statements which seem to speak of the Father and the Son as if they were two rival divinities, the one all justice, the other all love; the one bent on destroying guilty sinners, the other striving to appease the Father's wrath; the one judging and forgiving, the other suffering and pleading. Such is the impression we many of us receive from some expressions in Milton's "Paradise Lost," and in Protestant and Roman Catholic divines, and from many well-known hymns. It is the reverse of this impression that we receive from the Litany. It is not the wrath of the Father, but the wrath of Christ, from which in the Litany we pray to be delivered. It is the goodness and forgiveness, not of the Father, but of Christ, that we entreat for our sins. The mind and purpose of God is made known to us through the mind and purpose of Christ. We feel this truth nowhere more keenly than in the trials and sorrows of life; and we therefore express it nowhere more strongly than in the Litany.

2. Again, the Litany sets before us in its true aspect the meaning of Redemption. What is Redemption? It is, in one word, deliverance. We are in bondage to evil habits, in bondage to fear, in bondage to ignorance, in bondage to superstition, in bondage to sin: what we need is freedom and liberty. That is what we ask for every time we repeat the Litany: "Good Lord, set us free." Libera nos, Domine.

Deliverance-how, or by what means? By one part of Christ's appearance? by one part of Christianity? by a single doctrine or a single fact? By all-by the whole. Not by His sufferings only-not by His death only-not by His teaching only; but "by the mystery of His holy incarnation-by His baptism-by His fasting by His temptationby His agony and bloody sweat-by His precious death and burial-by His glorious resurrection and ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost." This wide meaning of the mode of Redemption was a truth sufficiently appreciated in the early ages of the Church; and then it was piece by piece divided and subdivided, till the whole effect was altered and spoiled. Let us go back once more in the Litany to the complex yet simple whole. Let us believe more nearly as we pray. The particular forms used may be open to objection. We might wish that some of the features had been omitted, or that

other features had been added. But there remains the general truth-that it is by the whole life and appearance of Christ we hope to be delivered.

Deliverance from what? From what is it that we ask to be ransomed, redeemed, delivered? This also was well understood in the early Church, though sometimes expressed in strange language. It was, as they then put it, "deliverance from the power of the devil"-deliverance from that control, over the world which was in those days supposed to be possessed by the Evil Spirit. This belief, in form, has passed away. We do not now see demons lurking in every corner. But the substance of the belief remains. We pray in the Litany for deliverance from evil in all its forms; from evil, moral and physical; from the evil in our own hearts; from the evil brought on the world by the misgovernment, and anarchy, and wild passions of mankind; from the evils of sickness and war and tempest; from the trials of tribulation and from the trials of wealth;—from all these it is that we ask for deliverance. Each petition places before us some of the real evils in life which keep us in bondage. In proportion as we get rid of them we share in Christ's redemption. This is the object of the most earnest supplications of the Church; because it is the object of Christianity itself; because it is the purpose for which Christ came into the world; because, if He delivers us not from these, He delivers us from nothing; because, so far as He delivers us from these, He has accomplished the work which He was sent to do. Let us act and think more nearly as we pray.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ROMAN CATACOMBS.

THE belief of the early Christians, that is, of the Christians from the close of the first century to the conversion of the Empire at the beginning of the fourth, is a question which is at once more difficult and more easy to answer than we might have thought beforehand.

It is in one sense extremely difficult.

The popular, the actual belief of a generation or society of men cannot always be ascertained from the contemporary writers, who belong for the most part to another stratum. The belief of the people of England at this moment is something separate from the books, the newspapers, the watchwords of parties. It is in the air. It is in their intimate conversation. · We must hear, especially in the case of the simple and unlearned, what they talk of to each other. We must sit by their bedsides; get at what gives them most consolation, what most occupies their last moments. This, whatever it be, is the belief of the people, right or wrong-this, and this only, is their real religion. A celebrated Roman Catholic divine of the present day has described, in a few short sentences, what he conceives to be the religious creed of the people of England :—that it consists of a general belief in Providence and in a future life. He is probably right. But it is something quite apart from any formal creeds or confessions or watchwords which exist. Is it possible to ascertain this concerning the early Christians? The books of that period are few and far between, and these books are, for the most part, the works of learned scholars rather than of popular writers. Can we apart from such books discover what was their most ready and constant representation of their dearest hopes here and hereafter? Strange to say, after all this lapse of time it is possible. The answer, at any rate, for that large mass of Christians from all parts of the empire

that was collected in the capital, is to be found in the Roman Catacombs.

