Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

While he was thus prey to an inner struggle, where nature struggled to yield to grace, he went to see his brothers who were with the Duke of Burgundy at the siege of the castle of Grancey. His perplexities having increased on the road, he entered a church where he prayed to God with many tears to make His will known to him and to give him the courage to follow it. His prayer finished, he felt a strong resolution to embrace the institute of Cîteaux. He pleaded his cau institut de Cîteaux Mother house of the Cistercian Order where Bernard completed his novitiate. se so well with his family that those who had disapproved of him followed his example. Such were his brothers Guido, Gerard, Bartholomew, Andrew, and Gauldry, his uncle, Count of Touillon, near Autun, famous for his martial valor.

Andrew, engaged in the profession of arms, hesitated to follow his brother Bernard; but his mother, the blessed Aleth, who, as we have said, had died, appeared to him and determined him to leave the world. Guido was held back by several obstacles: he was married and had two daughters. His wife gave him his freedom and entered the monastery of Juilly herself, near Dijon. Gerard, the Saint's second brother, was little disposed to become a religious. He was a very distinguished officer who loved the world. He received a lance wound to the side, as Bernard had predicted to him, and was taken prisoner. Then he promised to join his brothers; immediately he obtained his healing. After some time of captivity, from which Bernard made useless efforts to extract him, he heard, during his sleep, a voice that said to him: "You will be delivered today." He took this for a dream; but at the hour of Vespers (it was during Lent), reflecting on what he had heard, he touched the irons that held his feet, and they detached on one side. He went to the door of the dungeon, and the lock fell into his hands. He went out without anyone stopping him. He went up to the church still having his irons on one foot; but, either he was not recognized, or they could not seize him. Thus he came to find his brothers and joined them to embrace a nobler militia than that of this century.

After these domestic conquests, Bernard made others outside his family; for he was so powerful in his exhortations that, when he gave them in public or in private, wives would hold back their husbands, mothers would lock up their children, and friends would amuse their friends, for fear that by going to hear him they would let themselves be persuaded to become religious. He won over more than thirty people, among whom was the lord Hugh of Mâcon, a very noble, very virtuous, and very rich gentleman, who was later the founder and first abbot of Pontigny and Bishop of Auxerre. At first, all conversation between him and Bernard was prevented, but the latter having gone to find him in a field where he was, a great storm so effectively scattered everyone surrounding him that he had the means to speak to him alone. He did so in the middle of the countryside, without the rain falling on them; this miracle, joined to the unction of the Saint's word, decided Hugh to embrace the monastic life. This great number of people he had won for God retired together into a house that one of them had in Châtillon: there, before being religious, they performed all the exercises with incredible fervor.

Before retiring to Cîteaux, Bernard and his brothers went to the castle of Fontaines to say goodbye to their father and ask for his blessing. They left their young brother Nivard with him, who was to be the consolation of his old age. Having seen him, upon returning, playing with other children, Guido, the eldest of all, said to him: "Goodbye, my little brother Nivard; you alone will have our goods and our lands." — "What!" replied the child with a wisdom beyond his years, "you take heaven for yourselves, and you leave me the earth? The division is too unequal." They went away, leaving Nivard with his father. But, some time later, he left the world like them and followed them. Thus, of the whole family, only the father remained, who was very old, with a daughter of whom we shall speak later.

Saint Stephen was then Abbot of Cîteaux after Saint Robert and Saint Alberic, who had been its founders. Bernard, who was about twenty-three years old, came to throw himself at his feet with this illustrious company of postulants, to ask him for the favor of being admitted into his new institute. Stephen received them with all the more joy because a religious had been warned by a vision of their arrival. He began his novitiate with such fervor and such an ardent desire to advance in virtue that one would not have taken him for a neophyte, but for an old man already consumed in the practices of the inner life. He thought constantly of the motives he had had in leaving the world, and, so as not to slacken, he always had in his heart and often also on his lips this word: *Bernarde, Bernarde, quid venisti?* "Bernard, Bernard, what have you come here to do?" He submitted with perfect regularity to the humblest and most crucifying exercises of the discipline of Saint Benedict; and his virtue developed every day with such vigor that it astonished even the holy old man who governed this new school of prophets. He had taken the salutary habit of living within himself, united to God in the depths of his heart, always attentive to the voice of his conscience: which made his recollection easy and continuous. And as the graces he drew from this mysterious source overflowed onto his exterior, he seemed always surrounded by a halo of celestial joy; so that, says a contemporary, one would have taken him for a spirit rather than for a mortal man; expressing by his whole attitude the beautiful word he often liked to repeat to the novices: "If you desire to live in this house, you must leave outside the bodies you bring from the world; for only souls are admitted in these places, and the flesh is of no avail."

The more he tasted the delights of divine love that warmed him inwardly, the more he reduced his senses and his natural life to servitude, for fear that communications with external things might place some obstacle to the enjoyment of these ineffable consolations. The constant practice of mortification ended by deadening his nature to such a point that, living no longer except by the spirit, he saw without seeing, heard without hearing, ate without tasting, and barely retained any feeling for the things of the body. It is reported that more than once it happened to him to drink, without noticing it, oil or some other beverage instead of water; he did not know, at the end of a year of novitiate, if the room intended for the dormitory was flat or vaulted; he did not know if there were windows at the end of the oratory where he prayed every day. The one thing necessary absorbed him entirely and concentrated all his thoughts. His conscience, having become more delicate as it had been further purified, could no longer bear any imperfection; and the slightest fault gave the young novice anguish.

He kept silence exactly and never spoke unless he saw that speaking was better than being silent. His company, nevertheless, was not burdensome; and he knew so well how to accommodate his modesty with a charitable condescension to the infirmity of his confreres that no one left him dissatisfied. His pleasure was to have poor and worn-out clothes, without, however, being unclean. He went to the refectory only as to a place of torment, so that the thought that he had to eat sometimes took away all his appetite. He fled sleep as the image of death, and, when necessity forced him to take rest, he did so so lightly that one could almost say he did not sleep at all. He weakened his stomach so much by these fasts, vigils, and other mortifications that he could no longer support any food.

After his profession (1114), he always practiced exactly the same exercises; he said that those who are holy and perfect could well give themselves some relaxation; but that for him, who was filled with imperfections, he must always do violence to himself and walk at the same pace as those who are beginning. When his brothers were occupied with some manual work, at which he could not work because he had not been trained for it, he compensated for this defect with other works that were just as arduous and less pleasant. One day, at harvest time, the religious were cutting the wheat, and he was ordered to sit down and rest, because he had neither the strength nor the experience necessary for this job. He sat down out of obedience; but, raising his heart to God at the same time, he prayed to Him with many tears to grant him the grace of being able to work like the brothers. His pious desire was granted, and, from that day on, he was as skillful as any other in this exercise. During his work, he was not subject to the distractions of which the most spiritual complain; but, being occupied entirely with external functions, he did not cease to be still occupied entirely with the contemplation of divine things.

In the intervals, he prayed incessantly, or read, or meditated. As for prayer, he did it in solitude as much as he was able; but, when he could not, he made a solitude of his heart, from which he sent cries and groans toward heaven. He read the text of the Holy Scripture more often and with more pleasure, without commentary and continuously, than with explanations, saying that he never understood it better than by itself, and that everything he discovered of the mysteries and celestial truths seemed to him clearer and more lovable in this first source than in the streams of interpretations that one adds to it. He did not, however, fail to leaf through with humility the works of the Saints and Catholic authors who have explained the Scriptures, and profited from their lights, which he always preferred to his own. This assiduity in reading the sacred Text made its sentences and words so familiar to him that his sermons, his conferences, and his letters are full of them. Finally, as for meditation, one can say that it was his life, and he found so much satisfaction and delight in it that he was often as if intoxicated by it. It is by this exercise that he became so learned in the knowledge of Christian truths; for he had not studied the holy letters in the world, and he had no other school in the cloister than to approach the source of all lights through prayer; so that he sometimes said very pleasantly to his friends that the beeches and the oaks had been his masters.

When Saint Ber nard ha Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux and spiritual master of Raoul. d lived in Cîteaux with such perfection for two years, that is to say from the year 1113 until the year 1115, Saint Stephen, his abbot, was requested to establish a new monastery at Clairvaux, a valley Clairvaux Cistercian abbey where Raoul embraced religious life. covered in woods near the Aube, then in the diocese of Langres; it served as a retreat for many thieves, and was called for this reason the Valley of Wormwood, unless it had been given this name because wormwood grew there in abundance. He chose for this enterprise Bernard and his brothers, with some other religious whom he knew to be very fervent; in giving them his blessing at the moment of departure, he named as their superior Bernard, who was only twenty-one years old. The beginnings of this establishment were extremely harsh. Poverty there was extreme. Hunger, cold, and nakedness were the only wealth of these new inhabitants. They often made their pottage only with beech leaves. Their bread, like that of the Prophet, was only of barley, millet, and vetch; and even then, they did not have enough to satisfy their hunger. Finally, it was so black and of such bad taste that a foreign religious, to whom it was served, could not see it without shedding tears, and secretly carried away a piece to show everyone as a subject of admiration and a silent exhortation to penance. They were finally reduced to such scarcity that the bursar, Gerard, brother of the holy abbot, was forced to tell him that he was unable to provide for the needs of the religious for the coming winter. Bernard asked him what sum he would need for this. He replied that he needed at least eleven pounds. "Let us then pray to the goodness of God," he replied, "that He may send us this sum." He set himself at that very hour to prayer, and scarcely had he raised his pure hands toward heaven when a woman from Châtillon came to ask for him and offered him twelve pounds, begging him to order prayers for her husband who was at the point of death. The Saint thanked God for this alms, and assured the woman that she would find her husband in perfect health. She indeed found him up and perfectly healed, and as for the twelve pounds, they served for the subsistence of the community and to show that one must trust, in one's needs, in the paternal care of divine Providence. Saint Bernard did not receive these extraordinary and miraculous aids only once; for the hand of God was with him, and it did not fail to procure for him, by unforeseen and unexpected ways, what was necessary for the maintenance of his convent.

When Clairvaux had taken the form of a regular house, the bishopric of Langres, under which it fell, being then vacant by the death of Robert of Burgundy, this blessed superior received the abbatial blessing from William of Champeaux, bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, who was a famous doctor and a man of great piety. This blessing, which was also performed in 1115 or at the beginning of 1116, bound these two holy personages closely together, and caused the bishop to take as much to heart the interests of the new abbot and those of his monastery as his own. He therefore helped him with his advice and his means, and having recognized the eminence of his holiness and the rich talents with which the divine Goodness had favored him, he brought him into great reputation, not only in all his diocese, but also in that of Reims and throughout all of France.

Bernard put all his care into leading his religious in the ways of perfection. But, as he was accustomed to conversing continually with God, and as he drew from this conversation an innocence and a purity similar to that of the angels, he had much difficulty in accommodating himself to the reach of his inferiors. He spoke to them only a celestial language that they did not understand. Their slightest faults seemed intolerable to him, and when he heard them in the confessional, finding them subject, as men, to the weaknesses and miseries of men, he was quite surprised and gave them severe reprimands capable of discouraging them: he did not believe that a religious should still feel the movements of sensuality, nor let himself go to various defects that those who still live in a mortal body cannot entirely avoid. This manner of acting astonished these holy religious a little; but they had so much respect for their blessed superior that they preferred to tax themselves with cowardice and nonchalance than to accuse him of too great severity or imprudence. Such ravishing modesty and simplicity served as instruction to our Saint. He recognized that, if he had some speculative knowledge of the ways of God, he did not yet have all the experience necessary for government: he accused himself of indiscreet zeal; he condemned his own judgments in which he did not weigh enough the infirmity of nature, nor the difference of attractions and graces; finally, he entered into such contempt and distrust of his conduct that, imagining that his sermons were more harmful than profitable to his brothers, because they could, in the silence and retreat of their cells, receive thoughts much more pious than those he tried to inspire in them by his discourses, he took the resolution to say nothing more to them before God had made known to him His will on this point. Some time later, a child, who was all surrounded by a divine light, appeared to him and commanded him with great authority to say boldly everything that would come to his mind, because it would be the Holy Spirit Himself who would speak through his mouth. And, at the same time, God gave him a special grace to sympathize with the weaknesses of others and to accommodate himself to the reach of the mind of each one; finding himself all changed, he began to show extraordinary sweetness and condescension for his brothers, and to provide with maternal care for all their needs.

Moreover, this great sweetness of Saint Bernard, far from harming the regular observance in his abbey, renewed, on the contrary, the fervor of his religious; for, by a holy emulation, the more he showed himself indulgent toward them, the more they became severe and pitiless to their own bodies; and the more he excused and consoled them in their falls, the more they demanded of themselves harsh punishments. He had as a maxim not to perform correction when a religious did not appear disposed to receive it well: "for," he said, "when the one who corrects and the one who is corrected both become angry, it is no longer a salutary correction, but a fight." However, he knew so well how to take the time and the favorable occasion to say to each one what charity inspired him to say, that his word never returned empty, and that he remedied wounds without making painful incisions in them.

At this time, as he was walking one night around his monastery, he saw in spirit such a great quantity of people of different habits and different conditions, who were descending from the surrounding mountains and coming to pour into the valley where he was, that it did not have enough extent to contain them all. He recognized by this that God wanted to make him, like Abraham, the father of a great posterity, and that his children would be like the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, which one cannot count. Tescelin, his father, was one of the first who wanted to have a part in this happiness. He had remained alone in his house since Nivard, his last son, had left him to follow the example of his brothers; but being touched by the holiness of his children, he did not blush to become their brother, and even to make himself the spiritual son of Bernard, who was his son according to the flesh. Hombeline, his daughter, and sister of the holy abbot, therefore remained mistress of all his goods. She had found a very advantageous match, and in the abundance of her riches, she abandoned herself to the luxury and amusements to which her age and birth inclined her. She came one day, very elegantly dressed and with a numerous retinue of servants, to see her brothers. Saint Bernard, not looking at her in this state as anything but a trap of the demon to lose souls, refused to speak to her; his other brothers did the same, and Andrew, who happened to be at the door when she arrived, called her "a well-adorned sack of filth." This refusal made her melt into tears; she had these servants of God told that she confessed that she was a sinner and that she did not find herself worthy of their conversation; but since Our Lord had died for sinners, they should not for that reason reject her; she came to them as a sick person who sought the remedy for her ills; if they did not want to see her as her brothers according to the flesh, they should nonetheless see her as her physicians according to the spirit; in a word, she was ready to do everything they would order. On this promise, Saint Bernard and all his brothers came out to speak to her. The fruit of this interview was marvelous: Hombeline renounced from then on all the pomps and vanities of the world, and regulated her life on that of the blessed Aleth, her mother. Two years later, having obtained leave from her husband, she retired to the monastery of Billette, where she lived and died in great holiness.

