drals in size and
magnificence, and their abbots were lords and princes,--the palmy age of
monastic institutions, chiefly of the Benedictine order,--that Saint
Bernard, the greatest and best representative of Mediaeval monasticism,
was born, 1091, at Fontaine, in Burgundy. He belonged to a noble family.
His mother was as remarkable as Monica or Nonna. She had six sons and a
daughter, whom she early consecrated to the Lord. Bernard was the third
son. Like Luther, he was religiously inclined from early youth, and
panted for monastic seclusion. At the age of twenty-three he entered the
new monastery at Citeaux, which had been founded a few years before by
Stephen Harding, an English saint, who revived the rule of Saint
Benedict with still greater strictness, and was the founder of the
Cistercian order,--a branch of the Benedictines. He entered this gloomy
retreat, situated amid marshes and morasses, with no outward attractions
like Cluny, but unhealthy and miserably poor,--the dreariest spot,
perhaps, in Burgundy; and he entered at the head of thirty young men, of
the noble class, among whom were four of his brothers who had been
knights, and who presented themselves to the abbot as novices, bent on
the severest austerities that human nature could support.

Bernard himself was a beautiful, delicate, refined young man,--tall,
with flaxen hair, fair complexion, blue eyes from which shone a
superhuman simplicity and purity. His noble birth would have opened to
him the highest dignities of the Church, but he sought only to bear the
yoke of Christ, and to be nailed to the cross; and he really became a
common laborer wrapped in a coarse cowl, digging ditches and planting
fields,--for such were the labors of the monks of Citeaux when not
performing their religious exercises. But his disposition was as
beautiful as his person, and he soon won the admiration of his brother
monks, as he had won the affection of the knights of Burgundy. Such was
his physical weakness that "nearly everything he took his stomach
rejected;" and such was the rigor of his austerities that he destroyed
the power of appetite. He could scarcely distinguish oil from wine. He
satisfied his hunger with the Bible, and quenched his thirst with
prayer. In three years he became famous as a saint, and was made Abbot
of Clairvaux,--a new Cistercian convent, in a retired valley which had
been a nest of robbers.

But his intellect was as remarkable as his piety, and h