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APPENDIX I.

THIS exhibits a fac simile of a blasphemous Crucifix scratched on the wall of a bath in the palace of the Cæsars. It was found during some recent excavations on the slope of the Palatine towards the Circus, and the plaster containing the scratch having been carefully detached, it is now preserved in the Museum of the Roman College. A fac-simile, from which ours is taken, of the size of the original, was published in the Civiltà Cattolica, with an accompanying explanation.

The figure of a man clad in a dress not Roman, and with the head of an ass, is rudely represented on a cross formed like the letter (for a slanting line above seems to be owing only to a slip of the pointed tool with which the scratch was made). A little below, to the right of the figure on the cross, but to the left of the spectator, is another man, in the same sort of dress, with an over-big head, and with his arms thrown apart in a mock attitude of prayer and admiration. A Greek inscription is added, “ΑΛΕΚΣΑΜΕΝΟΣ ΣΕΒΕΤΕ ΘΕΟΝ,”“ Here is Alexamenus, worshipping his God!"

Tertullian, a writer of the second century, having mentioned that already, in his time, the heathen had begun to mock the Christians by representing Christ as a man with an ass's head, in a gown, fixed to a cross, we are probably not wrong in ascribing this specimen of the same mockery to the third century. Two points proved by it are worthy of notice: First, against the Arians and other later impugners of our Lord's divinity, it is here shown that the heathen themselves knew perfectly, in the third century, that the Christians worshipped Christ as their God. Secondly, against the Jews, the very heathen here proclaim that Christ, the Son of David, whom they had given up to Pilate to crucify, was not only their King but their God; the very same God that had appeared to Abraham, and had dwelt

in their Temple between the Cherubim. For it was a longestablished blasphemy and mockery among the heathen to pretend that the God of the Jews was only an ass, or an ass's head. And as Pilate before had written that he whom the Jews rejected was the King of the Jews, so the heathen of the third century testified, even by their mockeries, that Christianity, which the Jews rejected, was nevertheless the true representation and development of the faith of Abraham and Moses.

The thought occurred to present in juxtaposition, one upon the other, that view of their own religion which the Christians of the third century have left painted at the tombs of their martyrs, and the view of the same religion expressed at the same time by the blaspheming heathen in the palace of the Cæsars. Such a combination, it was thought, might suggest useful reflections as to the different lights in which both Christ himself and his Church appear to the worldly and to the spiritual eye at all times, in the nineteenth century no less than in the third. For this end, instead of reproducing the blasphemous crucifix alone, it has been made to disfigure a repetition of the central painting A. 1. of the Composition of the Dispensation; all that is spiritual, and seen properly only by the spiritual eye, being here painted in gold; all that is indifferent, and merely natural, in natural colours; and that which is bad being black. Thus the central figure of the Good Shepherd, with the sheep of universal redemption on his shoulders, and the flock of his elect at his feet, the two men representing the hierarchy, the rock on either side, and the graces given from the Rock through the hands of the clergy, are all in gold. The sky, the trees, and the grass are in natural colours; as are also the two pairs of sheep to whom the Word is offered; except that of these one on either side is white and the other black. The blasphemous crucifix, with its accompaniments, and a sort of den or cavern on which it is mounted, as on a Calvary, so that the ass's head may be upon the face of the Good Shepherd, are also in black.

The white sheep, who are found with a good and honest heart, and either drink in with simple love what they hear, or at least attend, and at length understand, see the Dispensation of Christ in its true character and proportions. But as for the black sheep, which have not the spiritual eye, these perhaps see only the scandal of the Cross, and have no disposition to be among

the worshippers of an ass, or an ass's head, which is to them foolishness, still less to cast in their lot with shame and suffering, which are symbolized by the Cross. Again, they see the true followers of Christ in what seems to them a black den of ignorance and superstition, grouped about a gigantic figure of which they see only the feet, while of its full proportions they have not the least idea. Or, lastly, they see a strange confusion of gold and ink, as of light and darkness; some things very beautiful certainly, and noble and attractive, such as the faces of Sisters of Charity, the acts of Confessors and Missionaries, or the sufferings of Chinese martyrs; other things, on the contrary, which seem to be absurd, false, unscriptural, and odious. So they are repelled, or at best perplexed; and they go on, turning their tails and eating grass, as before.

APPENDIX II.

These are four paintings copied for the author from the tomb of a woman named Vibia in a small cemetery or Catacomb of Gnostic heretics, at no great distance from the Cemetery of S. Callistus. Four others, from a similar arched tomb in the same gallery, and immediately opposite to that of Vibia, will form Appendix III. (Both sets have been published with notes by P. Garucci.)

