Catacombs has brought to light many most
interesting relics of primitive Christianity. In these Christian
cemeteries and places of worship there are signs not only of the deep
emotion and hope with which they buried their dead, but also of their
simple forms of worship and the festive joy with which they
commemorated the Nativity of Christ. On the rock-hewn tombs these
primitive Christians wrote the thoughts that were most consoling to
themselves, or painted on the walls the figures which gave them the
most pleasure. The subjects of these paintings are for the most part
taken from the Bible, and the one which illustrates the earliest and
most universal of these pictures, and exhibits their Christmas joy, is
"The Adoration of the Magi." Another of these emblems of joyous
festivity which is frequently seen, is a vine, with its branches and
purple clusters spreading in every direction, reminding us that in
Eastern countries the vintage is the great holiday of the year. In the
Jewish Church there was no festival so joyous as the Feast of
Tabernacles, when they gathered the fruit of the vineyard, and in some
of the earlier celebrations of the Nativity these festivities were
closely copied. And as all down the ages pagan elements have mingled
in the festivities of Christmas, so in the Catacombs they are not
absent. There is Orpheus playing on his harp to the beasts; Bacchus as
the god of the vintage; Psyche, the butterfly of the soul; the Jordan
as the god of the rivers. The classical and the Christian, the Hebrew
and the Hellenic elements had not yet parted; and the unearthing of
these pictures after the lapse of centuries affords another
interesting clue to the origin of some of the customs of
Christmastide. It is astonishing how many of the Catacomb decorations
are taken from heathen sources and copied from heathen paintings; yet
we need not wonder when we reflect that the vine was used by the early
Christians as an emblem of gladness, and it was scarcely possible for
them to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity--a festival of glad
tidings--without some sort of _Bacchanalia_. Thus it appears that even
beneath the palaces and temples of pagan Rome the birth of Christ was
celebrated, this early undermining of paganism by Christianity being,
as it were, the germ of the final victory, and the secret praise,
which came like muffled music from the Catacombs in honour of the
Nativity, the prelude to the triumph-song in which they s