be found among them. A military title, or the name of priest or deacon, or of some other officer in the Church, now and then is met with; but even these, for the most part, would seem to belong to the fourth century, and never contain any expression of boastfulness or flattery.
FL. OLIVS PATERNVS
CENTVRIO CHOR. X VRB.
QVI VIXIT AH XXVII
IN PACE
Flavius Olius Paternus, Centurion of the
Tenth Urban Cohort, who lived twenty-seven
years. In peace.
It is true, no doubt, that among the first Christians there were very few of the rich and great. The words of St. Paul to the Corinthians were as true of the Romans as of those to whom they were specially addressed: "For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called." Still there is evidence enough that even in the first two centuries some of the mighty and some of the noble at Rome were among those called, but that evidence is not to be gathered from the gravestones of the catacombs. We have seen, in a former article, that even the grave of one of the early bishops,--the highest officer of the Church,--and one who had borne witness to the truth in his death, was marked by the words,
CORNELIVS MARTYR
EP.
The Martyr Cornelius, Bishop.
Compare this with the epitaphs of the later popes, as they are found on their monuments in St. Peter's,--"flattering, false insculptions on a tomb, and in men's hearts reproach,"--epitaphs overweighted with superlatives, ridiculous, were it not for their impiety, and full of the lies and vanities of man in the very house of God.
With this absence of boastfulness and of titles of rank on the early Christian graves two other characteristics of the inscriptions are closely connected, which bear even yet more intimate and expressive relation to the change wrought by Christianity in the very centre of the heathen world.
"One cannot study a dozen monuments of pagan Rome," says Mr. Northcote, in his little volume on the catacombs, "without reading something of _servus_ or _libertus, libertis libertabusque posterisque eorum_; and I believe the proportion in which they are found is about three out of every four. Yet, in a number of Christian inscriptions exceeding eleven thousand, and all belonging to the first six centuries of our era, scarcely six have been found containing any allusion whatever--and even two or three of these are doubtful--to this fundamental division of ancient Roman society.
"No one, we think, will be rash enough to maintain, either that this omission is the result of mere accident, or that no individual slave or freedman was ever buried in the catacombs. Rather, these two cognate facts, the absence from ancient Christian epitaphs of all titles of rank and honor on the one hand, or of disgrace and servitude on the other, can only be adequately explained by an appeal to the religion of those who made them. The children of the primitive Church did not record upon their monuments titles of earthly dignity, because they knew that with the God whom they served 'there was no respect of persons'; neither did they care to mention the fact of their bondage, or of their deliverance from bondage, to some earthly master, because they thought only of that higher and more perfect liberty wherewith Christ had set them free; remembering that 'he that was called, being a bondman, was yet the freeman of the Lord, and likewise he that was called, being free, was still the bondman of Christ.'
"And this conclusion is still further confirmed by another remarkable fact which should be mentioned, namely, that there are not wanting in the catacombs numerous examples of another class of persons, sometimes ranked among slaves, but the mention of whose servitude, such as it was, served rather to record an