The manner with which God drew souls to this holy Congregation is very admirable; here is a beautiful example: Young gentlemen came, one carnival day, to see the abbey of Clairvaux and the holy abbot whose praise they heard everywhere. After having satisfied their curiosity, they wanted to take leave of him to go and continue their games and tournaments. Bernard begged them to grant him, as a favor, to spend the rest of the carnival in restraint, and to abstain from these amusements which could only corrupt the soul and fill it with criminal passions. They could never resolve to promise him; he therefore had a religious come to whom he ordered to present them with beer to refresh themselves; and, at the same time, he blessed it and begged them to drink it to the health of their souls. They all drank it, well resolved to obey him only in that. But scarcely had they left the monastery when a marvelous change took place in their souls: they were touched by a grace so prompt and so effective that they renounced on the spot all the vanities of the world, and returning on their steps to the feet of the Saint, they begged him to receive them into the number of his disciples. They have since been great servants of God, and they have died in the joy of having prepared themselves for death by an austere life filled with good works.

The conversion of a very considerable ecclesiastic, named Mascelin, is no less admirable. The archbishop of Mainz sent him to Saint Bernard, when he went to Germany, to welcome him on his behalf, and to testify to the joy he had at his coming. Mascelin acquitted himself with honor of his commission; but the Saint, looking at him lovingly, said to him: "A greater Master than the archbishop has sent you to us." Mascelin saw well what that meant; but he assured him that he was very far from thinking of being a religious, and that he had no tendency to do so. However, without Bernard making more insistence, he felt himself immediately so pressed by the movements of grace that, on this very journey, he joined Bernard with several other persons illustrious by their nobility and their science.

The change of Henry of France, brother of King Louis VII and son of King Louis VI and of Adelaide of Savoy, his wife, was even more striking. This prince, who was later made bishop of Beauvais, and then archbishop of Reims, had gone to Clairvaux to treat of some important business with the holy Abbot. Being on the point of leaving, he asked to see all the religious to assure them of his affection and to recommend himself to their prayers. Saint Bernard told him that he had hope that he would not die in the state in which he was, but that he would see, by experience, how effective the prayers of the religious, to whom he had recommended himself, were. This prediction, which seemed obscure, was clarified, from the very same day, by a very surprising event: for Henry, forgetting, so to speak, that being the eldest of the king's brothers, he was immediately touching the crown, wanted to remain at Clairvaux, where he took the habit and made profession. This resolution caused incredible pain to his officers, who loved him tenderly and rested the hope of their fortune on him. They did not weep for him less than if they had seen him dead before their eyes, and among others one named Andrew, who was from Paris, vomited for this reason many insults against Saint Bernard and against his monastery, and even attacking the prince, his master, he repeated to him often that he must be drunk or insane to perform acts of this nature. Henry begged his abbot to appease him and to take care primarily of his conversion. "Leave him now," he said to him, "to throw out all his fire; after that, be assured that he is yours." On new instances from the prince, Bernard replied to him: "Did I not tell you that he is yours?" Those who were present heard these words, and even Andrew, who, more furious and more obstinate than ever, shook his head and said to himself: "I see well, now, that you are a false prophet, because you say a thing that will not be, and I will not fail to reproach you for it before the king and in the assembly of all the princes, so that one may know you for the fraud that you are." The next day, he began his imprecations again, and left the monastery in this bad disposition: which did not give little to think about to those who had heard the prediction of the servant of God. But the following night, Andrew was so pressed by the remorse of his conscience and the desire to convert, that, without waiting for the day, he rose early in the morning and returned to Clairvaux, to ask humbly to be received there.

Let us add to these three examples that of a young German lord, coming from studying in Paris, with a tutor; he passed by the abbey of Clairvaux, only to see the house. His tutor was so touched by the devotion of the religious that he resolved to remain with them, and he effectively entered the novitiate. He begged at the same time his pupil, who was only fourteen years old, to follow his example; but this young man rejected him, and, not being able even to suffer the conversation of the brothers, he left the monastery as soon as possible, to continue his journey; but he did not go very far; he had two visions, the two following nights: in one, he was told that, if he went to Paris, he would die before Pentecost, and in the other he saw Saint Bernard who was pulling him from the bottom of a well into which he had thrown himself; he returned on his steps, to put himself under the guidance of the blessed Abbot. His tutor became discouraged later, and tried to determine him to go away together; but it was uselessly: the pupil was wiser than the master, he let him leave alone; as for him, Our Lord filled him with a grace so abundant that he attained a very eminent holiness and received from God great favors. All these things happened at various times, as well as the conversion of several gentlemen of Champagne and Flanders, who came to take the habit at Clairvaux, and were since the founders of the beautiful abbeys of the Order of Cîteaux, in these countries; but we have joined them together, because of the relationship they have between them. Let us return now to the continuation of our history.

If Saint Bernard had clothed himself with a spirit of tenderness toward others, he had retained for himself only a spirit of pitiless rigor. Far from diminishing his austerities, he increased them eve ry day, and, not Ordre de Cîteaux Monastic order to which Bertrand and the Abbey of Grandselve belong. believing that the fatigues of his office were for him a motive to treat himself with more indulgence, he refused his body everything that could sustain it, and made it suffer, on the contrary, everything that was capable of breaking it down and ruining his strength entirely. This austerity brought him great illnesses, and these illnesses, which he neglected, reduced him to such a great weakness that one expected only his death, or a life more troublesome than death itself.

The bishop of Châlons, who had blessed him, having come to visit him, found him in this state, and, not being able to suffer that the Church should lose so soon a great light, he went at the same pace to Cîteaux, prostrated himself, with surprising humility, at the feet of a small number of abbots who had gathered there, begged them to give him only for one year the abbot Bernard under his guidance to govern him, assuring that he would do so well that he would restore him to health. The abbots took care not to refuse anything to such a great prelate, who showed so much simplicity and charity; thus, this good bishop having returned to Clairvaux with full power, had the Saint lodged in a house apart, forbade him all kinds of bodily mortifications, and put him into the hands of a doctor who claimed he could cure him in a short time. Never did the submission and patience of Bernard appear with more brilliance than in this occasion. The place where they lodged him was so poor and so badly built that one would have taken it for the hut of a leper. The doctor to whom they submitted him was a rustic, presumptuous, and extremely ignorant man, who had him given things all contrary to his cure. They served him sometimes fat for butter, and oil in a vase for water. But he took everything with entire indifference; and, in this great humiliation and dependence, he was filled with so much joy that he seemed already to taste the delights of paradise. Those who had the happiness of entering his room breathed there an air of holiness, with which they were all embalmed; and, as they felt themselves filled with consolation in the company of this celestial man, they left it only with regret and with an ardent desire to return there as soon as possible.

When the year that the abbots had granted to the bishop of Châlons was expired, Bernard left this honorable prison to resume the functions of his office and the common austerities of his Order (1118). He did not consider at all that he was not cured; but, like a torrent that has overturned its dikes, and a bow that has broken the string that bound it, he let himself be carried away by all the impetuosity of his first fervor. Instead of sparing his body, he undertook to break it down by fasts, vigils, and new abstinences. He prayed standing day and night, and did not cease to do so until his knees, weakened by fasting, and his feet, swollen by work, could no longer support him. He wore the hair shirt for quite a long time and as long as he could hide it, but he left it as soon as it was noticed, for fear that his brothers might want to imitate this rigor which would have been too harmful to their health. His food was bread and water, or the juice of some cooked herbs, and he could not or would not take anything else. If he used wine sometimes, which he did very rarely, it was in very small quantity, because water, he said, was much better for him. He dispensed himself only with great difficulty from external works, both of the convent and of the countryside, although he dragged himself there instead of going there. Finally, his rigor toward himself was so great that his stomach was reduced by weakness to being able to retain nothing and to reject all the food he took. He admitted himself, being older, that there had been excess, and he reproached himself for it as guilty, because finally one must weaken and chastise oneself, and not destroy oneself, nor ruin entirely the strength that God has given us for His service.

It was however by this holy severity against himself, that God prepared him to be the worthy instrument of an infinity of wonders that He wanted to operate through him in the world; for He returned to him enough health for that when He pleased; and, despite the great dejection that he had procured for himself by his abstinences, He gave him the strength to preach His word before kings and peoples; to make journeys into very distant countries for the defense of the Church; to found, during his lifetime, one hundred and sixty houses of his Order; to be the arbiter of all the great disputes of Christendom; to appease schisms, to confound heresies, to pacify kingdoms, to stifle wars between sovereigns; to arm all of Europe against the infidels, and to be on earth the terror of all the wicked and the powerful protector of justice and of truth.

The first important service that God wanted to draw from him was the renewal of the monastic spirit and of the ancient fervor that was seen, in the preceding centuries, in religious communities. His example contributed more to this than his word, and it would also have been difficult for him to advance much in this design, if he had not been himself an excellent model of penance and mortification. But who could describe the innocence, the recollection, and the holiness of life that he made flourish in his monastery? The buildings were without ornament, but with a rustic simplicity that made it clear that those who lodged there did not believe they had an assured dwelling on earth, but that they expected an eternal one in heaven. The silence there was so great that one never heard anything but the harmony of the chanting of the psalms, when one was in the choir, and the noise of the works of the hands, when one was at work. Despite the number of religious, which was ordinarily six to seven hundred, each was as solitary as if he had been alone. The hours and the actions were so well regulated that one never found anyone idle, and that all were occupied without confusion. They attended the choir and the other community assemblies with an angelic modesty. The fire of divine love was kindled promptly in their meditation, and they did not move away from the feet of the sanctuary without being all ablaze with this celestial flame, and resolved to work constantly at their perfection. The bread that they ate seemed rather a mass of earth than bread kneaded from flour; and, in fact, there entered into it only wheat that the earth of this desert produced by their work, lean, black, and tasteless wheat. Their other foods were no more savory: there was only hunger or the love of God that could make one find some satisfaction in them. But, what is surprising, they believed nevertheless to be fed too delicately, because the anointing of grace softened these austerities for them so much that they felt no pain in them. This is what threw them into a dangerous distrust of their state and into a fear that their holy abbot was not leading them well and was treating them with too much indulgence; but they were immediately relieved of this anxiety, as much by his wise remonstrances as by those of the venerable bishop of Châlons, of whom we have already spoken, who made them see, by the example of the flour that softens the bitterness of a pottage of the prophet Elisha, that God tempers sometimes, by the abundance of His grace, the rigor of the austerity of His servants, in which case they must thank His goodness, and not draw from it subjects of fear and distrust.

When Saint Bernard had been for some time confined to the guidance of his abbey, Our Lord wished to use him abroad for the conquest of souls and the ruin of the empire of the demon, just as it had been predicted to his mother from the time she carried him in her womb. He therefore began to make him illustrious through the operation of several miracles, for he restored to health a lord named Josbert, his relative, who was near death without the Sacraments; after, however, his son was assured that all the wrongs he had done to the churches and the poor during his life would be entirely repaired, and that some had indeed been repaired, which could be remedied on the spot. He gave the use of an arm and a hand to a child who had been paralyzed since birth. He delivered from an abscess on the foot a young man who was extremely troubled by it. He restored health to Gauldry, his uncle, devoured by a violent fever from which it was believed he would die. He cured of the falling sickness the blessed Humbert, his monk, who was later the founder of the abbey of Igny, in the diocese of Reims. He multiplied the wheat of his monastery so much, during a famine, that what would not have sufficed until Easter for his community alone was sufficient until the harvest, not only for his community, but also for an infinity of poor people who abounded continually at the gates of his abbey. A poor man from the neighborhood had recourse to him in his illness; the Saint had him rest his head on the holy ciborium where the body of Our Lord was kept: which restored him to health. His uncle Gauldry and Guido, his elder brother, were at first surprised by the operation of these wonders; and, fearing that it might serve as a subject of presumption or vanity for him, they rebuked him with bitterness, and sometimes even with reproaches, without sparing his modesty and gentleness; but, when the same Gauldry had been healed by his prayers, they moderated their zeal and no longer sought so much to mortify him: especially because he never said anything in his defense, and because, although he was their superior, he received their reprimands with the humility, patience, and simplicity of a novice.

At the same time, one of his monks and relatives, named Robert, who was still very young, having escaped from his monastery to go to that of Cluny, at the persuasion of some from that abbey, he wrote to him, to make him return, the admirable letter that has been placed at the head of all his letters; he speaks with a holy freedom of the disorders that had been introduced into the Order of Cluny after the death of Saint Mayeul. The secretary he used to write it was Godefroy, who asserted that, while he was dictating it to him, a heavy rain occurred in a moment, which should have soaked all the paper, because they were in the open country; but not a drop of water fell on it: God wishing to show, by this miracle, that it was by his spirit and in the sole desire for his glory that he was writing this letter. He deprived another of his monks of holy communion for a secret fault. The latter, fearing to be noticed, did not fail to approach the holy Table, to receive from his hand this bread of Angels, and he received it, in fact, because the blessed Abbot knew well that one should not publicly refuse the Eucharist to those whose crimes are still hidden. But, by a just judgment of God, and by the prayer of the Saint, he could never swallow it; he was therefore forced to come and throw himself at his feet to confess his sacrilege, and then, after he had received absolution, the holy host passed without difficulty into his stomach. The word, the touch, and the kiss of the servant of God performed other wonders. By his word and his excommunication, he caused an incredible quantity of flies that were in his church of Foigny before it was dedicated to die, which gave rise to the proverb of the curse of the flies of Foigny. By his touch and the sign of the cross, he made a lame child walk straight, and, by his kiss, he healed another who was crying and screaming perpetually without anything being able to appease him. Finally, Gautier de Montmirail having been presented to him at the age of three, to receive his blessing, one saw him extend his little hands to take and kiss that of the holy Abbot. He took it, in fact, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it several times with a respect and affection that could not come from an instinct of nature, but from a movement of grace.

While so many wonders carried his reputation throughout France, he fell dangerously ill; his children and friends, who were around his bed, were expecting almost nothing but his last breath; then he had a rapture where it seemed to him that he was being presented before the tribunal of God, and that the demon, that cruel enemy of men, was proposing several counts of accusation against him. He then said without fear: "I confess that I am not worthy of eternal beatitude, and that I cannot obtain it by my own actions; but, my Lord and my Master possessing it by a double title: 1st by right of inheritance as the Son of God the Father; 2nd by the merit of his Passion as Savior of the world, he is content with the first title, and he gives me a share in the second. Thus, I have great reason for hope and confidence." He then returned to himself and, shortly after, having known by the vision of a ship where it was not possible to embark, that his end was still far off, he was miraculously healed by the touch of the sacred hands of the glorious Virgin, of Saint Lawrence, and of Saint Benedict, who appeared to him with a serenity of face worthy of that sovereign peace which they possess in heaven. The Abbot of Saint-Thierry of Reims, who wrote the life of our Saint, says that, as Saint Bernard had received health through the benefits of the Virgin and the Saints, so he, having fallen dangerously ill, was healed by the charity and prayers of Bernard; but that he gained much more than this bodily healing, because his illness having given him occasion to come to Clairvaux, he enjoyed there for a long time the entirely celestial conversations of this great servant of God, and heard him several times explain the Canticle of Canticles, and develop all the economy that God keeps in the conduct of souls to make them arrive at perfection; he drew from it a marvelous fruit for himself and for the monks of Saint-Thierry, of whom he was the superior.

