Rome and Italy were docile to the voice of their father; but the greatest part of the Latin Christians were far behind in the race of superstition.

The churches of France, Germany, England, and Spain, steered a middle course between the adoration and the destruction of images, which they admitted into their temples, not as objects of worship, but as lively and useful memorials of faith and history.

An angry book of controversy was composed and published in the name of Charlemagne: under his authority a synod of three hundred bishops was assembled at Frankfort: they blamed the fury of the Iconoclasts, but they pronounced a more severe censure against the superstition of the Greeks, and the decrees of their pretended council, which was long despised by the Barbarians of the West.

Among them the worship of images advanced with a silent and insensible progress; but a large atonement is made for their hesitation and delay, by the gross idolatry of the ages which precede the reformation, and of the countries, both in Europe and America, which are still immersed in the gloom of superstition..