“ The great rudeness in the drawing of the palm, often as if, while the mortar was still wet, the mason had made the lines upon it with his trowel, is a striking indication of the state of feeling at the time when the grave was made. There was no pomp or parade; possibly the burial of him or of her who had died for the faith was in secret; those who carried the corpse of their beloved to the tomb were, perhaps, in this very act, preparing to follow his steps,--were, perhaps, preparing themselves for his fate. ”

“ Within her church are the remains of the bath-chamber where she suffered death. The mosaics of the apse and the arch of triumph tell of the first finding of her body; Maderno's statue recalls the fact of its second discovery long after; and now this newly opened, long forgotten chapel shows where her precious body was first laid away in peace, brings the legend of her faithful death into clearer remembrance, and concludes the ancient story with dramatic and perfect completeness.
"The Lord discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death." ”

“ But, unhappily, the stories of the early Christian centuries were taken possession of by a Church which has sought in them the means of enhancing her claims and increasing her power; mingling with them falsehoods and absurdities, cherishing the wildest and most unnatural traditions, inventing fictitious miracles, dogmatizing on false assertions, until reasonable and thoughtful religious men have turned away from the history of the first Christians in Rome with a sensation of disgust, and with despair at the apparently inextricable confusion of fact and fable concerning them. ”

“ The same features which accompany the religious manifestations of the uncultivated in our own days, undoubtedly, with somewhat different aspect, presented themselves at Rome. The enthusiasms, the visions, the loud preaching and praying, the dull iteration and reiteration of inspired truth till all the inspiration is driven out, were all probably to be heard and witnessed in the early Christian days at Rome. Not all the converts were saints,--and none of them were such saints as the Catholic painters of the last three centuries have prostituted Art and debased Religion in producing. ”

“ It is difficult to convey to a distant reader even a small share of the interest with which one sees on the spot evidences of the reality of the precautions with which, in those early centuries, the Christians of Rome were forced to guard themselves against a persecution which extended to their very burial-places,--or even of the interest with which one walks through the unchanged paths dug out of the rock by this _tenebrosa et lucifugax natio_. In the midst of the obscurity of history and the fog of fable, here is the solid earth giving evidence of truth. ”

“ Riches paved an easy way into the next world, and power set up guards around it. Imperial remains were not to mingle with common dust, and the mausoleum of the princess rose above the rock-hewn and narrow grave of the martyr and saint.
The present descent into the catacombs that lie near the churches of St. Agnes and St. Constantia is by an entrance in a neighboring field, made, after the time of persecution, to accommodate those who might desire to visit the underground chapels and holy graves. A vast labyrinth of streets spreads in every direction from it. ”

“ Republican Rome had no braver heroes than Christian Rome. The ground and motives of action were changed, but the courage and devotion of earlier times did not surpass the courage and devotion of later days,--while a new spirit displayed itself in new and unexampled deeds, and a new and brighter glory shone from them over the world. ”

“ Consequently the martyrs were made into a hierarchy of saintly protectors of the strayed flock of Christ, and round their graves in the catacombs sprang up a harvest of tales, of visions, of miracles, and of superstitions. As the Church sank lower and lower, as the need of a heavenly advocate with God was more and more impressed upon the minds of the Christians of those days, the idea seems to have arisen that neighborhood of burial to the grave of some martyr might be an effectual way to secure the felicity of the soul. ”

“ Restoration in these days always implies irreverence and bad taste. But the architecture of this old building and the purpose for which it was originally designed present a marked example of the rapidity of the change in the character of the Christians with the change of their condition at Rome, during the reign of Constantine. The worldliness that follows close on prosperity undermined the spirit of faith; the pomp and luxury of the court and the palace were carried into the forms of worship, into the construction of churches, into the manner of burial. ”

“ No one who has visited the catacombs can believe, surprising as this number may seem, that the Padre Marchi's calculation is an extravagant one as to the number of graves in a given space. We have ourselves counted eleven graves, one over another, on each side of the passage, and there is no space lost between the head of one grave and the foot of another. Everywhere there is economy of space,--the economy of men working on a hard material, difficult to be removed, and laboring in a confined space, with the need of haste. ”

