When the Israelites escaped from the iron furnace of Egypt, they carried with them so intense an abhorrence of all that savoured of Misraim that they put away from them polytheism and repudiated idolatry; they swept away as well the doctrine of life after death, such as dominated the Egyptian mind, that they might focus all their desires on this present life. "Let me bury my dead out of my sight," expressed the feeling of the Israelite before and after the Exodus. The patriarchs had no conception of the resurrection of the body. The idea was unknown to them. Their faith did not even embrace a belief in the immortality of the soul. A passage in Job (xix. 25-27) has been adduced to prove the contrary, but it does so only because it is a mistranslation, and was manipulated by the translators according to their own preconceptions. Even the word rendered Redeemer has no such signification, it means "the Avenger of Blood." It was probably through contact with other nations that had a wider hope, that slowly and haltingly the conception of a prolonged existence after death made its way among the Jews. Christianity invested the body with a sacredness undreamt of under the Old Covenant, and gave assurance, not of a continued existence after death alone, but of a resuscitation of the body. "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." The Jews entertained a strong aversion towards incineration, because the latter was a pagan usage, and they gloried in their singularity. In Rome they had their catacombs hewn out of the rock, and the Christians followed their example. A short time before the Christian era, Judea had been made tributary to Rome by the victories of Pompey, and many thousands of Jews were transferred to Rome, where a particular district was assigned to them on the right bank of the Tiber. We know how tenaciously Jews clung to their religion and to their traditional practices, and they sought to lay their departed members in rocky sepulchres, such as those of their distant country. And, in fact, outside the Porta Portese, the gate nearest to their quarter of the town, a Jewish catacomb exists, discovered in 1602, excavated in Monte Verde, that contains the tombs of the Hebrews. From this all emblems exclusively Christian are absent. There are representations of the Ark of the Covenant, of the seven- branched candlestick. The lamps also were impressed with the same symbols; and in a fragment of a Greek inscription is traced the word "Synagogue." The catacombs of the Christians resembled those of the Jews in every other particular.