ably much later; that
has nothing to do with the argument:--

'Bridget, the victorious, she loved not the world;
She sat on it as a gull sits on the ocean;
She slept the sleep of a captive mother,
Mourning after her absent child.

She suffered not much from evil tongues;
She held the blessed faith of the Trinity;
Bridget, the mother of my Lord of Heaven,
The best among the sons of the Lord.

She was not querulous, nor malevolent;
She loved not the fierce wrangling of women;
She was not a backbiting serpent, or a liar;
She sold not the Son of God for that which passes away.

She was not greedy of the goods of this life;
She gave away without gall, without slackness;
She was not rough to wayfaring men;
She handled gently the wretched lepers.

She built her a town in the plains (of Kildare);
And dead, she is the patroness of many peoples.'

I might comment much on this quotation. I might point out how St.
Bridget is called the mother of the Lord, and by others, the Mary of the
Irish, the 'Automata coeli regina,' and seems to have been considered at
times as an avatar or incarnation of the blessed Virgin. I might more
than hint how that appellation, as well as the calling of Christ 'the
best of the sons of the Lord,' in an orthodox Catholic hymn, seems to
point to the remnants of an older creed, possibly Buddhist, the
transition whence towards Catholic Christianity was slow and imperfect. I
might make merry over the fact that there are many Bridgets, some say
eleven; even as there are three or four St. Patricks; and raise learned
doubts as to whether such persons ever existed, after that Straussian
method of pseudo-criticism which cometh not from above, from the Spirit
of God, nor yet indeed from below, from the sound region of fact, but
from within, out of the naughtiness of the heart, defiling a man. I
might weaken, too, the effect of the hymn by going on with the rest of
it, and making you smile at its childish miracles and portents; but I
should only do a foolish thing, by turning your minds away from the broad
fact that St. Bridget, or various persons who got, in the lapse of time,
massed together under the name of St. Bridget, were eminently good women.

It matters little whether these legends are historically correct. Their
value lies in the moral of them. And as for their real historical
correctness, the Straussian argument that no such persons e