“ For two centuries,--from the thirteenth to the fifteenth,--scarcely any mention of them is to be found. Petrarch, in his many letters about Rome, dwells often on the sacredness of the soil within the city, in whose crypts and churches so many saints and martyrs lie buried, but hardly refers to the catacombs themselves, and never in such a way as to show that they were an object of interest to him, though a lover of all Roman relics and a faithful worshipper of the saints. ”

“ It was a quiet, retired place, with the sacredness that invests every ancient sanctuary, in which the prayers and hymns of many generations have risen. The city was not near enough to disturb the stillness within its walls; little vineyards, and plots of market-garden, divided from each other by hedges of reeds and brambly roses, with wider open fields in the distance, lay around it; a deserted convent stood at its side; its precious marble columns were dulled and the gold ground of its mosaics was dimmed by the dust of centuries ”

“ The reality which is given to the lives of the Christians of the first centuries by acquaintance with the memorials that they have left of themselves here quickens our feeling for them into one almost of personal sympathy. "Your obedience is come abroad unto all men," wrote St. Paul to the first Christians of Rome. The record of that obedience is in the catacombs. ”

“ And nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome itself." It is, however, to the Cavaliere de Rossi, himself a Roman, that the most important of these discoveries are due,--the result of his marvellous learning and sagacity, and of his hard-working and unwearied energy. The discovery of the ancient entrance to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, and of the chapel within, where St. Cecilia was originally buried, is a piece of the very romance of Archaeology. ”

“ The soil crumbles so easily, that no row of excavations one above another could be made in it; for the stroke of the pick-axe brings it down in loose masses. The whole aspect of the sand-pit contrasts strikingly with that of the catacombs, with their three-feet wide galleries, their perpendicular walls, and their tier on tier of graves.
The stratum of pozzolana at the Catacombs of St. Agnes overlies a portion of the more solid stratum of tufa, and the entrance to the sand-pit from the cemetery is by steps leading up from the end of a long gallery. ”

“ The instances are numerous in which pictures of the highest interest have been thus ruthlessly defaced. No sacredness of subject could resist the force of the superstition; and we remember one instance where, in a picture of which the part that remains is of peculiar interest, the body of the Good Shepherd has been cut through for the grave of a child,--so that only the feet and a part of the head of the figure remain.
There is little reason for supposing, as has frequently been done, that the catacombs, even in times of persecution, afforded shelter to any large body of the faithful. ”

“ But her tomb overlooks the ground beneath which, in a narrow grave, was buried a more glorious Cecilia. [C] The contrast between the ostentation and the pride of the tombs of the heathen Romans, and the poor graves, hollowed out in the rock, of the Christians, is full of impressive suggestions. The very closeness of their neighborhood to each other brings out with vivid effect the broad gulf of separation that lay between them in association, in affection, and in hopes. ”

“ If we could banish all remembrance of all the churches and all the pictures contained in them, built and painted, since the fourteenth century, we might hope to gain some better view of the Christians who lived above the catacombs, and were buried in them. It is from the catacombs that we must seek all that is left to enable us to construct the image that we desire.
On other graves beside those of the martyrs there are often found some little signs by which they could be easily recognized by the friends who might wish to visit them again. ”

“ It is difficult to destroy the effect that has been produced upon one's own heart by these and innumerable other pictures of declining Art,--pictures honored by the Roman Church of to-day,--and to bring up before one's imagination, in vivid, natural, and probable outline, the life and form of the converts, saints, and martyrs of the first centuries. ”

“ This custom of propitiating the favor of the saints by fair promises was thus early established. It was soon found out that it was well to have a friend at court with whom a bargain could be struck. If the adorning of this chapel was all that Damasus had to pay for the getting rid of his rival's party, the bargain was an easy one for him. There had been terrible and bloody fights in the Roman streets between the parties of the contending aspirants for the papal seat. Ursicinus had been driven from Rome, but Damasus had had trouble with the priests of his faction. ”

“ No other work of the time is to be compared with it. It is a memorial not only of the loveliness of the Saint, but of the self-forgetful religious fervor of the artist, at a period when every divine impulse seemed to be absent from the common productions of Art. ”