ing, "Alas, my God was taken from me, and I do
not know whom I am now worshipping!"(10) I shall have, in the course of
this essay, opportunities to show that the monks have always been the most
zealous and efficient promoters of image-worship.

The following rapid sketch of the introduction of image-worship into the
Christian church, and of its consequences, has been drawn by a French
living writer, whose religious views I do not share, but whose profound
erudition, fairness, and sincerity, are deserving of the greatest praise:--

"The aversion of the first Christians to the images, inspired by the Pagan
simulachres, made room, during the centuries which followed the period of
the persecutions, to a feeling of an entirely different kind, and the
images gradually gained their favour. Reappearing at the end of the fourth
and during the course of the fifth centuries, simply as emblems, they soon
became images, in the true acceptation of this word; and the respect which
was entertained by the Christians for the persons and ideas represented by
those images, was afterwards converted into a real worship.
Representations of the sufferings which the Christians had endured for the
sake of their religion, were at first exhibited to the people in order to
stimulate by such a sight the faith of the masses, always lukewarm and
indifferent. With regard to the images of divine persons of entirely
immaterial beings, it must be remarked, that they did not originate from
the most spiritualised and pure doctrines of the Christian society, but
were rejected by the severe orthodoxy of the primitive church. These
simulachres appear to have been spread at first by the Gnostics,--_i.e._,
by those Christian sects which adopted the most of the beliefs of Persia
and India. Thus it was a Christianity which was not purified by its
contact with the school of Plato,--a Christianity which entirely rejected
the Mosaic tradition, in order to attach itself to the most strange and
attractive myths of Persia and India,--that gave birth to the images. And
it was a return to the spiritualism of the first ages, and a revival of
the spirit of aversion to what has a tendency of lowering Divinity to the
narrow proportions of a human creature, that produced war against those
images. But the manners and the beliefs had been changed. Whole nations
had received Christianity, when it was already escorted by that idolatrous
train of carved and painted images. Only thos