These Gnostic paintings are added to the Compositions from the Christian cemeteries, as a contrast which may be suggestive of useful reflections. The cemetery in which they occur being of no great extent, and containing no other traces of painting, it may be inferred that the sect was far from numerous. The form of the galleries and niches is exactly the same with that of the Christian cemeteries, just as these, again, were reproductions of the earlier Jewish Catacomb, the original mother and pattern of them all. At some of the ordinary niches one sees on the plaster cabalistic marks peculiar to the Gnostics, and not occurring in the Christian Catacombs; and in the few inscriptions which have been found at the same spot, while there is nothing dis

tinctly Christian, there are some expressions clearly inconsistent with Christian faith and piety. It is noticeable that the Christians (one of whose cemeteries was very near) and these Gnostics seem to have met in their excavations underground, and to have walled one another out. The wall still remains in part, though it has been broken through, so that now one can pass from the Gnostic into the Christian cemetery, and observe that while in the galleries on one side of the wall there are no traces of Christianity, in those on the other there are no traces of Gnosticism.

A few words may be useful to explain how this and other similar sects of the Gnostics took their origin from Christianity, and are reckoned among Christian heresies, while yet in details there are comparatively few traces of any such connexion. When the Gospel was first preached in the Roman empire, people of the higher classes, who spoke Latin and Greek, were mostly sceptics and sensualists. The ideas of a continuance of the soul after death, and of distinct awards of happiness or misery to the departed, were either absolutely forgotten, or but faintly remembered through the Eleusinian mysteries. In the East, on the contrary, among the Egyptians and other peoples subject to Rome, both these and other notions and practices connected with supranaturalism were still in vogue; and adventurers of all kinds, with all kinds of wares, astrology, magic, philosophy, and religion included, were attracted to the great cities of the empire, and especially to Rome.

Now to the eye of such adventurers there was doubtless something very striking and suggestive in the power and success of Christianity. They saw a few teachers despising all the world as sunk in ignorance, misery, and death, and offering to such as would listen to them some wonderful knowledge and happiness. They saw the followers of these teachers full of devotion and reverence towards them, placing their services, their means, often their whole properties, at their disposal, looking only for some future reward in another life. This new sect they saw rising up everywhere, and disturbing from below the dead materialism of society; and they thought, no doubt, that herein there was something to be imitated, if it could be imitated without sharing those persecutions to which the Christians were subjected. So some of these adventurers, professors originally perhaps of Oriental dualism, who had picked up some knowledge of

Judaism and Christianity, or who had even been themselves Christians (for Simon Magus had been baptized), began to think that they, too, like the Christians, might pretend to be the depositaries of a knowledge and hope unknown to the outer world, and that they too might persuade disciples to honour them with their substance in like manner as the Christians honoured their clergy. This radical idea being borrowed from Christianity, it mattered little in what proportion the details of the system to be built upon it should be also borrowed from Christianity or from other sources; and, in fact, the proportions in which Christianity and Judaism were mixed with heathen elements may have differed widely in different Gnostic sects. We now return to the paint

ings before us.

On one of the two side-walls within the arch over the tomb of Vibia, that which is to the left of the spectator, as he stands in the gallery facing the tomb, is a painting, a, of Death, like Pluto, with a chariot and four horses, carrying off Vibia, who is represented like Proserpine, her hair, arms, and robe flying back in the wind, while Mercury, with his caduceus, is seen in front of the chariot, trundling a sort of wheel down hill, to show the way to the Shades. The colours are bright, much brighter than is usual in the Christian cemeteries; and above is an inscription, Abreptio Vibies et Descensio," "The Carrying off of Vibia, and her Descent to the Shades." In the corners at top are the five planets influencing the fates of men.

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On the opposite side-wall is a corresponding painting, b, representing the funeral banquet, for which Vibia, no doubt, has left money by her will. Seated at the table are seven men, five of them with beards, two without. An inscription above with these words, "Septem Pii Sacerdotes," "Seven Pious Priests," informs us that all the seven are priests of the Gnostics; and over the chief of them, who is one of the two without beards, is the Latin name "Vincentius." Three of the others have Oriental caps on their heads. The cushions, the dishes, and the meats, give one the idea of a good supper. Possibly the number seven may have here a sense attached to it borrowed from Christianity. The five planets are again seen in the corners above, and some lightly festooned drapery overhangs the suppertable.

Against the end-wall, and upon the roof of the arcisolium,

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