Valentinian II was emperor, Syricius pope. Victorinus had held a bishopric, but zeal for the conversion of the heathen ate sleep from his eyes and flesh from his bones and from his heart willingness to rest in the cushioned places of the Church. He resigned his bishop’s crook, took a staff of oak, tied to it a cross, drew about him ten of his spiritual sons, and with them fared from the Gallic city, till then the scene of his labours. He fared northward, crossed after many days the Rhine, fared onward, northward, and eastward. He was not for tribes and nations who might hear daily of Christ and Paul; he was for barbarians who had never heard or heard but the faintest rumour. He was told of a Gothic people that had not moved with other Goths into Dacia. Victorinus turned his face in that direction. At last he and his following came to islands in the forest ocean, came to Goths, came to Terig Oak.
He stood in his Roman dress, with the oak staff and the bound cross advanced, and ranged behind him the ten Christian men and three barbarian converts, who served him for interpreters. Not tall, in his sixtieth year, he was dark and spare and filled with fire, had eyes that glowed and a voice of gold and honey. He would speak with the king of these home-staying Goths.
“Terig is sore wounded and ill in his bed.”
“O heathen folk, so much the more should we speak with your king! Else he may die unsalved.”
Alaran cried, “O Roman, are you one-who-heals? A boar tusked him.”
“I have healing, young man,” answered Victorinus, “for direr wounds. Let me see him.”
“Come, then,” said Alaran. “Who heals Terig, what care I if he be stranger or home man?”
Terig lay on bear-skins, very grim, looking silently at his ox-fate. Staff in hand, Victorinus stood and regarded him, while in at the ample doorway crowded the bishop’s own following and the household of Terig.
Victorinus beckoned from the ten Probus, the Milanese physician. “Heal the flesh if you can, Probus. So we may sooner come to his soul.”
Probus the physician healed Terig the Goth, whereby Victorinus got permission to dwell in the forest hard-by Terig Oak, to fell trees and build for himself and his followers a house, and for his god a church. For the time being that was all he won. Terig said that he was well contented with his own gods, and yawned whether Victorinus spoke persuasively, or with a solemn and threatening air. But the newcomers might use the forest. Did not the deer and the bear do that? Moreover, Terig would send men to help in the hewing and building. And Terig would not let interfere the priests of the sacred grove.