his chief means of success; he founded schools, filled them with students to whom promises of ecclesiastical preferments were held out as rewards of their merit, and, in fine, exerted himself with all his might to restore to the Christian Church her dignity and her influence.  When Charlemagne was dead, nearly all his great achievements disappeared in the chaos which came after him; his schools alone survived and preserved certain centres of intellectual activity.  When the feudal system had become established, and had introduced some rule into social relations, when the fate of mankind appeared no longer entirely left to the risks of force, intellect once more found some sort of employment, and once more assumed some sort of sway.  Active and educated minds once more began to watch with some sort of independence the social facts before their eyes, to stigmatize vices and to seek for remedies.  The spectacle afforded by their age could not fail to strike them.  Society, after having made some few strides away from physical chaos, seemed in danger of falling into moral chaos; morals had sunk far below the laws, and religion was in deplorable contrast to morals.  It was not laymen only who abandoned themselves with impunity to every excess of violence and licentiousness; scandals were frequent amongst the clergy themselves; bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices, publicly sold or left by will, passed down through families from father to son, and from husband to wife, and the possessions of the Church served for dowry to the daughters of bishops.  Absolution was at a low quotation in the market, and redemption for sins of the greatest enormity cost scarcely the price of founding a church or a monastery.  Horror-stricken at the sight of such corruption in the only things they at that time recognized as holy, men no longer knew where to find the rule of life or the safeguard of conscience.  But it is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity that it is unable to bear for long, without making an effort to check them, the vices it has been unable to prevent, and that it always carries in its womb the vigorous germ of human regeneration.  In the midst of their irregularities, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the outbreak of a grand religious, moral, and intellectual fermentation, and it was the Church herself that had the honor and the power of taking the initiative in the reformation.  Under the influence of Gregory VII. the rigor of the popes began to declare itself against the scandals of the episcopate, the traffic in ecclesiastical benefices, and the bad morals of the secular clergy.  At the same time, austere men exerted themselves to rekindle the fervor of monastic life, re-established rigid rules in the cloister, and refilled the monasteries by their preaching and example.  St. Robert of Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St. Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux, which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse;