In the year A. C. 231 there was a great division among the people. The old party lines were again definitely marked. Again the old animosity assumed shape, and Nephite and Lamanite once more became implacable foes. Those who rejected and renounced the gospel assumed the latter name, and with their eyes open, and a full knowledge of their inexcusable infamy, they taught their children the same base falsehoods that in ages past had caused the unceasing hatred that reigned in the hearts of the children of Laman and Lemuel toward the seed of their younger brothers. By A. C. 244 the more wicked portion of the people had become exceedingly strong, as well as far more numerous than the righteous. They deluded themselves by building all sorts of churches, with creeds to suit the increasing depravity of the masses. When 260 years had passed away, the Gadianton bands, with all their secret signs and abominations, through the cunning of Satan, again appeared and increased until, in A. C. 300, they had spread over all the land. By this time, also, the Nephites, having gradually forsaken their first love, had so far sunk in the abyss of iniquity that they had grown as wicked, as proud, as corrupt and as vile as the Lamanites. All were submerged in one overwhelming flood of infamy, and there were none that were righteous, save it were the disciples of Jesus. Still, active hostilities did not break out for some time; but when war commenced, it scarcely ceased until that great battle near Cumorah, which brought extinction to the Nephite race. This war, or series of wars, was one of peculiar horrors. All the old savagery, ten times intensified, was rekindled, transforming the combatants into fiends. Each race seems to have striven to out-rival the other in its bloody and infernal inhumanity. Mormon, the Nephite prophet-general, in an epistle to his son Moroni, sorrowingly relates the fate of the Nephite prisoners--men, women and children--taken at Sherrizah. He adds: And the husbands and fathers of those women and children they [the Lamanites] have slain; and they feed the women upon the flesh of their husbands, and the children upon the flesh of their fathers; and no water save a little do they give them. And notwithstanding the abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people in Moriantum. For behold, many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners; and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue; and after they had done this thing they did murder them in a most cruel manner, torturing their bodies even unto death; and after they have done this, they devour their flesh like unto wild beasts, because of the hardness of their hearts; and they do it for a token of bravery. Such was the horrible condition into which open, wilful, determined rejection of the gospel had brought both races. Amos entrusted the records to his son Ammaron in the year 306 A. C.