possible that the spread of Christian ideas, gradually penetrating the Roman world, and filtering into the spirit even of those who remained attached to paganism, may have suggested the making of the coins we have described; but it is certain, on the other hand, that we can claim priority in point of time for the work of the Christian artists in the Catacombs. The coins were struck, as we have said, in the beginning of the third century; the earliest Christian painting of the same subject is assigned to the beginning of the second. But whatever may be the history of the forms under which Noe and the ark are represented, there can be no question as to their meaning. We have the authority of St. Peter himself (1 iii. 20, 21) to instruct us upon this point; and Tertullian does but unfold what is virtually contained in the apostle’s words when he says that the ark prefigures the church, and that the dove sent out of the ark and returning with an olive-branch was a figure of the dove of the Holy Spirit, sent forth from heaven to our flesh, as it emerges from the bath of regeneration. And if we quote Tertullian again as our authority, this is not because he differs in these matters from other Christian writers who preceded or followed him, but because he has written at greater length and specially on that particular subject with which we are now engaged. St. Augustine, writing two hundred years later, gives the same explanation, and says that “no Catholic doubts it; but that it might perhaps have seemed to be a merely human imagination, had not the Apostle Peter expressly declared it.” It is, then, from no private fancy of our own, but simply in conformity with the teaching of all the ancient doctors of the church, that we interpret this scene of a man standing in an ark, and receiving an olive-branch from the mouth of a dove, as expressing this Christian doctrine: that the faithful obtain remission of their sins through baptism, receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of divine peace—that peace which, being given by faith in this world, is the gage of everlasting peace and happiness in the next—and are saved in the mystical ark of the church from the destruction which awaits the world. And if the same scene be rudely scratched on a single tomb, as it often was, and sometimes with the name of the deceased inscribed upon the chest, we can only understand it as denoting a sure and certain hope on the part of the survivors that their departed friend, having been a faithful member of the church, had died in the peace of God and had now entered into his rest.