S. Cyprian, a great theologian and a cautious teacher, believed that the blessed dead were anxious for those whom they had left behind. Now, granting that this was the common feeling of Christians in respect to their dear dead ones whom they believed were dwelling close to God and His Christ, we can well conceive how natural it was for them to ask them for their prayers--for were they not dwelling close to God and His Christ to Whom their prayers must be addressed? Thus in the Church of the first two hundred and fifty years this communion, largely made up of the constant interchange of prayer between the living and the dead, rested on this family and friendship bond, and on no other. The formal invocation of saint and martyr as of some specially powerful soul belongs to a later date. It was not the teaching, certainly not the _general_ teaching, of the Church of the catacombs. But even in the catacombs it appears that very soon the custom crept in of crowding round the grave of some famous martyr, as though some special virtue belonged to the spot where the saint’s remains had been deposited; and the little chamber where the hallowed remains of a hero or heroine of the faith lay, was soon filled with graves--graves excavated utterly without any regard to the paintings or decorations which adorned the chamber and its original tomb, paintings and decorations which were ruthlessly cut away to make room for new loculi where the dead might rest close to the remains of the saint or martyr.[140] The point, however, which especially concerns us here is the testimony, repeated many thousand times, which the catacombs bear to the perfect confidence of the early Christians in the continuance of life beyond the grave. To the faithful dead--to the believers in Jesus Christ--there was no break caused by death, for them life went on as it had done aforetime; conscious life went on after death, only under different and happier conditions. To appreciate the striking change in the conception of death--the most important event in the life of man on earth--it will be interesting to glance at the testimony supplied in the same period by pagan epitaphs. A very brief examination will suffice to show what an impassable gulf separated the Christian from the pagan conception. What at once catches our attention in any study of pagan epitaphs is the complete want of any hope beyond the grave. All the elaborate pagan pictures of the future life popularized in Greek circles by the Homeric poems, and in Latin society by the exquisite verses of Vergil, when brought face to face with the stern reality of the tomb are simply blotted out--are treated as purely fables. Death, in these pagan epitaphs, the true expressions of popular pagan belief in the first three centuries of the Christian era, is ever viewed as an enemy; is described as an everlasting sleep, and the grave is represented as the last eternal home.