m 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: under his authority
a synod of three hundred bishops was assembled at Frankfort: 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. 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 the gloom of superstition.

Chapter XLIX: Conquest Of Italy By The Franks.--Part IV.

It was after the Nicene synod, and under the reign of the pious Irene,
that the popes consummated the separation of Rome and Italy, by the
translation of the empire to the less orthodox Charlemagne. They were
compelled to choose between the rival nations: religion was not the sole
motive of their choice; and while they dissembled the failings of
their friends, they beheld, with reluctance and suspicion, the Catholic
virtues of their foes. The difference of language and manners had
perpetuated the enmity of the two capitals; and they were alienated from
each other by the hostile opposition of seventy years. In that schism
the Romans had tasted of freedom, and the popes of sovereignty: their
submission would have exposed them to the revenge of a jealous tyrant;
and the revolution of Italy had betrayed the impotence, as well as the
tyranny, of the Byzantine court. The Greek emperors had restored the
images, but they had not restored the Calabrian estates and the Illyrian
diocese, which the Iconoclasts had torn away from the success