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Before introducing to our reader, the extraordinary records that have come down to us regarding the great St Eustachius and his martyred family, it may be well to contemplate for a moment a grand and consoling feature of triumph which Almighty God vouchsafed to His servants in the days of persecution. Although hundreds of martyrs have gone to heaven from the arena of the Coliseum, yet few have been killed by the wild beasts. This strange fact is a beam of sunshine amid all its horrors of cruelty and bloodshed. He who knew how to change the ferocious nature of those animals which prowl through their native mountains and deserts in search of food, so that they became the protectors and even companions of His hermits and solitaries, made them (instead of being the instruments of the most awful death) the defenders of the chastity of His virgins, and the witnesses of the sanctity of His saints. The great Creator of all things intended the dumb animal to be the servant of man, and, with a few exceptions, He refused to allow it to be the executioner of the innocent. One of the most consoling pages in the history of these terrible times, is the oft-repeated miracle of Daniel in the lion's den; not, however, in the silence and darkness of the gloomy cavern into which the youthful prophet was cast, but under the noon-day sun, in the great amphitheatre of the capital of the world, and before 100,000 spectators. Miracles have been destined by God to be the handmaids of truth and the medium of conviction. In the visible interposition of His power in preserving His servants from the fury of the beasts in the Coliseum, He presented to the pagans of Rome an incontestable proof of the divinity of...