Let some daring missionary go to preach in that country, his reception is of the worst, or perhaps he is met ou the frontier with menaces, and forbidden to preach at all; except sorrow and lost labor, nothing has yet proved attainable. It was very dangerous to go;--and with what likelihood of speeding? Efforts, we may suppose, are rare; but the pious wish being continual and universal, efforts can never altogether cease. From Henry the Fowler's capture of Brannibor, count seventy years, we find Henry's great-grandson reigning as Elective Kaiser,--Otto III., last of the direct "Saxon Kaisers," Otto Wonder of the World;--and alongside of Otto's great transactions, which were onoe called MIRABILIA MUNDI and are now fallen so extinct, there is the following small transaction, a new attempt to preach in Preussen, going on, which, contrariwise, is still worth taking notice of.
About the year 997 or 996, Adalbert, Bishop of Prag, a very zealous, most devout man, but evidently of hot temper, and liable to get into quarrels, had determined, after many painful experiences of the perverse ungovernable nature of corrupt mankind, to give up his nominally Christian flock altogether;to shake the dust off his feet against Prag, and devote himself to converting those Prussian Heathen, who, across the frontiers, were living in such savagery, and express bondage to the Devil, worshipping mere stocks and stones. In this enterprise he was encouraged by the Christian potentates who lay contiguous;especially by the Duke of Poland, to whom such next-neighbors, for all reasons, were an eye-sorrow.
Adalbert went, accordingly, with staff and scrip, two monks attending him, into that dangerous country: not in fear, he;a devout high-tempered man, verging now on fifty, his hair getting gray, and face marred with innumerable troubles and provocations of past time. He preached zealously, almost fiercely,--though chiefly with his eyes and gestures, I should think, having no command of the language. At Dantzig, among the Swedish-Goth kind of Heathen, he had some success, or affluence of attendance;not elsewhere that we hear of. In the Pillau region, for example, where he next landed, an amphibious Heathen lout hit him heavily across the shoulders with the flat of his oar; sent the poor Preacher to the ground, face foremost, and suddenly ended his salutary discourse for that time. However, he pressed forward, regardless of results, preaching the Evangel to all creatures who were willing or unwilling;--and pressed at last into the Sacred Circuit, the ROMOVA, or Place of Oak-trees, and of Wooden or Stone Idols (Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb Blocks), which it was death to enter. The Heathen Priests, as we may conceive it, rushed out; beckoned him, with loud unintelligible bullyings and fierce gestures, to begone;hustled, shook him, shoved him, as he did not go; then took to confused striking, struck finally a death-stroke on the head of poor Adalbert: so that "he stretched out both his arms ('Jesus, receive me thou!') and fell with his face to the ground, and lay dead there,--in the form of a crucifix," say his Biographers:
only the attendant monks escaping to tell.
Attendant monks, or Adalbert, had known nothing of their being on forbidden ground. Their accounts of the phenomenon accordingly leave it only half explained: How he was surprised by armed Heathen Devil's-servants in his sleep; was violently set upon, and his "beautiful bowels ( pulchra viscera )were run through with seven spears:" but this of the ROMOVA, or Sacred Bangputtis Church of Oak-trees, perhaps chief ROMOVA of the Country, rashly intruded into, with consequent strokes, and fall in the form of a crucifix, appears now to be the intelligible account. [Baillet, Vies des Saints (Paris, 1739), iii. 722. Bollandus, Acta Sanetorum, Aprilis tom. iii (DIE 23; in Edition venetiis,
1738), pp. 174-205. Voigt, Geschichte Preussens (Konigsberg, 1827-1839), i. 266-270.] We will take it for the real manner of Adalbert's exit;--no doubt of the essential transaction, or that it was a very flaming one on both sides.
The date given is 23d April, 997; date famous in the Romish Calendar since.
He was a Czech by birth, son of a Heathen Bohemian man of rank:
his name (Adalbert, A'lbert, BRIGHT-in-Nobleness) he got "at Magdeburg, whither he had gone to study" and seek baptism; where, as generally elsewhere, his fervent devout ways were admirable to his fellow-creatures. A "man of genius," we may well say: one of Heaven's bright souls, born into the muddy darkness of this world;--laid hold of by a transcendent Message, in the due transcendent degree. He entered Prag, as Bishop, not in a carriage and six, but "walking barefoot;" his contempt for earthly shadows being always extreme. Accordingly, his quarrels with the SOECULUMwere constant and endless; his wanderings up and down, and vehement arguings, in this world, to little visible effect, lasted all his days. We can perceive he was short-tempered, thin of skin:
