[655] Iren., lib. ii, c. 57. Aug., tract 7, in Joan.; serm. 215, de Tempore. Chrysos., hom. vi, Contr. Judæos. Conc. Laodic., can. 36.
[656] Il y avait là une notion confuse et grossière sans doute de l’immortalité de l’âme, mais il s’y trouvait aussi la preuve sensible et palpable de cet instinct de l’homme, qui repugne à l’idée de la destruction de son être.—Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscr., tom. xiii, p. 689.
[657] Rochette says that this practice continued down to the time of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote against it.
[658] “Gold may justly be taken from the sepulture which no longer contains its original owner,” says the minister of Theodoric to a provincial governor; “indeed, it is a sort of fault to leave idly hidden with the dead that which might support the living.”—Aurum enim justè sepulcro detrahitur, ubi dominus non habetur; imo culpæ genus est inutiliter abdita relinquere mortuorum, unde se vita potest sustentare viventium.—Cassiod., Var., iv, 34.
[659] Italienische Forschungen, vol. i, p. 168.—The subject of early Christian sculpture is fully treated in a recent work by Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, entitled Geschichte der Plastik. Two vols. Leipzig: Seeman, 1870.
[660] Qua constantia exorcizabit alumnos suos, quibus domum suam cellariam præstat ... quid aliud quam procurator idolorum demonstraris?—De Idol., c. 11.
[661] Fabri deorum, vel parentes numinum.—Peristeph., x, 293.
[662] Constit. Apostol., lib. viii, c. 32.
[663] Stettero sempre lontane di quelle arti, colle quali avessero potuto correr pericolo di contaminarsi colla idolatria, e da ciò avvenne, che pochi, o niuno di essi si diede alla pittura e alla scultura, le quali aveano per oggetto principale di rappresentare le deità, e le favole de’ gentili.—Buonarotti, De’ Vetri Cemeteriali.
[664] These were exceedingly voluminous, and although several of them have perished, those which remain throw great light on one of the most obscure periods in the history of the church, and vindicate the title of Origen of the West, bestowed on Hippolytus by Pressensé. Among his most important works were a commentary on the greater part of the Old and New Testament, treatises on Antichrist, on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, on Good and the Origin of Evil, on God and the Resurrection. He was especially noted, moreover, as a vigorous and skilful polemic, and wrote against Platonism and Judaism, and, as we have seen, ([page 173],) against Callixtus, bishop of Rome, for his pantheistic heresy. His great work, however, is that entitled the Philosophoumena. “It is a vast repertory,” says Pressensé, “reviewing all the doctrinal controversies of the church from the earliest ages and most obscure beginnings of Gnosticism. Christian antiquity has left us no more valuable monument than the treatise “On all the Heresies” of Hippolytus, discovered a few years since among the dusty treasures of a convent of Mount Athos.”