On the other side of the corridor are the humble epitaphs of the despised and persecuted Christians, many of which, by their rudeness, their brevity, and often their marks of ignorance and haste, confirm the truth of the Scripture, that “not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” Yet these “short and simple annals of the poor” speak to the heart with a power and pathos compared with which the loftiest classic eloquence seems cold and empty. It is a fascinating task to spell out the sculptured legends of the Catacombs--the vast graveyard of the primitive church, which seems to give up its dead at our questioning, to bear witness concerning the faith and hope of the Golden Age of Christianity. As we muse upon these half-effaced inscriptions-- 398 Rudely written, but each letter Full of hope, and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter-- we are brought face to face with the church of the early centuries, and are enabled to comprehend its spirit better than by means of any other evidence extant. These simple epitaphs speak no conventional language like the edicts of the emperors, the monuments of the mighty, or even the writings of the Fathers; they utter the cry of the human heart in the hours of its deepest emotion; they bridge the gulf of time, and make us feel ourselves akin with the suffering, sorrowing, yet triumphant Christians of the primitive ages. These inscriptions were found _in situ_ in the explorations of the Catacombs, or were dug up in vineyards in the vicinity of the city. They have been diligently collected by antiquarians for the last three hundred years. Before the year 1578 there were not a thousand Christian inscriptions extant in all Italy. Of these not one was derived from the Catacombs, and the earliest date was the year 533. With all its boasted veneration for the past, and professed devotion to the antiquities of primitive Christianity, the Church of Rome allowed the memory of the Catacombs, the shrine and sanctuary of the faith in the early centuries, to be as completely forgotten as the site of Troy; and even after their rediscovery many of their principal records of the past were wantonly destroyed or recklessly lost through the ignorance or carelessness of their self-constituted guardians and preservers. Numerous invaluable inscriptions have perished from the effects of time; many have been scattered throughout the public and 399 private collections of Europe; and many more have been defaced or ruined by the feet of generations of worshippers in the churches of whose pavements they form a part. Bosio describes many monuments extant in his day of which De Rossi saw only the fragments, and the latter pathetically deplores the destruction and devastation of those precious relics of Christian antiquity.[670]