through the superincumbent soil up to the open air. In this way as many as a hundred persons might be collected in some parts of the catacombs to assist at the same act of public worship; whilst a still larger number might have been dispersed in the _cubicula_ of neighbouring galleries, and received there the bread of life brought to them by the assistant priests and deacons. Indications of this arrangement are not only to be found in ancient ecclesiastical writings; they may still be seen in the very walls of the catacombs themselves, episcopal chairs, chairs for the presiding deacon or deaconess, and benches for the faithful, having formed part of the original design when the chambers were hewn out of the living rock, and still remaining where they were first made."--_Roma Sotterranea, Northcote and Brownlow._ "To our classic associations, Rome was still, under Trajan and the Antonines, the city of the Cæsars, the metropolis of pagan idolatry--in the pages of her poets and historians we still linger among the triumphs of the Capitol, the shows of the Coliseum; or if we read of a Christian being dragged before the tribunal, or exposed to the beasts, we think of him as one of a scattered community, few in number, spiritless in action, and politically insignificant. But all this while there was living beneath the visible an invisible Rome--a population unheeded, unreckoned--thought of vaguely, vaguely spoken of, and with the familiarity and indifference that men feel who live on a volcano--yet a population strong-hearted, of quick impulses, nerved alike to suffer or to die, and in number, resolution, and physical force sufficient to have hurled their oppressors from the throne of the world, had they not deemed it their duty to kiss the rod, to love their enemies, to bless those that cursed them, and to submit, for their Redeemer's sake, to the 'powers that be.' Here, in these 'dens and caves of the earth,' they lived; here they died--a 'spectacle' in their lifetime 'to men and angels,' and in their death a 'triumph' to mankind--a triumph of which the echoes still float around the walls of Rome, and over the desolate Campagna, while those that once thrilled the Capitol are silenced, and the walls that returned them have long since crumbled into dust."--_Lord Lindsay' s Christian Art_, i. 4. The name Catacombs is modern, having originally been only applied to S. Sebastiano "ad catacumbas." The early Christians called their burial-places by the Greek name _Cœmeteria_, sleeping-places. Almost all the catacombs are between the first and third mile-stones from the Aurelian wall, to which point the city extended before the wall itself was built. This was in obedience to the Roman law which forbade burial within the precincts of the city.