21. Mayest thou live in peace and pray for us. 22. Mayest thou live in the Lord and pray for us. It would be easy to fill several pages with inscriptions of this kind; but enough has been produced to impress upon the reader a fair idea of their general character. They abound on the monuments of the second and third centuries; but after that date they fade out of use, and are succeeded by a new style of epigraphy, colder and more historical. Mention is now made of the exact age of the deceased, and of the length of his married life, not as to years only, but as to months, and sometimes even as to days and hours; of the day of his death also, more commonly of his burial, and, in a few instances, of both. To record the day of the burial (_depositio_) was creeping into use before the end of the third century; from the middle of the fourth, it became little short of universal; and in this century and the next, mention of the year also was frequently added. During this period, the phrase _in pace_ became general, as a formula to be used by itself absolutely without any verb at all. In old Christian inscriptions in Africa, this phrase frequently occurs with the verb _vixit_; in which case the word _pax_ is undoubtedly used in the same sense in which Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and other ecclesiastical writers employ it, as denoting peace with God to be obtained through communion with the Church; and in a community distracted by schisms and heresies, as the African Church was, such a record on the tomb of a Christian is intelligible and important. Not so in Rome; here the purport of the thousands of greetings of peace has reference to the peace of a joyful resurrection and a happy eternity, whether spoken of with confidence as already possessed, or only prayed for with glad expectation. The act of death had been expressed in earlier epitaphs under Christian phrases:—_Translatus de sæculo_; _exivit de sæculo_; _arcessitus a Domino_, or _ab angelis_; _natus in æternum_; or, much more commonly, _Deo reddidit spiritum_; and this last phrase had come into such established use by the middle of the third century, that the single letter R was a recognised abbreviation of it. But, in the second half of that century, and still more frequently afterwards _decessit_ was used in its stead; and in the fifth century we find this again superseded by _Hic jacet_, _pausat_, _quiescit_, or _requiescit_.