In the pictures of the most interesting period, that is, of the second and third centuries, there is no attempt at literal portraiture or historic accuracy. They were to be understood only by those who had the key to them in their minds, and they mostly arranged themselves in four broad classes. 1st. Representations of personages or scenes from the Old Testament regarded as types of those of the New. 2d. Literal or symbolic representations of personages or scenes from the New Testament. 3d. Miscellaneous figures, chiefly those of persons in the attitude of prayer. 4th. Ornamental designs, often copied from pagan examples, and sometimes with a symbolic meaning attached to them. It is a noteworthy and affecting circumstance, that, among the immense number of the pictures in the catacombs which may be ascribed to the first three centuries, scarcely one has been found of a painful or sad character. The sufferings of the Saviour, his passion and his death, and the martyrdoms of the saints, had not become, as in after days, the main subjects of the religious Art of Italy. On the contrary, all the early paintings are distinguished by the cheerful and trustful nature of the impressions they were intended to convey. In the midst of external depression, uncertainty of fortune and of life, often in the midst of persecution, the Roman Christians dwelt not on this world, but looked forward to the fulfilment of the promises of their Lord. Their imaginations did not need the stimulus of painted sufferings; suffering was before their eyes too often in its most vivid reality; they had learned to regard it as belonging only to earth, and to look upon it as the gateway to heaven. They did not turn for consolation to the sorrows of their Lord, but to his words of comfort, to his miracles, and to his resurrection. Of all the subjects of pictures in the catacombs, the one, perhaps, more frequently repeated than any other, and under a greater variety of forms and types, is that of the Resurrection. The figure of Jonah thrown out from the body of the whale, as the type that had been used by our Lord himself in regard to his resurrection, is met with constantly; and the raising of Lazarus is one of the commonest scenes chosen for representation from the story of the New Testament. Nor is this strange. The assurance of immortality was to the world of heathen converts the central fact of Christianity, from which all the other truths of religion emanated, like rays. It gave a new and infinitely deeper meaning than it before possessed to all human experience; and in its universal comprehensiveness, it taught the great and new lessons of the equality of men before God, and of the brotherhood of man in the broad promise of eternal life. For us, brought up in familiarity with Christian truth, surrounded by the accumulated and constant, though often unrecognized influences of the Christian faith upon all our modes of thought and feeling, the