Some scrupulous and educated Christians, such as Epiphanius and Augustine, had naturally set their faces against such a general reversion to practical idolatry, just as many educated pagans had done on philosophical grounds; and the council of Elvira in the fourth century condemned the admission of pictures into churches. But this had no lasting effect. In the eighth century, when it could no longer be pretended that Christian images served merely for edification, the Greek emperor Leo the Isaurian began the famous iconoclastic movement in the East. It is probable that he was influenced by Saracen ideas, with which he often came in contact; though it has been held that his motive was mainly political, the local worship of images having weakened the central authority of the Church. But after some generations of struggle and fluctuation, despite the ready support given to iconoclasm by many bishops, the throne reverted to orthodoxy, and idolatry thenceforth remained normal in the Greek as in the Latin Church. The one variation from pagan practice lay in the substitution of pictures and painted wooden images or icons for the nobler statues of past paganism, with which indeed Christian art could not pretend for a moment to compete. In the West, though the iconoclastic emperors met from the popes not sympathy but intense hostility, leading soon to the severance of Rome from the empire, we find in the ninth century a remarkable opposition to image-worship on the part of Claudius bishop of Turin, and Agobard bishop of Lyons, both of whom show a surprising degree of rationalism for their age. Claudius opposed papal claims as well as saint-worship and image-worship, and when condemned by a council of bishops called them asses. Agobard opposed all the leading superstitions of his day, even going so far as to pronounce the theory of plenary inspiration an absurdity. As both men were born in Spain, there is reason to suspect that they like Leo had been influenced by the higher Saracen thought of the time. In any case, their stand was vain; and though the northern nations, mainly perhaps by reason of their backwardness in the arts, were slow to follow the Italian lead, a century or two sufficed to make the whole Latin Church devoutly image-worshipping. At no time, of course, had any part of it been otherwise than boundlessly credulous as to miracles of every order, and as to the supernatural virtue of relics of every species; and both, accordingly, abounded on all hands. The average mass of Christendom was thus on the same religious and psychological plane as pagan polytheism.