r
hanging over their hypo-gorillaceous visages, coming to the prophet
maiden, and asking her to take their land, for they could make no decent
use of it themselves; and look after them, body and soul, for they could
not look after themselves; and pray for them to her God, for they did not
know how to pray to Him themselves. If any man shall regret that such an
event happened to any savages on this earth, I am, I confess, sorry for
him.

St. Severinus, again, whom I have mentioned to you more than once:--none
of us can believe that he made a dead corpse (Silvinus the priest, by
name) sit up and talk with him on its road to burial. None of us need
believe that he stopped the plague at Vienna by his prayers. None of us
need attribute to anything but his sagacity the Divine revelations
whereby he predicted the destruction of a town for its wickedness, and
escaped thence, like Lot, alone; or by which he discovered, during the
famine of Vienna, that a certain rich widow had much corn hidden in her
cellars: but there are facts enough, credible and undoubted, concerning
St. Severinus, the apostle of Austria, to make us trust that in him, too,
wisdom was justified of all her children.

You may remark, among the few words which have been as yet said of St.
Severinus, a destruction, a plague, and a famine. Those words are a fair
sample of St. Severinus's times, and of the circumstances into which he
voluntarily threw himself. About the middle of the fifth century there
appears in the dying Roman province of Noricum (Austria we now call it) a
strange gentleman, eloquent and learned beyond all, and with the
strangest power of melting and ruling the hearts of men. Who he is he
will not tell, save that his name is Severinus, a right noble name
without doubt. Gradually it oozes out that he has been in the far East,
through long travels and strange dangers, through many cities and many
lands; but he will tell nothing. He is the servant of God, come hither
to try to be of use. He certainly could have come for no other reason,
unless to buy slaves; for Austria was at that time the very highway of
the nations, the centre of the human Mahlstrom, in which Huns, Gepiden,
Allmannen, Rugen, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down
round the starving and beleaguered Roman towns of that once fertile and
happy province. A man who went there for his own pleasure, or even
devotion, would have been as wise as one who had built hi