experience warrants us in saying are now demonstrated with palpable and almost mathematical exactness. First, then, De Rossi observes it as a notable fact, attested by the contents of all the Catacombs, that the most ancient inscriptions on Christian tombs differ from those of the Pagans “more by what they do _not_ say, than by what they do say.” The language of Christian epigraphy was not created in a day any more than Christian art was. There were urgent reasons for changing or omitting what the Pagans had been wont to use; but the Church did not at once provide anything else in its stead. Hence the very earliest Christian tombstones only recorded the bare name or names of the deceased, to which, in a _very few_ instances, chiefly of ladies, one or two words, or the initials of words, were added, to denote the rank or title which belonged to them—_e.g._, C.F., _clarissima femina_, or lady of senatorial rank. Generally speaking, however, there is an entire absence from these epitaphs of all those titles of rank and dignity with which Pagan monuments are so commonly overloaded. And the same must be said of those titles also which belong to the other extremity of the social scale, such as _servus_ and _libertus_. One cannot study a dozen monuments of Pagan Rome without coming across some trace of this great social division of the ancient world into freemen and slaves. Yet in a number of Christian inscriptions in Rome, exceeding twelve or thirteen thousand, and all belonging to centuries during which slavery still flourished, scarcely ten have been found—and even two or three of these are doubtful—containing any allusion whatever to this fundamental division of ancient Roman society. It is not to be supposed that there was any legislation upon the subject; not even, perhaps, a hint from the clergy; it was simply the spontaneous effect of the religious doctrines of the new society, reflected in their epigraphy as in a faithful mirror. The children of the Primitive Church did not record on their monuments titles of earthly dignity, because they knew that with the God whom they served there was no respect of persons; neither did they care to mention the fact of their bondage, or of their deliverance from bondage, to some earthly master, because they thought only of that higher and more perfect liberty “wherewith Christ had set them free;” remembering that “he that was called, being a bondman, was yet a freeman of the Lord; and likewise he that was called, being free, was still the bondman of Christ.”