your enemies be subjected to the yoke of your supreme rule; and the hearts of your subjects, hitherto broken and depressed, be relieved by your clemency." Proceeding to paint their former miseries, he concludes, with wishing that the commonwealth may long enjoy its present happiness. Thus, in language evidently borrowed from the inspired writers, and in which they anticipate the joy and gladness that should pervade universal nature at the birth of the Messiah, does this pope celebrate the march of this tyrant and usurper through seas of blood to the imperial throne. "As a subject and a Christian," says Gibbon, "it was the duty of Gregory to acquiesce in the established government; but the joyful applause with which he salutes the fortune of the assassin, has sullied, with indelible disgrace, the character of the saint. The successor of the apostles might have inculcated with decent firmness the guilt of blood, and the necessity of repentance: he is content to celebrate the deliverance of the people, and the fall of the oppressor; to rejoice that the piety and benignity of Phocas have been raised by Providence to the imperial throne; to pray that his hands may be strengthened against all his enemies; and to express a wish, that, after a long triumphant reign, he may be transferred from a temporal to an everlasting kingdom." "I have traced," says the same writer, "the steps of a revolution, so pleasing in Gregory's opinion both to heaven and earth, and Phocas does not appear less hateful in the exercise than in the acquisition of power. The pencil of an impartial historian has delineated the portrait of a monster; his diminutive and deformed person, &c. Ignorant of letters, of laws, and even of arms, he indulged in the supreme rank, a more ample privilege of lust and drunkenness; and his brutal pleasures were either injurious to his subjects, or disgraceful to himself. Without assuming the office of a prince, he renounced the profession of a soldier; and the reign of Phocas afflicted Europe with ignominious peace, and Asia with desolating war. His savage temper was inflamed by passion, hardened by fear, and exasperated by resistance or reproach. The flight of Theodosius, the only surviving son of the emperor Mauricius, to the Persian court, had been intercepted by a rapid pursuit, or a deceitful message: he was beheaded at Nice; and the last hours of the young

prince were soothed by the comforts of religion and the consciousness of innocence." "* Now, if there be any thing of either truth or justice in these remarks on the cha racter of Phocas, what are we to think of that of Gregory, who could stoop to the vile practice of panegyrizing such a monster; and, with all due deference, I humbly submit it to the consideration of my discreet monitor, "What valu able end can possibly be answered, by shutting our eyes against such flagrant enormities, and applauding the men who have perpetrated them?" "To me," says a late candid writer, "Gregory appears to have been a man, whose understanding, though rather above the middle rate, was much warped by the errors and prejudices of the times in which he lived. His piety was deeply tinctured with superstition, and his morals with monkery. His zeal was not pure, in regard to either its nature or its object. In the former respect it was often intolerant; and in regard to the latter, he evinced an attachment more to the form than to the power of religion, to the name than to the thing. His zeal was exactly that of the Pharisees, who compassed sea and land to make a proselyte, which, when they had accomplished, they rendered him twofold more a child of hell than before. He was ever holding forth the prerogatives of St. Peter, nor did he make any ceremony of signi fying, that this prime minister of Jesus Christ, like other prime ministers, would be most liberal of his favours to those who were most assiduous in making court to him, especially to them who were most liberal to his foundation at Rome, and that most advanced its dignity and power. So much for St. Gregory, and for the nature and extent of Roman Papal virtue."†

* Decline and Fall, ch. xlvi.

✦ Campbell's Lectures on Eccles. History, vol. ii. p. 79,

SECTION V.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

From the establishment of the dominion of the popes to the rise of the Waldenses.

