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OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 279 recommendation of absurdity, I am surprised that it was not more explicitly decided in the affirmative. In the West, pope Hadrian the First accepted and announced the decrees of the Nicene assembly, which is now revered by the Catholics as the seventh in rank of the general councils. Rome and Italy were docile to the voice of their father ; but the greatest part of the Latin Christians were far behind in the race of superstition. The churches of France, Germany, England, and Spain, steered Eeioctance a middle course between the adoration and the destruction of andof caiarie- images, which they admitted into their temples, not as objects ?^f&c. of worship, but as lively and useful memorials of faith and history. An angry book of controversy was composed and published in the name of Charlemagne ; ^'^ under his authority a synod of three hundred bishops was assembled at Frankfort ; ^ they blamed the fury of the Iconoclasts, but they pronounced a more severe censure against the superstition of the Greeks and the decrees of their pretended council, which was long despised by the barbarians of the West.** Among them the worship of images advanced with a silent and insensible pro- gress ; but a large atonement is made for their hesitation and delay by the gross idolatry of the ages which precede the re- formation, and of the countries, both in Europe and America, which are still immersed in the gloom of superstition. It was after the Nicene synod, and under the reign of the rinai separa- pious Irene, that the popes consummated the separation of Rome popes from and Italy, by the translation of the empire to the less orthodox empire, a.d. 1 774-800 Charlemagne. They were compelled to choose between the rival nations ; religion was not the sole motive of their choice ; and, while they dissembled the failings of their friends, they beheld, with reluctance and suspicion, the Catholic virtues of !^ The Libri Carolini (Spanheim, p. 443-529), composed in the palace or winter quarters of Charlemagne, at Worms, A.D. 790; and sent by Engebert to pope Hadrian I. who answered them by a grandis et verbosa epistola (Concil. torn. viii. P- 1553)- ^he Carolines propose 120 objections against the Nicene synod, and such words as these are the flowers of their rhetoric — dementiam priscae Gentilitatis obsoletum errorem . . . argumenta insanissima et absurdissima . . . derisione dignas naenias, kc. &c. "^ The assemblies of Charlemagne were political, as well as ecclesiastical ; and the three hundred members (Nat. Alexander, sec. viii. p. 53), who sat and voted at Frankfort, must include not only the bishops, but the abbots, and even the principal laymen. '^ Qui supra sanctissima patres nostri (episcopi et sacerdotes) otnnimodis servi- tium et adorationem imaginum renuentes contempserunt, atque consentientes con- demnaverunt (Concil. torn. ix. p. loi ; Canon u. Frankfurd). A polemic must be hard-hearted indeed, who does not pity the efforts of Baronius, Pagi, Alexander, Maimbourg, i&c. to elude this unlucky sentence.