o EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
lay folk, and the claim of Rome to a leading position in the union of Christian communities.
But it was not only a Roman who thought and felt thus. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, a Syrian of mystical fervour who was at that time travelling to his death as a Roman martyr, wrote a letter to the com- munities from which he was parting. In this there is a picture of the Church which contains all the features of Clement's Roman letter. Even beyond that Ignatius, trembling with anxiety lest all churches in the East and West should lack unity, used for the first time the name for the whole Church which was to remain its title forever. Where the Bishop is, there also shall the people be, just as the Cath- olic Church is there where Christ is; but the seat of priority in this confederation of love shall belong to the Roman community.
The subterranean resting places of the dead offer a symbol of the inner unity in which the living faithful were gathered. These mass graves of the catacombs, long forgotten, rediscovered by a subsequent age and even now replete with puzzles which scholars work at and sometimes solve, indicate through pictures and inscriptions what was written in the hearts of many generations which sought comfort for themselves in the glory of that better world to which their dead be- loved had gone. What they sketched on the walls down there in the stifling air and the silence, were pictorial symbols of the things they believed, hoped and loved. They may have used antique forms, old or new symbols; but their straight-forward language is on the whole no riddle. A little art sufficed to voice the conviction that the Salva- tion of men had appeared the true Master and Shepherd of souls and of peoples. It is all dominated by an apocalyptic mood of realiza- tion that in the turbulent womb of the present there stirs eternal reality, glorious and precious, though none might know whether it would be born in the room of time or revealed as the true life only through death.
But this mood was evoked by an experience of historic events con- stantly swaying up and down, hither and thither, like a sea shaken by a strong wind. It was eminently necessary that youthful Christianity, in itself from the beginning everything else but simple, should find a strong, dependable centre on which it could rest amid the eddies of time and thus find a form consonant with itself. And it was histori- cally logical, therefore, that the Papacy should be based on the See of
CHRISTIAN
