and chalices, the Christians put these emblems of their faith, keeping in mind their spiritual significance. Many of these symbols have preserved their inner meaning to the present day, while others have long lost it. Thus, the crown and the laurel were the emblems of victory; the palm, of triumph; the olive, of peace; the vine loaded with grapes, of the joys of heaven. The dove was at once the figure of the Holy Spirit, and the symbol of innocence and purity of heart; the peacock the emblem of immortality. The ship reminded the Christian of the harbor of safety, or recalled to him the Church tossed upon the waves; the anchor was the sign of strength and of hope; the lyre was the symbol of the sweetness of religion; the stag, of the soul thirsting for the Lord; the cock, of watchfulness; the horse, of the course of life; the lamb, of the Saviour himself.
Many of these symbols were, it is plain, derived from the Scripture, but many also had a heathen origin, and were adopted by the Christians with a new or an additional significance. It was not strange that this should be so, for many associations still bound the Christians of the early centuries to the things they had turned away from. Thus, the horse is frequently found upon the funeral vases and marbles of the ancients; the peacock, the bird of Juno, was the emblem of the apotheosis of the Roman empresses; the palm and the crown had long been in use; and the funeral genii of the heathen Romans were in some sort the type of the later Christian angels. But although this adoption of ancient symbols is to be noticed, it is also to be observed that there is in the Christian cemeteries on the whole a remarkable absence of heathen imagery,--less by far than might have been expected in the works of those surrounded by heathen modes of thought and expression. The influence of Christianity, however, so changed the current of ideas, and so affected the feelings of those whom it called to new life, that heathenism became to them, as it were, a dead letter, devoid of all that could rouse the fancy, or affect the inner thought. A great gulf was fixed between them and it,--a gulf which for three centuries, at least, charity alone could bridge over. It was not till near the fourth century that heathenism began, to any marked extent, to modify the character and to corrupt the purity of Christianity.
And with this is connected one of the most important historic facts with regard to the Art of the catacombs. In no one of the pictures of the earlier centuries is support or corroboration to be found of the distinctive dogmas and peculiar claims of the Roman Church. We have already spoken of the pictures that have been supposed to have symbolic reference to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and have shown how little they require such an interpretation. The exaltation of St. Peter above the other Apostles is utterly unknown in the works of the first three centuries; in instances in which he is represented, it is as the companion of St. Paul. The Virgin never appears as the subject of any special reverence. Sometimes, as in pictures of the Magi bringing their gifts, she is seen with the child Jesus upon her lap. No attempt to represent the Trinity (an irreverence which did not become familiar till centuries later) exists in the catacombs, and no sign of the existence of the doctrine of the Trinity is to be met with in them, unless in works of a very late period. Of the doctrines of Purgatory and Hell, of Indulgences, of Absolution, no trace is to be found. Of the worship of the saints there are few signs before the fourth century,--and it was not until after this period that figures of the saints, such as those spoken of heretofore, in the account of the crypt of St. Cecilia, became a common adornment of the sepulchral walls. The use of the _nimbus_, or glory round the head, was not introduced into Christian Art before the end of the fourth century. It was borrowed from Paganism, and was adopted, with many other ideas and forms of representation, from the same source, after Romanism had taken the place of
