Iconium is distant by rail 466 m. from the Bosporus at Haidar-Pasha, and 389 from Smyrna by way of Afium-Kara-Hissar. It has recently become the seat of a considerable manufacture of carpets, owing to the cheapness of labour. The population was estimated at 44,000 in 1890, and is now probably over 50,000. Mercury mines have begun to be worked; other minerals are known to exist. (W. M. Ra.) ICONOCLASTS (Gr. [Greek: eikonoklastês: eikôn], image, and [Greek: klaein], to break), the name applied particularly to the opponents in the 8th and 9th centuries of the use of images in Christian cult. As regards the attitude towards religious images assumed by the primitive Christian Church, several questions have often been treated as one which cannot be too carefully kept apart. There can be no doubt that the early Christians were unanimous in condemning heathen image-worship and the various customs, some immoral, with which it was associated. A form of iconolatry specially deprecated in the New Testament was the then prevalent adoration of the images of the reigning emperors (see Rev. xv. 2). It is also tolerably certain that, if for no other reasons besides the Judaism, obscurity, and poverty of the early converts to Christianity, the works of art seen in their meeting-houses cannot at first have been numerous. Along with these reasons would co-operate towards the exclusion of visible aids to devotion, not only the church's sacramental use of Christ's name as a name of power, and its living sense of his continued real though unseen presence, but also, during the first years, its constant expectation of his second advent as imminent. It was a common accusation brought against Jews and Christians that they had "no altars, no temples, no known images" (Min. Fel. _Oct._ c. 10), that "they set up no image or form of any god" (see Arnob. _Adv. Gent._ vi. I; similarly Celsus); and this charge was never denied; on the contrary Origen gloried in it (_c. Celsum_, bk. 7, p. 386). At a comparatively early date, indeed, we read of various Gnostic sects calling in the fine arts to aid their worship; thus Irenaeus (_Haer._ i. 25. 6), speaking of the followers of Marcellina, says that "they possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; and they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among men. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world; that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images after the same manner as the Gentiles" (cf. Aug. _De Haer._ c. 7). It is also well known that the emperor Alexander Severus found a place for several Scripture characters and even for Christ in his lararium (Lamprid. _Vit. Alex. Sev._ c. 29). But there is no evidence that such a use of images extended at that period to orthodox Christian circles.