But far more than the public recital of these well-loved acts and passions was required for the training and preparation work, so a number of short treatises or tracts were specially composed and put out for the instruction of the earnest and devoted men and women as “Manuals,” so to speak, of preparation for the great trial. Most of these have disappeared; they were composed by fervid teachers for a special season, for the years when the Church was exposed to bitter trial; and when the trial time was over they were no longer required, and as a rule were not preserved. A very few remain to us, such as the “Exhortatio ad Martyrium” of Origen, such tractates of Tertullian as “ad Martyres” and the “Scorpiace”; the letter “Ad Thibaritanos” of S. Cyprian, and the anonymous work quoted at the beginning of this chapter, _De Laude Martyrii_. These are fair specimens of what was once a considerable literature. In very many of the “Passions of the Martyrs” which have been preserved we meet with an oft-repeated answer made by the Christian to the judge when asked about his rank in life, country, family, and the like. “_I am a Christian_” was the almost invariable answer to these questions; often nothing more. This seems to have been the “formula” taught in the schools of martyrdom,--very few traces, however, of this “formula” appear in the treatises which have come down to us; it must, however, have been constantly repeated in the “lost” treatises or tracts placed in the hands of those under training, lost treatises to which reference has been made. The Epistle of S. Ignatius to the Romans was no doubt used as one of these treatises or manuals. The words too of a famous teacher like Cyprian, who himself in the end suffered martyrdom, were treasured up. Some of them are contained in the Vision of S. Flavian before he suffered: “I saw in a dream the martyr Bishop of Carthage, and I said to him: ‘Cyprian, is the death stroke very agonizing?’ He replied: ‘When the soul is in a state of heavenly rapture the suffering flesh is no longer ours; the body is quite insensible to pain when the spirit is with God.” This conception of the insensibility to pain on the part of the martyr was a very general one. Tertullian repeats it almost in identical words. S. Felicitas, quoted in the Passion of S. Perpetua above referred to, said: “When I am in the amphitheatre the Lord will be there and will suffer for me.” S. Perpetua in the same well-known “Passion,” after having been tossed and gored by a wild and maddened beast, woke up from the ecstacy into which she had been plunged and asked the official standing near her when she was to be exposed to the infuriated animal. S. Blandina in another cruel scene of martyrdom was equally insensible to pain--her soul was far away speaking with or praying to the Lord.