naturally fell sick, and remembering the prediction, and finding "how hard it was to kick against the pricks," begged Bernard's forgiveness, and promised all that he required of her. Accordingly she was separated from her husband, and took the usual conventual vow, which she kept "until this day," says the Abbot; for he wrote while she and Bernard were both still living. The other brother, Gerhard, still held out, "and loved the world." Nothing but suffering will ever convince you," said Bernard. "But the day is coming," continued he, putting his finger on his brother's side," and it comes quickly, when the lance plunged in your breast shall open to your heart a way for my counsels, which now you despise." "No sooner said than done," proceeds the biographer, "for after a few days he was wounded in just the spot marked by the priestly finger, and taken prisoner besides." Then, fearing death, he exclaimed, "I am a monk, a Cistercian monk." Bernard was sent for to comfort him in prison. But he refused to go, saying he "knew all this before, and the wound was not unto death, but unto life." And "it was even so;" for, contrary to expectation, the wound healed of a sudden. However, he was still a captive, and kept closely in ward. But one day, as he grew continually more and more desirous of the monastic life, he heard a voice more than mortal, as he lay wakeful in his dungeon, saying to him, "This day shalt thou be set free," and about nightfall, by accident as it were, he felt of his chains, and they fell off his hands with a heavy clank; still the door was shut, and a crowd of beggars stood before it, not to mention the guards. But the bar fell back, and the door opened at his approach. The beggars, astonished at the prodigy, fled without speaking. It was the hour of evening prayers when he drew nigh the church, walking slowly, for some of the chains still clung to him. Bernard espied his brother, and said, "Brother Gerhard, have you come? There is still something left that you may hear." But "his eyes were holden, so that he did not know what was going on," until Bernard led him into the church. "Thus was he freed from captivity and love of the world." After this, Bernard "went to and fro upon the earth, and walked up and down in it," seeking to bring souls into the monastic fold. He compelled many to come in. His word was so taking, his eloquence so persuasive,-for he knew the way equally to the heart of the clown and the courtier, that when he was to preach in public or private, wise "mothers shut up their sons at home; wives kept back their husbands from hearing, for the Holy Ghost gave such voice and power to his words, that scarce any tie could restrain those who listened." All whom he converted were like the first Christians, "of one heart and one mind." * His biographer gives a glowing account of his noviciate, and holds him up as an ideal of austerity, to be looked up to and imitated by all tyros in the convents. He not only resisted the desire of the senses, but turned the senses themselves out of doors. "When, with the interior sense, he began to feel the sweetness of divine love breathe gently over him, he feared lest the secret sense within should be darkened by the senses from without, so he scarce gave them enough to keep them in being. The 'breathings of divine love' were at first but a momentary impression, but soon became a constant habit, and the habit, at length, nature itself." Absorbed entirely in the spirit, all his hopes directed inward to God, his mind entirely occupied with spiritual meditation, seeing he saw not, hearing he heard not; eating he tasted not; and scarce felt anything with the corporeal sense. After passing a year in the noviciate's cell, he hardly knew when he went out whether it had a roof or not." This was deemed the perfection of a monk's life. He ate only to sustain the body, and knew not whether he fed on bread or stones, or whether his drink was water or wine. "He went to his dinner as to the rack." Nemesis never sleeps even in a monk's cell, so nature took sweet revenge, and racked him all his life long in every limb of his attenuated frame. However, he did two good things, and that daily. He worked hard with his hands, and walked in the woods, The monastic life was then held in very high esteem. Bernard calls it "a second baptism;" "it renders its professors like the angels, and unlike men." It could wash out the deepest sins. See Neander's Heilige Bernhard und sein Zeitalter, &c. Berlin, 1813. p. 1, 42, note 2. But he mentions Norbert advising Count Theobald of Champagne not to become a monk, because he was already so useful to the poor and down-trodden. where he used afterwards to confess he found his best thoughts, and had no teachers but the birch-trees and the oaks. "Trust my experience," he subsequently wrote to Henry of Murdoch, a celebrated teacher of speculative theology, "thou wilt find in the woods somewhat more than in books; wood and stone shall teach thee what thou canst not learn from masters."