Library Eusebius of Caesarea Preparation for the Gospel
Book 5, Chapter 15
[PORPHYRY] 'Now that they love the symbols of their features is signified by Hecate comparing them with what men love, as follows:
"What mortal longs not for the features carv'd
In bronze, or gold, or silver gleaming bright?
What god loves not this pedestal, whereon
I weave the tangled web of human fates?"'
He has made it clear that not only the features are dear, but that also, as I said, the gods themselves are confined therein, and dwell in the underlying likeness as it were in a sacred place: for they could not be supported on earth, except on sacred ground: and that ground is sacred which bears the image of the deity; but if the image be taken away, the bond which held the deity on earth is loosed.
By all these testimonies, then, I think it is clearly proved that their gods were found to be daemons haunting the earth and enslaved to passions: wherefore it seems to me that I have followed sound reason in turning away from them.
You see, for instance, how they say that their magic figures and images of that kind hold them fast in certain spots of ground: though they ought, if, as they say, there is any real divinity in them, to set foot in no other place, except only in the thought of the soul, and that thought too purified from all filth and from every stain, and adorned with modesty and righteousness and all the other virtues.
English translation by E. H. Gifford, Eusebii Pamphili Evangelicae Praeparationis Libri XV (Oxford, 1903). Public domain. Digital text via Roger Pearse / tertullian.org.