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 bon