Bernard became illustrious, not only by his miracles, but also by his preachings all filled with the spirit of God. He began this exercise at Châlons-sur-Marne, and he was so successful in this first cast of the net of the word of God, that several noble and learned persons wanted to follow him to be his brothers, his children, and his disciples. He then preached in Flanders, and his word was no less effective there and did not make less considerable conquests than at Châlons. He also came to Paris, preached twice in the schools of philosophy, and won to God and his Order a great number of young men whom he took with him to his abbey. He saw there at the same time six hundred novices; but, as new ones were always arriving, it was necessary to enlarge the places to receive them, to house them more tightly, finally to send swarms of them on all sides, according to the insistent prayers of the bishops and lords who wished to have some in the places of their jurisdiction. Indeed, the abbey of Clairvaux became, in a short time, the mother and the source of one hundred and sixty other monasteries, where one saw shining the same spirit of silence and devotion, the same love for poverty, the same detachment from all things of the earth, the same ardor for mortification and penance, and the same observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict in all its rigor. France was not the only kingdom that wanted to have a share in this blessing: Savoy, Italy, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and Germany hastened to give houses to Saint Bernard; and his name flew so far beyond the seas, that even the barbarian and infidel nations asked for his children, to receive, by their means, the lights of the faith and the instructions necessary to live well. Moreover, when he sent some to make some new establishment, if he did not accompany them in body, he accompanied them in spirit, and God, by a miracle of his goodness, made him know everything that was happening among them, and the good or the evil that happened to them: he sometimes ordered them to correct certain faults, which he could only know by a supernatural light.

We must now see him appear on the great stage of the universal Church, to defend the rights of its head, attacked by an ambitious faction of schismatics. Innocent II, previo usly named Innocent II Pope reigning during the saint's lifetime. Gregory, had been canonically elected sovereign Pontiff; Cardinal Peter of Leon, of the title of Santa Maria in Trastevere, who had been a legate with him in France in the time of Pope Callixtus II, had himself raised, against the Canons, to the chair of Saint Peter under the name of Anacletus II. Justice was on the side of the former; but force was, at the beginning, on the side of the latter: the people, won over by prodigious sums of money, were ready to shed their blood for his cause. Innocent was forced to leave Rome and take refuge first in Pisa, where he was received with great respect, and then in France, which has always been the asylum of persecuted sovereign Pontiffs. Before he arrived, a council was held at Étampes to examine his right and see if the procedure of his election was canonical. King Louis VI and the principal bishops asked that Bernard be called there: for they were so convinced of his wisdom and holiness that they did not doubt that he would know what needed to be done on this occasion, and that he would declare it with apostolic freedom. He came, however, only with fear, fearing that the outcome would not be favorable to the Church. But God consoled him on the way with a vision. No sooner had he arrived than the king and the prelates, by common consent, entrusted, after God, the whole affair to his judgment. He accepted a commission of this importance only with difficulty; but he was obliged to submit to it.

After having often consulted the oracle of the Holy Spirit in prayer, and having maturely weighed all the reasons of Innocent and Anacletus, he declared that the former was Pope and that all the faithful were obliged to recognize him and obey him: which was received, not only by the whole Council, but also by the entire kingdom of France. Our Saint then went to the King of England and persuaded him, against his initial resolutions, to render obedience to Innocent. He even brought him to Chartres, to His Holiness, who had just arrived there after being received very magnificently at Orléans by Louis VI and the bishops who had attended the Synod of Étampes. From there, Innocent went to Reims, where he held a new Council for the affairs of the Church, and to Liège, where he conferred with Emperor Lothair II. In all these meetings, he could not bear for Saint Bernard to move away from him for a moment, and he wanted him to attend, with the cardinals, the Consistories. Thus, he received great services from him everywhere: for, at Reims, he was the soul of the entire Council, where nothing was settled except by his judgment; and at Liège, the Emperor wanting to take the opportunity of the schism to have the investitures of the Churches returned to him, he stood like a wall against such an illegitimate claim, and showed him that recognizing the Pope was not an arbitrary submission to which he could attach conditions at his whim, but an indispensable obligation and a necessity of salvation.

Upon returning from Liège, His Holiness wished to visit the abbey of Clairvaux himself. The monks did not go out to meet him with vestments of purple and silk, nor with crosses, reliquaries, missals, and sacred vessels of gold. Nor did they receive him with the sound of trumpets and musical instruments, nor with acclamations and cries of joy; but they were preceded by a poorly polished wooden cross; their poor and worn habits were their only ornament; and, instead of tumultuous cries, they modestly sang psalms and hymns to the praise of Jesus Christ, poor and humble, of whom the Pope is but the vicar. The restraint with which they walked, without raising their eyes or turning them from side to side out of curiosity to see the pomp of the Roman Church, drew tears from the eyes of His Holiness and all the prelates in his retinue. They could not admire enough that men were so dead to the things of the world that they did not seem at all concerned to look at such an august company, which they had never seen. The Pope dined in the convent with his entire court. A fish was served for the Holy Father, but for the others, they were served only vegetables. No extraordinary wines were presented, but only the small wine of the house, with brown bread containing all the bran. Such a poor meal, which marked the virtue of these excellent monks, satisfied this holy company more than the most magnificent feasts of great princes; and, although it had seen in Clairvaux only bare walls, wooden furniture, and altars without gold, it was forced to admit, upon leaving, that it was there that true riches were to be found.

From Clairvaux, the Pope returned to Rome, where he was restored to his seat by the Emperor himself, who had himself crowned by his hands. Saint Bernard was obliged to follow him there, and he worked with all his might, but in vain, with Saint Norbert, to win over the antipope who occupied the strongest and best-fortified places in the city. Innocent II sent him to Genoa to maintain the Genoese in his obedience and to reconcile them with the Pisans, against whom they were exercising continuous hostility: which he did with marvelous success. He then sent him to Germany to reconcile the Emperor with Conrad and Frederick, nephews of Henry, his predecessor: in which he succeeded no less happily. However, the Pope, not finding himself safe in Rome, where Anacletus was the strongest and where his soldiers often plundered everything they encountered of true Catholics, took the road back to Pisa, which was perfectly faithful to him. When he arrived there, he assembled a very famous council of the bishops of the West and other learned and pious persons to remedy the evils of the Church. Our holy Abbot was summoned there, and he attended all the deliberations and decisions of this assembly. He was held in such veneration that the door of his lodging was continually besieged by ecclesiastics waiting to speak to him. One would have said that he was called not only to a part of the care of the Church, but to a universal solicitude and authority, which did not diminish any of that profound humility and admirable modesty with which his soul was excellently adorned.

After the council, the Pope sent him as legate to Milan, with Guy, Bishop of Pisa, and Matthew, Bishop of Albano, cardinals, to bring back to the obedience of his See that Church which Anselm, its archbishop, had made schismatic. Bernard also took with him Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres, his intimate friend, whose prudence he knew, to give more weight to a negotiation of this importance. It is impossible to express the honor with which he was received in that city. All the people went out to meet him. The nobility went out in several companies of cavalry to give him a more magnificent welcome. People rushed to see and hear him, they prostrated themselves before him to kiss his feet. He did his best to prevent these testimonies of veneration, but his prohibitions as well as his prayers were useless. They tore the threads from his clothes, and even cut off pieces to make them into relics. His negotiation had all the success he could hope for. The inhabitants, previously carried away and furious, surrendered gently to all his wishes and entirely abandoned the party of the antipope to reconcile with Innocent.

Saint Bernard cemented this peace with great miracles. He publicly delivered several possessed persons. He restored sight to several blind people, healed many sick people with blessed water or bread, and by the power of the sign of the cross. He restored to a young man the use of his hand, which had withered and become paralyzed. Water placed in a dish from which he had eaten drove away the fever from which the Cardinal of Albano, one of his colleagues, was grievously tormented. Among the possessed he delivered was a lady of high condition, who had long been so suffocated by the demon that she had lost the use of sight, hearing, and speech, and, by sticking her tongue out horribly, she appeared more like a monster than a woman. The Saint had her brought to the church of Saint Ambrose and, having had everyone pray, he went up to the altar to say Mass. A kick that this unfortunate woman gave him did not move him and only increased the compassion he had for her. During the ceremonies of the Mass, at each sign of the cross he made over the host, he would turn around and make a similar one over the possessed woman: which tormented the demon extremely. Finally, after the Lord's Prayer, taking the body of Our Lord on the paten, he carried it to the head of this woman, and holding it there firmly, he said these words to the demon: "Wicked spirit, here is your Judge, here is He who has sovereign power over you; resist now if you can: here is He who, ready to endure death for our salvation, said loudly: The time has come when the prince of this world will be cast out. The body that I hold in my hands is that which is formed from the body of the Virgin, which was stretched on the tree of the Cross, which rested in the tomb, which rose from the dead, and which ascended into heaven in the sight of his disciples. It is in the formidable power of this majesty that I command you, malicious spirit, to leave the body of his servant and never have the boldness to re-enter it." The demon could not resist such a terrible command; hardly had the Saint returned to the altar to perform the breaking of the host and give the peace to the deacon, than he fled shamefully and left the patient entirely cured of all her ills. So many wonders placed him in such high esteem in Milan that one does not read in the Lives of the Saints that more honor was ever paid to a mortal man. His house was surrounded by people day and night. He could not go out without an infinite number of people preceding and following him with public acclamations. The crowd was so numerous that, so as not to be suffocated, he was forced to keep himself locked up and speak to the people through his window. He gave them his blessing, he instructed them in the truths of salvation, and he also blessed the bread and water they presented to him to serve for the healing of the sick.

From Milan he went to Pavia; a peasant having followed him with his demoniac wife to obtain her deliverance from him, the demon treated the blessed abbot injuriously: "This eater of leeks and cabbages," he said, "will not drive me out of my little bitch." His design was to make him fall into some impatience, but he gained nothing; the Saint, without being moved, ordered that the possessed woman be taken to the church of Saint Syrus to be healed there, wishing to defer the honor of this miracle to that illustrious bishop and martyr. Saint Syrus, on the contrary, sent him back to Saint Bernard. The demon, taking advantage of this, said mockingly: "Little Syrus will not drive me out, little Bernard will not cast me out." But our Saint confounded him by answering: "It will not be Syrus or Bernard who will drive you out, but Jesus Christ himself, whose servants they are." And in fact, after praying, he compelled him to leave. This deliverance having been only for a time, the same possessed woman was brought back to him in Cremona, on the continuation of his route; he spent the night in prayer for her and delivered her in the morning forever, having her wear around her neck a note on which were written these words: "I forbid you, in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord, to ever touch this woman." In the same place, he healed a man whom the demon made bark like a dog; and, while passing through Milan again later, he granted the same grace to an old woman who spoke Italian and Spanish at the same time, as if it were two people, and who outran horses in a race.

These are some of the things that Saint Bernard did beyond the Alps. But, however surprising they may be, his humility was even more admirable; for, in the midst of so much respect and applause, and when he saw himself as if above the cardinals and bishops, and when the Pope himself deferred entirely to his advice and gave him the power of a legate for all of Christendom, he was so small in his own eyes and recognized so well that he had nothing of himself, that he never let himself fall into a thought of vanity. All the honors that were deferred to him, he faithfully returned to God, as to the one to whom they belonged, and reserved for himself only a continual feeling of his misery. In this spirit, he refused three great archbishoprics and two bishoprics that were presented to him, namely: the archbishoprics of Genoa, Milan, and Reims, and the bishoprics of Langres and Châlons-sur-Marne, preferring the cowl to the miter, and the spade and the rake to the episcopal crozier.

Upon his return to Clairvaux, he was received with a joy that cannot be expressed; he had the consolation of finding all things in the same state as he had left them, without the young complaining of the authority of the elders, nor the elders reproaching the young for any slackening. They had all maintained themselves in their first fervor and in a perfect union of spirit and heart, because their holy Abbot, who was not with them in body, was always there in spirit, and merited for them, by the assistance of his prayers, the abundance of graces that were necessary for them to preserve themselves in the observance. At this time, the buildings were moved, and the abbey was built in a more convenient place than where it was before. The Saint at first had a little difficulty consenting to it; but he finally yielded to the desire of his children. God blessed this design through the great alms that Theobald, Count of Champagne, and several other lords gave to the servant of God to contribute to this new building, which was very necessary.

It would now be necessary to report here what Saint Bernard did afterwards to extinguish, in Guyenne and Poitou, the schism of the antipope Anacletus, which Duke William and Gerard, Bishop of Angoulême, his confidant, were maintaining there by all sorts of violence and cruelty towards both laypeople and priests and bishops. Our Saint had four different conferences with this prince, then ambitious and voluptuous. In the first two, before his trip to Italy, he gained nothing over his mind; but in the other two, after his return to France, at Parthenay, a city of Poitou, he frightened him so much by the force of his words and especially by presenting to him his sovereign Judge, hidden under the veil of the Eucharist, that he compelled him to renounce the schism entirely and to recognize Innocent II as the legitimate successor of Saint Peter. Afterwards, he completed his conversion by the abundance of tears he shed for him, and he obtained for him a contrition so perfect that he made him one of the most excellent models of Christian penance. As for Gerard, Bishop of Angoulême, who had inspired him with the spirit of rebellion against the true Pope, he died suddenly without viaticum or confession, and ruined, by his death, all that remained of the schismatic party in France, as no one dared to support the antipope anymore once all the princes and bishops had submitted to Innocent. After this great affair, our Saint returned to Clairvaux, loaded with glory and merit; and, seeing himself at rest for a little while, he shut himself in a cell made of intertwined foliage, where, at the request of another Bernard, his intimate friend and prior of the Charterhouse of Portes, he began his admirable exposition on the Song of Songs, in which he clearly showed that he himself was one of the chaste spouses called to the embraces, kisses, and other most loving caresses of the Beloved.

However, he did not enjoy the happiness that the Spouse wanted to procure for his Spouse, when, speaking to the daughters of Jerusalem, he forbade them to wake her and make her rise before she he rself wished it and had slept enough; fo exposition sur le Cantique des cantiques A major work of mystical spirituality by Saint Bernard. r, in the midst of this divine tranquility, where his soul was all flooded with the delights of heaven, the Pope, with all the cardinals who were in his retinue, called him to Viterbo, so that he might finish destroying in Italy the schism of which we have spoken, and which the authority of the relatives and friends of the antipope, and especially the power of Roger, Prince of Naples and Sicily, who had made himself his protector, still maintained. His monks could not see him leave without shedding torrents of tears; the demon also opposed his journey with all his might, and it is even said that he broke on the way the wheel of the chariot on which he was mounted, to make him fall into a precipice; but as he overcame by his courage all the tenderness that the tears and groans of his children gave him, so he was delivered from the snares of the demon by a miraculous help of divine Providence. His arrival in Italy put an end to this great schism, which had lasted more than seven years. He was stopped in Viterbo by the illness of Gerard, his brother, whom he had brought with him; but, having obtained his healing from God, only until his return to Clairvaux, he traveled to Rome, where he reunited with the Church the most considerable of the schismatics; from there he went to Monte Cassino, where he procured this same happiness for the monks of that abbey, who had followed the party of Anacletus. He then went to Salerno, where he obtained for the army of the Holy See a signal victory against Prince Roger, and, having entered into a conference with Peter of Pisa, an excellent orator and learned jurist, whom Anacletus had made a cardinal and his legate, he compelled him by the force of his reasons to quit his defense, which showed in him either much ignorance or much wickedness; he also performed a great miracle there to confirm the right of Innocent.

