urch in honor of the Saint, built in part
beneath the soil, that its pavement might be on a level with the upper
story of the catacombs and the faithful might enter them from the
church.

The older catacombs, whose narrow graves had been filled during the last
quarter of the third century with the bodies of many new martyrs, were
now less used for the purposes of burial, and more for those of worship.
New chapels were hollowed out in their walls; new paintings adorned the
brown rock; the bodies of martyrs were often removed from their original
graves to new and more elaborate tombs; the entrances to the cemeteries
were no longer concealed, but new and ampler ones were made; new
stairways, lined with marble, led down to the streets beneath;
_luminaria_, or passages for light and air, were opened from the surface
of the ground to the most frequented places; and at almost every
entrance a church or an oratory of more or less size was built, for the
shelter of those who might assemble to go down into the catacombs, and
for the performance of the sacred services upon ground hallowed by so
many sacred memories. The worship of the saints began to take form, at
first, in simple, natural, and pious ways, in the fourth century; and
as it grew stronger and stronger with the continually increasing
predominance of the material element in the Roman Church, so the
catacombs, the burial-places of the saints, were more and more visited
by those who desired the protection or the intercession of their
occupants. St. Jerome, who was born about this time in Rome, [A.D. 331,]
has a curious passage concerning his own experiences in the catacombs.
He says: "When I was a boy at Rome, being instructed in liberal studies,
I was accustomed, with others of the same age and disposition, to go on
Sundays to the tombs of the apostles and martyrs, and often to go into
the crypts, which, being dug out in the depths of the earth, have for
walls, on either side of those who enter, the bodies of the buried; and
they are so dark, that the saying of the prophet seems almost fulfilled,
_The living descend into hell._" But as the chapels and sacred tombs
in the catacombs became thus more and more resorted to as places for
worship, the number of burials within them was continually growing
less,--and the change in the spirit of the religion was marked by the
change of character in the paintings and inscriptions on their walls.
By the middle of the fifth century