Jupiter proclaims its vices and vanities on the tombstones and urns of its votaries; but on those rough blocks, with their rude and shapeless memorials, the faith that is in Christ exhibits its power and glory, “graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever." The heathen relics, on your one hand, of tasteful form and lavish ornament, covered with the pithy hexameter, the terse maxims of sullen stoicism, or the gay watchwords of epicurean frolic and dissipation, and emblazoned, too, with the proud names and titles of illustrious descent and civic prerogative, tell the melancholy fate of "many mighty, many noble," who went down to the grave with a lie in their right hand. But as you turn away in sadness, and look on your other hand, your spirit throbs with joy, for the artless and often ill spelled scrawls, cut without skill or pains on these humble christian memorials, torn from a subterranean cemetery after it had been shut and forgotten for a thousand years, speak of an oppressed people, often driven to live and worship in rocks, dens, and caves of the earth,-a people that "dwelt alone," and committed their dead to a resting-place which ferocity could not plunder, nor impiety desecrate. The simplicity and purity of the early church in Rome, may be easily and accurately gathered from these tombstones. It was their creed "to believe, and love, and suffer." They had learned to look on death, not as a gloomy annihilation or an eternal sleep. The Styx and Lethe of a sombre mythology had given place with them to the "pure river of water of life," flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb. The Elysium of which their ancestors dreamed-so earthy, so sensual, and so thickly peopled by pale and sickly shades no longer delighted them. Heaven was their hope, a world of purity and love; the spirits of just men made perfect its busy and refined population; and

their noble exercise and employment the praise and service of Him who made them-of Him who redeemed them. They felt a cheering nearness to departed friends, and were upborn by the thought of an eternal and indissoluble reunion. Their deceased brethren were not lost, but only gone before, and they were prepared to follow when the summons came. Death was translation to glory. The spirit, bursting its fetters of flesh, passed at once into heaven, and hid itself in the bosom of God; and though the body was committed to darkness and to dust, in deep and lonesome caverns, where light never penetrated, nor foot of ordinary wayfarer ever trod, they knew it to be precious to Christ, and felt assured of its being raised a perfect and spiritualized structure. Nor had they any idea of an intermediate state of purgatorial fires. No. They reckoned well,—that if they were absent from the body, they would be present with the Lord. Their faith is found inscribed in the calm hope of immediate and eternal felicity. The philosophers around them were without God, having no notion of immortality, and looking forward to death as the final extinction of their being. A darkness that might be felt enveloped all their views of futurity. Their pulse stood still with horror as they anticipated the approach of mortality, and they never formed any conception or cherished any anticipation of a resurrection. To die -to perish-to cease to be-the doom was inevitable. Its speed could not be arrested; swift and fatal it seized its miserable victims. But the glory and crown of Christianity is its promise and securement of life. The despised followers of the Son of God, in the days of the Caesars, scorned by the patrician, pitied by the sophist, and wondered at by the crowd-the disciples of a foreign creed, and a strange and simple ritual-had the invaluable assurance

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of a life not interrupted by dissolution, enjoyed on no lowly sphere, but in that region of pure serenity, where are pleasures" at God's "right hand for evermore." Death, then as now, unfolded the power of religion. Faith in Christ is often like the star, which shines with brightest radiance when the gloom of night envelopes the earth. Those "sermons in stones," taken out of the catacombs, are to us not only an eloquent lesson of the power and comfort of godliness; but afford at the same time an unexpected and triumphant evidence of the hopes and holiness of that church in the world's metropolis --whose faith the apostle affirms, was at an early period "spoken of throughout the whole world."Rom. i. 8.

What then are the catacombs, from which this primitive church has been raised to attest her ancient orthodoxy, and condemn her modern and apostate descendant?