Finally, after God had taken from this world, by a sudden death, the one whose ambition and obstinacy were troubling the whole Christian world, having already returned to Rome, he dealt the final blow to the division: for the schismatics, having immediately elected a successor to Anacletus, whom they named Victor III, the latter came at night to find our Saint, who made him understand how abominable he would render himself before God and men if he supported his election, which he knew well to be null; then he compelled him on the spot to quit all the marks of his imaginary pontificate, and brought him to the feet of the legitimate Pope; the latter received him with kindness and granted him pardon. Thus, this deplorable schism, which had so long torn the robe of Jesus Christ, was entirely extinguished by the zeal, prudence, and piety of our blessed Abbot: which increased the esteem and veneration that one had for him so much that he was no longer looked upon anywhere otherwise than as the Father of the faithful, the Pillar of the Church, the support of the Holy See, the tutelary Angel of the people of God, and the Author of all the goods that were in Christendom. He could, after that, remain only five days in Rome, the praises and honors that he received there being unbearable to him, and he returned as soon as possible to his dear solitude to continue his sermons on the Song of Songs, which such a long journey and such pressing occupations had necessarily interrupted. He brought with him very beautiful relics that the Pope gave him in gratitude for his labors, and among others, a tooth of Saint Caesarius, martyr, which detached itself from his jaw at the prayer of the Saint, although previously it had been impossible to extract it; but he left to the Templars of Rome one of his tunics, which afterwards performed great miracles.

Upon his return, he sent to Rome an abbot and twelve religious of his Order to take possession of a convent that His Holiness had prepared for them near the Salvian Waters, which was also called the Abbey of the Three Fountains, and whose church was dedicated to Saint Anastasius, martyr. This edifice, one of the oldest in Christendom, occupies the place where Saint Paul was beheaded. It was named Three Fountains because of the head of the Apostle, which, while rolling on the ground, made three leaps, from which gushed three springs that one can still see today. It was in 625 that the abbey was restored under the invocation of Saint Anastasius. It fell into ruin again, and Innocent II had it rebuilt by the religious of Clairvaux in 1138. The abbot was Bernard of Pisa, formerly grand vicar and official of the cathedral church of Pisa, and then a religious of Clairvaux, who, after the death of Innocent II and those of Celestine and Lucius, his successors, was raised to the chair of Saint P eter, and Eugène III Pope who transferred the relics of Saint Vannes in 1147. took the name of Eugene III. It is to him that Saint Bernard addressed his five books of 'Consideration,' in which he instructed him in all the duties of a sovereign Pontiff, and warned him of all the disorders he had to prune in his court and in the government of the Church. It is an admirable work that must serve as a lesson to the greatest prelates, as much for their own person as for the conduct of the flock that has been entrusted to them.

Besides the affair of the schism, there were no considerable matters in the Church in which our Saint was not employed. If the Popes allowed themselves to be surprised by ill-founded complaints; if they suffered in their court abuses prejudicial to the good and honor of the Church; if they rendered unjust judgments for not having been informed of the truth of things; if kings and princes strayed from their duty, abusing the sovereign authority that God had given them in their States; if dangerous disputes arose between bishops and their diocesans, and between abbots and religious; if one tried to raise unworthy persons to the episcopal seat, and to exclude some excellent and faithful subjects whose election had been canonical; if truth found itself overwhelmed by falsehood, and justice by iniquity and perfidy; if one attempted against the legitimate rights of the clergy, and ecclesiastics were unjustly oppressed; if secular or religious prelates lived with scandal and dishonored their character by libertinage and the depravity of their morals, Bernard was the general physician of all these evils and the one who worked most effectively to destroy them. He fought vice, supported virtue, opposed disorder, maintained good order, pacified disputes, reconciled parties heated against one another, fortified the good, repelled the impious, and made himself, by his exhortations, his remonstrances, his reprimands, his urgent and repeated prayers, the wall and the counter-wall of the house of God.

It is well known with what freedom he wrote to the popes Innocent II, Celestine II, and Eugene III, nearly eighty letters to warn them, sometimes of the abuse of the appeals they had received, sometimes of the surprise of the judgments they had rendered, sometimes of the little necessity or utility of the dispensations they had granted, sometimes of the evils that the Church suffered by the negligence, condescension, avarice, or luxury of their officers. King Louis the Fat having driven the archbishop of Tours and the bishop of Paris from their seats, for some dissatisfactions he had conceived against them, Saint Bernard not only reproved him severely by his letters, but he threatened him in his own person with the judgments of God, if he did not correct what he had done; he even took the cause of these bishops to the Pope against His Majesty, without either this holy boldness, or the fulfillment of his threats by the violent and sudden death of the eldest son of this prince, being capable of attracting his disgrace and putting him in a bad light in his mind, so much did the esteem and veneration that the greatest monarchs had for this holy abbot rise above the ordinary changes of the caprice of men. It is also known how he acted with Theobald, Count of Champagne, a very pious prince and his distinguished benefactor, when he had learned that he had stripped a gentleman of his property by a judgment too hasty. He wrote to him in his ordinary style, which was lively and pressing, not only once, but twice and three times, and did not cease to write to him until he had obliged him to repair the wrong he had done.

It was he who reconciled this count with King Louis the Young, who had already led a large army into Champagne to seize his lands. He was the arbiter of their disputes: he judged them as if sovereignly, and he obliged the king to return to his States and to leave the count in the peaceful possession of what belonged to him, although dependent on his royal power. It was he who converted Alcide, wife of the Duke of Lorraine, by driving seven demons from her body, and made of her, as of Magdalene, not only an illustrious penitent, but also a very holy woman worthy of celestial revelations. It was he who, jointly with Geoffrey, Cardinal of Vendôme, awakened by his counsels the ancient fervor of Ermengarde, Countess of Brittany, who had relaxed from her former devotions. Finally, without repeating here what we have said of the reconciliation of the Pisans with the Genoese, and of the Emperor Lothair with the nephews of his predecessor, effects of his wisdom and his industry, we see by his epistles that there were no affairs in the Church nor in the States for which one did not consult him, and on which he was not obliged to give his opinion, and often a final resolution.

He also made himself the invincible protector of the faith against all the errors that dared to appear in his time. The first were those of Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia, his disciple, who, by false subtleties, renewed the dogmas of Arius, Nestorius, and Pelagius. The Saint, who loved Abelard for his wit and for some appearan ces of piety t Pierre Abélard Celebrated theologian whom Peter the Venerable caused to retract. hat one saw in him, warned him first in private to correct his sentiments and to remain inviolably attached to the doctrine of the holy Fathers; but, as this presumptuous man despised his remonstrances and even had the boldness to provoke him to discussion, he had him condemned first at Sens, by a Council of three provinces (1140), and secondly at Rome, by Pope Innocent II, to whom he wrote a letter for the refutation of his reveries. The second errors that he combated were those of Gilbert de la Porée, Bishop of Poitiers, a learned and subtle prelate, but who, for wanting to accommodate our mysteries to the principles of nature, destroyed the simplicity of God and put an infinite composition in his being, his attributes, and his divine persons. For he taught that the divinity by which God is God, as also the wisdom, the power, and the goodness by which God is powerful, wise, and good, are not God, but only in God; and he said that the relations of the divine persons were outside these persons, just as, in creatures, the relationships they have between them are outside their substance and their own constitution. Arnault and Calon, his two archdeacons, were the first to recognize the iniquity of his doctrine, which destroyed the divine nature. They warned him of it, and, upon his refusal to renounce it, they went to Rome to make their complaint to Pope Eugene III, a disciple of our Saint. His Holiness referred the examination of this affair to the Council of Reims that he was going to hold in person. He presided over it as head of the Church; several cardinals, ten archbishops, and a large number of bishops attended; but Bernard was the soul and the spirit that animated all this assembly. He argued against Gilbert; he made him discover his venom that he hid under the folds of his reasonings; he made him recognize his error; he obliged him to retract it, to censure it, to anathematize it, and to confess that the divine essence, the divine form, the goodness, the power, the divine virtue is God. He had the decree made, and, despite the difficulty brought by the cardinals who wanted to suppress this affair to spare the honor of Gilbert, especially because he submitted, he brought the Pope and the whole Council to condemn his opinions, without nevertheless doing harm to his person.

Finally, the principal heresy against which our blessed Abbot employed his zeal was that of an apostate monk, named Henry, who was waging a cruel war against the Church in Languedoc, by attacking the Sacraments, which are its treasures, and the priests, who are its ministers; and, because this heresiarch was a great talker, he had so seduced the world, that, as our Saint says, in his Epistle CXXI and in Sermon LXV on the Canticles, one already found Churches without people, people without priests, priests without the respect that is due to their character, and, finally, Christians without Jesus Christ. One refused baptism to little children; one mocked prayers and sacrifices for the dead, the invocation of Saints, excommunications, pilgrimages, the construction of temples, consecration, chrism and holy oils, the cessation of work on feast days, and other ecclesiastical ceremonies. The Pope, being warned of these disorders, sent his legate to remedy them, who took with him Bernard as the strongest rampart of the persecuted Church. The Toulousains received this angel of the earth as an angel come from heaven; he preached to them with incredible zeal, and preached the same in all the places that the heresiarch had infected. His word was so effective that it healed all the wounds that this public enemy had made; those even whom he had seduced pursued him, caught him, and put him, loaded with chains, into the hands of the Bishop of Toulouse.

What contributed much to this success were the great miracles that this Saint performed in all the places where he preached. He was at Sarlat, an episcopal city; after the sermon, the people brought him a quantity of bread to bless according to his custom, by making the sign of the cross over it; he assured those present, as a mark of the truth of what he was telling them, and of the falsity of the doctrine of the heretics, that all the sick who would eat of this bread would be healed. The venerable Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres, who was near the Saint, believing that this proposition was too general, wanted to modify it, adding that they would be healed, provided that they ate it with a firm faith. But the Saint, whose confidence in God had no limits, took back the word and said: 'I do not say that, but I say absolutely that all the sick who will eat of this bread will be healed, so that one may know, by this great number of prodigies, that what we announce is true.' Such an authentic promise was followed by execution; an infinity of sick people were healed by eating this bread, and no one ate of it who did not receive healing. This great event was a blow of a club that crushed almost all the remains of the heresy; there remained only a few sparks, which later became a great fire among the Albigensians. One cannot explain the honors that were then rendered everywhere to this humble religious; the countryside through which he passed was all full of people; at the entrance of the towns and cities the press was so great that he could hardly advance. He went once more to Toulouse, where he performed a signaled miracle in the person of a regular canon of the church of Saint-Sernin, who was paralyzed and could not move. He asked God for his healing and he obtained it; so that after having given him his blessing, as he was leaving his room, so as not to appear the author of the miracle, the sick man jumped from his bed, threw himself at his feet, and, finding himself perfectly healed, he presented himself to the legate and the Bishop of Chartres, who had a canticle of praise and thanksgiving sung in the church. Since then, this canon, who was also called Bernard, followed his benefactor and became a religious at Clairvaux, where he advanced so much in virtue that he was found worthy to be abbot of the monastery of Valdeau.

After so many battles and victories, one will be forced to admit that our Saint was the scourge and persecutor of the wicked, just as, on the contrary, he was the friend and faithful cooperator of all the great prelates and holy personages of his time in the Church. It is impossible to express the love, respect, and joy with which he was received by Saint Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, and by the monks of the Grande-Chartreuse, when he visited them. This excellent prelate, who was later canonized at the Council of Pisa, not looking upon him as a man, but as a living image of the holiness of God, made no difficulty, bishop and old man that he was, to prostrate himself on the ground to greet him. Bernard was extremely surprised by this act of humility, and threw himself at the feet of the holy bishop to receive his blessing; from then on, these two children of light were but one heart and one soul, being bound and united by a close charity in Jesus Christ. He had already written to the Carthusians letters full of a divine sweetness, which had united their souls to his; but this affection was inflamed even more by their mutual conversation. All that troubled Guigues, Prior of the Chartreuse, was to see that he had come on a horse whose saddle and harness were too magnificent; but he was very surprised when he realized that the holy Abbot, who had used it throughout his journey, had not noticed it, his mind being so occupied with God, and his senses so dead to the very objects that were at every moment before his eyes, that he did not discern them. Likewise, having one day traveled along the edge of a lake, he did not know in the evening what his companions meant when they spoke of the lake they had traveled along. Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres; Manasses, of Meaux; William, of Châlons; Gaudry, of Dol; Hildebert, of Le Mans; Aubry, of Bourges; Josselin, of Soissons; Hugh, of Mâcon; Ouger, of Antwerp; Milon, of Thérouanne; Alvise, of Arras; Albero, of Trier; Samson, of Reims; Geoffrey of Bordeaux, and Arnulf, of Lisieux, some of whom are in the number of the Saints, and who were the elite of the bishops of Christendom, were also his intimates; he respected and served them as much as he could, and he was also singularly loved and revered by them. Nor must we omit Saint Malachy, that great archbishop and apostle of Ireland, whose life he himself wrote, and w ho was the mos saint Malachie Archbishop of Ireland who died at Clairvaux in the arms of Bernard. t beautiful ornament of his century. This incomparable man, having come to Clairvaux on a journey he was making to Rome, was so enraptured by the fervor of this blessed Abbot and his monks that he wished to be clothed in their habit, and he made great entreaties to the Pope to be relieved of his bishopric, in order to spend the rest of his days with them; but His Holiness, not wishing to deprive the Church of Ireland of a light that was so necessary to it, made him instead his legate throughout that island; instead of remaining at Clairvaux, he took Clairvaux with him, so to speak, by having Saint Bernard's monks go to his country to establish monasteries there.

Nine years later, knowing that the hour of his death was near, he returned to Clairvaux to die in the midst of this company of Saints. Bernard administered the sacraments to him and received his last breaths; then, when his body was washed, he exchanged tunics with him. Finally, having begun the Mass for the repose of his soul, he had a very manifest revelation of his glory: by an extraordinary movement of the Holy Spirit, he ceased the Requiem Mass, and finished the Mass of a holy confessor pontiff.

We should now speak specifically of the prophecies, miracles, virtues, sufferings, and writings of this beloved of God: but as these great subjects would lead us too far, it will suffice to touch upon some of them, in addition to what we have said so far. As for the prophecies, his life provides us with an infinity of examples. He saw what was happening in the most distant abbeys dependent on his own, without being notified, and when it was some disorder, he would send word that it should be corrected as soon as possible. He knew which of the postulants and novices would persevere and make profession, and which would return to the world and abuse the grace of their vocation. He predicted to some the time and place of their death, to others their happy return from some journey, to others the conversion of their parents, to others the punishment with which they would be overwhelmed by the justice of God. And these predictions always had their effect. Among others, he predicted the death of the eldest son of Louis the Fat, as punishment for the ill-treatment his father had given to some good bishops, as we have said, and that of the Count of Anjou, as punishment for the contempt he had shown for the sentence of excommunication fulminated against him. He also predicted the reconciliation of the Count of Champagne with the King of France, at the end of five months, a reconciliation impossible without an evident miracle; this happened nevertheless exactly at the end of that time.

