believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the religious feeling of his time. [Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.] It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change, without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church in the decision of the Seventh General Council. [Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]