There are several instances, among these subterranean pictures, of a symbolic representation of the Saviour, drawn, not from Scripture, but from a heathen original. It is that of Orpheus playing upon his lyre, and drawing all creatures to him by the sweetness of his strains. It was a fiction widely spread soon after the introduction of Christianity among the Gentiles, that Orpheus, like the Sibyls and some other of the characters of mythology, had had some blind revelation of the coming of a saviour of the world, and had uttered indistinct prophecies of the event. Forgeries, similar to those of the Sibylline Verses, professing to be the remains of the poems of Orpheus, were made among the Alexandrian Christians, and for a long period his name was held in popular esteem, as that of a heathen prophet of Christian truth. Whether the paintings in the catacombs took their origin from these fictions must be uncertain; but driven, as the Roman Christians were, to hide the truth under a symbol that should be inoffensive, and should not reveal its meaning to pagan eyes, it was not strange that they should select this of the ancient poet. As he had drawn beasts and trees and stones to listen to the music of his lyre, so Christ, with persuasive sweetness and compelling force, drew men more savage than beasts, more rooted in the earth than trees, more cold than stones, to listen to and follow him. As Orpheus caused even the kingdom of Death to render back the lost, so Christ drew the souls of men from the very gates of hell, and made the grave restore its dead. And thus from the old heathen story the Christian drew new suggestions and fresh meaning, and beheld in it an unconscious setting-forth of many holy truths.