As for his miracles, the author of the third book of his life, who was his secretary, and who was later his successor in the abbey of Clairvaux, assures that, when he went to Germany to preach the crusade there, he healed in a single day, at Doningen, near Rheinfeld, nine blind men, ten deaf or mute, eighteen lame or paralyzed. He adds that he performed similar wonders at Constance, Basel, and Speyer, in the presence of Conrad, King of the Romans. At Mainz, the crowd of sick people, who came to be touched by his hands, was so great that the king, to pull him from the press that was overwhelming him, was forced to take off his royal mantle and take him in his arms, in order to carry him out of the church. He performed no fewer wonders at Cologne: in the space of four days that he remained there, he straightened twelve lame, gave hearing to ten deaf, sight to five blind, and speech to three mutes; finally, he healed two one-armed men. The inhabitants of Aachen shared in this blessing at the same time and received similar favors and assistance. When the Saint was in his abbey, he was no less pressed and importuned by the sick. Pope Eugene III, having come there unexpectedly, when he was saying Mass, was himself a witness to the multitude of these unfortunates who ran to him to obtain their healing; so that he was almost suffocated, and had difficulty getting out of this press with the help of his officers. The same Pope having gone to Cîteaux, to attend the assembly of the abbots, as one of their brothers, the Saint, who had also come there, delivered from deafness a small child who had lost his hearing from a sudden fright. Finally, wherever this great Servant of God turned, he performed so many wonders that one no longer bothered to count them, or even to mark them in particular.

We would now have a beautiful field to speak of his virtues, if we did not know that it is a history we are writing and not a eulogy. We will only say a word about it. The greatness of his faith appears admirably in the continuous war he waged against heretics to support it, in the excellent treatises he composed to explain and defend it, in his respect and devotion for our Mysteries, and above all in the desire he always had to shed his blood to seal the Catholic truths. One has seen his confidence in God, whether in the needs of his abbey, or in the persecutions that were stirred up against his person and that of his children, or in the public calamities of the Church, or finally in the particular miseries of his neighbor, for which one asked him and he performed so many miracles. He showed his love for God by working perpetually for his glory, by acquiring new servants for him every day, by seeking to converse with him through prayer, and by making at every moment pure sacrifices of his honor, his life, and all of himself.

His devotion toward Jesus Christ and toward the Blessed Virgin was incomparable: it suffices to read the sermons and treatises he composed in their honor to see that his heart was all consumed with the ardor of their love. Being one day in the cathedral church of Speyer, in Germany, in the midst of all the clergy and a great multitude of people, he knelt three different times, saying at the first: *O clemens*! at the second: *O pia*! at the third: *O dulcis Virgo Maria*! And the Church has placed these three salutations at the end of the famous antiphon *Salve Regina*. Some authors even say that Saint Bernard is the author of the entire antiphon. One still sees in this cathedral three copper plates where these three words, pronounced by our Saint, are engraved, and the *Salve Regina* is also sung there every day in music. One would have to be animated by his spirit to represent worthily his affection, his zeal, and his true and cordial love for his neighbor. He was the best friend and the most grateful of his century, and his letters show us that he never spared anything to serve those who had rendered him some service. All the rest of men were also lodged in the depths of his heart; he wished them all in the bowels of Jesus Christ, and he spared neither his labors nor his vigils to ensure their salvation and to help their spiritual advancement in virtue. The constant refusal he made all his life of all ecclesiastical dignities is an evident mark of his modesty and his humility; but it appears with even more brilliance by the aversion he had for praise and for the esteem of men, and by the care he took to turn them away.

Never has a Saint been more praised, and one can add nothing to the eulogies that the most distinguished and holy persons of the Church gave him, even during his lifetime. But one must see in his Epistles XI, XVIII, LXXII, LXXXVII, and CCLXV how he took from there the subject to humble himself, to declare his weaknesses, to discover his imperfections with which he believed he was filled, and to hold himself firmly in the knowledge and feeling of his nothingness. While everyone admired the strength, beauty, and unction of his writings, he despised and blamed them himself, being able to attribute to himself only ignorance and indiscretion. His own advice was suspect to him, and as he says himself in Epistle LXXXVIII, he preferred that one did not follow it, because he feared that they were the effects of a blind light, or a weakness of judgment. The demon did what he could to make him fall into pride or vanity; but it was always uselessly. One day, during the preaching he was doing before an elite audience, this proud spirit suggested this thought to him: "You are very glorious to be listened to and followed with such applause." The Saint said to him generously: "I did not begin for you, I will not finish for you either." He joined to an incomparable sweetness, which earned him the title of *Doctor mellifluus*: "Doctor sweet as honey," a freedom and an apostolic courage that have almost no equals in other Saints. We have already given examples of this in his way of acting with princes, kings, emperors, bishops, cardinals, and even Popes, to whom he knew how to say and write truths that could not be agreeable to them according to nature, and which, in fact, often displeased them. Those who take the trouble to read Epistles XLVIII to Cardinal Haimeric; CLXXXII to Henry, Archbishop of Sens; CLXXXV to Eustace, Bishop of Valence, in Dauphiné; CC to Ulger, Bishop of Angers, and CXXXIII to Josselin, Bishop of Soissons, will find there new marks of this firmness worthy of a Basil, an Ambrose, and a Chrysostom. What shall we say of his disinterestedness, and of the generous contempt he had for all the favors and comforts of this world? Never could the friendship of the great make him make a recommendation against his duty. When the Count of Champagne, to whom he owed so much, asked him to procure benefices for his son William, who was still a child, he refused him absolutely, as much because he condemned the plurality of benefices, without pressing necessity where it concerns the good of the Church, as because he did not approve that a child should be charged with an office whose functions he could not perform. A notable sum of money intended for a foundation was taken from him, and he was made to lose several monasteries, without him being moved or wanting harm to those who had done him this wrong. He often ceded his rights to the monks of other Orders; there was nothing that was agreeable to him than to be poor and to see his monks poor. Retirement and solitude were all that he wished for most on earth, and it was only with extreme violence that one saw him in these states like a child that one pulls from the breast of its nurse; finally, Bernard was a masterpiece of which the divine Wisdom took pleasure in making as it were the summary of all virtues.

But, as he was a man, that did not prevent that, to test him, purify him, and consume him, he was subject to insults, calumnies, and persecutions of men. It was on these occasions that his virtue appeared in all its brilliance, and that he showed that he had a patience and a humility proof against all blows. Pope Innocent II, who was entirely indebted to him for the extinction of the schism of Anacletus, sometimes forgot these obligations, and, being prejudiced by bad tongues to whom the zeal and courage of Bernard could not be agreeable, treated him on some occasions as importunate, indiscreet, and even a traitor. One must see in his Epistles CCX, CCXI, with what wisdom and modesty he excused himself from these accusations, and how he knew, without shocking the sovereign power of this Pontiff, to make him see that his importunity was that which the Apostle asks of his disciple Timothy, when he says to him: *Prædica verbum, insta opportune, importune*: "Preach the word, press the correction in season and out of season"; that his indiscretion was that which the same Apostle attributes to himself when he says: *Factus sum insipiens; vos me coegistis*: "I have spoken as a fool; you have constrained me"; and that finally the treason could not be imputed to him, since, in all the affair in question, he had done nothing but by the order of His Holiness. The cardinals and bishops also sometimes had jealousy against him to see him terminate with such authority all the causes of Christendom, and there were some, both in Rome and at the Council of Reims, who said that being a monk he should stay in his cloister and should not meddle in ecclesiastical affairs. But, far from being offended by these complaints contrary to all sorts of justice, he begged the bishops no longer to employ him in what was not his charge, no longer to tear him from his retreat, to leave the frog in its marsh, the bird in its nest, and the dove in the clefts of the rock, without interrupting his rest any longer for things that concerned their function, of which they and not he would render account at the judgment of God. In calumnies, he knew admirably well how to blame himself, and yet vigorously support the interests of God, without his humility hindering the ardor of his zeal, nor his zeal prejudicing the true sentiments of his humility.

Finally, the rudest test of his constancy was the bad outcome of the Crusade that he had preached in a large part of Europe, and that he had made people hope would be so happy. It was Pope Eugene III who, by a public brief, obliged him to engage the Christian princes and peoples in this holy war; he applied himself to it with all the ardor that the love of Jesus Christ and the spirit of obedience could inspire in him. He performed an infinity of wonders to confirm his preachings and to show that he spoke in the name of God. Thus, the emperor, the King of France, Louis the Young, and a great number of other princes and lords took the cross and went to the East to fight the infidels. But the success did not answer the hopes, for most of the Christian troops perished there, either by the sword of the enemies, or by the ill-treatment of the Greeks and the Eastern Christians; so that there was almost no family in France, Italy, and Germany that did not have reason to regret the death of their own and the loss of many goods that had been used to equip this army. This disgrace unleashed the impious and the libertines against the reputation of Saint Bernard; he was made to pass for a false prophet, he was charged with insults and reproaches, and neither the great wonders he had performed in publishing the indulgences of this Crusade, nor the express order he had received to publish them even against his will, could prevent him from being treated as a deceiver, a seducer, and a public plague of Christendom. It required this great reversal to counterbalance the incomparable praises that had been given to him, and to finish purifying him like gold in the crucible and like the purest essences in the still. He received this blow so little expected with a marvelous constancy, without being moved, and what he wrote about it in book II of the *Consideration* is so edifying that one can read nothing more instructive. He says, among other things: "If it is necessarily required that men murmur in this encounter, it is better that it be against me than against God. It is an extreme happiness for me that God wishes to use me as a shield. I receive with a good heart the slanders of the tongues that attack me and the poisoned darts of the blasphemers that pierce me, so that they do not reach the divine Majesty. I will willingly suffer to be dishonored by them, since the honor of God remains covered by my dishonor." Moreover, several learned men of the same time have shown the true origin of the disaster of the Christians in this encounter: it was the overflow of vices that entered the armies and made them unworthy of the help that divine Providence had prepared for them. Besides, several who had gone there in a true spirit of contrition found there their eternal salvation which they would not have found in Europe, where the abundance of goods and comforts of life effeminated them and made them rot in impenitence. Finally, Saint Bernard, to justify those who were the first authors of the Crusade, publicly healed a blind man, and God, not to render his preaching entirely useless, even for the temporal, changed the face of things and made the Christians masters of the city of Ascalon, which was of great importance for the preservation of Jerusalem, and which one had uselessly attempted to take for fifty years: which happened the very week of the death of the blessed Abbot.

We have said many things about Saint Bernard, but we have omitted a much greater number, which would require an entire volume. It was he who perpetually assisted the Popes during their stay in France, and it is said that, when Eugene celebrated Mass in the church of Montmartre, a quarter of a league from Paris, he made him a deacon, and the venerable Peter of Cluny, subdeacon. It was he who wrote terrible letters to the Roman people, to remonstrate with them for the fault they were committing against the Roman Pontiff, by forcing him, through outrages, to leave Rome and take refuge in France. It was he who gave a Rule to the Templars, by order of the Council of Troyes, and who formed the beginnings of the blessed Felix of Valois, who, later, was the founder of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives. Finally, Cardinal Baronius makes no difficulty in saying that he was not only a truly apostolic man, but also a true apostle, and that he was in no way inferior to the great Apostles.

After so much labor, being exhausted from the extraordinary fatigues he had endured there, in addition to his penances and continual illnesses, he fell into such a state of weakness that he could no longer support himself (1152); his liver was no longer functioning, his natural heat was almost extinguished, and his legs became swollen as in those with dropsy. He received all these infirmities as great favors from heaven and as warnings that his vessel would soon arrive at port.

Nevertheless, always calm and smiling, his spirit, full of vigor, dominated his weakened limbs and compelled them to lend themselves still, within the monastery, to sacred functions. He strove, despite his exhaustion, to celebrate the holy sacrifice each day, saying to those who assisted him and supported him at the altar that no action was more effective, in this final passage, than to offer oneself as a holocaust, in union with the adorable Victim immolated for the salvation of men.

His words, rarer but more penetrating, seemed impregnated with the sweet warmth that consumed his soul; and often, after the celebration of the divine mysteries, the fire of heaven inflamed him so ardently that no one could approach him without feeling within themselves surges of fervor. The religious, his beloved children, sadly sympathized with his pains and held him back with all the vehemence of their prayers, with all the bonds of their tenderness. Day and night, the community on its knees asked God, with tears, for the preservation of such a beloved father; at every glimmer of improvement, hope erupted in thanksgiving.

But the Saint gathered his great family around him and, with a touching voice, implored them to let him die. "Why," he said to them, "why do you keep a miserable man here below? Your supplications prevail over my desires. Use charity toward me, I pray you, and let me go to God."

Overcoming his extreme weakness, he wished to write to one of his dearest friends; and with a failing hand, he wrote a letter of friendship to Arnault, Abbot of Bonneval, of the Order of Saint Benedict, in which, after having described some of his ailments and pains, which were without relief, he said to him: "Pray to the Savior, who does not want the death of the sinner, not to delay the end of my life any longer, but to provide it with His assistance. Do me also the grace of covering the nakedness of my final hour with your vows and your prayers, so that my enemy, who is in ambush to surprise me, may find no place to set his tooth and cause wounds."

Six weeks before his death, Bernard received the painful news of the death of Pope Eugene. The unexpected death of this Pope, whom Saint Bernard loved with such a tender and devoted love, tore his heart and made his tears flow. He would receive no consolation and seemed to become from day to day more of a stranger to what was happening around him. Godefroy, the pious Bishop of Langres, having come to see him to consult him on an important matter, was astonished at the little attention the servant of God paid him. The latter guessed his thought: "Do not hold it against me," he said to him, "I am no longer of this world." Indeed, he applied himself only to untying the last threads that attached him to earthly life; all the rays of his soul were concentrated in God, as in the attractive hearth of his love; and in advance, on the wings of the most fervent sighs, he rose to the immortal regions.

However, a miracle had to crown the life of this great man.

He was lying on his bed and preparing to virilely close his earthly career, when the Archbishop of Trier came to find him at Clairvaux, begging and imploring him to help the province of Metz, where lamentable scenes were taking place. The burghers and the nobles, long in disagreement, were waging a bitter war: blo Metz City where the saint received his theological training. od was flowing in great streams; already more than two thousand insurgents had perished in the struggle, and anxiety was at its peak. The Archbishop of Trier, in his capacity as metropolitan of the Metz region, had rushed with the warm solicitude of the good shepherd to separate the combatants and prevent greater evils. But his voice had been ignored, his mediation rejected; and the prelate, deploring his insufficiency, saw only one resource: it was to call the Abbot of Clairvaux to the battlefield.

