to see the murmurs of men falling upon me rather than upon the Lord.  To me it is a blessed thing that God should deign to use me as a buckler to shield Himself.  I shrink not from humiliation, provided that His glory be unassailed.”  But at the same time St. Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety.  “We be fallen upon very grievous times,” he wrote to Pope Eugenius iii.; “the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy.  Do not the heathen say, ’Where is now their God?’ And who can wonder?  The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine.  Did we undertake the work rashly?  Did we behave ourselves lightly?  How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians!  Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it?  But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it.”

The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise.  King Louis, on his way back to France, had staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that from which he had found it so difficult to get out.  Suger, when he became acquainted with this project, opposed it as he had opposed the former; but, at the same time, as he, in common with all his age, considered the deliverance of the Holy Land to be the bounden duty of Christians, he conceived the idea of dedicating the large fortune and great influence he had acquired to the cause of a new crusade, to be undertaken by himself and at his own expense, without compromising either king or state.  He unfolded his views to a meeting of bishops assembled at Chartres; and he went to Tours, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Martin to implore his protection.  Already more than ten thousand pilgrims were in arms at his call, and already he had himself chosen a warrior, of ability and renown, to command them, when he fell ill, and died at the end of four months, in 1152, aged seventy, and “thanking the Almighty,” says his biographer, “for having taken him to Him, not suddenly, but little by little, in order to bring him step by step to the rest needful for the weary man.”  It is said that, in his last days and when St. Bernard was exhorting him not to think any more save only of the heavenly Jerusalem, Suger still expressed to him his regret at dying without having succored the city which was so dear to them both.