and loving of saints. His humanity was as marked as his
fanaticism, and nothing could weaken it,--not even the rigors of his
convent life. He wept at the sorrows of all who sought his sympathy or
advice. On the occasion of his brother's death he endeavored to preach a
sermon on the Canticles, but broke down as Jerome did at the funeral of
Paula. He kept to the last the most vivid recollection of his mother;
and every night, before he went to bed, he recited the seven Penitential
Psalms for the benefit of her soul.

In his sermons and exhortations Bernard dwelt equally on the wrath of
God and the love of Christ. Said he to a runaway Cistercian, "Thou
fearest watchings, fasts, and manual labor, but these are light to one
who thinks on eternal fire. The remembrance of the outer darkness takes
away all horror from solitude. Place before thine eyes the everlasting
weeping and gnashing of teeth, the fury of those flames which can never
be extinguished" (the essence of the theology of the Middle Ages,--the
fear of Hell, of a physical and eternal Hell of bodily torments, by
which fear those ages were controlled). Bernard, the loveliest
impersonation of virtue which those ages saw, was not beyond their
ideas. He impersonated them, and therefore led the age and became its
greatest oracle. The passive virtues of the Sermon on the Mount were
united with the fiercest passions of religious intolerance and the most
repulsive views of divine vengeance. That is the soul of monasticism,
even as reformed by Harding, Alberic, and Bernard in the twelfth
century, less human than in the tenth century, yet more intellectual.

The monks of Citeaux, of Morimond, of Pontigny, of Clairvaux, amid the
wastes of a barren country, with their white habits and perpetual vigils
and haircloth shirts and root dinners and hard labors in the field, were
yet the counsellors and ministers of kings and the creators of popes,
and incited the nations to the most bloody and unfortunate wars in the
whole history of society,--I mean the Crusades. Some were great
intellectual giants, yet all repelled scepticism as life repels death;
all dwelt on the sufferings of the cross as a door through which the
penitent and believing could surely enter heaven, yet based the justice
of the infinite Father of Love on what, when it appeals to
consciousness, seems to be the direst injustice. We cannot despise the
Middle Ages, which produced such beatific and exalted saints, but we