Mr. Withrow, however, and his co-religionists, may plead that, though constrained to yield to De Rossi’s statement of facts, they are not bound by his interpretation of them. Waiving, therefore, all dispute as to the number and antiquity of the inscriptions which seem to favor the practice of prayers for the dead, they may still persist that they should be taken, not as the voice of the church, but the errors of individuals; or, as Mr. Withrow himself expresses it, “they are not a formulated and authoritative creed formed by learned theologians, but the untutored utterances of humble
peasantry, many of whom were recent converts from paganism or Judaism, in which religions such expressions were a customary sepulchral formula.” If Mr. Withrow merely means to say that Christian epigraphy was the spontaneous growth of the natural feelings and supernatural faith of the people, rather than the result of any written or traditional law devised and imposed by ecclesiastical authority, we are heartily at one with him. We do not doubt that it was the natural fruit of the religious feeling which pervaded all classes of the new society, that was reflected in their epigraphy as in a mirror. But Mr. Withrow clearly meant something different from this; he intended to insinuate that these inscriptions which are distasteful to himself would have been disapproved of also by all well-instructed members of the church, especially by her pastors and doctors. Yet Tertullian, at least, could hardly have disapproved, who takes for granted in one of his treatises, and uses it as the foundation of an argument, that every Christian widow will be continually praying for the soul of her departed husband, and asking for him refreshment (refrigerium), and offering sacrifice for him on the anniversary of his decease. Neither could such prayers have been deemed either objectionable or useless by St. Cyprian and his predecessors in the see of Carthage, who decreed the loss of them as a fitting punishment for any man who should presume to leave the care of his children or of his property after his decease to a cleric, because “he does not deserve to be named in the prayer of the priest at the altar of God who has done what he could to withdraw a priest from the service
of the altar.”[115] However, it is not worth while, easy as the task would be, to justify the inscriptions in question by a catena of venerable authorities from among the bishops and teachers of the primitive church; we will only mention one fact about them which seems to us conclusive—viz., that they are in exact accordance, not to say in verbal and literal agreement, with the most authoritative formularies that have come down to us from ancient days; we mean the ancient liturgies. The language of the public offices of the church—if not an apostolic tradition, which Mr. Withrow would not easily admit—was surely formulated by somebody and formulated according to the dogmas of the faith, and not in a spirit of weak indulgence to any poetical fancies or excess of passionate feeling, whether of affection or of grief. We turn, then, to the oldest sacramentaries,[116] and the prayers we find there run as follows: “We pray that thou wilt grant to all who rest in Christ a place of refreshment, light, and peace”; “Grant to our dear ones who sleep in Christ refreshment in the land of the living”; “Refresh, O Lord! the spirits of the deceased in peace”; “Cause them to be united with thy saints and chosen ones”—the very words and phrases which we have read on the ancient tombstones, and which we still hear from the lips of all devout Catholics when they pray, either in public or in private, for those who are gone before them.
Not without reason, then, does De Rossi describe these prayers for the dead, which are of such frequent recurrence
in the Catacombs, as a faithful echo of the prayers of the liturgy. Of such an inscription as this, In pace Spiritus Silvani, amen, he says very truly that one seems to hear in it the last words of the solemn burial rite, just as the tomb is being closed and the sorrowing survivors bid farewell to the grave.[117]
But Mr. Withrow would have us look for the original of these prayers, not to the Christian liturgy, but to the monuments of “paganism and Judaism, in which religions such expressions were a customary sepulchral formula.” No doubt there was in many pagan epitaphs an address, or acclamation, or apostrophe—call it what you will—to the deceased. But it was either a brief and sad farewell—an “everlasting farewell,” as they mournfully felt it to be—or it was an idle wish “that his bones might rest well,” or (far more commonly) “that the earth might lie lightly upon him”; or there was a still more unmeaning and unnatural interchange of salutations between the living and the dead. The passer-by was exhorted to salute the deceased with the customary Ave or Salve, and the imaginary response of the dead man stood engraven on the stone, ready for all comers. Surely it is impossible that anybody (εἰ μὴ ζέσιν διαφυλάττων, as old Aristotle has it) can be so blind as to confound this empty trifling of the pagan with the hearty yet simple and touching prayers of the Christian. Between the Christian epitaphs and those of the ancient Jews we might naturally have expected a somewhat closer degree of affinity; and so there is. Yet even here the closest point of resemblance
that we are able to find is this: that the Jews ordinarily spoke of death as sleep, and very commonly wrote on the grave-stones, “His sleep is in peace.” We do not remember ever to have seen one of ancient date in which peace is prayed for, neither does Mr. Withrow produce one, though it has suited his purpose to give a deprecatory form to his translation of Dormitio in bonis. The Christian epitaphs, then, have this in common with Jewish epitaphs: that they speak of the dead as sleeping in peace; it still remains as peculiar to themselves that they supplicate for the deceased life—life in God, life everlasting, life with the saints—light, and refreshment.
But we must pass on to another point of doctrine connected with the dead, on which inscriptions in the Catacombs might reasonably be expected to throw some light, and on which the testimony they give is sometimes disputed. Mr. Withrow shall again be permitted to make his own statement of the case: “Associated with the Romish practice of praying for the dead is that of praying to them. For this there is still less authority in the testimony of the Catacombs than for the former. There are, indeed, indications that this custom was not unknown, but they are very rare and exceptional. In all the dated inscriptions of the first six centuries there is only one invocation of the departed.” It is of the year 380, and by an orphan. “But the yearning cry of an orphaned heart for the prayers of a departed mother is a slight foundation for the Romish practice of the invocation of the saints. Previous to this date we have found not the slightest indication of Romish doctrine.… The few undated inscriptions
of a similar character are probably of as late, or it may be of a much later, date than this.”
We have already had occasion to expose the fallacy of this favorite argument of Mr. Withrow’s founded on the paucity and relative antiquity of dated inscriptions. We have pointed out its direct contradiction to all the canons of chronology so laboriously and conscientiously established by De Rossi. Here, however, we must be allowed again to quote his testimony, given precisely upon this particular subject: “Invocations of the deceased,” he says, “asking them to pray for the survivors, are found only in the subterranean cemeteries, not in those made above ground; always in epitaphs without dates, never in those bearing dates of the fourth and fifth centuries. They belong to the period before peace was given to the church, and the new style inspired by the changed conditions of the times sent them quickly into disuse.” The simple and natural character of earlier Christian epigraphy gave place to colder and more artificial announcements. But whilst the more ancient and more religious style prevailed the following are fair specimens of the epitaphs that were written: Vivas in pace et pete pro nobis. Christus spiritum tuum in pace et pete pro nobis. Bene refrigera et roga pro nos. Spiritus tuus bene requiescat in Deo petas pro sorore tuâ. Vincentia in Christo petas pro Phœbe et pro Virginio ejus. Vivas in Deo et roga. Spiritus tuus in bono, ora pro parentibus tuis. In orationis tuis roges pro nobis quia scimus te in Christo—“Mayest thou live in peace, and pray for us. May Christ refresh thy spirit in peace, and pray for us. Mayest thou be well refreshed, and pray for us. May thy spirit rest well in