At the account of these misfortunes, which the Archbishop deplored with tears, Bernard felt deeply moved; a supernatural zeal revived him; and his bones seemed to strengthen within himself; for God held this holy soul in His hands and did with it whatever He willed.

He therefore rose from his deathbed and left for Metz!

Both armies were camped on the two banks of the Moselle; on one side the burghers, breathing only hatred and vengeance; on the other, the lords and their soldiers, drunk with a first victory and ready to restart the combat. Suddenly, the man of peace, supported by a few venerable monks, appeared in the midst of the fray. He was weak, he could not make himself heard, he was not even listened to; but he went from one camp to the other, addressing himself in turn to different leaders, seeking to calm the passions in effervescence, but without humanly glimpsing any chance of success. His presence had no other effect than to suspend momentarily the clash of arms.

The Saint did not lose heart; he calmed the anxiety of the religious who accompanied him: "Do not trouble yourselves," he said to them; "for, notwithstanding the difficulties that are accumulating, you will see, with the grace of God, good order re-established."

Indeed, at daybreak, he received a deputation of the principal inhabitants of the city, declaring that they accepted his mediation. In the morning, he summoned the most considerable of both parties to a small island on the river, where numerous small boats came to land, bringing the leaders of the various troops. Bernard listened to their grievances and appeased them; he triumphed over the most obstinate spirits; the belligerents were moved and laid down their arms; hearts opened; soon the kiss of peace circulated through all the ranks!

A miraculous healing signaled this memorable day. It happened, by the order of Providence, that a poor woman, tormented for eight years by a cruel illness, came to prostrate herself before the servant of God to ask for his blessing. This woman was constantly agitated by convulsive tremors, and her appearance caused as much horror as pity. Bernard recollected himself; he made the sign of the cross; and at that very instant, under the eyes of a multitude of spectators, the agitations of the unfortunate woman disappeared, and health was restored to her.

The news of this miracle finished capturing sympathies. The assistants, in a crowd, even those who until then had shown themselves intractable, struck their breasts and blessed aloud the works of the power of God. This edifying scene lasted nearly an hour, during which, the historian adds, tears of compunction, tenderness, and gratitude flowed without stopping.

Now, the man of God, surrounded by an immense concourse of people, and visibly overwhelmed by the influx of those who threw themselves at his feet to show him their respect, nearly lost, as he had recently in Germany, the little breath that animated his frail existence, so that the religious carried him on their shoulders; and, having deposited him in a boat, they left the shore in all haste. The lords and magistrates did not delay in joining him: "We must," they said to him, "listen with docility to the one whom we see to be loved and heard by God; and we will observe his recommendations, since Jesus Christ, at his prayer, has done such great things in our presence." But Bernard, accepting no praise, answered them: "It is not for me, it is for you that God has done these things."

The Saint then returned to Metz, to the episcopal house, where, through his influence and his happy mediation, the peace treaty was concluded and signed. This work was finished!

Like the boatman, upon returning from a laborious navigation, lowers and folds his sails at the sight of the port where he is going to drop his anchor; so the disciple of Jesus, after having finished his course, returned humbly to the holy asylum of Clairvaux, where, stretching out on his bed of pain, the last station of the pilgrimage of the earth, he waited with tranquility for the hour of rest.

Bernard, like a ripe and perfect fruit, seemed no longer to hold to the tree of earthly humanity except by a thread that the slightest jolt would break. However, his faculties were not weakened; his reason shone, firm, pure, and lucid. The most beautiful gifts that one can admire in a man, holiness, serenity, invincible self-mastery, all these gifts subsisted in him. He received the sacred anointings; he listened to the voice of God who spoke to him in the solitude of his heart; or else, when, forgetting his own sufferings, he sympathized with those of his brothers, he consoled them, he warmed them, and flooded them with sublime hopes.

His disciples, arranged around his bed, eyes bathed in tears, fixed with holy terror the last reflections of this torch that had guided them on the road to heaven. Arranged around him, they looked at him with anxiety, spoke to him without words; they prayed with tears; they still hoped; they hoped against all hope; for such is the blindness of love! Filial tenderness does not understand the possibility of certain separations: it blinds itself to the open grave of a father or a mother, as the mother blinds herself to the cradle of a child. One would say that hearts, intertwined with one another by a pure affection, can neither live nor die without each other.

Thus the pious cenobites preserved, and until the last moment, a vain hope that hid from them the all-too-real apprehension of losing their father. The latter, compassionate to the depths of his bowels, strove to moderate their pain and to fortify their courage. He lavished upon them the sweetest consolations, exhorting them to abandon themselves with confidence to the divine goodness, to love the will of God, to persevere in heavenly charity. He promised them that, even in leaving, he would not abandon them, and that he would take care of them after his death. Then, with a suavity that no expression could render, he recommended that they love one another, advance in the holy ways of perfection, and remain faithful to their rule, in the fear and love of God...

Finally, all penetrated with the apostolic spirit, he repeated to them the solemn words of Saint Paul: "My brothers, we beseech and conjure you, in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to live for God, according to what you have learned from us, so that the Lord may fill you more and more with His graces...; for the will of God is that you be holy."

Then he had the superior general of the Order of Cîteaux, the venerable Abbot Gozevin, approach his bed, as well as several other abbots and prelates who had come to Clairvaux to pay him their last respects.

Gozevin was melting into tears; for, although he was raised above Saint Bernard in the monastic hierarchy, he loved him with a filial love and openly recognized him as his master and father. The Saint thanked them all, and with a moved voice said a final farewell to them...

This scene tore the hearts of the poor monks. "Oh! charitable father, beloved father," they cried out while sobbing, "you want then to abandon your family? Have pity on us who are your children; have pity on those whom you have nourished from your maternal breast, whom you have raised, formed, guided, like a tender mother! What will become of the fruits of your labors? What will become of the children whom you have loved so much?..."

These exclamations softened the servant of God, and he wept... "I do not know," he said to them, raising toward heaven a look full of angelic sweetness, "I do not know to which of the two I must yield, whether to the love of my children, which presses me to remain here below, or to the love of my God, who draws me upward..." He said: and that was his last breath!

The funeral chants, accompanied by the death knell, intoned by seven hundred monks, interrupted the silence of the desert and announced to the world the death of Saint Bernard.

It was the twentieth day of the month of August 1153, around nine o'clock in the morning. The Saint was sixty-three years old. For forty years he had dedicated himself to Jesus Christ in the cloister, and for thirty-eight years he had exercised the dignity of abbot. He left one hundred and sixty monasteries, which he had founded in various regions of Europe and Asia. And in the course of time, including the houses destroyed in England and in the kingdoms of the North, one counted up to eight hundred abbeys issued from and dependent on Clairvaux! This fertile source has never been exhausted: it still flows in our days: the Cistercians, the Bernardines, the Trappists, perpetuate, under various forms, the life of their Patriarch, and fertilize with their manly virtues the fields of the Church.

There is almost nothing left now at Clairvaux that recalls the memory of its illustrious founder. After visiting the prisoners' chapel, the former refectory of the monks, and the current refectory, the former cellar of the monastery, one goes into the forest to the Fountain of Saint Bernard. It is there that, every year, on the Tuesday after Quasimodo Sunday, the religious would go in procession, sing a responsory to Saint Bernard, the Regina Cæli, plant around a large cross near the spring several small wooden crosses that they fashioned themselves, and drink the water of the fountain with their hands. "The water comes out of the ground through five openings under the enclosure wall of the house; it fills a small basin and forms a stream that descends into the valley and flows into the Aube. The fountain is sheltered by a small structure leaning against the hillside, in this place covered with moss and young undergrowth. The facade of the monument, erected in 1854 by the prisoners in honor of Saint Bernard, presents a semicircular niche with ashlar stone courses, covered by a molded stone roof and surmounted by a stone cross. In the niche is the statue of Saint Bernard; at the foot of the cross is his coat of arms: it is azure with a chevron of silver accompanied in chief by two crescents also of silver and in point by a lion of the same. The crest is an abbatial miter and crozier, the miter on the dexter and the crozier on the sinister."

There appeared on his face a marvelous grace and sweetness that were born more from the unction with which his soul was perpetually imbued than from the constitution of his body. One saw in his eyes a mark of angelic purity and the simplicity of a dove. His austerities had so exhausted him that he was nothing but skin and bones, and he was obliged to be almost always seated. His height was average, but rather tall than short.

He was buried in the tunic of Saint Malachy; he had always worn it on solemn days when he celebrated the holy mysteries at the altar. Before he was laid in the ground, one of his religious who, for several years, had suffered from the falling sickness, having approached him with firm faith, was so healed of it that he has not felt it at all since. The body of the Saint was placed in a stone sepulcher, before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, at Clairvaux. On his chest was placed a box in which there were relics of Saint Thaddeus, apostle, which had been sent to him from Jerusalem the very year of his death, and which he had ordered to be buried with him, in order to be able to be joined to this great Apostle on the day of the general resurrection. There were several revelations of his glory, and so many miracles were performed through his intercession that, twenty-one years later, in the year 1174, Pope Alexander III placed him among the Saints and awarded him the title of Doctor. Pope Pius VIII solemnly confirmed this title, and willed that the office of the feast of Saint Bernard be that of the Doctors of the Church.

One sees in the church of Ville-sous-la-Ferté (Aube), on canvas, a full-length portrait of Saint Bernard. The Saint is standing, his head slightly inclined toward his left shoulder; with his left hand he supports the church of Clairvaux; with his right, he holds a Gothic cross of exquisite workmanship. At the back of the painting opens a large window, near which two monks seem to be talking, and one sees the harmonious lines and bluish tints of the Claire-Vallée fading to the horizon. — He is represented not only with the cross, but with the various instruments of the Passion, to recall his continuous mortification pushed to true excesses. — He is also sometimes seen with a demon under his feet, to mark the triumphs he won over the enemy of salvation, whether by overcoming his temptations, or by overturning his empire in the hearts of men through his apostolic labors, or also by the deliverance of numerous possessed persons.

[APPENDIX: CULT AND RELICS. — HIS WRITINGS.]

The children of Saint Bernard religiously preserved his body deposited next to Saint Malachy in their conventual church; they did not even want to raise it from the ground, so as to be entitled to refuse the innumerable requests that were addressed to them from all sides regarding his relics.

In 1178, Henry of Haute-Combe, abbot of Clairvaux, sent a finger of the Saint, canonized four years earlier, to the King of England; then the charters mention no further removal until the 17th century.

In 1625, the Genoese, who had chosen Saint Bernard as their patron, came to ask for some of his bones; their deputies were the first to be able to contemplate his mortal remains and returned carrying one of his ribs. The abbot who had given them this gift, Dom Largeutier, sent in 1643 to Anne of Austria some fragments of the head, which Dom Jean d'Aixauville had enclosed in a magnificent vermeil bust, just like that of Saint Malachy.

This is, according to the abbey's catalogs, all that was removed from the holy body until the 18th century; nevertheless, it is to be believed that some less important donations may not have been mentioned: for, in Spain, the Escorial possessed a fragment of a rib and some less considerable relics; in France, the cathedral of Langres exhibits some bones; the church of Notre-Dame de Saint-Dizier still shows today an arm bone of Saint Bernard, which came to it from the former abbey of Saint-Pantaléon; the churches of Chaumont, Saint-Mammès, and Saint-Martin of Langres possess some of his relics.

The last abbot of Clairvaux, Dom Rocourt (died at Bar-sur-Aube in 1824), sent to the Paris mint, at the invitation of the government, all the gold and silver objects that made up the sacristy treasure: he only kept the vermeil busts containing the heads of Saint Bernard and Saint Malachy. A year later, in 1790, he had to part with them; but he kept the most precious, the two heads, and affixed his seal inside to guarantee their authenticity. When the storm had passed, he handed them over to M. Caffarelli, prefect of the Aube, who donated them to the cathedral of Troyes; they can still be seen, under the high altar, in silvered wooden chairs; the authentic bears the signature and seal of Mgr de Boulogne. On December 25, 1862, Mgr Ravinet blessed a magnificent reliquary, in Romanesque style, entirely covered with gilded copper plates, and placed there, next to other relics, on white silk cushions, the head of Saint Bernard, which is exposed to the veneration of the faithful.

The remains of the holy bodies were protected in 1793 by the surrounding populations against the fury of the revolutionary agents who wanted to throw them into the common cemetery. They were transported to the commune of Ville-sous-la-Ferté, three kilometers southeast of Clairvaux, and they are still there, but indignantly mixed in a miserable chest in the sacristy. The bones of Saint Bernard are easy to distinguish from the others; they are, inside and out, of a fairly pronounced brown shade: there is not an inhabitant of Ville who does not agree on this point. Let us hope that it will not be long before these precious remains are restored to the veneration of the faithful by renewing the authentic.

Some families of Ville-sous-la-Ferté (Aube) possess bones of their glorious patron that were stolen during the translation made in 1794.

A large number of parishes in the diocese of Troyes consider it an honor to possess some relics of the illustrious abbot of Clairvaux. Jully-sur-Sarce preserves in a silver medallion some particles of Saint Bernard's ribs and a fragment of his rush mat. Bamerupt and Celles exhibit to the homage of the faithful a portion of his venerated head; the church of Saint-Remi, in Troyes, a fragment of a skull bone; Bourguignons, a portion of a rib and a fragment of the shroud; Bar-sur-Aube, the Maison-des-Champs, Dampierre-de-l'Aube, etc., have enclosed in precious reliquaries the venerable remains of this great Saint, the glory of our regions. Outside the diocese, the cathedral of Châlons-sur-Marne possesses a considerable part of the mat on which the abbot of Clairvaux died. The Bible that Saint Bernard used daily is at the library of Troyes; it is noted that the pages containing the Song of Songs are particularly worn.

The church of Fontaines, in the diocese of Dijon, possesses a particle of his head, and a part of his belt which appears to come from the monastery of the Feuillants: this belt is placed in a terracotta bust, very beautiful and very lifelike. The Dijon museum has his wooden cup or mug: "Cynthus sancti Bernardi abbatis Ciarevallis."

From the beginning of the 14th century, a confraternity had been erected at Fontaines under the patronage of Saint Bernard, and the room where he was born had been transformed into a chapel. In 1614, the Feuillants, protected by Louis XIII, established themselves in the castle, and, in 1619, they built a church in honor of the holy patriarch. Anne of Austria, who had dedicated herself to Saint Bernard to obtain a son from God, provided the expenses. Louis XIV asked the bishop of Langres to oblige his diocesans to celebrate the feast of Saint Bernard, "protector of his crown," as a commanded feast, and he had himself inscribed, with his brother and the queen mother, at the head of the confraternity newly erected in the church of the Feuillants by Mgr Sébastien Zamet, bishop of Langres, and enriched with indulgences by Pope Leo X.

This confraternity was re-established in 1823 by Mgr de Boisville, bishop of Dijon, and transferred to the parish church of Fontaines.

What the Revolution left of the church of the Feuillants has been piously restored by priestly hands and opened to the devotion of pilgrims.

