[2] Possibly the images of the Saviour prevalent in the third century may have contributed to the apparent fitness of this. For at this epoch--and for some three hundred years after--these images embodied the Greek ideas of divinity; they represented Christ as a youth of superb grace and beauty, and they appear largely to have been founded upon the conceptions of Orpheus. Indeed, in one representation which has survived, we see Him as a beardless adolescent, seated upon a mountain, grasping an instrument with whose music he has charmed the wild beasts assembled below. Another picture in the catacombs (included in the illustrations of Didron’s “Iconographie Chrétienne”), representing Him as the Good Shepherd, depicts a vigorous youth, beardless and with short hair, in a tunic descending to the knees; His left hand supporting a lamb which is placed across His shoulders, His right holding a shepherd’s pipe. That such pictures were not accepted as portraits by the fathers, but merely as idealistic representations, is clear from the disputes which arose in the second century (and were still alive in the eighteenth) on the subject of Christ’s personal appearance. St. Justin argued that to render His sacrifice more touching He must have put on the most abject of human shapes; and St. Cyril, also holding this view, uncompromisingly pronounced Him “the ugliest of the sons of men.” But others, imbued with the old Greek notions that beauty was in itself a mark of divinity, protested: “If He is not beautiful, then He is not God.” St. Augustine formally states that no knowledge existed in his day (the fourth century) of the features of either the Saviour or His Mother. “Nam et ipsius Dominicæ facies carnis, innumerabilium cogitationum diversitate variatur et fingitur, quæ tamen una erat, quæcumque erat.... Neque enim novimus faciem Virginis Mariæ. Nec novimus omnino, nec credimus” (“De Trinitate,” lib. viii. cap. 4). It is clear, therefore, that the two miraculous portraits were not known in St. Augustine’s time--_i.e._ the Veronica, or the Holy Face (which is preserved at St. Peter’s, Rome), and another portrait of similar origin, which it was alleged Christ had, Himself, impressed upon a cloth and sent to Abgarus, Prince of Edessa (as related by St. John of Damascus, in the eighth century). To preserve it, Abgarus glued the cloth upon wood, and thus it came later to Constantinople and thence to Rome, where it is still believed to be treasured in the Church of St. Sylvester in Capite. These portraits, and still more a letter purporting to have been written to the Roman Senate by Lentulus (who was pro-consul in Judea before Herod) and believed to have been forged to combat the generally repugnant theory that Christ was ugly and deformed (“sine decore et specie”), supply the materials for the representations with which we are to-day familiar. That letter contained the following description: