That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II. The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power, but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the Church’s two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence, because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then, in 726, a contest, the most unequal which can be conceived, began between Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III., used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring, while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in 754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen