Small wonder, therefore, that those Christian converts who had been brought up in pagan or Jewish superstition should retain traces of this ancient custom so congenial to the sympathies of the human heart, unprescient as they were of the baneful results to which it would lead. Their freedom of language had not yet been restricted, as Bishop Kip remarks, to the cold rules of ordinary logic by the fear of deadly 445 heresy. We know, indeed, from the testimony of the Fathers, that mention of the dead was frequently made in the prayers of the church. These prayers, however, were often thanksgivings--εὐχὴ εὐχαριστήριος--for those who were asleep in Christ, or commemorations of their virtues for the improvement of the living.[726] Many of the Fathers vigorously protest against the idea that the dead can be benefitted by any prayers on their behalf, and strongly assert their changeless state in the other world.[727] The notion, however, of the efficacy of these prayers gradually crept into the church; but that they were not conceived to procure remission from purgatorial flames is evident from the fact that, even at a comparatively late period, they were offered on behalf of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints, and even of the Virgin Mary herself, who were all believed to be in the immediate presence of God. At length even this tremendous error found entrance into the church, and gave into the hands of a mercenary hierarchy the keys of heaven and hell. But in the testimony of the Catacombs is no trace of that torturing doctrine which hangs the heart on tenter-hooks of dread suspense, and wrings from the lacerated affections a dole to a hireling priesthood for the exercise of their ghostly functions in delivering the souls of 446 the departed from burning flame. There is no hint in their cheerful art and pious epitaphs of the Dantean horrors, the worse than Sisyphean toil, and torments more dire than those of Tantalus, under the intense conception of which for centuries the heart of Christendom was wrung. No; the early church believed the pious dead already to enjoy the ampler life, the more ethereal air, and sweet beatitude of paradise.[728]