Charlemagne says, that there is no harm in having images in a church, provided they are not worshipped; and that the Greeks had fallen into two extremes, one of which was to destroy the images, as had been ordained by the Council of Constantinople, under Constantine Copronymus, and the other to worship them, as was decided by the second Council of Nice under Irene. He censures much more severely this latter extreme than the former, because those who destroyed images had merely acted with levity and ignorance, whilst it was a wicked and profane action to worship them. He compared the first to such as mix water with wine, and the others to those who infuse a deadly poison into it; in short, there could be no comparison between the two cases. He marks, with great precision, the different kinds of worship offered to the images, rejecting all of them. The second Council of Nice decided that this worship should consist of kisses and genuflexions, as well as of burning incense and wax candles before them. All these practices are condemned by Charlemagne, as so many acts of worship offered to a created being. He addresses the defenders of the worship of images in the following manner:--
"You who establish the purity of your faith upon images, go, if you like, _and fall upon your knees and burn incense before them_; but with regard to ourselves we shall seek the precepts of God in his Holy Writ. _Light luminaries before your pictures_, whilst we shall read the Scriptures. _Venerate, if you like, colours_; but we shall worship divine mysteries. _Enjoy the agreeable sight of your pictures_; but we shall find our delight in the Word of God. _Seek after figures which cannot either see, or hear, or __ taste_; but we shall diligently seek after the law of God, which is irreprehensible." He further says:--"I see images which have such inscriptions, as for instance St Paul, and I ask, therefore, those who are involved in this great error, why they do call images _holy (sanctus)_, and why they do not say, conformably to the tradition of the fathers, that these are images of the _saints_? Let them say in what consists the sanctity of the images? Is it in the wood which had been brought from a forest in order to make them? Is it in the colours with which they are painted, and which are often composed of impure substances? Is it in the wax, which gets dirty?" He taunts the worshippers of images, pointing out an abuse which even now is as inevitable as it was then. "If," says he, "two pictures perfectly alike, but of which one is meant for the Virgin and the other for Venus, are presented to you, you will inquire which of them is the image of the Virgin and which is that of Venus, because you cannot distinguish them. The painter will call one of these pictures the image of the Virgin, and it will be immediately put up in a _high place, honoured, and kissed_; whilst the other, representing Venus, will be thrown away with horror. These two pictures are, however, made by the same hand, with the same brush, with the same colours; they have the same features, and the whole difference between them lies in their inscriptions. Why is the one received and the other rejected? It is not on account of the sanctity which one of them has, and the other has not; it is, then, on account of its inscription; and yet certain letters attached to a picture cannot give it a sanctity which it otherwise had not."