A. D. 606-800.

THE introduction of images into places of Christian worship, and the idolatrous practices to which, in process of time, it gave rise, is an evil which dates its origin very soon after the times of Constantine the great; but, like many other superstitious practices, it made its way by slow The earlier Christians reproand imperceptible degrees. bated every species of image worship in the strongest language; and some of them employed the force of ridicule to great advantage, in order to expose its absurdity. When the empress Constantia desired Eusebius to send her the image of Jesus Christ, he expostulated with her on the impropriety and absurdity of her requisition in the following very striking words" What kind of image of Christ does your imperial Majesty wish to have conveyed to you? Is it the image of his real and immutable nature; or is it that which he assumed for our sakes, when he was veiled in the form of a servant? With respect to the former, I presume you are not to learn, that no man hath known the Son but the Father, neither hath any man known the Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.' But you ask for the image of Christ when he appeared in human form, clothed in a body similar to our own. Let Let me inform you, that the body is now blended with the glory of the Deity, and all that was mortal in it is absorbed in life.”*

*White's Bampton Lectures, Notes, p. 8.

Paulinus, who died bishop of Nola, in the year 431, caused the walls of a place of worship to be painted with stories taken out of the Old Testament, that the people might thence receive instruction; the consequence of which was, that the written word was neglected for these miserable substitutes. But about the commencement of the seventh century, during the pontificate of the first Gregory, a circumstance turned up which tends to throw additional light upon this subject. Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, in France, observing some of his congregation paying worship to the images, that had been placed in the churches of that city, in his zeal, commanded them to be broken and destroyed, which gave so much disgust, that many withdrew from his communion, and complaints against him were made to the bishop of Rome. Gregory wrote to him in consequence of these complaints; and the following is an extract of his letter. "I am lately informed," says he, "that upon your taking notice that some people worshipped images, you ordered the church pictures to be broken, and thrown away. Now, though I commend you for your zeal, in preventing the adoration of any thing made with hands, yet, in my opinion, those pictures should not have been broken in pieces. For, the design of pictures in churches, is to instruct the illiterate, that people may read that in the paint, which they have not education enough to do in the book. In my judgment, therefore, brother, you are obliged to find out a temper to let the pictures stand in the church, and likewise to forbid the congregation the worship of them. That by this provision, those who are not bred to letters, may be acquainted with the scripture history; and the people, on the other hand, preserved from the criminal excess of worshipping images."* Hence it appears, that the worship of images was not a very general thing in Gregory's time, and that he disapproved of the practice.

* Ep. Greg. I. 1. 7. epist. 109.

But this imprudent concession, sanctioned by the authority and influence of Gregory, was productive of the worst consequences that can be imagined, and tended to accelerate the growing superstition with amazing velocity throughout the countries subject to his pontificate. For as the knowledge of God's true character is only to be fully learned from the revelation which is made of it by means of the gospel of Christ, in proportion as the hearts of men become fortified against that which alone dispels the clouds of ignorance and error from the human mind, their propensity to every kind of superstition and idolatry naturally succeeds. This evil, therefore, made a most rapid progress, during the seventh century, and arrived at its zenith in the next. It did not, however, succeed without a struggle; and as the conflict ultimately issued in bringing about two important events, viz. the schism between the Greek and Roman churches, and the establishment of the pope as a temporal potentate, I shall endeavour, as concisely as possible, to sketch the leading particulars of this article of ecclesiastical history.

About the beginning of the eighth century, LEO, the Greek emperor, who reigned at Constantinople, began openly to oppose the worship of images. One Besor, a Syrian, who appears to have been an officer of his court, and in great favour with the emperor, is said to have convinced him by his arguments that the adoration of images was idolatrous, and in this he was ably seconded by Constantine, bishop of Nacolia in Phrygia. Leo, anxious to propagate truth and preserve his subjects from idolatry, assembled the people, and with all the frankness and sincerity which mark his character, publicly avowed his conviction of the idolatrous nature of the prevailing practice, and protested against the erection of images. Hitherto no councils had sanctioned the evil, and precedents of antiquity were against it. But the scriptures, which ought to have had infinitely more weight upon the minds of men than either councils or precedents, had expressly and point