* The cheerful though serious countenance of nature, we should fancy, might shame even a monk into a rational life; but man outgrows nothing so reluctantly as the religious prejudice of his times, and it is given to but few to take a single step in advance of their age. But one day, while exhausted with very slight labour in reaping, Bernard felt a natural shame at the artificial weakness of his body; he turned aside, and "besought the Lord for strength," which was given, miraculously, as the Abbot thinks, and he reaped before them all. On entering the monastic state, he had not chosen, as many did, a cloister, where the buxom ascetics revelled in everything but self-mortification. He chose the cloister at Citeaux, a wild quarter of the bishopric of Chalons sur la Saone. The number of monks increased so rapidly, through his efforts and austere reputation, that the buildings of the establishment required to be enlarged, and new ones erected. A new cloister, also, was established in another place. This was the celebrated cloister of Clairvaux, a wild, desolate glen, formerly named the Valley of Wormwood,† on account of a den of robbers in it, as some say; but after the cloister was built, it was called Clairvaux,-the fair valley. In three years from its foundation, Bernard was appointed Abbot of Clairvaux, and ordained to that office by the famous William de Champeaux, whose skill in dialectics took nothing from the jolly roundness of his face. The spectators laughed, or admired, at the Boulau, Hist. Universitatis Parisiensis, Tom. II. p. 162, cited in Neander, 1. c., p. 45. Nicolaus Hacqueville thus poetically celebrates the charms of the place: Et nemore, et viridi tunc adoperta rubo, De Laudibus Bernardi, prefixed to his works, fol. 24, 1, of this edition. contrast between the bishop and the monk. Established in his new office, his example animated the whole cloister. "You might see there a weak and languid man, solicitous for all, but careless of himself; obedient to all in all things, but scarce doing anything for himself. Not deeming his own concerns of prior importance to others, he strove chiefly to avoid sparing his own body. So he made his spiritual studies the more rigorous. His body, attenuated by various infirmities, was still more worn down by fast and watching without intermission. He prayed standing day and night, till his knees, weakened by fasting, and his feet, swollen with extreme toil, refused to sustain his body. For a long time, in secrecy he wore sackcloth next his skin, but when the fact was accidentally discovered he cast it off, and returned to his common dress. His food was bread and milk; water, in which pulse had been boiled, or such thin water-gruel as men make for little children."* Physicians who saw him, or listened to his eloquence, wondered at the strength in his emaciated frame, as much as if they had seen a lamb drawing the plough. The monkish admirer relates that Gerhard was a sort of butler in the establishment, and as winter began to set in, he naturally, in the way of his vocation, complained of the slender provision, both in money and victuals, laid in for the season. To this complaint Bernard returned no reply. But being told that no less a sum than eleven pounds was absolutely needed, and that for the present emergency, he sent away his brother and betook himself to prayer. While at his devotion a messenger arrived, and said that a woman stood at the gate, asking to see him. She fell down at his feet, and gave him twelve pounds to pray for her husband, then dangerously ill. "Go in peace," said Bernard to the woman, "thou shalt find thy husband safe and sound." She went home and found as he had foretold. A similar case often occurred, says William, and unexpected help came from the Lord, whenever common means failed. It is difficult to estimate the power of prejudice and superstition to blind men's eyes, but each of the then contemporary biographers of Bernard ascribes to him a similar * Vita S. Bernardi, 1. c., Lib. I. c. viii. miraculous power, and relates the wonderful cures he effected on men, women, and children.* Weak as Bernard was in body, and secluded from the world, in that remote valley, he yet took an active part in all the great concerns of Church and State, not only in France but out of it. He was present at councils, and men journeyed from far to ask his advice. He lifted his voice indignantly to rebuke the wantonness and pride of the clergy; wantonness and pride not surpassed by the nobles of the court of Sardanapalus. He declaimed with the sternest vehemence against the great, who trod the humble down into the dust. He laboured to extend his own order, and still more to defend the Church from the assaults of the temporal powers,-no light work, nor lightly undertaken. At this time the moral state of the clergy was bad, very bad. Men of loose habits and no religion pressed into the lucrative offices of the Church, through the influence of some prince or count. "Of other care they little reckoning took, Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, Their office was gain. The Pope might make laws, often as he listed, against simony, extravagance, licentiousness, and all other clerical sins of the age; cunning men found means to break them all, and live unconcerned, or at least unmolested. The Popes themselves were partakers of their crimes. "The stench of the Roman court," says William of Paris, "rising from this dunghill of usury, robbery, and simony, went up a hateful steam, to the very clouds." The vice of the clergy reached its height about the middle of the twelfth century. In England alone, about that time, in the short space of ten or twelve years, more than a hundred murders were committed by priests. Bernard saw these monstrous evils, and laboured Neander tells a singular story, illustrating this peculiarity of the age. One Norbert, a rough, tempestuous, destructive personage, was once riding in a hunting expedition, and a violent storm came on. His horse was struck down by lightning, and he lay senseless nearly an hour. When he recovered, and saw how providentially he had escaped death, a shudder came over him, at the thought of his past life, from which he was so near being summoned to the bar of God. He resolved to found a religious institution, kept his vow, and was one of the most distinguished reformers of his age. L. c., p. 44, seq. |