About half the time of the monks, in a well-regulated monastery, was given to singing and devotional exercises and religious improvement, and the other half to labors in the fields, or in painting or musical composition.  So far as we know, the monks lived in great harmony, and were obedient to the commands of their superiors.  They had a common object to live for, and had few differences in opinion on any subject.  They did not enjoy a high life, but it was free from distracting pleasures.  They affected great humility, with which spiritual pride was mingled,—­not the arrogant pride of the dialectician, but the self-satisfied pride of the devotee.  There was no religious hatred, except towards Turks and Saracens.  The monk, in his narrowness and ignorance, may be repulsive to an enlightened age:  he was not repulsive to his own, for he was not behind it either in his ideas or in his habits of life.  In fact, the more repulsive the monk of the dark ages is to this generation, the more venerated he was by bishops and barons seven hundred years ago; which fact leads us to infer that the degenerate monk might be to us most interesting when he was most condemned by the reformers of his day, since he was more humane, genial, and free than his brethren, chained to the rigid discipline of his convent.  Even a Friar Tuck is not so repulsive to us as an unsocial, austere, narrow-minded, and ignorant fanatic of the eleventh century.

But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles of ignorance and despair.  With the opening of the twelfth century light began to dawn upon the human mind.  The intellectual monk, long accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those subjects which had occupied his thoughts,—­on God and His attributes, on the nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the Saviour, on the power of the will to resist evil, and other questions that had agitated the early Fathers of the Church.  Then arose such men as Erigena, Roscelin, Berenger, Lanfranc, Anselm, Bernard, and others,—­all more or less orthodox, but inquiring and intellectual.  It was within the walls of the cloister that the awakening began and the first impulse was given to learning and philosophy.  The abbey of Bec, in Normandy, was the most distinguished of new intellectual centres, while Clairvaux and other princely abbeys had inmates as distinguished for meditative habits as for luxury and pride.

It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in ample possessions, and their churches rivalled cathedrals 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