Council, which was held at Nicaea, not only protested against the
violent fanaticism of the East, but sanctioned the veneration of images
and pictures to an extent which we find it hard to justify, and which
was, in fact, deemed unjustifiable by many in the West, who yet wished
for their retention as decorations and aids to devotional feeling.
Charlemagne, under the influence of our English Alcuin, opposed the
decision of the Council, and held provincial synods (especially one at
Frankfort, A.D. 794) {97} to condemn what was, at any rate, very like
image-worship.

[Sidenote: Charitable supposition regarding them.]

Probably dread of Judaism and Mahometanism, with their hatred of our
Blessed Lord and of His Image, as well as of all sculpture, had some
influence on the decisions of the council of A.D. 786, and we may
reasonably hope that it was not really intended to encourage any
worship or veneration contrary to the express law of God. At any rate,
the Iconoclast controversy aided very strongly to put an end to all
political union, and with it to all public ecclesiastical intercourse,
between East and West; though the bonds of external communion were not
yet broken, and they were still one both in faith and practice.

Section 3. _The Controversy respecting the Double Procession of the
Holy Ghost._

[Sidenote: Western addition to the Nicene creed.]

We have seen[1] that the summary of Christian belief, known to us as
the Nicene Creed, was completed at the Council of Constantinople, A.D.
381; but with this exception, that the article defining the faith of
the Church concerning the Third Person of the Ever-Blessed Trinity,
asserted only that "the Holy Ghost . . . . proceedeth from the Father,"
without the addition of the words "_and the Son_;" and it was the
controversy as to the admission or non-admission of these words into
the Creed which caused the formal division between Eastern and Western
Christendom. The question is said to have first arisen in the fifth
{98} century; and gradually the words in dispute came to be sung in the
West during Divine Service. [Sidenote: Decrees against it.] In the
ninth century an appeal was made on the subject to Pope Leo III., who
decided in a provincial Council that no such addition could lawfully be
made to the Creed, and ordered it to be engraved on silver plates
exactly as the Council of Constantinople had left it. Towards the end
of the same century another Council was