A subscription, presided over by the bishop, had a magnificent bronze statue of the illustrious abbot of Clairvaux erected in Dijon on November 7, 1847. Another, in stone, embellishes the main courtyard of the minor seminary of Plombières. In Châtillon, his image adorns the hospital chapel, and the altar of Notre-Dame of the castle is now dedicated to him.

We will follow, as much as possible, the chronological order in the enumeration of the works of the holy doctor.

1st The Treatise on the Twelve Degrees of Humility, which is spoken of in the Rule of Saint Benedict. It is the first work that the Saint published. It is written in a very touching manner and contains excellent things.

2nd The Homilies on the Gospel "Missus est," etc., which are from the year 1120. The author composed them to satisfy his own devotion toward the mystery of the Incarnation and toward the Blessed Virgin.

3rd His Apology. The congregation of Cluny, which was a reform of the Order of Saint Benedict, had then fallen far from the regularity and fervor that had made it so famous for two hundred years. Some of its members, animated by a secret jealousy, which easily disguises itself with the name of zeal, loudly blamed the austerities of Cîteaux and even made them the subject of their declamations. William, abbot of Saint-Thierry, near Reims, who was of this congregation, but at the same time filled with esteem for the new Order, begged Saint Bernard to take up the pen for its defense. The Saint composed his Apology. He justifies his monks there and declares that if some of them meddled in slandering others, their fasts, their vigils, their labors would be of no use to them; they would be, he says, the most miserable of men, to lose by distraction the fruit of all their penance. They would be very foolish to take so much trouble to be damned, while they could go to hell by a route more easy and more in conformity with nature. After having shown that spiritual exercises are infinitely more useful than bodily ones, he admits that the Order of Cluny is the work of Saints, although in his time mitigations had been admitted there, out of consideration for the weak. But so that one would not imagine that he approved of the essential abuses that had slipped into some monasteries, he reproves them in the strongest manner. One sees, he says, among certain monks, several authorized vices, which even take the name of virtue; profession is called liberality; the itch to speak, politeness; immobilized laughter, necessary gaiety; pride and affectation in clothing and lifestyle are decorated with the specious title of savoir-vivre. He fights with the weapons of mockery the excess and delicacy of these monks in drinking and eating, their love for finery, for the sumptuousness of their buildings, for the richness of their furnishings. How, he says, can one excuse all these things in men who profess to be no longer of the world, who have renounced for Jesus Christ the pleasures and goods of this life, who have trampled underfoot everything that dazzles the eyes of worldlings, who have denied everything that flatters the senses or can lead to vanity? He complains that some abbots, who should have been for their monks models of recollection, humility, and penance, inspired in them on the contrary a taste for worldly vanities, by the magnificence of their equipages, by the continuity of their dissipation, by the delicacy of their table, by their commerce with strangers. To excuse such disorders, or to see them without raising one's voice, would be to authorize and encourage them. According to Dom Rivet, the relaxation of monastic discipline in the Order of Cluny began after the death of Saint Hugh, and mainly under Abbot Pontius; but Peter the Venerable re-established the primitive regularity for some time.

4th The Book of the Conversion of Clerics, composed in Paris in 1122, and addressed to the young ecclesiastics of the university of this city. It is an exhortation to penance, and an invective against lax, ambitious, and unruly clerics in their morals.

5th The Exhortation to the Knights of the Temple, addressed to Hugh of Payens, first grand master and prior of Jerusalem, was written in 1129. It is a eulogy of this military Order which had been instituted in 1118, and an exhortation to the knights to behave with courage in the different posts that would be entrusted to them. Instead, he says, of other wars usually beginning with anger, ambition, or avarice, those that you undertake have no other motive than justice and the cause of Jesus Christ; and whatever the success of your arms may be, there is nothing but gain for you. He describes their way of life thus. They follow in everything the command of their prior, and have only what he gives them. Their clothing has nothing sought after or superfluous. They observe their rule exactly, and have neither wife nor children. They do not claim anything that is theirs, and do not desire more than they have. All profane amusements are unknown to them. They do not seek to make a reputation for themselves, and expect victory only from the Lord. Such was the primitive institute of the Templars. But when, later on, this Order became rich, it corrupted itself, excited the cupidity of people of the world, and became its victim.

6th The Treatise on the Love of God. It is said there that the way to love God is to love Him without measure; that far from putting limits on our love, we must work without ceasing to increase it; and that the reason to love God is because He is God, and He loves us; that the reward of love is love itself which makes us happy in time and in eternity; that it has for its principle the charity and grace that God pours into our souls. The holy Doctor counts several degrees of love. "We can," he says, "love God for our own happiness, for Him and for ourselves all at once, and solely for Himself. The supreme purity of this love will only take place in heaven. The pure love of God is called charity, and differs from the love of desire, which is interested and relates to us, but which is good nonetheless, although less perfect than charity."

7th The Book of Precepts and Dispensations, written in 1131, contains answers to several questions on certain points of the Rule of Saint Benedict, from which an abbot can or cannot dispense.

8th The Book of Grace and Free Will, where the Catholic dogma relating to these two objects is proven according to the principles of Saint Augustine.

9th The Letter or Treatise addressed to Hugh of Saint-Victor contains the explanation of several difficulties concerning the Incarnation and various other points of theology.

10th His Treatise on the Works of Abelard, and his five Books of Consideration, addressed to Pope Eugene III, are a masterpiece.

11th The Book of the Duties of Bishops, written in 1127, and addressed to Henry, archbishop of Sens. It deals with chastity, humility, pastoral solicitude, and the different obligations of bishops. The Saint condemns there the abbots who sought to exempt themselves from episcopal jurisdiction.

12th The Sermons on Psalm 90, "Qui habitat," etc., were composed around the year 1145.

13th The Sermons on the Song of Songs, eighty-six in number. Saint Bernard, however, only explains the first two chapters, and the first verse of the third chapter of this sacred book. But, by means of the mystical and allegorical interpretations to which he abandons himself, he treats in the most interesting manner a large number of points of morality and spirituality. One cannot read without admiration what he says about humility and compunction, divine love, and the interior ways of contemplation. William, abbot of Saint-Thierry, made an abridgment of the first fifty-one sermons. Gilbert, a monk of Holland, from the Cistercian abbey in England, which depended on the bishop of Lincoln, continues the work of Saint Bernard on the Song of Songs, and gave forty-eight discourses in the same genre, around the year 1176. He goes up to the tenth verse of the fifth chapter.

14th The Sermons for the whole year contain excellent maxims, and are very suitable for inspiring piety. The author makes the greatest devotion for the mystery of Jesus suffering and for his holy Mother shine forth there. The style of these discourses shows that they were usually delivered in Latin, a language that the monks understood. But they were translated into French for the lay brothers who did not have the understanding of Latin, as Mabillon proved, vol. 1, p. 706, n. 8. It is probable that Saint Bernard did the translation himself. There was in the library of the Feuillants, in Paris, a collection of these sermons, which were put into French at that time, or at least shortly after. Mabillon, "Præf. in Serm. sancti Bernardi," p. 716, gave a sample of them.

The style of the sermons and other writings of Saint Bernard is full of sweetness and elegance, and yet passes for being very flowery; but this defect, if it is one, pleases the reader instead of shocking him, so much naturalness, beauty, and fire are there in the figures and images that the holy Doctor employs. His funeral oration for his brother Gerard, who had been his assistant in the government of Clairvaux, is a masterpiece of eloquence and sentiment. He consoles himself in that he hopes that his brother enjoys the happiness of heaven; and the tender manner with which he expresses his regrets over the loss of the one who was his counsel and his support shows that sensitivity is compatible with eminent holiness. Gerard died in 1138. Ten years later, the Saint gave the funeral oration for Saint Malachy. He delivered a second one on the anniversary day of this Saint. The authors of the "Hist. lit. de la Fr.," vol. x, "Præf.," observe that these three funeral orations are, since the century of Saint Augustine, what has appeared best in Latin.

15th The Letters, 440 in number, in the edition of Mabillon. They are for the most part addressed to Popes, kings, bishops, abbots, etc. They will be an eternal monument to the knowledge, prudence, and indefatigable role of Saint Bernard.

16th The Treatise addressed to Hugh of Saint-Victor is a response to various questions of theology.

We will give immediately the list of the main works falsely attributed to Saint Bernard:

1st The Ladder of the Cloister, which is by Guigo, first prior of the Grande-Chartreuse and author of several spiritual letters; 2nd the Meditations which were composed by a person of piety whose name is unknown, but who appears to have lived later than the holy Abbot of Clairvaux; 3rd the Treatise on the Edification of the Interior House, written by some monk of Cîteaux, who appears to have been a contemporary of Saint Bernard; 4th the Treatise on the Virtues, which has for its author some Benedictine monk. It is an instruction for novices; 5th the book to the Brothers of Mont-Dieu, and that of the Contemplation of God, although often cited under the name of Saint Bernard, are certainly by the author of the first book of the life of the Saint. It is William, abbot of Saint-Thierry, near Reims, who later entered the Order of Cîteaux, at Signy, where he died around the year 1150.

Saint Bernard, in his writings, is all at once insinuating, affectionate, and vehement; his style is animated, sublime, and agreeable. Charity makes him season his reproaches so much that one sees that the goal he proposes to himself in making them is to correct, and not to insult. Even when he employs the strongest expressions, he wins the heart and inspires respect with love: the culprit he warns blames only himself; he is not angry either at the reprimand or at the one who makes it. He possessed Scripture so perfectly that he made its language pass into almost all his periods; and, if one can speak in this way, he spread into all his writings the marrow of the sacred text with which his heart was filled. He had read the ancient Fathers a great deal, especially Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine: often he borrows their thoughts; but he knows how to make them his own by the new turn he gives them. Although he lived after Saint Anselm, the first of the scholastics (and contemporaries are ranked in the same class), he treated matters of theology in the manner of the ancients. This reason, joined to the excellence of his writings, has made him counted among the Fathers of the Church. All his works are marked with the stamp of homily, devotion, and charity; as he always speaks the language of the heart, he touches his readers singularly.

The learned Father Mabillon owed the foundation of this high reputation that he enjoyed in the literary world to the complete edition of the Works of Saint Bernard, which he published in 1667, 2 vol. in-fol. in 9 vol. in-8°. In 1690, he gave a second one, enriched with very curious prefaces and notes that were not found in the first. He had prepared a third one when he died in 1707. It was published in 1719. The second is the most sought after.

These editions have been reproduced by M. Migne, by M. Périsse, and by MM. Gaume.

M. L. Guérin, in Bar-le-Duc (Meuse), published an excellent translation of the complete Works of Saint Bernard. This translation is preceded by the life of the Saint by Father Ratisbonne; a masterpiece serving as a portico to other masterpieces, 5 vol. in-8°.

We have used, to compose this biography, the life of Saint Bernard written in five books by three different abbots, of whom the first is William, abbot of Saint-Thierry of Reims, of the Order of Saint Benedict; the second, Bernard, abbot of Bonneval, of the Order of Cîteaux, from a diocese of Vienne; and the third, Geoffrey, secretary of the Saint, and later abbot of Igny, and fourth abbot of Clairvaux; the latter composed the last three books, and the other two the first two. We have completed it with Godoscard, the Annals of Cîteaux, and especially with the "History of Saint Bernard and his Century," by Father Ratisbonne, ed. Guérin, Bar-le-Duc (Meuse); the life of the Saints of Troyes, by the abbot Defer, local Notes provided by M. A. Fourat, and the Saints of Dijon, by the abbot Duplus.

[APPENDIX: NOTICE ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF BOSSUET.]

We believe it our duty to place, after the life of Saint Bernard, one of the greatest glories of the Church of France, a notice on Bossuet, one of the most illustrious men of whom our fatherland boasts, and who, by his genius and his works, occupies a rank so distinguished after the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was born in Dijon, on September 27, 1627, of a family distinguished in the legal profession; he began his studies at the Jesuit college, then was sent to Paris by his parents to finish them. Already he belonged to the Church by more than one title. He had been tonsured in 1635, and named in 1640, at the age of thirteen, canon of the cathedral of Metz.

It was in 1642 that he arrived in Paris. He was placed at the College of Navarre, whose grand-master was Nicolas Cornet, a doctor famous for his knowledge and his piety. Bossuet was sixteen years old when, in 1643, he defended his first philosophy thesis; it had such brilliance that soon one spoke of the young student in Paris only as a prodigy. They wanted to see him at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and he was invited there to compose a sermon on the spot. The young orator withdrew, and after a few hours of recollection and reflection, he reappeared in the midst of the assembly, which was composed of the finest minds of the kingdom, and he astonished this formidable audience with a sermon that was covered in applause and which excited general admiration.

He received the subdiaconate at Langres, and returned to Paris at the end of 1648. The following year, he returned to Metz and received the diaconate there. Bossuet returned again to Paris in 1659. During the two years that his licentiate lasted, he made an in-depth study of all parts of theology. His science and his reputation grew with extreme rapidity; but far from letting himself be dazzled by his successes, he seemed not to notice them or even not to think of them, loving religion, retreat, and work more and more, and he gave himself without respite to the studies he judged indispensable in the career he had embraced. Holy Scripture and the Fathers formed the foundation of his meditations and his works.

He had barely finished his licentiate (in 1652) when he was named archdeacon of Metz, under the title of archdeacon of Sarrebourg; his merit alone raised him two years later to the grand archdeaconry of the same Church.

He also received in 1652 the doctor's cap and the order of priesthood. He wished, to prepare for the priesthood, to spend some time in retreat at Saint-Lazare. There he was known to Saint Vincent de Paul, founder of that house, and he obtained his friendship. All his life he gloried in calling him his master, and he found himself happy to render to his memory the tribute of praise and veneration that he owed him, when at the beginning of the 18th century they were occupied in Rome with the beatification of this holy priest.

His theological studies finished, Bossuet returned to Metz, and there, in the silence of retreat, he resumed his work with new activity. Holy Scripture always formed the principal object of his studies. Not a day passed that he did not charge his Bible with some brief note on doctrine or morality. He also continued to read the Fathers very assiduously.

The Protestants of Metz, who sincerely desired to be enlightened, went to find Bossuet, who welcomed them with kindness and helped them to shake off the yoke of error. They then had as their principal minister Paul Ferry, a man highly esteemed for his knowledge, his talents, and his affability. This minister published in 1654 a catechism that appeared very dangerous due to the propositions it contained. Bossuet, at the solicitation of the Bishop of Augusta, grand vicar of the Bishop of Metz, undertook the refutation of this catechism and acquitted himself with the most complete success. What must appear most astonishing is that this refutation only increased the esteem and friendship that Paul Ferry already had for his formidable adversary, so much had Bossuet known how, while fighting error, to spare the person! The Refutation of the catechism of Paul Ferry had such a great effect that the Protestants flocked to Bossuet, with the intention of being instructed.

Bossuet's father, having become a widower, had engaged in the ecclesiastical state and had taken holy orders up to the diaconate. Bossuet resigned to him the grand archdeaconry of Metz, of which he was the titular, when he himself was named dean of that Church. One then saw the father and the son exercise themselves in the practice of the same virtues and show equal assiduity and the same zeal in the accomplishment of the same duties.

