[663] Stettero sempre lontane di quelle arti, colle quali avessero potuto correr pericolo di contaminarsi colla idolatria, e da ciò avvenne, che pochi, o niuno di essi si diede alla pittura e alla scultura, le quali aveano per oggetto principale di rappresentare le deità, e le favole de’ gentili.--Buonarotti, _De’ Vetri Cemeteriali_. [664] These were exceedingly voluminous, and although several of them have perished, those which remain throw great light on one of the most obscure periods in the history of the church, and vindicate the title of Origen of the West, bestowed on Hippolytus by Pressensé. Among his most important works were a commentary on the greater part of the Old and New Testament, treatises on Antichrist, on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, on Good and the Origin of Evil, on God and the Resurrection. He was especially noted, moreover, as a vigorous and skilful polemic, and wrote against Platonism and Judaism, and, as we have seen, (page 173,) against Callixtus, bishop of Rome, for his pantheistic heresy. His great work, however, is that entitled the _Philosophoumena_. “It is a vast repertory,” says Pressensé, “reviewing all the doctrinal controversies of the church from the earliest ages and most obscure beginnings of Gnosticism. Christian antiquity has left us no more valuable monument than the treatise “On all the Heresies” of Hippolytus, discovered a few years since among the dusty treasures of a convent of Mount Athos.” [665] Whence the name, from δίπτυχον, twofold; when several tablets were used they were called πολύπτυχον, or manifold. BOOK THIRD. 395 THE INSCRIPTIONS OF THE CATACOMBS. CHAPTER I. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE INSCRIPTIONS. Few places in Rome are more attractive to the student of Christian archæology than the Lapidarian Gallery in the palace of the Vatican. In this long corridor[666] are preserved a multitude of epigraphic remains of the venerable past, shattered wrecks of antiquity, which have floated down the stream of time, and have here, as in a quiet haven, at length found shelter. The walls on either side are completely covered with inscribed slabs affixed to their surface. On the right hand are arranged the pagan monuments collected from the neighbourhood of the city--sepulchral and votive tablets, altar dedications, fragments of imperial rescripts and edicts, and other evidences of the power and splendour of the palmy days of Rome. On the left are the humble epitaphs of the early Christians, rudely carved in stone or scratched in plaster, and brought hither chiefly from the crypts of the Catacombs. Of greater interest to him who would rehabilitate the early ages of the church, and