their prayers, help, and assistance, in order to obtain benefits _from God through his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour_". Accordingly we say in the litany "Lord, have mercy on us: holy Mary _pray for us_" etc.] [Footnote 123: We shall say nothing of sculptured figures taken from the catacombs, such as the statues of the good shepherd and S. Hippolitus now in the Vatican, or the numerous bas reliefs on Christian sarcophagi (on which see Raoul-Rochette, Tableau des Catacombes, c. IV. Beschreibung der Stadt Rom. B. 2, in the description of the Christian Museum in the Vatican Library). On another class of Christian representations the reader may consult Buonarruoti's _Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vetro, ornati di figure_. We shall rather call the attention of the Christian antiquarian to the numerous frescoes painted in the chapels of the catacombs, and illustrated by Bosio, Bottari, d'Agincourt etc., the latter of whom attributes some of them to the second century on account of the similarity of their style to that of frescoes in the tomb of the Nasones, which is situated on the Flaminian way at a short distance from Rome; his opinion is confirmed by the fact that some of them have been broken through, with the view of preparing a place of burial for the bodies of martyrs slain in _subsequent persecutions_. A list of their subjects which are _generally_ taken from the old and new Testaments may be seen in Raoul-Rochette (c. 3, p. 157 foll. ed. de Brusselles). Of these we may briefly notice in particular some of the representations of Christ, of the B. Virgin, of the apostles and martyrs. In them Christ sometimes appears as an infant on the lap of His holy mother, Who ever pure and modest is always veiled; and this lovely group is found not only on these paintings, but also on bas-reliefs and glass-vessels generally anterior to the 4th century, and consequently to the general council of Ephesus held in 431; although it is pretended that such figures were first designed after that period. (Instances are enumerated by Raoul-Rochette c. VI). Constantina, daughter of Constantine, whose tomb is still preserved at Rome, begged of Eusebius bishop of Cesarea a likeness of our Divine Saviour (Concil. Labbe. t. VII, 493 seq): we must have recourse to the catacombs for His most ancient portraits. See one resembling the ordinary type of His sacred head and taken from the cemetery of Calixtus, at the end of Raoul-Rochette's work. This type, repeated again and again on Christian monuments during the last sixteen hundred years or more, may suggest the hope that some traces of our Divine Saviour's features are still preserved among us, notwithstanding the diversity of His portraits, of which S. Augustine complained, De Triniti l. 8, c, 4 5. Raoul-Rochette's opinion, that this likeness and the portraits of the apostles were of Gnostic origin, is altogether unsupported, as the Belgian editors of his work justly observe.