How the Primitive Christians Regarded Death.
By Uriah Smith
FROM recent explorations in the catacombs of Rome, some interesting facts in regard to the faith of the primitive Christians, have come to light. We find the following description in the Oberlin Evangelist, entitled, The Catacombs of Rome:93 "Prof. Jules Delassney spoke in the Chapel Sabbath evening, June 29, on the testimony to the life of primitive Christians that comes down to us in the catacombs of Rome. He has devoted himself with great diligence to the personal exploration of these remarkable recesses underneath the city of Rome, and has furnished himself with several hundred copies of inscriptions and pictorial illustrations from these ancient sepulchres. It is wonderful how much may be done with such aid to re-produce the thoughts, the faith, and the exultant piety of those Christian men and women, some of whom heard the gospel from the lips of the apostles themselves. "The seven mountains on which Rome stands are volcanic. The masses of ashes and other volcanic remains lying from forty to one hundred feet below the surface was long ago found to make an admirable cement, and immense excavations have been consequently made in obtaining it. They were already vast in the days of Nero. Hither therefore Christians resorted to escape his persecutions, and here the remains of many who fell martyrs to the Christian name were buried. Mr. Delassney thinks these subterranean passages, if extended in one line, would reach nine hundred miles: that interments continued during at least ten generations, and numbered not less than six millions. The inscriptions on their tombs are brief and simple, bearing a most impressive testimony to the great points of their faith in Jesus. The word death is not there. They all sleep in Jesus—in hope of the resurrection when God wills. One verb for sleeping, and one other for rising again, complete the vocabulary of verbs in the literature of the catacombs. Their creed is in five words, Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour. The epitaph over one of the youthful ones of those times is expressive: Here sleeps—ten years old—God's little lamb. The pictorial delineations represent the saints with uplifted hands and eyes, imploring, yet hopeful, trusting, and waiting. "So those mute pictures and dumb inscriptions testify to the simple faith of men who faced death without fear, in the love of Jesus and in the confidence of a better life beyond. Being dead their graves are made to speak. As the monuments and recovered alphabet of Egypt cause her ancient life to re-appear before the men of these generations, so do the inscriptions and memorials of the catacombs bring up before us the identical saints of Nero's life, and show us how they lived, suffered, and triumphed, through the grace given to his people by their faithful Friend above. No one, it seems to us, can examine this testimony without a deep and pleasing impression of the reality of the great facts of Scripture and early church history; and of the preciousness and power of that simple faith which so raised them above the fear of tortures, losses of all, and even death itself. The Christian world is deeply indebted to such antiquarians as Prof. Delassney, for their labors in bringing out from underneath the rubbish of the ages such a mass of testimony to the Christian Rest, and also for making it accessible to the people. We hope he will by and by give it to the world in a volume." So then among all the millions of epitaphs which mark the resting-places of those primitive Christians, the modern idea of life in death is utterly discarded. Death, in accordance with the uniform teaching of the Bible, they represented as a sleep; and it seems they looked forward to the resurrection as their only hope of a future life. The epitaphs of the present day show too plainly the effect of nearly eighteen hundred years of apostasy from God, and departure from the plain truths of the sacred record. Those ancient tombstones, inscribed almost under the eye of the inspired writers themselves, contain no such contradictory motto as this: "Go thy way, thy son liveth." Would not such mottoes have been as frequent then as now, had they contained the truth? Thanks for those ancient records which reflect so clearly the light of truth from the time of those early disciples—records which speak volumes, the force of which no sophistry can evade.