This glorious confessor was born in Crete, and was the son of pious parents, who educated him from earliest infancy in the fear of God. At the age of ten he was sent to Constantinople, to see his kinsman Theophanes. He found him a monk of the order of the Sleepless Ones,[16] in the monastery called the Studium. He entered the same order, and fulfilled his monastic duties with regularity and devotion. Having set a brilliant example, he was deemed worthy to be invested with the priesthood. Then broke out the furious persecution of the Iconoclasts, about which a few words must be said in this place.[17] When God was made Man, He was put at once into the most intimate relation with men; and just as it is lawful for any son to have a portrait of his father or mother, so did it become lawful and reasonable that he should have a picture of that God-Man, who is dearer to him than father or mother. The picture served as a constant reminder, an evidence for the Incarnation. It is a sermon declaring God to be made Man. But the Arians, who denied the divinity of our Lord, were most hostile to sacred representations of Christ, and with reason, for these pictures were a testimony against them. At first the Arian attack on the foundation doctrine of the Incarnation was open. But, when the theological statement of that mystery was made so plain that there was no opposing it by counter statement, Arianism adopted other tactics, and appeared as Iconoclasm, or war against sacred pictures. He who disbelieved, or only coldly acquiesced in the Incarnation of God, saw that this chief corner-stone of Christianity could only be uprooted by chilling the ardour of Christian affection. And no better method of chilling that affection could be devised, than the obliteration of representations of Christ, His acts, His passion, and of His mother, and His Saints; then there was some prospect of religious acceptance of this dogma sinking into cold intellectual apprehension, and thence it could be dislodged without difficulty. After the reconciliation of large congregations of Gnostics and Arians with the Catholic Church, they maintained that icy worship which had preceded their separation, they adored God as a Spirit, but actually, though they had ceased to do so formally, overlooked His manhood. These reconciled bodies afforded a fund of passive prejudice and aversion of small account so long as Catholic princes were on the throne, but which, in the fortune of a soldier, might produce serious results to the Church.