study of these. For the most part, they are very short, containing
only the name and date; sometimes only an initial letter or a
rudely-drawn cross, indicating that it was a time of sore trial, when
such hurried obsequies were all that the imminent danger allowed.
Sometimes I came upon a larger record--such as, "Thou sleepest sweetly
in God;" "In the sleep of peace."

But the most touching of all the inscriptions were those which were
scratched rudely in a few places on the walls by visitors to the tombs
of their fellow-Christians. The survivors came often to weep over the
relics of the dead. Here a husband records the virtues of a beloved
wife; there, a son invokes the precious memory of a pious father or
mother; and all of them express their calm resignation and unshaken
hope. One inscription especially struck me. It was very rude, and
almost obliterated, for seventeen hundred years had passed over it. It
was a husband's lamentation over a dead wife: "O Sophronia! dear
Sophronia! thou _mayest_ live?--Thou _shalt_ live!" How eloquently did
that rough, faded scrawl, over a long-forgotten grave, speak of the
human fear that perhaps his wife was lost to him for ever--"Thou
mayest live?" and of the noble faith that triumphed over it--"Thou
_shalt_ live!" Nothing affects and astonishes one more in these
inscriptions than this calm, assured confidence that death was but a
profound sleep,--a rest unspeakably grateful after such a weary life
of awful suffering,--and that they should see their beloved ones
again. It was a literal realisation of the words of the Epistle to the
Hebrews: "And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that
they might obtain a better resurrection." They surrendered all that
life holds dear, and life itself, from loyalty to the God of truth,
knowing whom they had believed, and persuaded that He would keep that
which they had committed to Him against the great day. They made their
family ties so loyal and sacred, that their human love, in the higher
love of Christ Jesus, endured for evermore. In many of the crypts, the
emblems of martyrdom are roughly denoted by a sword, an axe, or by
faggots and fire. What sorrowful scenes must have taken place in
these dreary passages, as the mangled forms of parent, child, brother,
or friend were stealthily brought in from the bloody games in the
Flavian amphitheatre, or from the cruel tortures of the prison-house,
to their last dark, narrow home along the v