pontificate in the catacombs—­eight years.  Another was discovered in them and murdered in the episcopal chair.  There was no satisfaction in being a Pope in those days.  There were too many annoyances.  There are one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to the top with scooped graves its entire length.  A careful estimate makes the length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions.  We did not go through all the passages of all the catacombs.  We were very anxious to do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time obliged us to give up the idea.  So we only groped through the dismal labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian.  In the various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly lights.  Think of mass and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns under ground!

In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of the most celebrated of the saints.  In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St. Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there.  It was also the scene of a very marvelous thing.

     “Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love
     as to burst his ribs.”

I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and written by “Rev. William H. Neligan, ll.D., M. A., Trinity College, Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain.”  Therefore, I believe it.  Otherwise, I could not.  Under other circumstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for dinner.

This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then.  He tells of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited only the house—­the priest has been dead two hundred years.  He says the Virgin Mary appeared to this saint.  Then he continues: 

“His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization, are still preserved in a glass case, and after two centuries the heart is still whole.  When the French troops came to Rome, and when Pius vii. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it.”

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages, would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an ll.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it sounds strangely enough.  Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for Neligan’s faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.