This sanguinary lesson to the Iconodulic party seems to have cowed them to such an extent that they did not raise another open rebellion in the long reign of Constantine (740-775). But they adhered as fully as ever to their faith: nothing is so difficult to eradicate as a well-rooted superstition, and Constantine’s strong hand was better fitted to cow than to persuade. As the years of his reign passed by, and he found image-worship practised in secret by thousands of conscientious votaries, the emperor grew more and more determined to uproot it. After a time he resolved to call in the spiritual sanction to aid the secular arm: in 753 he summoned a general council to meet at Constantinople, but it was œcumenical only in name. The Pope replied by anathemas of contumely to the summons to appear; the patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, safe under the protection of the caliph, denied their presence. [Sidenote: Council of Constantinople, 753.] But there assembled an imposing body of three hundred and thirty-eight bishops, presided over by the Constantinopolitan patriarch, Constantine of Sylaeum, and by Theodosius, metropolitan of Ephesus, son of the emperor Tiberius II. This council committed itself fully to Iconoclastic doctrine; it proscribed all representations of Our Lord as blasphemous snares, for endeavouring to express both His human and His divine nature in the mere likeness of a man, and thereby obscuring His divinity in His humanity. At the same time it condemned the worship of images of saints, because all adoration except that paid to the Godhead savoured of heathenism and anthropolatry. The emperor had other scruples of his own, on which he did not press the council to deliver a decision; he denied the intercessory powers of the Virgin, and scrupled to prefix the epithet ἅγιος, ‘holy,’ to the names of even the greatest saints. He spoke, for example, of ‘Peter the Apostle,’ not of ‘the holy Peter.’ On these awful depths of free thought the Iconodules of his own and the succeeding generation wasted expressions of horror, worthy to be employed on a Herod or a Judas.