Yet, for centuries that blessed tomb was lost and none could pray beside it. Every word, almost every look and gesture of Cecilia’s last days on earth, was written in the “Acts of the Martyrs,” that enormous collection of archives instituted by St. Clement, who appointed seven holy and learned notaries to take down at once even the smallest details connected with the trial and sufferings of the Christian victims, a work zealously continued by all the succeeding Pontiffs, one of whom, Anterus, was put to death solely on this charge. The “Acts of the Martyrs,” as we possess them to-day, were finally compiled in the Fourth or early part of the Fifth Century. The Latin, though vivid and powerful, is already notably defective, ungrammatical, but not as debased as it became at the beginning of the Sixth Century. The great masters of language in the Fourth Century—St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Jerome—were eager to preserve the purity of the Latin tongue, but their contemporaries all over the Empire, either through ignorance or carelessness, spoke and wrote an idiom as far removed from that of the Golden Age of Augustus as is fashionable English to-day from that of Addison and Pope. Is our misuse of our own noble tongue the cause, or the effect, of political degeneration? One thing is certain, the slaughter of its language has invariably accompanied the downfall of a State. When the Goths invaded Rome in the Fifth Century their Arian fury was especially directed at all that Catholics held sacred, barring only the Tombs of the Apostles, which they feared to profane. They raged through the Catacombs in the hope of finding plunder, or else some secret ingress to the city; the Christians, warned of their approach, had time to fill up and close the entrance of a few of the cemeteries, among others of that where Cecilia’s body lay. As a result, the pilgrims were unable to visit these underground sanctuaries for many years, and when peace was restored to the Church, and the bodies of many martyrs brought back to the city, all but the vaguest clue to her resting-place was lost, though it was sought for eagerly and persistently. Her Church—the “House where Cecilia prayed”[17]—was ever protected from destruction and continually resounded with prayer and praise, but it was empty of the treasure of her remains. As time went on, almost all the bones of the martyrs had been restored to the piety of the Faithful in the different Churches and Basilicas of Rome; the sanctuaries ruined and desecrated by the Goths and Lombards had been rebuilt; the Catacombs reopened and partially restored; so that, although they would never again inspire quite the veneration with which they had been regarded before the Barbarians defaced and defiled them, yet pilgrims, with their strange old guidebooks to direct their steps, would visit the places which had been hallowed by those noble presences in past ages.