Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/99

Rh thousand years ago. In yet another chapel, were many remarkably beautiful small pictures, representing saints praying with uplifted hands. One of them was a woman, richly dressed, and very beautiful. Was it Mary, the mother of Jesus, who Father Gall Morell, at Einsiedeln, maintained was represented in the catacombs as the praying Queen of Heaven? Certain it is that this portrait does not, in any essential, differ from the rest of the praying figures—Peter, Paul, and other martyrs. And had any such image of the Virgin Mary, as “Queen of Heaven,” been in existence here, the Catholic archæologist, De Rossi, would not have neglected to make us observant of it. But there is none such here, nor could there have been, at a time when the Christian doctrine still retained its purity.

What, however, do these most ancient figures of praying saints say to us, their descendants? Most assuredly, that death does not dissolve the bond of human spirits; that the fixed relationship of one generation to another is an eternal relationship; that the departed live and labor for us who yet wander on the earth, as we here on earth can and ought to labor even for them, as for all Christians, here or there,—ought to labor for the accomplishment of the prayer “Thy kingdom come,” the perfected order of the world in love and happiness.

We observed no names in this catacomb. Upon most of the graves which were covered with a slab of marble, were cut a Greek cross, or an anchor, a dove, with an olive branch, often merely the words in pace.