e Roman Catacombs,--the palm branch, the sacred fish the monogram
of Jesus, the dove, are unmistakably represented on these rings. Some
of them are double, indicating that they were used by married persons:
one has the palm branch twice repeated; another exhibits the palm and
anchor; a third has a dove with a twig in its bill; and one ring has
the Greek word _elpis_--hope--inscribed upon it.

St. Paul at Puteoli may be said to have dwelt among his own people.
Not only was he with his own countrymen and fellow-disciples, but he
was in the midst of associations that forcibly recalled his home. The
apostle was a citizen of a Greek city, and the language in which he
spoke was Greek; and here, in the Bay of Naples, he was in the midst
of a Greek colony, where Roman influence had not been able to efface
the deep impression which Greece had made upon the place. The original
name of the splendid expanse of water before him was the Bay of Cumae;
and Cumae was absolutely the first Greek settlement in the western
seas. Neapolis or Parthenope was the beautiful Greek name of the city
of Naples, testifying to its Hellenic origin; and Dicaearchia was the
older Greek name of Puteoli, a name used to a late period in
preference to its Latin name, derived from the numerous mineral
springs in the neighbourhood. The whole lower part of Italy was wholly
Greek; its arts, its customs, its literature, were all Hellenic; and
its people belonged to the pure Ionic race whose keen imaginations and
vivid sensuousness seemed to have been created out of the fervid hues
and the pellucid air of their native land. Everywhere the subtle Greek
tongue might be heard; and all, so far as Greek influence was
concerned, was as unchanged in the days of the apostle as when
Pythagoras visited the region, and adopted the inhabitants as the
fittest agents in his great scheme of universal regeneration. St. Paul
therefore, at Puteoli, might have imagined himself standing on the
very soil of classic Hellas, and felt as much at home as in his own
native city of Tarsus. This wide diffusion of the Greek language
throughout the West as well as the East at this time is another of
the remarkable providential pre-arrangements which prepared the way
for the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world. A Gentile
speech, by a series of wonderful events, was thus made ready over all
the world to receive and to communicate the glorious Gospel that was
to be preached to all nation