, rekindle the courage, or
repress the fury, of the Roman legions. Of these pictures, the far
greater part, the transcripts of a human pencil, could only pretend to
a secondary likeness and improper title: but there were some of higher
descent, who derived their resemblance from an immediate contact with
the original, endowed, for that purpose, with a miraculous and prolific
virtue. The most ambitious aspired from a filial to a fraternal relation
with the image of Edessa; and such is the _veronica_ of Rome, or Spain,
or Jerusalem, which Christ in his agony and bloody sweat applied to
his face, and delivered to a holy matron. The fruitful precedent was
speedily transferred to the Virgin Mary, and the saints and martyrs. In
the church of Diospolis, in Palestine, the features of the Mother of God
were deeply inscribed in a marble column; the East and West have been
decorated by the pencil of St. Luke; and the Evangelist, who was perhaps
a physician, has been forced to exercise the occupation of a painter, so
profane and odious in the eyes of the primitive Christians. The Olympian
Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might
inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic
images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last
degeneracy of taste and genius.

The worship of images had stolen into the church by insensible
degrees, and each petty step was pleasing to the superstitious mind, as
productive of comfort, and innocent of sin. But in the beginning of the
eighth century, in the full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous
Greeks were awakened by an apprehension, that under the mask of
Christianity, they had restored the religion of their fathers: they
heard, with grief and impatience, the name of idolaters; the incessant
charge of the Jews and Mahometans, who derived from the Law and the
K