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 himself last summer a villa on the Rappahannock, or retired for private meditation to the orchard of Hougoumont during the battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, there Severinus stayed till men began to appreciate him; and called him, and not unjustly, Saint. Why not? He preached, he taught, he succoured, he advised, he fed, he governed; he turned aside the raids of the wild German kings; he gained a divine power over their hearts; he taught them something of God and of Christ, something of justice and mercy; something of peace and unity among themselves; till the fame ran through all the Alps, and far away into the Hungarian marches, that there was a prophet of God arisen in the land; and before the unarmed man, fasting and praying in his solitary cell on the mountain above Vienna, ten thousand knights and champions trembled, who never had trembled at the sight of armed hosts.