Christian Lares and Penates. They were, like Rachel's teraphim, survivals in the home of a kind of superstition not so openly observed in public. But the pictures were in the churches or out in the open air, and the adoration of them was public. Here was an overt public superstition which could be directly attacked. That this is not too harsh a verdict on the popular image worship is proved by the serious commotion that the emperor's policy aroused. If no more than Gregory the Great's didactic use of pictures had been in practice, people would not have been so profoundly stirred at the removal of their lesson illustrations. What roused them to fury was the idea that the emperor was taking away their idols, their gods. Thus this very passion of opposition justified Leo's theory of the system he was attacking. In a word, Leo was a reformer, a protestant, a man who saw the fatal character of the materialistic religion of his day, and endeavoured to alter it.
Nevertheless Leo made two serious mistakes. First, he acted solely on his own initiative and by force. His reformation was purely a State action; there was no popular movement supporting it. Such a reformation, coming on to the Church from without, does not stir up an internal revival of better things. Secondly, it was negative, only destructive; it did nothing to substitute a new living religion for the old superstition. Leo was no Luther. It is the positive revival of religion alone that can effect genuine reformation.
Still, while we must admit these two damaging factors of the case, we may hold that the emperor's motive was good and honest and enlightened. In point of fact, there was some revival of religion under the iconoclastic emperors, and it was accompanied by a betterment of morals. The period that followed Leo's reforms was a real improvement on that which preceded it. Mr. Bury holds that the Iconoclasts should not be regarded as Puritans; that it would be more correct to consider them to be Rationalists.[1] Certainly they did not anticipate the grim
- ↑ Bury, History of Later Roman Empire, vol. ii. p. 429.
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