ay, however, mention that one of these disputes was about images, to
which the Christians of those ages, and especially the Greeks, had come
by degrees to pay a sort of reverence which St. Augustine and other
fathers of older days would have looked on with horror. It had become
usual to fall down before images, to pray to them, to kiss them, to burn
lights and incense in their honour, to adorn them with gold, silver, and
precious stones, to lay the hand on them in taking oaths, and even to
use them as godfathers or godmothers for children in baptism. Those who
defend the use of images would tell us that the honour is not given to
them, but to Almighty God, to the Saviour, and to the saints, through
the images. But when we find, for instance, that people paid more honour
to one image of the blessed Virgin than to another, and that they
supposed their prayers to have a greater hope of being heard when they
were said before one image than when they were said before another, we
cannot help thinking that they believed the images themselves to have
some particular virtue in them.

There were, then, some of the Greek emperors who tried to put down the
superstitious regard for images; and they were the more set on this
because the Mahometans, who abhorred images, reproached the Christians
for using them. These emperors, wishing to do away with the grounds for
such reproaches, caused the figures of stone or metal to be broken, and
the sacred pictures to be smeared over; and they persecuted very cruelly
those who were foremost in defending them. Then came other emperors who
were in favour of images; or widowed empresses, who governed during the
boyhood of their sons, and took up the cause of images with great zeal;
and thus the friends and the enemies of images succeeded each other by
turns on the throne, so that the battle was fought, backwards and
forwards, for a long time, until at length an agreement was come to
which has ever since continued in the Greek Church. By this agreement,
it was settled that the figures made by carving in stone or wood, or by
casting metal into a mould, should be forbidden, but that the use of
religious pictures (which were also called by the name of images) should
be allowed. Hence it is said that the Greeks may not worship anything of
which one can take the tip of the nose between his finger and his thumb.
But in the Latin Church the carved or molten images are still allowed;
and among the poorer a