An iron door creaks upon its hinges, and flies open. Out from the dungeon leaps the bull, with flaming eyes, tail in air, bellowing, and pawing the sand in rage. He glares around for an instant upon the shouting thousands, and then catches a view of the maiden swinging before him. With a bound he plunges upon her, and buries his horns in her side. The blood gushes forth, and she is tossed ten feet in the air; while the shrieks of the tortured victim are lost in the hundred thousand shouts of joy. This scene cannot be described: it can hardly be imagined. Lunge after lunge the bull plunges upon his victim, piercing, tossing, tearing, mangling, till the sand of the arena is drenched with the blood of the victim; until her body swings around, a lifeless, mangled mass, having lost all semblance of humanity. Felicitas in the mean time is compelled to gaze upon the scene, that she may taste twice the bitterness of death. In her turn she is placed in the suspended network, and in the same fiery chariot of martyrdom ascends to heaven. Several other Christians perished at the same time, being torn by wild beasts, and devoured by half-famished bears, leopards, and wild boars. Pages might be filled with similar accounts; but this record must be brief. The Emperor Severus died on an expedition to Britain, in the year of our Lord 211, leaving the crown to his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. They were both thoroughly depraved boys. Caracalla, the elder, invited his brother Geta to meet him in the presence of his mother to confer upon the division of the empire. During the conference, Caracalla drew near his brother, and, taking a dagger from beneath his dress, buried it to the hilt in Geta’s heart. The murdered boy sprang into his mother’s arms, and died, she being deluged with the blood of her son. This was early in the third century, when pagan Rome was at the summit of its wealth, refinement, luxury, and power. The murderer of Geta thus became sole emperor of Rome. Christianity was beginning to create a public conscience. It was throwing the light of future judgment and final retribution upon such hideous crimes. Both of these young men, depraved though they were, had received some religious instruction. The stings of remorse imbittered every remaining hour of Caracalla’s life. The image of his brother Geta, gasping, shrieking, dying, bathed in blood, in the arms of his terrified mother, pursued the murderer to his grave: but it did not soften his heart; it only hardened him in sin, and inflamed his soul with almost insane jealousy and fear. Every individual who was supposed to be in the interest of Geta was put to death, without regard to age or sex. In the course of a few months, twenty thousand perished by this wholesale proscription.