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 was the third son.  Like Luther, he was religiously inclined from early youth, and panted for monastic seclusion.  At the age of twenty-three he entered the new monastery at Citeaux, which had been founded a few years before by Stephen Harding, an English saint, who revived the rule of Saint Benedict with still greater strictness, and was the founder of the Cistercian order,—­a branch of the Benedictines.  He entered this gloomy retreat, situated amid marshes and morasses, with no outward attractions like Cluny, but unhealthy and miserably poor,—­the dreariest spot, perhaps, in Burgundy; and he entered at the head of thirty young men, of the noble class, among whom were four of his brothers who had been knights, and who presented themselves to the abbot as novices, bent on the severest austerities that human nature could support.

Bernard himself was a beautiful, delicate, refined young man,—­ tall, with flaxen hair, fair complexion, blue eyes from which shone a superhuman simplicity and purity.  His noble birth would have opened to him the highest dignities of the Church, but he sought only to bear the yoke of Christ, and to be nailed to the cross; and he really became a common laborer wrapped in a coarse cowl, digging ditches and planting fields,—­for such were the labors of the monks of Citeaux when not performing their religious exercises.  But his disposition was as beautiful as his person, and he soon won the admiration of his brother monks, as he had won the affection of the knights of Burgundy.  Such was his physical weakness that “nearly everything he took his stomach rejected;” and such was the rigor of his austerities that he destroyed the power of appetite.  He could scarcely distinguish oil from wine.  He satisfied his hunger with the Bible and quenched his thirst with prayer.  In three years he became famous as a saint, and was made Abbot of Clairvaux,—­a new Cistercian convent, in a retired valley which had been a nest of robbers.

But his intellect was as remarkable as his piety, and his monastery became not only a model of monastic life to which flocked men from all parts of Europe to study its rules, but the ascetic abbot himself became an oracle on all the questions of the day.  So great was his influence that when he died, in 1153, he left behind one hundred and sixty monasteries formed after his model.  He became the counsellor of kings and nobles, bishops and popes.  He was