[6] This has not escaped Windisch. "Während," he writes, "Patrick nur der christlichen Hagiologie angehört, scheint Brigit zugleich die Erbin einer alten heidnischen Gottheit zu sein. Ihr Wesen enthält Ziige die mehr als eine heilig gesprochen Nonne hinter ihr vermuthen lassen." Windisch bases this chiefly upon the expressions in Broccan's hymn, which calls her the mother of Christ, and calls Christ her son, and equates her with Mary. The passage which I have adduced from the Irish life is even more remarkable: "Brigit," writes Whitley Stokes "(cp. Skr. _bhargas_) was born at sunrise neither within nor without a house, was bathed in milk, her breath revives the dead, a house in which she is staying flames up to heaven, cow-dung blazes before her, oil is poured on her head; she is fed from the milk of a white red-eared cow; a fiery pillar rises over her head; sun rays support her wet cloak; she remains a virgin; and she was one of the two mothers of Christ the Anointed. She has, according to Giraldus Cambrensis, a perpetual ashless fire watched by twenty nuns, of whom herself was one, blown by fans or bellows only, and surrounded by a hedge within which no male could enter" ("Top. Hib." chaps. 34, 35 and 36), from all which Stokes declares that one may without much rashness pick out certain of her life-incidents, as having "originally belonged to the myth or the ritual of some goddess of fire." (_See_ preface to "Three Middle Irish Homilies.") [7] "Mac-léighinn," which is to this day a usual Irish term for student. [8] Thus translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes in his "Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore," p. 194. In the original: "Conid assein dorala cumthanus mac leighinn in domuin re Brigit, co tabair in coimdhi doibh tria atach Brigte gach maith fhoirbhthi chuinghid." [9] Or to speak more accurately no names _were_ more common, but owing to the action of various influences, particularly of the National Board, with unsympathetic persons at its head, and of the men who direct the modern education of the Irish, the people who are not allowed by the National Board to learn history, and who are taught to despise the Irish language, are gradually being made ashamed of any names that are not English, and Patrick and Brigit almost bid fair to follow the way of Cormac, Conn, Felim, Art, Donough, Fergus, Diarmuid, and a score of other Christian names of men in common use a century ago, but now almost wholly extinct, and of Mève, Sive, Eefi, Sheela, Nuala, and as many more female names now nearly or completely obsolete. A woman of some education said to me lately, "God forbid I should handicap my daughter in life by calling her Brigit;" and a Catholic bishop said the other day that too often when an Irish parent abroad did pluck up courage to christen his son "Patrick," he put it in, in a shamefaced whisper, at the end of several other names. This is the direct result of the teaching given by the National Board.