In the latter days of the republic, when Rome was so rapidly growing in extent and architectural splendour, it was resolved to open quarries for sand and building materials in the immediate vicinity of the city. Accordingly the volcanic subsoil in the neighbourhood of the enlarging capital was gradually excavated by means of numerous perforations, extending on one side to the distance of fifteen miles. These subterraneous pits and passages were a kind of net-work, full of connected windings and galleries, having many entrances, numerous points of junction, and still more numerous divergencies-mile upon mile of dark labyrinth and devious and intricate recesses. The sanddiggers were a low and degraded caste, but they seem to have at a very early period embraced Christianity. Those among them who were Christian converts secreted their fellow believers in periods of danger. The first persecution drove hundreds of Roman Christians to those secure

retreats among the mines of sand and cement under the ground, and the emperors in their edicts oftentimes interdicted the Christians from entering into them. Worship was there conducted in the day of "trouble and rebuke"-lamps, pulpits, desks, and fonts, used on such emergencies, have been found in abundance.* The persecutors occasionally found access to the catacombs, and caught some of the refugees. Four bishops, with several presbyters and deacons, were, at different periods, traced in their flight, apprehended, and put to death. Sometimes, too, they heaped earth upon the entrances to smother the inmates; and, at other times, they flung the captives down the eyes or apertures, that they might be dashed to pieces. Those vaults became in course of time the Christian cemeteries, and 70,000 epitaphs are said to have been contained in them. Constantine at length formally handed them over to the church as a sacred donation. But in the fifth and sixth centuries, they were gradually disregarded, and blocked up with rubbish. The barbarian from the North and East then pressed hard upon Rome, and the sand-pits being no longer needed, the knowledge of their turns and chasms was easily lost.

It was not till the pontificate of Sixtus the Fifth, in 1585, that this vast necropolis was disentombed, and its multifarious contents treasured up in the museums of modern Rome.† Round their walls are now ranged these interesting relics, often placed face to face with similar vestiges of pagan antiquity. We propose to give our readers a few of the epitaphs, showing how christianity stood not only

Jerome, and they are often alluded to in the *The catacombs are also described by poetry of Prudentius.

The principal writers on these antiquities are Bosio in his Roma Sotteranea, 1632; Boldetti in his "Osservazioni sopra i cimiterii dei Santi Martiri;" Bottari,

Aringhi, Mabillon, Raoul-Rochette, are well known also in this department.

brace the blessed truth of Him who "hath abolished death." In these obscure sepulchral chapels, amidst streets of graves, and with the ashes of the saint, the bones of the martyr, and the emblems of mortality on every side, they often cheered themselves with the song of hope and eternal blessedness. And as their hymn was prolonged through the surrounding aisles, or caught up and repeated by successive echoes, till at last it died away amid the distant passages and profound abysses, O what joy, "unspeakable and full of glory," swelled their bosoms, lighted up their faces, and mingled a thrilling emphasis with that strange melody which floated through the niches and corridors of this city of the dead!

II. The early Church of Rome stands opposed not only to Paganism but to Popery. The tablets from the "Catacombs" are in direct contrast to the errors and grossly anti-scriptural fables and dogmas of Popery, found in the more modern self-called-Church of Rome. The old Church of Rome, as found in these receptacles of truth sealed in blood, had no notion of purgatory, of clerical celibacy, of prayer to the Virgin, of paintings of her Son, or of adoration to the martyrs. The only, or almost the only, symbol, seen on those sepulchral stones, is the cross.

1. They believed in the immediate blessedness of the dead. The following is a specimen :-" MACUS (OR MARCUS), AN INNOCENT BOY. YOU HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO BE AMONG THE INNOCENT ONES. How ENDURING IS SUCH A LIFE TO YOU!" The phrases "rest in peace,' "may God refresh you," are sometimes added; but these are merely the natural expression of a blessed hope, that the deceased has rested in peace, and has been refreshed by God.

or

2. The ministers of Christ had also in that old period wives and families. Thus we read among the tablets: "THE PLACE OF BASIL THE PRES

SPARE

"IN THIS PLACE I LAY MY BONES; YOUR TEARS, DEAR HUSBAND AND DAUGHTERS, AND BELIEVE THAT IT IS FORBIDDEN ΤΟ WEEP FOR ONE WHO LIVES IN GOD. BURIED IN PEACE, ON THE 3D BEFORE THE NONES OF OCTOBER, IN THE CONSULATE OF FESTUS (i. e. In 472).”

