the noble at Rome were among those called, but that evidence is not to be
gathered from the gravestones of the catacombs. We have seen, in a 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