Late researches concerning the Catacombs of Rome have thrown much light upon the early use of relics. The former opinion of the Catacombs was that they were used for secret worship by the persecuted Christians, but now we know that they were burial-places under the protection of Roman law, with entrances opening on the public roads. Their chapels and altars were for memorial and communion services. Great reverence was felt for the bodies of all Christians, so that for the first seven centuries the bodies were not disturbed, and relics, in the modern sense of the word, were unknown. People prayed at the tombs, or if they wished to take something away, they touched the tomb with a handkerchief, or else they took some oil from the lamps which marked the tombs. These mementos were regarded as true relics, so that when the Lombard Queen, Theodelinda, sent the abbot John for relics to put in her cathedral at Monza, he came back with over seventy little vials of oil, each with the name of the saint from whose tomb the oil was procured, and many of them are still preserved. The oil from altar lamps was of therapeutic value, as St. Chrysostom tells us in speaking of the superiority of the church over ordinary houses. "For what is here," he asks, "that is not great and awful? Thus both this Table [the altar] is far more precious and delightful than that [any table at home], and this lamp than that; and this they know, as many as have put away diseases by anointing themselves with oil in faith and due season." If the body of a saint lay beneath the altar, the oil was then known as the "Oil of the Saints," and was even more efficacious for healing. Notice the following quotations on the subject taken from Dearmer's work. "Far more common are stories of healing by oil from a lamp burnt in honor of Christ or the saints. The following examples are from the East. The wounded hand of a Saracen was healed by oil from a lamp before the icon of St. George." "St. Cyrus and St. John appeared to a person suffering from gout, and bade him take a little oil in a small ampulla from the lamp that burnt before the image of the Saviour, in the great tetrapyle at Alexandria, and anoint his feet with it." "Similar stories are found in Western writers. Thus Nicetius of Lyons, by means of the oil of the lamp which burnt daily at his sepulchre, restored sight to the blind, drove demons from bodies possessed, restored soundness to shrunken limbs," etc. "An epileptic was cured by oil from the lamp that burnt night and day at the tomb of St. Severin." "It was revealed to a blind woman, that oil from the lamp of St. Genevieve would restore her sight, if the warden of the church were to anoint her with it. A week after she brought a blind man, who was healed in the same manner."[26]