“You say: We worship stones and walls and boards. But it is not so, O Emperor; but they serve us for remem brance and encouragement, lifting our slow spirits upwards, by those whose names the pictures bear and whose representations they are. And we worship them not as God, as you maintain, God forbid! ...Even the little children mock at you. Go into one of their schools, say that you are the enemy of images, and straightway they will throw their little tablets at your head, and what you have failed to learn from the wise you may pick up from the foolish. You wrote : ‘As the Jewish King Ozias cast the brazen serpent out of the temple after eight hundred years (2 Kings xviii. 4), so I after eight hundred years cast the images out of the Churches.’ Yes, Ozias was your brother, and, like you, did violence to the priests. ...In virtue of the power which has come down to us from St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, we might inflict a punishment upon you, but since you have invoked one on yourself, have that, you and the counsellors you have chosen, ...though you have so excellent a high priest, our brother Germanus, whom you ought to have taken into your counsels as father and teacher. . .The dogmas of the Church are not a matter for the emperor, but for the bishops.” Pope Gregory II, Letter to Emperor Leo III, against iconoclasm   (Horace K. Mann in his work “Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Vol. I”, pp. 191-192)