Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/59

II] out their savage rhymes on the simple monuments; each catching from each the epithets, the texts, the names, almost Homeric in the simplicity and the sameness with which they are repeated on those lonely tombstones from shore to shore of the Scottish kingdom.

Or turn to a similar instance, of kindred but wider interest. What insight into the familiar feelings and thoughts of the primitive ages of the Church can be compared to that afforded by the Roman catacombs! Unnoticed by Gibbon, unknown to Mosheim, they yet give us a likeness of the life of those early times beyond any that we receive from any of the written authorities on which Gibbon and Mosheim rest. Their very structure is significant; their vast extent, their labyrinthine darkness, their stifling atmosphere, are a standing proof both of the rapid spread of the Christian conversions, and of the active fury of the heathen persecutions. The subjects of the sculptures and paintings place before us the exact ideas with which the first Christians were familiar; they remind us, by what they do not contain, of the ideas with which the first Christians were not familiar. We see with our own eyes the parables and the miracles, and the stories from the Old Testament, which sustained the courage of the early martyrs, and the innocent festivities of the early feasts of Christian love. The barbarous style of the sculptures, the bad spelling, the coarse engraving of the epitaphs, impresses upon