With a fierce shouting that seemed to shake the very towers, the triumphant legionaries poured over the walls, and proceeded to carry fire and sword through the length and breadth of the city. Enraged by the long opposition of the Zealots, the Romans made no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, but wreaked upon all alike, man, woman, and child, the accumulated vengeance of a long term of weeks. The flames of night lit up wild scenes of carnage, lust, and rapine, scenes that have scarcely any parallel in history. One significant fact attests the extent of the slaughter--the fires on the lower parts of Zion were extinguished by the rivers of blood that poured down from the higher! The Romans only ceased from slaying when their arms had become weary of striking; the surviving Jews--still to be counted by myriads--were driven like sheep across the Tyropæon bridge to the ruined cloisters of the temple, where they were put under guard. Scores of them, sullen and defiant to the last, refused to taste food prepared by Gentile hands, and so died. When Titus entered the city and beheld the massy towers which the Zealots had so cravenly relinquished, he was filled with wonder. “Truly,” he murmured, “unless the gods had put it into the hearts of these men to flee, we should never by our own strength have taken these towers.” But however much Titus may have thought himself indebted to Divine power, he showed little of the Divine in his treatment of the captive multitude, who, if the figures of Josephus are to be trusted, amounted to ninety-seven thousand! For many days a sorting process went on in the temple-courts. Those who were convicted of having borne arms against the Romans were executed at once. Seven hundred others, the tallest and most handsome, were set aside to grace the triumph of Titus. Of the rest, those under seventeen years of age were sold into slavery; all who had passed that age were either sent in fetters to Egypt, there to work in the mines, or were distributed among the provinces, to die in the amphitheater by the sword of the gladiator or by the fangs of wild beasts. As for the aged and infirm, these, as being useless and unsaleable, were simply put to death in cold blood. Thus were weeping families parted to meet no more on earth; never were such heartrending scenes as those that took place in the temple-courts upon the closing days of September in the year A.D. 70, and all under the sanction of the Cæsar who was called by his sycophantic contemporaries, “_Amor et deliciæ generis humani_--the love and darling of mankind!” As Crispus heard the nightly wailings of the captive multitude he longed for the day when the progress of Christianity should temper warfare with a spirit more humane and merciful.