faith was too sincere; their belief in the actual union of heaven and earth, and of the presence of God with them in the world, too absolute to allow them to feel the need of that lower order of incitements which are the resort of superstition, ignorance, and conventionalism in religion.  In the earlier burials, no differences, save the ampulla and the palm, or some equally slight sign, distinguished the graves of the martyrs from those of other Christians.

It is not to be supposed that the normal state of the Christian community in Rome, during the first three centuries, was that of suffering and alarm.  A period of persecution was the exception to long courses of calm years.  Undoubtedly, during most of the time, the faith was professed under restraint, and possibly with a sense of insecurity which rendered it attractive to ardent souls, and preserved something of its first sincerity.  It must be remembered that the first Christian converts were mostly from among the poorer classes, and that, however we might have admired their virtues, we might yet have been offended by much that was coarse and unrefined in the external exhibitions of their religion.  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.  The real St. Cecilia stood in the beauty of holiness before the disciples at Rome far purer and lovelier than Raphael has painted her.  Domenichino has outraged every feeling of devotion, every sense of truth, every sympathy for the true suffering of the women who were cruelly murdered for their faith, in his picture of the Martyrdom of St. Agnes.  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.  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.