Such is the full meaning of the scene at the Sea of Tiberias, as interpreted according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; and the adjuncts of this picture show that it was intended to be so understood here also; for on one side is the figure of the consecration already described; and on the other, the sacrifice of Isaac by his father, which was surely a most lively type of the sacrifice of Christ upon the altar; wherein blood is not really shed, but the Lamb is only “_as it were_ slain,” just as Isaac was not really slain, but was received back from the dead, “for a parable.” Lastly, as has been mentioned before, there follows on the third wall of the same chamber the natural complement of the rest; the doctrine of the Resurrection, as contained in the fact of the rising again of Lazarus. Thus, this whole series of paintings, executed at the end of the second century, or within the first twenty or thirty years of the third, and repeated (as has been said) in several successive chambers, was a continual homily, as it were, set before the eyes of the faithful, in which they were reminded of the beginning, progress, and consummation of their new and supernatural life. We do not say that every modern Christian who looks at these paintings will thus read their meaning at once; but we believe that all ancient Christians did so, because it is clear from the writings of the Apostles themselves and their successors, that nothing was more familiar to the Christian mind of those days than the symbolical and prophetical meaning of the facts both of the Old and of the New Testaments. They believed the facts themselves to have taken place just as they are recorded, but they believed also that they had a mysterious signification, whereby the truths of the Christian faith were insinuated or expressed, and that this was their highest and truest meaning. “Perhaps there is no one recorded miracle of our Lord,” says St. Gregory, “which is not therefore selected for recording because it was the type of something to happen in the Church;” and precisely the same was felt to be true also of the histories of the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations. “All these things had happened to them in figure, and they were written for our correction, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”