monarchy. "During ten pure and fortunate years," says Gregory to
the emperor, "we have tasted the annual comfort of your royal
letters, subscribed in purple ink, with your own hand, the sacred
pledges of your attachment to the orthodox creed of our fathers.
How deplorable is the change! how tremendous the scandal! You
now accuse the Catholics of idolatry; and, by the accusation, you
betray your own impiety and ignorance. To this ignorance we are
compelled to adapt the grossness of our style and arguments: the
first elements of holy letters are sufficient for your confusion;
and were you to enter a grammar-school, and avow yourself the
enemy of our worship, the simple and pious children would be
provoked to cast their horn-books at your head." After this
decent salutation, the pope attempts the usual distinction
between the idols of antiquity and the Christian images. The
former were the fanciful representations of phantoms or daemons,
at a time when the true God had not manifested his person in any
visible likeness. The latter are the genuine forms of Christ,
his mother, and his saints, who had approved, by a crowd of
miracles, the innocence and merit of this relative worship. He
must indeed have trusted to the ignorance of Leo, since he could
assert the perpetual use of images, from the apostolic age, and
their venerable presence in the six synods of the Catholic
church. A more specious argument is drawn from present
possession and recent practice the harmony of the Christian world
supersedes the demand of a general council; and Gregory frankly
confesses, than such assemblies can only be useful under the
reign of an orthodox prince. To the impudent and inhuman Leo,
more guilty than a heretic, he recommends peace, silence, and
implicit obedience to his spiritual guides of Constantinople and
Rome. The limits of civil and ecclesiastical powers are defined