I am well aware that thou desirest not the image of our Saviour that thou mayest worship it as God, but to enkindle in thee the love of Him whose image thou wouldst see. Neither do we prostrate ourselves before an image as before a deity, but we adore Him whom the image represents to our memory as born or seated on the throne; and according to the representation, the correspondent feelings of joyful elevation, or of painful sympathy, are excited in our breasts.[274:1] Images were put into churches "only to instruct the minds of the ignorant." Again, he explained the use of images thus: "It is one thing to worship a picture and another to learn from the language of a picture what that is which ought to be worshipped. What those who read learn by means of writing, that do the uneducated learn by looking at a picture."[274:2] The most eloquent of all the apologists of images, John of Damascus, gave this explanation: I am too poor to buy books and I have no leisure for reading. I enter the church choked with the cares of the world. The glowing colours attract my attention and delight my eyes like a flowering meadow; and the glory of God steals imperceptibly into my soul. I gaze on the fortitude of the martyr and the crown with which he is rewarded, and the holy fire of emulation kindles within me and I receive salvation.[274:3] It must be remembered that, however clearly the teachers of the Church might see the difference between the right use of images to instruct the unlettered and to excite a spiritual feeling, on the one hand, and a superstitious worship of images, on the other, the ignorant masses did not make the distinction in either thought or practice, and therein lay the great abuse. From the death of Gregory the Great in 604 until the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy in 716, twenty-five Popes ruled in Rome. With several exceptions they were ecclesiastics of no historical importance. To say that they lost nothing of the ground gained by Gregory the Great is to say much for them. But in addition they made some progress in the evolution of the mediæval Church. On this question of the use of images in worship they uniformly continued the policy of Gregory the Great.