that morality was but little more regarded than the faith.  Dating from the latter half of the eleventh century, not only the popes, but the whole orthodox Church of France and its spiritual heads, were seriously disquieted at the state of mind of Southern France, and the dangers it threatened to the whole of Christendom.  In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius iii., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse.  “We see here,” he wrote to Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, “churches without flocks, flocks without priests, priests without the respect which is their due, and Christians without Christ; men die in their sins without being reconciled by penance or admitted to the holy communion; souls are sent pell-mell before the awful tribunal of God; the grace of baptism is refused to little children; those to whom the Lord said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me,’ do not obtain the means of coming to salvation.  Is it because of a belief that these little children have no need of the Saviour, inasmuch as they are little?  Is it then for nought that our Lord from being great became little?  What say I?  Is it then for nought that He was scourged and spat upon, crucified and dead?” St. Bernard preached with great success in Toulouse itself, but he was not satisfied with easy successes.  He had come to fight the heretics; and he went to look for them where he was told he would find them numerous and powerful.  “He repaired,” says a contemporary chronicler, “to the castle of Vertfeuil (or Verfeil, in the district of Toulouse), where flourished at that time the scions of a numerous nobility and of a multitude of people, thinking that, if he could extinguish heretical perversity in this place where it was so very much spread, it would be easy for him to make head against it elsewhere.  When he had begun preaching, in the church, against those who were of most consideration in the place, they went out, and the people followed them; but the holy man, going out after them, gave utterance to the word of God in the public streets.  The nobles then hid themselves on all sides in their houses; and as for him, he continued to preach to the common people who came about him.  Whereupon, the others making uproar and knocking upon the doors, so that the crowd could not hear his voice, he then, having shaken off the dust from his feet as a testimony against them, departed from their midst, and, looking on the town, cursed it, saying, ‘Vertfeuil, God wither thee!’ Now there were, at that time, in the castle, a hundred knights abiding, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense, not at the expense of other.”