Among the most prominent tokens of this growth of irrational superstitions was the great tendency of the seventh century towards image-worship,—Iconoduly as its opponents called the practice. In direct opposition to early Christian custom, it became common to ascribe the most strange and magical powers to representations, whether sculptured or painted, of Our Lord and the Saints. [Sidenote: Image-worship.] They were not merely regarded as useful memorials to guide the piety of believers, but were thought to have a holiness inherent in themselves, and to be capable of performing the most astonishing miracles. Heraclius possessed, and carried about with him as a fetich, a picture which he believed to have been painted in heaven by angelic hands, and thought it brought him all manner of luck. The crucifix over the door of the imperial palace was believed to have used human speech. Even patriarchs and bishops affirmed that the hand of a celebrated picture of the Virgin in the capital distilled fragrant balsam. Every church and monastery had its wonder-working image, and drew no small revenue from pious offerings to it. The freaks to which image-worship led were often most grotesque: it was, for example, a well-known practice to make a favourite picture the god-father of a child in baptism, by scraping off a little of its paint and mixing it with the baptismal water. The act for which the name of Leo the Isaurian is best remembered is the issue of his edict against these puerile superstitions, and his attempt to put down image-worship all through his realm. Leo was not only a man of strong common sense, but he was sprung from those lands on the Mohammedan border where Christians had the best opportunity of comparing the gross and material adoration of their co-religionists for stones and paint, with the severe spiritual worship of the followers of Islam. The Moslem was always taunting the Christian with serving idols, and the taunt found too much justification in many practices of the vulgar. Thinking men like Leo were moved by the Moslem’s sneer into a horror of the superstitious follies of their contemporaries. [Sidenote: Iconoclasm.] They fortified themselves by the view that to make graven or painted representations of Our Lord savoured of heresy, because it laid too much stress on His humanity as opposed to His divinity. Such an idea was no new thing: it had often been mooted among the Eastern Christians, though more often by schismatics than by Catholics. Of Leo’s own orthodoxy, however, there was no doubt: even his enemies could not convict him of swerving in the least from the faith: it was only on this matter of image-worship that he differed from them. Wherever he plucked down the crucifix he set up the plain cross—on the standards of his army, on the gates of his palace, on his money, on his imperial robes. It was purely to the anthropomorphic representation of Our Lord and to the over-reverence for images of saints that he objected.