IMAGE WORSHIP

All the points of doctrine or practice in which the Church of Rome differs from the Church of England are novelties, introduced gradually in the middle ages: of these the worship of images is the earliest practice, which received the sanction of what the Papists call a general council, though the second Council of Nice, A. D. 787, was in fact no general council. As this is the earliest authority for any of the Roman peculiarities, and as the Church of England at that early period was remarkably concerned in resisting the novelty, it may not be out of place to mention the circumstances as they are concisely stated by Perceval. The emperor Charlemagne, who was very much offended at the decrees of this council in favour of images, sent a copy of them into England. Alcuin, a most learned member of the Church of England, attacked them, and having produced Scriptural authority against them, transmitted the same to Charlemagne in the name of the bishops of the Church of England. Roger Hoveden, Simon of Durham, and Matthew of Westminster, mention the fact, and speak of the worship of images as being execrated by the whole Church. Charlemagne, pursuing his hostility to the Nicene Council, drew up four books against it, and transmitted them to Pope Adrian; who replied to them in an epistle “concerning images, against those who impugn the Nicene Synod,” as the title is given, together with the epistle itself, in the seventh volume of Labbe and Co art’s Councils. The genuinene of these books is admitted by all the chief Roman writers. For the purpose of considering the subject more fully, Charlemagne a embled a great council of British , Gallican, German, and Italian bishops at Frankfort, at which two legates from the bishop of Rome were present; where, after mature deliberation, the decrees of the soi-disant general Council of Nice, notwithstanding Pope Adrian’s countenance, were “ rejected ,” “ despised ,” and “ condemned .” The synod at Frankfort remains a monument of a noble stand in defence of the ancient religion, in which the Church of England had an honourable share, occupying, a you sand years ago, the self-same ground we now maintain, of protesting against Roman corruptions of the Catholic faith.