nder Mr. Northcote's guidance, and much of our
knowledge of them was gained through him. Mr. Northcote estimates the
total length of the catacombs at nine hundred miles; we cannot but think
this too high.]

This question of the number of the dead in the catacombs opens the way
to many other curious questions. The length of time that the catacombs
were used as burial-places; the probability of others, beside
Christians, being buried in them; the number of Christians at Rome
during the first two centuries, in comparison with the total number
of the inhabitants of the city; and how far the public profession
of Christianity was attended with peril in ordinary times at Rome,
previously to the conversion of Constantine, so as to require secret and
hasty burial of the dead;--these are points demanding solution, but of
which we will take up only those relating immediately to the catacombs.

There can, of course, be no certainty with regard to the period when the
first Christian catacomb was begun at Rome,--but it was probably
within a few years after the first preaching of the Gospel there. The
Christians would naturally desire to separate themselves in burial from
the heathen, and to avoid everything having the semblance of pagan
rites. And what mode of sepulture so natural for them to adopt, in
the new and affecting circumstances of their lives, as that which was
already familiar to them in the account of the burial of their Lord?
They knew that he had been "wrapped in linen, and laid in a sepulchre
which was hewn out of a rock, and a stone had been rolled unto the door
of the sepulchre." They would be buried as he was. Moreover, there was
a general and ardent expectation among them of the second coming of the
Saviour; they believed it to be near at hand; and they believed also
that then the dead would be called from their graves, clothed once more
in their bodies, and that as Lazarus rose from the tomb at the voice of
his Master, so in that awful day when judgment should be passed upon the
earth their dead would rise at the call of the same beloved voice.

But there were, in all probability, other more direct, though not more
powerful reasons, which led them to the choice of this mode of burial.
We read that the Saviour was buried--at least, the phrase appears
applicable to the whole account of his entombment ... "as the manner
of the Jews is to bury." The Jewish population at Rome in the early
imperial times was very larg