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.

The monks of Citeaux, of Morimond, of Pontigny, of Clairvaux, amid the wastes of a barren country, with their white habits and perpetual vigils and haircloth shirts and root dinners and hard labors in the field were yet the counsellors and ministers of kings and the creators of popes, and incited the nations to the most bloody and unfortunate wars in the whole history of society,—­I mean the Crusades.  Some were great intellectual giants, yet all repelled scepticism as life repels death; all dwelt on the sufferings of the cross as a door through which the penitent and believing could surely enter heaven, yet based the justice of the infinite Father of Love on what, when it appeals to consciousness, seems to be the direst injustice.  We cannot despise the Middle Ages, which produced such beatific and exalted saints, but we pity those dismal times when the great mass of the people had so little pleasure and comfort in this life, and such gloomy fears of the world to come; when life was made a perpetual sacrifice and abnegation of all the pleasures that are given us to enjoy,—­to use and not to pervert.  Hence monasticism was repulsive, even in its best ages, to enlightened reason, and fatal to all progress among nations, although it served a useful purpose when men were governed by fear alone, and when violence and strife and physical discomfort and ignorance and degrading superstitions covered the fairest portion of the earth with a funereal pall for more than a thousand years.