away with the
many abuses which had become so widely spread in the Church by worldly
influences. "Who will give me the satisfaction," said he in his letter,
"of beholding the Church of God, before I die, in a condition like that
in which it was in ancient days, when the apostles threw out their nets,
not for silver and gold, but for souls? How fervently I wish thou
mightest inherit the word of that apostle whose episcopal seat thou hast
acquired, of him who said, 'Thy gold perish with thee.' Oh that all the
enemies of Zion might tremble before this dreadful word, and shrink back
abashed! This, thy mother indeed expects and requires of thee, for this
long and sigh the sons of thy mother, small and great, that every plant
which our Father in heaven has not planted may be rooted up by thy
hands." He then alluded to the sudden deaths of the last predecessors of
the Pope, exhorting him to humility, and reminding him of his
responsibility. "In all thy works," he wrote, "remember that thou art a
man; and let the fear of Him who taketh away the breath of rulers be
ever before thine eyes."

Eugene was soon forced to yield, it is true, to the superior force of
the insurrectionary spirit in Rome, and in 1146 to take refuge in
France; but, like Urban and Innocent, he too, from this country,
attained to the highest triumph of the papal power. Like Innocent, he
found there, in the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, a mightier instrument
for operating on the minds of the age than he could have found in any
other country; and like Urban, when banished from the ancient seat of
the papacy, he was enabled to place himself at the head of a crusade
proclaimed in his name, and undertaken with great enthusiasm; an
enterprise from which a new impression of sacredness would be reflected
back upon his own person.

The news of the success which had attended the arms of the Saracens in
Syria, the defeat of the Christians, the conquest of the ancient
Christian territory of Edessa, the danger which threatened the new
Christian kingdom of Jerusalem and the Holy City, had spread alarm among
the Western nations, and the Pope considered himself bound to summon the
Christians of the West to the assistance of their hard-pressed brethren
in the faith and to the recovery of the holy places. By a letter
directed to the abbot Bernard he commissioned him to exhort the Western
Christians in his name, that, for penance and forgiveness of sins, they
should march to th