Leo III. was a soldier of great courage and considerable skill. He was of low birth in the province of Isauria, but worked his way through the various grades of the army until he became the most highly reputed of its generals at a moment when a succession of seven revolutions had seemed to portend the coming extinction of the empire. Besides its internal dissensions, it was hard pressed by the chalif Solomon, who was making every preparation for the final conquest of the capital. When by the cession of the good but impotent Theodosius III. the Isaurian officer obtained the crown, sodden as it were with the blood of three successive emperors, it might have seemed that the last hour had come of the great city whose ramparts had served as the only sufficient bulwark against the Mohammedan torrent of conquest. Leo III. thought not so. His first act was to defeat the chalif and cast back his invading host. The eastern empire breathed afresh under his resolute spirit and strategic skill, and learnt to meet not ingloriously the Saracen in battle. Ten years of success had given to its ruler some rays of the glory which had shone upon the older emperors. It is of the year 726 that the most learned of Italian historians(164) speaks in these words: “This year Leo, the Isaurian, began a tragedy which convulsed the Church of God and laid the foundations for the loss of Italy to the Greek emperors. Theophanes, Nicephorus, and other historians tell us that a submarine volcano had broken out in the Ægean Sea and cast up a quantity of pumice stone on the adjoining coast. This natural incident had produced the greatest alarm. Moreover, a perfidious renegade named Bezer,(165) who had embraced the Arabian superstition, had nestled himself in the imperial court, and succeeded in making the emperor believe that God was enraged with the Christians on account of the images which they had in their churches and venerated. No doubt abuses did exist in the veneration of these images, as have since appeared among the Moscovites, united to the Greek Church. But such abuses neither were nor are a reason to abolish these images, for, as men of great knowledge have proved, the use of images and a well-regulated veneration of them is not only lawful, but greatly fosters piety in the Christian Catholic people. Now the emperor Leo, infatuated by his own great penetration of mind and seduced by this evil counsellor, practised a usurpation upon the rights of the priesthood, and published an edict ordering that from that moment all the sacred images should be forbidden and removed through the territory of the Roman empire. He called the kissing them or venerating them idolatry. This was the beginning of the Iconoclast heresy. This rash and iniquitous prohibition excited great commotion among his subjects. The larger part detested him as heretical, as holding Mohammedan sentiments, and the more because it was known that he held in abomination the sacred relics, and