Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/60

52 of a fish swimming in the water, and bearing on his back a basket filled with loaves of the peculiar shape and color used by the Jews as an offering of the first fruits to their priests; beneath the bread appears a vessel which shows a red color, like a cup filled with wine. "As soon as I saw this picture," says the Cavaliere de Rossi, in his account of the discovery, "the words of St. Jerome came to my mind,—'None is richer than he who bears the body of the Lord in an osier basket and his blood in a glass.

In the same cemetery, very near the crypt of St. Cecilia, there is a passage wider than common, upon whose side is a series of sepulchral cells of similar form, and ornamented with similar pictures. In one of them a table is represented, with four baskets of bread on the ground, on one side, and three on the other, while upon it three loaves and a fish are lying. In another of the chambers is a picture of a single loaf and of a fish upon a plate lying on a table, at one side of which a man stands with his hands stretched out towards it, while on the other side is a woman in the attitude of prayer. It seems no extravagance of interpretation to read in these pictures the symbol of that memorial service which Jesus had established for his followers, —a service which has rarely been celebrated under circumstances more adapted to give to it its full effect, and to awaken in the souls of those who joined in it all the deep and affecting memories of its first institution, than when the bread and wine were partaken of in memory of the Lord within the small and secret chapels of the early catacombs. To the Christians who assembled there in the days when to profess the name of Christ was to venture all things for his sake, his presence was a reality in their hearts, and his voice was heard as it was heard by his immediate followers who sat with him at the table in the upper chamber.

There are several instances, among these subterranean pictures, of a symbolic representation of the Saviour, drawn, not from Scripture, but from a heathen original. It is that of Orpheus playing upon his lyre, and drawing all creatures to him by the sweetness of his strains. It was a fiction widely spread soon after the introduction of Christianity among the Gentiles, that Orpheus, like the Sibyls and some other of the characters of mythology, had had some blind revelation of the coming of a saviour of the world, and had uttered indistinct prophecies of the event. Forgeries, similar to those of the Sibylline Verses, professing to be the remains of the poems of Orpheus, were made among the Alexandrian Christians, and for a long period his name was held in popular esteem, as that of a heathen prophet of Christian truth. Whether the paintings in the catacombs took their origin from these fictions must be uncertain; but driven, as the Roman Christians were, to hide the truth under a symbol that should be inoffensive, and should not reveal its meaning to pagan eyes, it was not strange that they should select this of the ancient poet. As he had drawn beasts and trees and stones to listen to the music of his lyre, so Christ, with persuasive sweetness and compelling force, drew men more savage than beasts, more rooted in the earth than trees, more cold than stones, to listen to and follow him. As Orpheus caused even the kingdom of Death to render back the lost, so Christ drew the souls of men from the very gates of hell, and made the grave restore its dead. And thus from the old