HUNTING

No other change equally momentous has ever since affected its features, yet none has ever been so silent and secret. The stream in that most critical moment of its passage from the everlasting hills to the plain below is lost to our view at the very point where we are most anxious to watch it. We may hear its struggle under the overarching rocks; we may catch its spray on the boughs that overlap its course, but the torrent itself we see not or see only by imperfect glimpses. * * * A fragment here, an allegory there; romances of unknown authorship: a handful of letters of which the genuineness of every portion is contested inch by inch; the summary explanation of a Roman magistrate; the pleadings of two or three Christian apologists; customs and opinions in the very act of change; last, but not least the faded paintings, the broken sculptures, the rude epitaphs in the darkness of the Catacombs these are the scanty, though attractive materials out of which the likeness of the early church must be produced, as it was working its way, in the literal sense of the word, underground, under camp and palace, under senate and forum.