The Lives of the Saints Volume 1 - St. Patrick's Basilica

master of Italy, sent honorable letters to the saint, promising him all
he was pleased to ask; but Severinus only desired of him the restoration
of a certain banished man. Having foretold his death long before it
happened, he fell ill of a pleurisy on the 5th of January, and on the
fourth day of his illness, having received the viaticum, and arming his
whole body with the sign of the cross, and repeating that verse of the
psalmist, _Let every spirit praise the Lord_,[1] he closed his eyes, and
expired in the year 482. Six years after, his disciples, obliged by the
incursions of Barbarians, retired with his relics into Italy, and
deposited them at Luculano, near Naples, where a great monastery was
built, of which Eugippius, his disciple, and author of his life, was
soon after made the second abbot. In the year 910 they were translated
to Naples, where to this day they are honored in a Benedictin abbey,
which bears his name. The Roman and other Martyrologies place his
festival on this day, as being that of his death.
* * * * *
A perfect spirit of sincere humility is the spirit of the most sublime
and heroic degree of Christian virtue and perfection. As the great work
of the sanctification of our souls is to be begun by humility, so must
it be completed by the same. Humility invites the Holy Ghost into the
soul, and prepares her to receive his graces; and from the most perfect
charity, which he infuses, she derives a new interior light, and an
experimental knowledge of God and herself, with an _infused_ humility
far clearer in the light of the understanding, in which she sees God's
infinite greatness, and her own total insufficiency, baseness, and
nothingness, after a quite new manner; and in which she conceives a
relish of contempt and humiliations as her due, feels a secret sentiment
of joy in suffering them, sincerely loves her own abjection, dependence,
and correction, dreads the esteem and praises of others, as snares by
which a mortal poison may imperceptibly insinuate itself into her
affections, and deprive her of the divine grace; is so far from
preferring herself to any one, that she always places herself below all
creatures, is almost sunk in the deep abyss of her own nothingness,
never speaks of herself to her own advantage, or affects a show of
modesty in order to appear humble before men, in all good, gives the
_entire_ glory to God alone, and as to herself, glories only in her
infirmities, pleasing herself in her own weakness and nothingness,
rejoicing that God is the great _all_ in her and in all creatures.
Footnotes:
1. Ps. 150.
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