Of such adventurers, the most fortunate was the Emperor Leo III., who, from the mountains of Isauria, ascended to the throne of the East. He was ignorant of sacred and profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with a hatred of images; and he held it to be the duty of a prince to impose on his subjects the dictates of his own conscience. In the reformation of religion, his first steps were moderate and cautious; he assembled a great council of senators and bishops, and enacted, with their consent, that all the images should be removed from the sanctuary and altar to a proper height in the churches, where they might be visible to the eyes, and inaccessible to the devotion of the people. But it was impossible on either side to check the rapid though adverse impulses of veneration and abhorrence: in their lofty position, the sacred images still edified their votaries, and exasperated their enemies. He was himself provoked by resistance and invective; and his own party accused him of an imperfect discharge of his duty, and urged for his imitation the example of the Jewish king, who had broken without scruple the brazen serpent of the temple. By a second edict, he proscribed the existence, as well as the use of sacred pictures; images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, were demolished, or a smooth surface of plaster was spread over the walls of the edifice. The sect of the Iconoclasts was supported by the zeal and despotism of six emperors, and this topic involved the East and West in an angry conflict of one hundred and twenty years. It was the design of Leo the Isaurian to pronounce the condemnation of images as an article of faith, and by the authority of a General Council; but the convocation of such an assembly was reserved for his son Constantine Copronymus. This council was attended by three hundred and thirty-eight bishops of Europe and Anatolia, but not by those of the Western Church, African Church, or that of Palestine. It was, in fact, an assembly of those prelates who were weak enough to assist, fearing condemnation and exile if they did not submit, ambitious enough to follow the caprice of the reigning emperor, in hopes of emolument, and also of those who heartily concurred with his semi-Arianism. After a serious deliberation of six months, the prelates subscribed such a decree as the emperor desired, condemning all visible symbols of Christ,[18] except the Eucharist, as blasphemous and heretical; and denouncing veneration for images as the idolatry of Paganism. "As if," says a Catholic writer of the time, "there were not this great difference between the Christian image and the heathen idol, that the latter is the thing worshipped, whereas the former is the representation of the person adored."