“It may be asked,” he says, “whether it is credible that the faithful, in the age of the Apostles or their disciples, when the Church, fresh from the bosom of the image-hating synagogue, was in deadly conflict with idolatry, should have so promptly and so generally adopted and (so to speak) baptized the fine arts?” And he replies, “I can only say that the universal use of pictures throughout the subterranean cemeteries, and the richness, the variety, and the freedom of the more ancient types, when contrasted with the cycle of painting which I see becoming more stiff in manner and poorer in conception towards the end of the third century,—these things demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the hypothesis of those who affirm that the use of pictures was introduced little by little, on the sly, as it were, and in opposition to the practice of the primitive Church.” He points out also that the (comparatively) flourishing condition of the fine arts, and the large number of their professors in Rome during the reigns of Trajan, of Hadrian, and of the Antonines, materially favoured the early introduction and development of pictorial art amongst the faithful; and that the conversion to Christianity of wealthy personages, and even of members of the imperial family, such as Domitilla and Flavius Clemens, told powerfully in the same direction; “whereas, on the contrary, the decline of the fine arts in the third and fourth centuries, the increasing cost of the handiwork of the painter and sculptor as their numbers diminished every day, the gradual but continuous impoverishment of public and private fortunes, which induced even the Senate and the Emperors to make their new monuments at the expense of others more ancient,—all this could not facilitate the multiplication of new works of Christian art during that period; so that, even if the faithful were gaining in the number of converts, in power and in liberty, they lost quite as much, if I may say so, in the conditions required for the flourishing of Christian art.”