But the most touching of all the inscriptions were those which were scratched rudely in a few places on the walls by visitors to the tombs of their fellow-Christians.  The survivors came often to weep over the relics of the dead.  Here a husband records the virtues of a beloved wife; there, a son invokes the precious memory of a pious father or mother; and all of them express their calm resignation and unshaken hope.  One inscription especially struck me.  It was very rude, and almost obliterated, for seventeen hundred years had passed over it.  It was a husband’s lamentation over a dead wife:  “O Sophronia! dear Sophronia! thou mayest live?—­Thou shalt live!” How eloquently did that rough, faded scrawl, over a long-forgotten grave, speak of the human fear that perhaps his wife was lost to him for ever—­“Thou mayest live?” and of the noble faith that triumphed over it—­“Thou shalt live!” Nothing affects and astonishes one more in these inscriptions than this calm, assured confidence that death was but a profound sleep,—­a rest unspeakably grateful after such a weary life of awful suffering,—­and that they should see their beloved ones again.  It was a literal realisation of the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews:  “And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection.”  They surrendered all that life holds dear, and life itself, from loyalty to the God of truth, knowing whom they had believed, and persuaded that He would keep that which they had committed to Him against the great day.  They made their family ties so loyal and sacred, that their human love, in the higher love of Christ Jesus, endured for evermore.  In many of the crypts, the emblems of martyrdom are roughly denoted by a sword, an axe, or by faggots and fire.  What sorrowful scenes must have taken place in these dreary passages, as the mangled forms of parent, child, brother, or friend were stealthily brought in from the bloody games in the Flavian amphitheatre, or from the cruel tortures of the prison-house, to their last dark, narrow home along the very path I was now treading!

A number of rude paintings ornament the walls of the chapels, which repeat over and over again the simple symbols of the Christian faith, and the touching stories of the Bible.  The ark of Noah; Daniel in the lions’ den; the miracle of Cana; the raising of Lazarus—­are among the most common of these frescoes.  And they are deeply interesting, as showing that down in these dim and dreary vaults, which presented such a remarkable contrast to the lovely violet sky and the grand architectural magnificence above ground, among men who cared little for the things of time and sense, because life itself had not a moment’s security, were nevertheless nourished thoughts of ideal beauty and unearthly grandeur, which afterwards yielded such glorious fruit in the Christian art of Italy.  The frescoes of the Catacombs are the feeble beginnings of an artistic inspiration which culminated in the “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci, and the “Transfiguration” of Raphael.