e's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate,
including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance
of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter
persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father
Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the
most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The
Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to
their old ways of worship in the eighth century was indeed not unlike
that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active
persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern
suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was
believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about
the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate
association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he
had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a
fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the
religious feeling of his time.

[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]

It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day
to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the
Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how
the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the
strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march
over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes
of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew
the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem
to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an
irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition,
an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when
materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great
city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against
"iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern
Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the
field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic
victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was
content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to
sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest