And so at last the Nibelungen hoard was won. 'And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and the merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas! alas, that great Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.' St. John passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria--especially to Jerusalem; perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's tomb, or even Christ himself, might save them. St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had passed their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his hermitage at Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied. St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all human power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself. Babylon the great had fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven to set up the city of God for ever. In that thought he wrote his De Civitate Dei. Read it, gentlemen--especially you who are to be priests--not merely for its details of the fall of Rome, but as the noblest theodicy which has yet proceeded from a human pen. Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing the spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, 'with the native instinct of the barbarian,' as Dr. Sheppard well says. Always toward the sun. Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the sun, and Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting light. He tried to cross into Sicily: but a storm wrecked his boats, and the Goths were afraid of the sea. And after a while he died. And the wild men made a great mourning over him. They had now no plan left; no heart to go south, and look for Odin over the sea. But of one thing they were resolved, that the base Romans should not dig up Alaric out of his barrow and scatter his bones to the winds. So they put no barrow over the great king; but under the walls of Cosenza they turned the river-bed, and in that river-bed they set Alaric, armed and mailed, upright upon his horse, with gold, and jewels, and arms, and it may be captive youths and maids, that he might enter into Valhalla in royal pomp, and make a worthy show among the heroes in Odin's hall. And then they turned back the river into its bed, and slew the slaves who had done the work, that no man might know where Alaric lies: and no man does know till this day.