inction,
yet at another shone forth gloriously in opposition to the arrogance and
brutality of mundane passions; ignorance was profound, and yet here and
there, in the very heart of the mental darkness, gleamed bright centres
of movement and intellectual labor. It was the period when Abelard,
anticipating freedom of thought and of instruction, drew together upon
Mount St. Genevieve thousands of hearers anxious to follow him in the
study of the great problems of Nature and of the destiny of man and the
world. And far away from this throng, in the solitude of the abbey of
Bee, St. Anselm was offering to his monks a Christian and philosophical
demonstration of the existence of God--"faith seeking understanding"
(fides quoerens intellectuan), as he himself used to say. It was the
period, too, when, distressed at the licentiousness which was spreading
throughout the Church as well as lay society, two illustrious monks, St.
Bernard and St. Norbert, not only went preaching everywhere reformation
of morals, but labored at and succeeded in establishing for monastic life
a system of strict discipline and severe austerity. Lastly, it was the
period when, in the laic world, was created and developed the most
splendid fact of the middle ages, knighthood, that noble soaring of
imaginations and souls towards the ideal of Christian virtue and
soldierly honor. It is impossible to trace in detail the origin and
history of that grand fact which was so prominent in the days to which it
belonged, and which is so prominent still in the memories of men; but a
clear notion ought to be obtained of its moral character and its
practical worth. To this end a few pages shall be borrowed from Guizot's
_History of Civilization in France_. Let us first look on at the
admission of a knight, such as took place in the twelfth century. We
will afterwards see what rules of conduct were imposed upon him, not only
according to the oaths which he had to take on becoming knight, but
according to the idea formed of knighthood by the poets of the day, those
interpreters not only of actual life, but of men's sentiments also. We
shall then understand, without difficulty, what influence must have been
exercised, in the souls and lives of men, by such sentiments and such
rules, however great may have been the discrepancy between the knightly
ideal and the general actions and passions of contemporaries.

"The young man, the esquire who aspired to the title of