[Footnote B:  The foregoing extract is taken from a book by the Rev. J. Spencer Northcote, called The Roman Catacombs, or some Account of the Burial-Places of the Early Christians in Rome:  London, 1857.  It is the best accessible manual in English,—­the only one with any claims to accuracy, and which contains the results of recent investigations.  Mr. Northcote is one of the learned band of converts from Oxford to Rome.  A Protestant may question some of the conclusions in his book, but not its general fairness.  Our own first introduction to the catacombs, in the winter of 1856, was under Mr. Northcote’s guidance, and much of our knowledge of them was gained through him.  Mr. Northcote estimates the total length of the catacombs at nine hundred miles; we cannot but think this too high.]

This question of the number of the dead in the catacombs opens the way to many other curious questions.  The length of time that the catacombs were used as burial-places; the probability of others, beside Christians, being buried in them; the number of Christians at Rome during the first two centuries, in comparison with the total number of the inhabitants of the city; and how far the public profession of Christianity was attended with peril in ordinary times at Rome, previously to the conversion of Constantine, so as to require secret and hasty burial of the dead;—­these are points demanding solution, but of which we will take up only those relating immediately to the catacombs.

There can, of course, be no certainty with regard to the period when the first Christian catacomb was begun at Rome,—­but it was probably within a few years after the first preaching of the Gospel there.  The Christians would naturally desire to separate themselves in burial from the heathen, and to avoid everything having the semblance of pagan rites.  And what mode of sepulture so natural for them to adopt, in the new and affecting circumstances of their lives, as that which was already familiar to them in the account of the burial of their Lord?  They knew that he had been “wrapped in linen, and laid in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and a stone had been rolled unto the door of the sepulchre.”  They would be buried as he was.  Moreover, there was a general and ardent expectation among them of the second coming of the Saviour; they believed it to be near at hand; and they believed also that then the dead would be called from their graves, clothed once more in their bodies, and that as Lazarus rose from the tomb at the voice of his Master, so in that awful day when judgment should be passed upon the earth their dead would rise at the call of the same beloved voice.