Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/270

248 THE DECLINE AND FALL of his face on a linen, with which he gratified the faith of the royal stranger, who had invoked his healing power and offered the strong city of Edessa to protect him against the malice of the Jews. The ignorance of the primitive church is explained by the long imprisonment of the image, in a niche of the wall, from whence, after an oblivion of five hundred years, it was released by some prudent bishop, and seasonably presented to the devotion of the times. Its first and most glorious exploit was the deliverance of the city from the arms of Chosroes Nushirvan ; and it was soon revered as a pledge of the divine promise that Edessa should never be taken by a foreign enemy. It is true, indeed, that the text of Procopius ascribes the double deliverance of Edessa to the wealth and valour of her citizens, who purchased the absence and repelled the assaults of the Persian monarch. He was ignorant, the profane historian, of the testimony which he is compelled to deliver in the ecclesias- tical page of Evagrius, that the Palladium was exposed on the rampart, and that the water which had been sprinkled on the holy face, instead of quenching, added new fuel to, the flames of the besieged. After this important service, the image of Edessa was preserved with respect and gratitude ; and, if the Armenians rejected the legend, the more credulous Greeks adored the similitude, which was not the work of any mortal pencil, but the immediate creation of the divine original. The style and sentiments of a Byzantine hymn will declare how far their worship was removed from the grossest idolatry, " How can we with mortal eyes contemplate this image, whose celestial splendour the host of heaven presumes not to behold .'* He who dwells in heaven condescends this day to visit us by his venerable image ; He who is seated on the cherubim visits us this day by a picture, which the Father has delineated with his immaculate hand, which he has formed in an ineffable manner, and which we sanctify by adoring it with fear and love." Before the end of the sixth century, these images, made ivithout hands (in Greek it is a single word ^^), were propagated in the of the second Nicene Council (Actio, v. p. 1030). The most perfect edition may be found in Cedrenus (Compend. p. 175-178 [i. p. 308 sqq., ed. Bonn]). 11 'AxfipoTTO^DTos. See Ducange, in Gloss. Graec. et Lat. The subject is treated with equal learning and bigotry by the Jesuit Gretser (Syntagma de Imaginibus non Manu factis, ad calcem Codini de Officiis, p. 289-330), the ass, or rather the fo.x, of Ingoldstadt (see the Scaligerana) ; with equal reason and wit by the Protes- tant Beausobre, in the ironical controversy which he has spread through many volumes of the Bibliotheque Germanique (torn. .wiii. p. 1-50, .x. p. 27-68, xxv. p. 1-36, xxvii. p. 85-118, .xviii. p. 1-33, x.xi. p. 111-148, xxxii. p. 75-107, xxxiv. p. 67-96). [The Hellenic parallel to these eixove? axf ipowoiTjToc are the iyiA/aa-ra 5tojrt-T^.]