God; pray for thy sister. Vincentia in Christ, pray for Phœbe and for her husband. Mayest thou live in God, and pray. Thy spirit is in good; pray for thy parents. In thy prayers make petition for us, because we know thee to be in Christ.”
In all these instances—and many more might easily be given, in Greek as well as in Latin, some edited, others still inedited—it is clear that the survivors had a firm hope that their departed friends had been called by the ministry of angels to the enjoyment of the promised bliss and heavenly peace, and this faith was the foundation of these fervid petitions for their prayers. But, objects our author, “these invocations are almost invariably uttered by some relative of the deceased, as if prompted by natural affection rather than by religious feeling.” No doubt the invocations that have been quoted are the utterances of loving and sorrowing relatives; for to them it usually belongs to bury their dead and to write the epitaphs on their tombstones. But does it therefore follow that they were extravagant, unwarranted, and out of harmony with the teaching of the church? First, their very number and antiquity is primâ facie evidence against so unjust a suspicion; and, next, they in no way go beyond the eloquent invocations of the martyrs, whether in the graffiti on the walls near their tombs or in the more formal inscriptions of the bishops themselves—e.g., of Pope Damasus at the tomb of St. Agnes; but, lastly and above all, these again are in exact agreement with the public liturgy of the church. In a fragment of a very ancient liturgy, only published in our own day, and bearing internal evidence of having been used during the days of persecution, the
priest is instructed to pray “for grace to worship God truly in times of peace, and not to fall away from him in times of trial,” and then, after the accustomed reading of the diptychs—i.e., reading the names of the martyrs, the bishops, and the dead for whom the Holy Sacrifice was being offered—he proceeds as follows: “May the glorious merits of the saints excuse us or plead for us, that we may not come into punishment; may the souls of the faithful departed who are already in the enjoyment of bliss assist us, and may those which need consolation be absolved by the prayers of the church.” The different gradation of ranks and the different sense of the liturgical commemoration of the saints, the faithful who are dead and those who are still living, could hardly be defined with greater distinctness in “a formulated and authoritative creed formed by learned theologians.” We need hardly add that the same doctrine is to be found more or less explicitly in all the old liturgies—e.g., in a prayer that “Christ will, through the intercession of his holy martyrs, grant to our dear ones who sleep in him refreshment in the abode of the living”; “that the prayers of the blessed martyrs will so commend us to Christ that he will grant eternal refreshment to our dear ones who sleep in him,” and several other petitions to the same effect. But we are already exceeding the limits of space assigned to us, and we must be content with a general reference to the old sacramentaries; neither can we find room for the passages which are at hand from St. Cyril, St. Chrysostom, and other patristic authorities containing the same doctrine.
We must not, however, altogether omit another branch of evidence
belonging to the Catacombs themselves—namely, the frescoes and other monuments in which the saints are represented as receiving and welcoming the deceased into heaven, conversing with them, lifting up the veil, and introducing them into the garden of Paradise, etc. Everybody knows the inscription scratched in the mortar round a grave in the cemetery of Pretextatus fifteen centuries ago, and now brought to light again some twenty years since, in which the martyrs Januarius, Agapetus, and Felicissimus are invoked to refresh the soul of some departed one, just buried near their own tombs; and the anxiety of the faithful of old to obtain a place of burial near the graves of the martyrs is too notorious to need confirmation in this place. This practice had, of course, a doctrinal foundation. St. Gregory Nazianzen, Paulinus of Nola, or other Christian poets may use the language of mere poetical fancy when they talk of the blood of the martyrs penetrating the adjacent sepulchres; but the spiritual meaning that underlies their words is plain—viz., that the merit of the martyrs’ pains and sufferings, and the intercession of their prayers thus sought by the living, were believed to profit the souls of the deceased. In a recently-discovered fresco in the cemetery of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, a deceased matron, Veneranda, is manifestly commended to the patronage of St. Petronilla, who is represented standing at her side; and there are not wanting inscriptions in which the survivors distinctly commend the souls of their children or others whom they have buried to the care of that particular martyr in whose cemetery they have been laid. We do not quote them at length, not only from want of space, but also
because this class of monuments belongs, generally speaking, to the fourth century, when no one doubts that invocation of the saints was in common use; and we have already quoted a large class of inscriptions, more ancient and quite as conclusive to all minds of ordinary candor. We mention them, however, because they are links in the chain of evidence we have been inquiring about—evidence given by the Catacombs—and yet more especially because they remind us of the beautiful language of our ritual, which none can forget who have ever heard it sung to the solemn chant of the church: In Paradisum deducant te angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. We cannot help suspecting that these prayers or acclamations are as old as the monuments which they so faithfully interpret. The invocation of the martyrs, and of them only amongst “the spirits of the just made perfect” who have already “come to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels,” seems to point to such a conclusion; it has a flavor of quite primitive times about it, certainly of the age of persecution. It may well have been contemporary with the following inscription, at present in a private museum, but originally taken from the Catacombs: “Paulo filio merenti in pacem te suscipiant omnium ispirita sanctorum.”
[110] The Catacombs of Rome, and their Testimony relative to Primitive Christianity. By the Rev. W. H. Withrow, M.A. New York: Nelson & Phillips. 1874.
[111] Inscr. Christ., i. c. ix.
[112] Inscr. Christian., i. c. x.
[113] R. S., ii. 305.