to pity or excite to rage.  With a long neck, like that of Cicero, and a trembling, emaciated frame, he preached with passionate intensity.  Nobody could resist his eloquence.  He could scarcely stand upright from weakness, yet he could address ten thousand men.  He was an outspoken man, and reproved the greatest dignitaries with as much boldness as did Savonarola.  He denounced the gluttony of monks, the avarice of popes, and the rapacity of princes.  He held heresy in mortal hatred, like the Fathers of the fifth century.  His hostility to Abelard was direful, since he looked upon him as undermining Christianity and extinguishing faith in the world.  In his defence of orthodoxy he was the peer of Augustine or Athanasius.  He absolutely abhorred the Mohammedans as the bitterest foes of Christendom,—­the persecutors of pious pilgrims.  He wandered over Europe preaching a crusade.  He renounced the world, yet was compelled by the unanimous voice of his contemporaries to govern the world.  He gave a new impulse to the order of Knights Templars.  He was as warlike as he was humble.  He would breathe the breath of intense hostility into the souls of crusaders, and then hasten back to the desolate and barren country in which Clairvaux was situated, rebuild his hut of leaves and boughs, and soothe his restless spirit with the study of the Song of Songs.  Like his age, and like his institution, he was a great contradiction.  The fiercest and most dogmatic of controversialists was the most gentle 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.