Having sufficiently considered the _form_ of the inscription, let us now say a few words about its _substance_, which is important, because it restores to us a lost chapter of Church history. Every student knows how keenly contested in the early ages of the Church was the question as to the discipline to be observed towards those Christians who relapsed into an outward profession of Paganism under the pressure of persecution. There were some who would fain close the door of reconciliation altogether against these unhappy men (_miseri_), whilst others claimed for them restitution of all Christian privileges before they had brought forth worthy fruits of penance. The question arose whenever a persecution followed after a long term of peace; for during such a time men’s minds were specially apt to decline from primitive fervour, and the number of the lapsed to increase. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the question agitated during the persecution of Decius in the middle of the third century. There is still extant a touching letter, written to St. Cyprian by the clergy of Rome at a time when the Holy See was vacant after the martyrdom of St. Fabian, which clearly defines the tradition and practice of the Church. In it they say that absolution was freely given to those of the lapsed who are in danger of death, but to others only when wholesome penance has been exacted; and they declare that “they have left nothing undone that the perverse may not boast of their being too easy, nor the true penitents accuse them of inflexible cruelty.” The same question arose under the same circumstances in the persecution of Diocletian. Pope Marcellus was firm in upholding the Church’s discipline, but he was resisted with such violence that public order was disturbed in the city by the strife of contending factions, and the Pope was banished by order of the Emperor Maxentius. This we learn from another inscription of Pope Damasus, who says that he wrote it in order that the faithful might not be ignorant of the merit of the holy Pontiff. Eusebius was the immediate successor of Marcellus, and the epitaph now before us is clearly a continuation of the same history, ending in the same punishment of the Pope, as the reward of his contention for the liberties of the Church. For it should be remembered that these Popes were driven from their see and died in exile, not because they refused to apostatize, but because they insisted on maintaining the integrity of ecclesiastical discipline. They may justly be reckoned, therefore, among the earliest of that noble army of martyrs, who, from those days even to our own, have braved every danger rather than consent to govern the Church in accordance with other than the Church’s rules.