"CLAUDIUS ATTICIANUS A LECTOR,* AND CLAUDIA FELICISSIMA, HIS WIFE."

1. TERENTIUS THE FOSSOR, † FOR PRIMITIVA HIS WIFE, AND HIMSELF.”

There are symbols found also of several actions and scenes of Christ's life rudely sketched, but no image of Jesus has been discovered. No divine titles are given to the martyrs; they were imitated and honoured, but not adored. Up to the year 350, Christians were accused of worshipping only one dead man; and that was the " man Christ Jesus." The enemy never hinted that the worship of the new sect had a multiplicity of objects, either the virgin or the saints. Modern Rome has, however, "sought out many inventions." Her errors are novelties.

The ancient Church of Rome, as the reader of those epitaphs and inscriptions perceives, does not more plainly oppose itself to Paganism than to Popery. Modern Rome has thus been discovered to contain within and under herself the elements of her own condemnation. Her own halls and museums prove that she is a degenerate daughter. The catacombs, which she yet de

*"Lector," a reader of the Scriptures in public.

garded as possessing a sacred office. He + The "fossor," or gravedigger, was rewas of the lowest order of the clergy....

lights to honour, contain a fearful indictment against her; are a "swift witness" of her wide and continued apostasy. This unexpected information so peculiarly brought to light, as to the faith, discipline, and worship of the primitive Church of Rome, must be to all of us matter of fervent congratulation. That ancient and apostolic community long preserved its pristine purity and beauty, and corresponded, in all essential elements, with the creed and the ritual organized among ourselves. We have not, indeed, in this brief and imperfect article, been seeking the living among the dead; but we have briefly exhibited the resuscitated memorials of long past years, and read the les sons they so plainly and effectively teach us. The early church planted in Rome, and to which Paul wrote such an epistle as that contained in the New Testament, resembles the Protestant congregations of our own day in creed and practice. Will Rome profit by the discovery which

her own antiquarians have brought before her? Alas! she shows no willingness to unlearn her heresies; she hears not Moses and the prophets; nor will she be persuaded though a church has risen again from the dead.

The book which has furnished the material of the preceding remarks, is a publication deserving of all praise. It is clear, accurate, and convincing. Dr Maitland's researches would have been still more ample and extended among the frescoes and scrolls of the gallery delle Lapidi, but Jesuit bigotry and Romish jealousy prohibited him; and he was allowed to keep the inscriptions he had copied, only on condition that they should not be published in Rome. Rome was afraid of the use which an enlightened Protestant would make of her cherished antiquities, and shrunk with miserable terror at the idea of being exposed, or compared with the primitive and apostolic church that flourished in the city of the Cæsars.

THE government scheme of education is stealthily but steadily developing itself in all its ramifications, and its promoters are carrying out their plans apparently unnoticed and unresisted. When the scheme was first promulgated, Roman Catholic schools and the Scottish parochial schools were excluded from all participation in its benefits. By and bye, however, when the opposition which it had excited appeared to have somewhat abated, a minute of the committee of council on education was drawn up, agreeing to augment the salaries of the parochial teachers, but without taking any steps to free the system from sectarian restrictions. A few months later, after the elections were concluded, the Romanists were in like manner admitted to a share in all the

benefits of the scheme. We have just received a copy of the minute of the committee of council, defining the conditions of aid to Roman Catholic schools. It bears date the 18th of December 1847, but was made public only a few weeks since. The conditions prescribed are-that the Roman Catholic poor school committee be the ordinary channel of such inquiries as may be necessary respecting schools applying for aid-that the schools be open to inspection, but that the inspectors shall report respecting secular instruction only; in other words, that all the soul-destroying errors and idolatrous practices of Popery may be. taught in these schools at the public expense, and no inquiry respecting them shall be permitted that the inspectors be not appointed without the