The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): FebruaryBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): February
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian saints
Shortly before his death, and during his last pastoral visitation, S.
Cuthbert went to see Elfleda in the neighbourhood of the great
monastery of Whitby, to consecrate a church which she had built there,
and to converse with her for the last time. They dined together, and
during the meal, seeing his knife drop from his trembling hand in the
abstraction of supernatural thoughts, she had a last opportunity of
admiring his prophetic intuition, and his constant care for the
salvation of souls. The fatigue of the holy bishop, who said
laughingly, "I cannot eat all day long; you must give me a little
rest"; the eagerness and pious curiosity of the young abbess, anxious
to know and do everything, who rushed up breathlessly during the
ceremony of the dedication to ask the bishop a _memento_ for a monk,
whose death she had just heard of,--all these details, says a modern
writer,[27] form a picture complete in its simplicity, upon which the
charmed mind can repose amid the savage habits and wild vicissitudes
of the struggle, then more violent than ever, between the
Northumbrians and Picts, the Saxons and the Celts.
S. Elfleda died at the age of sixty. No account of her last illness
has been transmitted to us.
S. MENGOLD, M.
(ABOUT A.D. 892.)
S. Mengold, second patron of the town of Huy on the Meuse, where a
church is erected under his invocation, was count of Huy, and was
murdered by some knights of his court, whose vices he attempted to
restrain.
His relics, along with those of several other saints of Huy, are
preserved in the noble church of Our Lady in that town.
S. CUTHMAN, C.
(DATE UNCERTAIN.)
[In Ancient Anglo-Saxon Kalendar belonging to the Abbey of Fécamp,
and French Martyrology. Authority:--Two lives of uncertain date, by
anonymous writers.]
The blessed Cuthman was by birth a native of Devonshire or Cornwall,
and his youth was spent in pasturing his father's sheep on the granite
moors. One day, when dinner time came, he was hungry, and not having a
companion to whom he could entrust his flock during his absence, he
drew a circle in the heather and gorse with his staff, and then
planted it in the soil, and said, "In the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, I command you sheep not to transgress the bounds I have drawn,
till I return from my dinner." And, wonderful to relate, the sheep
obeyed his command. Now there was a grey moorstone on which he was
wont to sit; and this moorstone has been ever since regarded with
singular veneration, says the ancient writer of his life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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