ine were invested with the purple and prerogatives
of the Caesars. So deep was the ignorance and credulity of the times,
that the most absurd of fables was received, with equal reverence, in
Greece and in France, and is still enrolled among the decrees of the
canon law. The emperors, and the Romans, were incapable of discerning
a forgery, that subverted their rights and freedom; and the only
opposition proceeded from a Sabine monastery, which, in the beginning of
the twelfth century, disputed the truth and validity of the donation of
Constantine. In the revival of letters and liberty, this fictitious deed
was transpierced by the pen of Laurentius Valla, the pen of an eloquent
critic and a Roman patriot. His contemporaries of the fifteenth century
were astonished at his sacrilegious boldness; yet such is the silent and
irresistible progress of reason, that, before the end of the next age,
the fable was rejected by the contempt of historians and poets, and the
tacit or modest censure of the advocates of the Roman church. The popes
themselves have indulged a smile at the credulity of the vulgar; but a
false and obsolete title still sanctifies their reign; and, by the same
fortune which has attended the decretals and the Sibylline oracles, the
edifice has subsisted after the foundations have been undermined.

While the popes established in Italy their freedom and dominion, the
images, the first cause of their revolt, were restored in the Eastern
empire. Under the reign of Constantine the Fifth, the union of civil and
ecclesiastical power had overthrown the tree, without extirpating the
root, of superstition. The idols (for such they were now held) were
secretly cherished by the order and the sex most prone to devotion; and
the fond alliance of the monks and females obtained a final victory over
the reason and authority of man. Leo the Fourth maintained with less
rigor the religion of his father and grandfather; but his wife, the fair
and ambitious Irene, had imbibed the zeal of the Athenians, the heirs of
the Idolatry, rather than the philosophy, of their ancestors. During
the life of her husband, these sentiments were inflamed by danger and
dissimulation, and she could only labor to protect and promote some
favorite monks whom she drew from their caverns, and seated on the
metropolitan thrones of the East. But as soon as she reigned in her own
name and that of her son, Irene more seriously undertook the ruin of the
Iconocla