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