Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/159

Rh or less absurd. His horse seems to have had its share in his saintly glory. In one picture, you see a remarkable white flower growing out of its mouth. The people in the surrounding districts seem to have a fanatical devotion for his memory, as well as faith in his power.

“Do you pray also to Brother Klaus, when you are in need of help?” I inquired from our young attendant, the daughter of the host of our hotel, the Golden Key, at Sarnen. “Yes, certainly!” replied she.

“But do you not think that God would hear your prayers, if you addressed them to Himself?” “Yes—but help comes more quickly if one prays to Brother Klaus.”

It is an easy thing for the Protestant Christian to smile at the attributes with which the popular imagination, and the popular childishness of Catholic countries, deck out their saint; and the thinking world, of the present day, has another and a higher ideal of the Christian life, than that which is represented by the life of the self-torturing, world-abandoning hermit. But yet it is certain, that this lonely, self-abnegation of all which the world gives, brings with it, powers of which the earthly great are destitute, and which govern the heart of princes and people. To fear nothing but God, gives alone, immeasurable strength.

When the cruel Queen Agnes, in order to revenge the death of her husband, King Albrecht, had a thousand innocent persons, men, women, and children, tortured and murdered, in whose blood, she said, “she bathed as in morning dew”—when she, with the property of her victims, built upon the spot of Albrecht's