reat preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal
character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule,
which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by
Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule
of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S.
Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of
floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did--and
this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164}
preached--seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane.
There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his
three _Antirrhetici_, in which he triumphantly vindicates the worship
of Christ in His Godhead and His manhood as being inseparable and
essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There
can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The worship of the image
is worship of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of
likeness to Christ."

This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who
defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images
were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true
humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and
worship,--reverence rather than worship in the modern English use of
the words,--of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the
Manhood of the Lord. The worship was not _latreia_, which can be paid
to God alone, but _proskunesis schetike_. Christ, said S. Theodore,
was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and
worshipped in an image.

The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the
Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great
religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional
opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had
exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and
they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.]
The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own
secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the
decrees that {165} had been passed at Constantinople in 754. In 787
for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora,
which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came
representatives of East and West, and