"The allegory of a ship is peculiarly dwelt upon by the ancient Fathers. A ship entering the port was a favourite heathen emblem of the close of life. But the Christian idea, and its elevation from individual to universal or catholic humanity, is derived directly from the Bible,--see, for instance, I Peter iii. 20, 21. 'Without doubt,' says St. Augustine, 'the ark is the figure of the city of God pilgrimising in this world, in other words, of the Church, which is saved by the wood on which hung the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.' The same interpretation was recognised in the Latin Church in the days of Tertullian and St. Cyprian, &c. The bark of St. Peter is similarly represented on a Greek gem, found in the Catacombs, as sailing on a fish, probably Leviathan or Satan, while doves, emblematical of the faithful, perch on the mast and stern,--two Apostles row, a third lifts up his hands in prayer, and our Saviour, approaching the vessel, supports Peter by the hand when about to sink.... But the allegory of the ship is carried out to its fullest extent in the fifty-seventh chapter of the second book of the 'Apostolical Constitutions,' supposed to have been compiled in the name of the Apostles, in the fourth century."--_Lord Lindsay's Christian Art_, i. 18. On the right is (first) the gateway of the deserted convent of Redemptorists, called _S. Tommaso in Formis_, which was founded by S. Giovanni de Matha, who, when celebrating his first mass at Paris, beheld in a vision, an angel robed in white, with a red and blue cross upon his breast, and his hands resting in benediction upon the heads of two captives,--a white and a black man. The bishop of Paris sent him to Rome to seek explanation from Innocent III., who was celebrated as an interpreter of dreams,--his foundation of the Franciscan order having resulted from one which befell him. S. Giovanni was accompanied to the pope by another hermit, Felix de Valois. They found that Innocent had himself seen the same vision of the angel between the two captives while celebrating mass at the Lateran, and he interpreted it as inculcating the duty of charity towards Christian slaves, for which purpose he founded the Trinitarians, since called Redemptorists. The story of the double vision is commemorated in a _Mosaic_, erected above the door, A.D. 1260, and bearing the name of the artist, Jacobus Cosmati. The next gate beyond the church is that of the _Villa Mattei_, the garden of the Redemptorists. (The villa is now the property of Baron Richard Hoffmann: visitors are generally admitted upon writing down their names at the gate.)