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 nothi