The early believers carefully avoided, as though prevented by a sacred interdict, any attempt to depict the awful scenes of Christ’s passion, the realistic treatment of which in Roman Catholic art so often shocks the sensibilities and harrows the soul. This solemn tragedy they felt to be the theme of devout and prayerful meditation rather than of portraiture in art. Hence we find no pictures of the agony and bloody sweat, the mocking and the shame, the death and burial of Our Lord. “The Catacombs of Rome,” says Milman, “faithful to their general character, offer no instance of a crucifixion, nor does any allusion to such a subject of art occur in any early writing.”[458] “The passion is not represented literally,” says Dr. Northcote, a strenuous 274 advocate of Roman Catholic views, “but under the veil of secresy. It is not our Beloved Lord, but some other who bears his cross. The crown which is placed on his head is of flowers rather than of thorns, and corresponds better with the mystical language of the Spouse in the Canticles[459] than would a literal treatment.”[460] With this agrees the assertion of the distinguished Prussian archæologist, Prof. Piper, of Berlin. Speaking of the series of art representations, belonging to the first five centuries, of scenes in the life of Our Lord, which extend from his nativity to his appearance before Pilate, he says, “Further, however, this series does not go: the death and resurrection of Christ have not at all been made the subject of representation in this period.”[461] In the fifth century Paulinus of Nola speaks of Christ as represented by a snowy lamb standing at the foot of the cross.[462] Sometimes a lamb bore the cross, at others it was couchant in the midst of it; and, as if to bring the sacrificial emblem more vividly to mind, the 275 lamb was represented as wounded and bleeding, an innocent victim given to an unjust death.[463] In A. D. 692 the Quinisextan Council decreed that the historic figure of Christ in human form should be substituted for paintings of the lamb[464]--an evidence that the earlier representations were purely allegorical. The lamb, however, still continued to be employed, and it required the reiterated injunction of Pope Adrian, in the eighth century, to enforce uniformity of usage; and even after that time a reversion to the former practice sometimes occurred.