“Oh, veiled woman,” he answered, “why should I, that am clean now in body and limb, touch this filthy leper of the blue-grey skin? Ask me not to do this thing.”
Then Bridget took water and washed the leper herself. Immediately the other who had been healed, cried out, “A fire is raging under my skin;” and the disease came again on him worse than ever. Thus was he punished for his pride.
The lark is sacred to St. Bridget because its song woke her every morning to prayers, when she had service for the women who were her converts.
The influence of St. Bridget remains a permanent power in Ireland even to this day, and she is much feared by the enemy of souls and the ill-doer. When Earl Strongbow was dying, he affirmed that he saw St. Bridget approaching his bed, and she struck him on the foot, and the wound she gave him mortified, and of this he died. This happened six hundred years after Bridget’s death.
St. Bridget, throughout her long life, held the highest position and dignity in the Irish Church. She erected a temple in Kildare, ordained bishops, and was head and chief of all the sacred virgins.
She also held equal rank with the archbishop; if he had an episcopal chair (cathedra episcopalis), so St. Bridget had a virginal chair (cathedra puellaris), and was pre-eminent above all the abbesses of Ireland, or of the Scots, for sanctity and power.
ST. KIERAN.
St. Kieran, also, did good service five hundred years after his death; for when a great chief and his band plundered Clonmacnoise and carried off the jewels from the shrine, the spirit of St. Kieran was seen in the doorway, crosier in hand, striking at the plunderers; and when they fled to their boat, St. Kieran raised up a strong wind that drove back the boat, and finally the chief robber was taken and put to death, having first confessed his crime, and testified as to St. Kieran’s wrath against him.