Some of these pagan teachers, he goes on to say, even esteemed burial as superfluous, adding that it was no evil to lie unburied and neglected.
The great fourth century writer proceeds at some length to give some of the reasons which had influenced Christians so tenderly to care for their brethren who had fallen asleep: “We will not suffer the image and workmanship of God to lie exposed as a prey to beasts and birds, but we will restore it to earth from which it was taken; and although it be in the case of an unknown person, we will supply the place of relatives, whose place, since they are wanting, let benevolence take.”—Lactantius, Inst. vi. 12.
Aristides—middle years of second century—thus dwells upon the tender solicitude of the Christian folk for their dead: “When one of their poor passes away from the world, one of them (the brethren) looks after him, and sees to his burial according to his means.”—Apol. xv.
Aristides is here referring to the private charity of individual members of the community, which was often very lavish in the early centuries. Tertullian, on the other hand, writing on the same duty of caring for the brethren, includes the cost of “burying the poor” as coming out of the common fund made up of the money contributed at the public meetings of the Brotherhood.—Apol. xxxix.
As the amount required for these burials and the subsequent care bestowed on the places of Christian sepulture was very considerable, the public collections made in the assemblies were necessarily often largely supplemented by private alms.
All this loving care for the remains of the deceased went home to numberless hearts among the survivors of the loved, and evidently ranked high among the reasons which attracted many into the ranks of the Christian Brotherhood.
In our little picture of very early Christian life, Rome and its powerful Church has been generally selected as the scene of the life in question. In this primitive custom of reverent care for the dead,—a care which embraced the very poor as well as the rich and well-to-do, we discern the reasons which led to the first beginnings of the vast city of the Christian dead,—the wonderful city known as the Roman catacombs. This will be carefully described at some length in this work: the building and excavating of the endless corridors, the private chambers, the chapels and meeting-rooms, began even before the close of the first century of the Christian era, and went on for some two centuries and a half—the long-drawn-out age of persecution.
They constitute a mighty and ever-present proof of the accuracy of much that has been advanced in the foregoing pages on the subject of the life led—of the hopes and ideals cherished among the disciples of Jesus in that first stage of anxious trial and sore danger.
The pictures painted below in the chapters treating of the catacombs of Rome are admirable contemporary illustrations of what the writings of Aristides, Tertullian, and Lactantius tell us of the solemn duty to the dead which was insisted upon with such touching eloquence to the primitive congregations of the faithful.