The symbols of the Catacombs, like every other indication of early teaching, show the glad, bright, loving character of the Christian faith. It was a religion of joy and not of gloom, of life and not of death, of tenderness not of severity. * * * We see in them as in the acts of the apostles, that the keynotes of the music of the Christian life were exultation and simplicity. And how far superior in beauty and significance were these early Christian symbols to the meaningless and pagan broken columns and broken rose-buds and skulls and weeping women and inverted torches of our cemeteries. We find in the Catacombs neither the cross of the fifth and sixth centuries, nor the crucifixes of the twelfth, nor the torches and martyrdom's of the seventeenth, nor the skeletons of the fifteenth, nor the cypresses and death's heads of the eighteenth. Instead of these the symbols of beauty, hope and peace!
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