one of the most, populous of the subterranean cemeteries, and one of the most interesting, from the great variety in its examples of underground architectural construction, and from the number of the paintings that are found upon its walls. But it's peculiar interest is, that it affords at one point a marked example of the connection of an arenarium, or pit from which pozzolana was extracted, with the streets of the cemetery itself. At tins point, the bed of compact tufa, in which the graves are dug, degenerates into friable and loosely compacted volcanic sand, —and it was here, very probably, that the cemetery was begun, at a time when every precaution bad to be used by the Christians to prevent the discovery of their burial-places. No other of the catacombs gives a clearer exhibition of the differences in construction resulting from the different objects of excavation. In the Acts known as those of St. Valentine it is related, that in the time of Claudius many Christians were condemned to work in certain sand-pits. Under cover of such opportunities, occasions might be found in which hidden graves could be formed in the neighboring harder soil. In digging out the sand, the object was to take out the greatest quantity consistent with safety, leaving only such supports as were necessary to hold up the superincumbent earth. There are few regular paths, but wide spaces with occasional piers,—the passages being of sufficient width to admit of the entrance of beasts of burden, and even of carts. The soil crumbles so easily, that no row of excavations one above another could be made in it; for the stroke of the pick-axe brings it down in loose masses. The whole aspect of the sandpit, contrasts strikingly with that of the catacombs, with their three-feet wide galleries, their perpendicular walls, and their tier on tier of graves.
The stratum of pozzolana at the Catacombs of St. Agnes overlies a portion of the more solid stratum of tufa, and the entrance to the sand-pit from the cemetery is by steps leading up from the end of a long gallery. Such an entrance could have been easily concealed; and the tufa cut out for the graves, alter having been reduced to the condition of pozzolana, might easily at night have been brought up to the floor of the pit. In many of the Acts of the Martyrs it is said that they were buried in Arenario, “ in the sand-pit,”—an expression which, there seems no good reason for doubting, meant in the catacombs whose entrance was at the sand-pit, they not having yet received a distinctive name.
It is difficult to convey to a distant reader even a small share of the interest with which one secs on the spot evidences of the reality of the precautions with which, in those early centuries, the Christians of Rome were forced to guard themselves against a persecution which extended 1o their very burial-places,—or even of the interest with which one walks through the unchanged paths dug out of the rock by this tenebrosa et lucifugax natio. In the midst of the obscurity of history and the fog of fable, here is the solid earth giving evidence of truth. Here one sees where, by the light of his dim candle, the solitary digger hollowed out the grave of one of the near followers of the apostles; and here one reads in hasty and ill-spelt inscriptions something of the affection and of the faith of those who buried their dead in the sepulchre dug in the rock. The Christian Rome underground is a rebuke to the Papal Rome above it; and, from the worldly pomp, the tedious forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture, that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow Catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. In them is at once the exhibition and the promise of a purer Christianity. In them, indeed, one may see only too plainly the evidences of ignorance, the beginnings of superstitions, the
