Precarious image hypotheses: Christian liberty, early practice, and images as books for the rude
Theologians have long sifted precarious supporting claims here.
One: that the Second Commandment's ban on images concerns something indifferent in itself, and so Christian liberty has lifted it.
Another: early Christian practice — though Chemnitz and others admit that before Jerome's day no images stood in temples.
Another: that images are books for the unlearned. Chemnitz, answering Trent (Part IV), cuts that pretext down, and points to Christ and the apostles, who neither taught by images or statues nor ever used them, content to set the handed-down doctrine in the Scriptures.
On the practice of the earlier ages, and on Elvira canon 36, see our History of Images, Section I.
Latin
PRECARIAE Hypotheses prolixè à Theologis discussae, ex gr. De Praecepti II. naturâ, in prohibitione Imaginum, quod ut de re in se ἀδιαφόρῳ, ita sit per Christianam Libertatem sublatum: Sic de praxi priorum Christianorum, quum tamen Chemnitius & alii fassi sint, ante tempora Hieronymi nullas in Templis collocatas Imagines: Sic de Imaginibus ut Libris imperitorum, eodem Chemnitio ad Concil. Trident. P. IV. hunc obtentum confutante, etiam exemplo Christi, Apostolorum, qui nec per Imagines, aut statuas docuerint, nec adhibuerint usquam, contenti doctrinam traditam in Scripturas retulisse, &c. Vide de priorum Seculorum praxi, & de Canone Eliberat. XXXVI, nostram Hist. Imag. Sect. I.