It is not necessary to enter upon the formation of the Catacombs. For a general view it may be sufficient to refer to "On Pagan and Christian Sepulture," in the "Es- The Catasays" of Dean Milman. For the details of the combs. question it is more than sufficient to refer to the great work of Commendatore De Rossi. It has been amply proved by the investigations of the last two hundred, and especially of the last thirty years, that there were in the neighborhood of Rome, from the first beginning of the settlement of the Jews in the city, large galleries dug in the rock, which they used for their places of burial. The Christians, following the example of the Jews, did the same on a larger scale. In these galleries they wrote on the graves of their friends the thoughts that were most consoling to themselves, or painted on the walls the figures which gave them most pleasure. By a singular chance these memorials have been preserved to us by the very causes which have destroyed so much beside. The Catacombs were deserted at the time of the invasion of the barbarians, and filled up with ruins and rubbish; and from the sixth to the seventeenth century no one thought it worth while to explore them. The burial of Christian antiquity was as complete as that of Pagan antiquity, and the resurrection of both took place nearly at the same time. The desertion, the overthrow of these ancient galleries, has been to the Christian life of that time what the overthrow of Pompeii by the ashes of Vesuvius was to the Pagan life of the period immediately antecedent. The Catacombs are the Pompeii of early Christianity. It is much to the credit of the authorities of the Roman States that at the time when the excavations began they allowed these monuments to speak for themselves. Many questionable interpretations have been put upon them, but in no respect has there been substantiated any charge of wilful falsification.

We confine ourselves to the simple statement of the testimony which they render to the belief of the second and third centuries. For this reason, we exclude from consideration almost, if not altogether, those subsequent to the age of Constantine. We merely state the facts as they occur; and if the results be pleasing or displeasing to the members of this or that school

of modern religious opinion, perhaps it will be a sufficient safeguard that they will be almost equally pleasing or displeasing to the members of all such schools equally.

I. First, what do we learn of the state of feeling indicated in the very structure of the Catacombs beyond what any books could teach us?

The Catacombs are the standing monuments of the Oriental and Jewish character even of Western Christianity. The fact Their Jewish that they are the counterparts of the rock-hewn character. tombs of Palestine, and yet more closely of the Jewish cemeteries in the neighborhood of Rome, corresponds to the fact that the early Roman Church was not a Latin but an Eastern community, speaking Greek, and following the usages of Syria. And again, the case with which the Roman Christians had recourse to these cemeteries is an indication of the impartiality of the Roman law, which extended (as De Rossi has well pointed out) to this despised sect the same early Chris- protection in respect to burial, even during the times of persecution, that was accorded to the highest in the land. They thus bear witness to the unconscious fostering care of the Imperial Government over the infant Church. They are thus monuments, not so much of the persecution as of the toleration, which the Christians received at the hands of the Roman Empire.

The toleration of the

tians.

These two circumstances, confirmed as they are from various quarters, are, as it were, the framework in which the ideas of the Church of the Catacombs are enshrined, and yet they are quite unknown to the common ecclesiastical histories.

3. A similar profound ignorance shrouded the existence of the Catacombs themselves. There are no allusions to the Catacombs in Gibbon, or Mosheim, or Neander; nor, in fact, in any ecclesiastical history, down to the close of the first quarter of this century. Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" was the earliest exception. Nor again is there any allusion in the Fathers to their most striking characteristics. St. Jerome's narrative of being taken into them as a child is simply a description of the horror they inspired. Prudentius has a passing allusion to the paintings, but nothing that gives a notion of their extent and importance.

II. We now proceed to the beliefs themselves, as presented