Bossuet found himself obliged, towards the end of 1666, to leave Metz to come to Paris to render to the memory of the Queen Mother, who died at the beginning of that year, a homage that gratitude seemed to make a duty for him. He pronounced the funeral oration of this princess on January 20, 1667. He did not delay in returning to Metz, where he would soon have to mourn a more sensitive loss. He lost his father on the following August 15.

Bossuet, in the following years, appeared with even more brilliance than one had seen until then. It was especially from 1660 to 1669 that his virtue, his genius, his rare knowledge, and his apostolic works raised him to that high rank that he occupied in the Church.

He brought back to the Catholic religion the Marquis of Dangeau and his brother, who later took the ecclesiastical habit and made known to the public what path Bossuet had followed to disabuse him of his errors. A more striking conquest was that of Marshal Turenne, whose example necessarily had to influence a large number of other persons raised in the same principles. It was while working on the conversion of this great man that Bossuet composed the book of the Exposition of the Catholic Doctrine. A justly famous book, simple, full of knowledge, strong in proofs and reason, and which avenges religion of those who slander it or insult it without knowing it. Three Protestant ministers tried to refute it. Bossuet made a reply to the first two that remained without reply; as for the third, who was Brueys, Bossuet did better than answer him, he converted him.

One was astonished not to see Bossuet raised to the episcopate, of which he seemed worthy for so long, when finally he was named Bishop of Condom on September 13, 1669; but he was not consecrated until more than a year later.

The King named him, in 1670, preceptor to the Dauphin, in replacement of Monsieur the President of Périgny, who had just died after having filled this important employment for two years. The Duke of Montanier was governor of the young prince. Bossuet hesitated to accept a position that did not seem to him compatible with the duties of the episcopate, especially with the obligation of residence, from which nothing in his eyes could dispense him; he resigned his bishopric, and accepted only a modest benefice in compensation.

Bossuet composed for his pupil the Treatise on the Knowledge of God and of Oneself, an important book that can pass for a complete treatise on metaphysics. He wished to coordinate the education of the Dauphin through three works no less important: 1st the Discourse on Universal History; 2nd the Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture; and 3rd the State of the Kingdom of France and of all Europe. Nothing of this last writing has been found in Bossuet's papers; it is a precious work whose loss one can only regret. In the Politics of Holy Scripture, Bossuet preaches moderation to kings, obedience to peoples, and to both submission to the divine will. As for the Discourse on Universal History, it is a masterpiece that alone would have sufficed to carry the name of Bossuet to immortality. One cannot regret enough that he did not have the leisure to complete this immortal work, that is to say, to give its continuation from the times of Charlemagne to those of Louis XIV.

The education of the Dauphin being finished, Bossuet would have well desired to leave Versailles, but he had been named chaplain to Madame the Dauphine in 1680, and these new functions kept him at court despite himself. The King named him in 1681 Bishop of Meaux.

Louis XIV had believed it his duty to convoke at this moment a general assembly of the clergy of France, to support himself with its authority against Pope Innocent XI who threatened to repress the abusive extension of the regale. The bishops, slaves of the king, appeared ready to formulate in a schismatic manner the alleged liberties of the Gallican Church. Bossuet preached the opening sermon; it is his famous sermon on the Unity of the Church. He showed there his attachment to the Apostolic See and his desire to inspire the same sentiment in all the members of his audience. He represented the Roman Church with all the characters that a divine institution has imprinted upon it, and finished by exhorting the bishops of the assembly to remain invariably united to it. One nevertheless reproaches Bossuet for having drafted the four articles of the declaration of the clergy of France: one excuses him by saying that another would have made a more erroneous, more violent, more hostile drafting to the Holy See. One also blamed the Latin work that he made to defend this declaration, although it was in the intention of the illustrious author to complete and correct it before publishing it. Our readers will find the solution to these historical questions in the notices of the editors that precede the Works of Bossuet (ed. Bar-le-Duc); they will also see there what Bossuet did to combat Quietism.

When the assembly of 1682 had separated, Bossuet gave himself entirely to the government and to the heart of his diocese. He executed, to prepare himself for it, the design so long formed of a retreat at La Trappe. There, in the conversations of his old friend the Abbot of Rancé, and by the example of the numerous religious who lived there in the most austere penance, he revived his piety, and gave it, so to speak, a new temper. Bossuet loved this holy solitude; he made eight trips there at various times during his episcopate; he said that La Trappe was the place where he liked to be most after his diocese.

The first object of his solicitude, when he was installed at Meaux, was his episcopal seminary. He re-established discipline, order, and the taste for study there, and by the effect of his assiduous surveillance, no less than by wise regulations, everything in this house breathed fervor, piety, and the love of the most austere virtues, of which he himself gave the example.

He established missions for the conversion of the Protestants and for the instruction of the peoples; he revived and perfected the use of ecclesiastical conferences. He attended regularly those that were held at Meaux, and often those of the other principal cantons of his diocese. He visited even the smallest parishes, even the oratories of the smallest hamlets, and everywhere he addressed to the peoples words of price and consolation. His exterior inspired respect and confidence; he left in the soul of his diocesans a long impression of attachment and veneration. Long after his death, the old people liked to speak to their children of their good and worthy bishop, and of the pleasure they had had in seeing and hearing him.

Not only did Bossuet often visit the general hospital of Meaux, but he poured abundant alms into it every year. He increased his liberality for this house and for the poor, in a year of scarcity, with so much profusion that his steward, frightened, believed he should urge him to moderate them. Bossuet's response was: "To diminish them, I will do nothing of the sort; and to make money, on this occasion, I will sell everything I have."

Bossuet was extremely sober, an enemy of all profusion, of all luxury in his meals, and of all refinement in the dishes that were served to him. A religious observer of the laws of the Church, he was a model of austerity and abstinence on the days that the Church has consecrated to penance and the mortification of the senses. He had at the age of seventy-two an erysipelas that obliged him to modify the habitual severity of his regimen, and this was the first time that he permitted himself to relax a little from the austerity of Lent. As soon as he felt recovered, he resumed his accentuated way of life. In his interior, with his family, with his friends, he was the simplest of men. His servants found in him a father rather than a master, and served him by affection as much as by duty. He made them love work and virtue; they lost their bad habits in his house, and took on good ones; for he did not disdain to watch over their conduct and to instruct them. Each day he gathered them for prayer, and every evening he blessed them with his hand.

Always occupied with the triumphs of the Church, Bossuet did not cease to devote all his vigils to it until the last moment of his life. It was in 1688 that he composed his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, one of the most astonishing works of the man who excites the most astonishment and admiration. Nothing truer or stronger has ever been said to bring back the Protestants. Of all Bossuet's works, none shows more science, frankness, or form. One sees there a certainty of conscience, a simple and imposing authority, which astonish and subjugate; no book contains less reply. One nevertheless replied: Jacques Bénigne de Beauvais, minister at Rotterdam, showed himself one of the most eager to fight against Bossuet. This attack produced the Defense of the History of the Variations; a work in which Bossuet victoriously repels the objections and allegations of the Protestant doctor, with a tone of decency and moderation of which his adversaries were very far from providing him the model. After Bénigne, came the minister Jurien, a fanatic visionary, disavowed by the most reasonable of his sect. Bossuet answered him with six Warnings to the Protestants. The fifth is especially remarkable for the substance of the question that is agitated there; it is that of the sovereignty of the people, examined in the same terms as it has been since, as well as the theory of the social contract. Bossuet supports all his reasonings with facts; he proves by the authority of history that when peoples have been well enlightened on their true interests, they have had a horror of anarchy, which would be the true state of what is called a sovereign people.

Jurien was suspicious of prophesying: he announced the coming ruin of Catholicism; he fixed the epoch of the destruction of the Holy See, and had it printed that the Pope was truly the Antichrist predicted in the Apocalypse. Bossuet, indignant at this profanation of a sacred text, published, in 1689, his Explanation of the Apocalypse. His design, in this work, is not to delve into the different meanings of this famous prophecy, but to show that it has been accomplished in one of its important parts, by the fall of the Roman Empire. His conjectures are confined within the just limits that the intention of the Church has always been to respect, and that such a wise genius was incapable of crossing.

The great scandal that the errors of Molinos, recently condemned by the Holy See, had caused in the whole Church was not yet erased, when the works of Mme Guyon were submitted to the examination of Bossuet.

Accustomed to the simple and severe language of the Scriptures and to the precision of a sound theology, he could not fail to find dangerous a doctrine that counted for nothing conduct and even positive sentiments. Several bishops, by ordinances and pastoral instructions, censured and forbade in their dioceses the writings of Mme Guyon, and Bossuet, in his Treatise on the States of Prayer, undertook a complete and direct refutation of the doctrine of the new mystics. He desired that this book have the approval of the Archbishop of Cambrai. Fénelon refused it after some delays.

The struggle once engaged between such men, strong in their purity and their conscience, had to be lively, and nowhere perhaps has their soul shown itself more powerful. While Bossuet was composing his book against the mystics, Fénelon believed himself obliged to support them, and published his Maxims of the Saints, which were referred, and which he himself submitted to the judgment of the Holy See.

Hardly had the Pope named examiners to pronounce on this affair, when there arose between the Archbishop of Cambrai and the Bishop of Meaux a war of the pen, which lasted without respite for eighteen months. As soon as Bossuet published a writing, Fénelon answered with another.

The Relation of Quietism, which Bossuet published in this interval, made the greatest sensation in the public and had a prodigious success. Unfortunately, Fénelon was little spared there; this is the most distressing epoch of the Quietism controversy. It was also that where Fénelon deployed the greatest character. Rome, after long deliberations, pronounced on the book of the Maxims of the Saints; Pope Innocent XII condemned it by a brief of March 12, 1699. One knows with what humility and what resignation Fénelon submitted to this condemnation.

The assembly of the clergy of 1700 had an account rendered of the whole affair of Quietism. Bossuet was charged with making the report, and this choice was well justified by the moderation and impartiality that he showed there. He declared with the most noble frankness, before all the assembled bishops, that the vehemence with which he had fought the errors of his colleague had never altered his sentiments for his person.

When it was a question, around 1690, of the reunion of the Protestants of Germany to the Catholic Church, Bossuet seemed charged by Providence to treat this important negotiation. Already proposals had been made by the Bishop of Neustadt and Molanus, Abbot of Lokkum, a wise and skillful doctor. The court of Brunswick, which was occupied with this project, engaged Leibnitz to enter into relation with Bossuet. This negotiation, followed with a good faith very rare in these sorts of affairs, let one hope for the most happy results, and only failed due to circumstances independent of the very substance of the discussions, and among which one must count the new political situation in which the Elector of Hanover, to whom Leibnitz was entirely devoted, found himself placed in 1701.

Bossuet sensed the danger that threatened all political and religious institutions; he foresaw all the evils that descended upon France at the end of the 18th century; he explained himself several times quite openly, and his zeal for religion received a new ardor from the very thought of the few days that remained for him to fight for it.

In the midst of all the cares and all the movements to which his zeal and his pastoral solicitude gave him over, Bossuet already felt the attacks of the illness that was to put an end to his glorious career. From 1696, he had experienced pains that could indicate that he was threatened with the stone; but he was then far from foreseeing such a grave accident.

He had not waited for old age and infirmities to prepare himself seriously for his end. At the synod that he held in 1702, he spoke in the most touching terms of his death, which his infirmities made him look upon as very near. Soon, in fact, his illness, taking a more grave character, was no longer a secret; his pains became more lively, and there was added to them, at the end of 1703, a fever that did not leave him until April 12, 1704, which was his last day. His death was very edifying. He received the Extreme Unction and the holy Viaticum from the hands of the vicar of Saint-Roch, answering everything with firmness, without ostentation, docile as the most humble sheep of the flock of the Church. Full of resignation to the will of God and of hope in his mercy, he expired without agony, aged seventy-six years, six months, and sixteen days.

One began to reunite the works of Bossuet in an edition given in 1743, 17 vol. in-4°; 13 volumes of another were published around 1780; but the spirit of sect having denatured and interpolated certain works of the great bishop, it was publicly blamed and rejected by the assembly of the clergy of France. Burigny gave, in 1761, a life of Bossuet, a weak and incomplete work. Cardinal de Bausset, the faithful and elegant historian of Fénelon, published another in 1814, 4 vol. in-8°. This life has been joined to the edition that the bookseller Lobel, of Versailles, gave in 1819, in 45 vol. in-8°. Since then, an edition has been published in Paris in 63 vol. in-12, two others in Besançon in 52 vol. in-8° and 48 vol. in-12, two others in 12 vol. large in-8° two columns (one, Paris, Lefebvre; the other, Chalandre, Gaume, Leroux and Jouby, and Lefort). An edition in 51 vol. in-8° appeared, a few years ago, at Vivès, in Paris. M. Poujoulat published a very remarkable study on Bossuet, Paris, 1855, 1 vol. in-8°. A new edition of the Complete Works of Bossuet, in 12 vol. large in-8°, is on sale at the Célestins printing house, in Bar-le-Duc. We will follow, in the analysis that is to follow, the order given in this last edition.

1° Liber Psalmorum. — The dissertation or preface that Bossuet placed at the head of his Commentary on the Psalms can be regarded as one of his most beautiful works. — 2° Veteris et Novi Testamenti Cantica. — 3° Supplenda in Psalmos. — 4° Explanation of the prophecy of Isaiah on the birth of the holy Virgin. — 5° Literal explanation of Psalm 22 on the passion and the abandonment of Our Lord. — 6° Libri Salomonis, Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Canticum Canticorum, Sapientia, Ecclesiasticus. — 7° The Apocalypse with an explanation, followed by an Abridgment of the Apocalypse, and a Warning to the Protestants, on the alleged fulfillment of the prophecies. — 8° De excidio Babylonis, apud S. Joannem, demonstrationes tres adversus S. Verensfeistum. — 9° Meditations on the Gospel.

## CONTROVERSY. — PROTESTANTISM.

1° Exposition of the Catholic doctrine on matters of controversy. — 2° Fragments on various matters of controversy: On the worship due to God; — on the worship of images; — on the satisfaction of Jesus Christ; — on the Eucharist; — on tradition. — 3° History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches, with Preface. — 4° Six Warnings to the Protestants on the letters of the minister Jurien against the History of the Variations. — 5° Defense of the History of the Variations, followed by a Clarification on the reproach of idolatry and on the error of the pagans, where the slander of the ministers is refuted by themselves. — 6° Refutation of the catechism of Paul Ferry, minister of the so-called reformed religion. — 7° Conference with M. Claude, minister of Charenton, on the matter of the Church. — 8° Thirteen Reflections on a writing of M. Claude. — 9° Two Pastoral Instructions on the promises of the Church. — 10° Treatise on communion under both species. — 11° Tradition defended on the matter of communion under one species. — 12° Pastoral letter to the new Catholics of the diocese, to exhort them to make their Easter. — 13° Explanation of some difficulties on the prayers of the mass, to a new Catholic. — 14° Letter on the adoration of the cross, to brother N., novice of the abbey of N. (La Trappe), converted from the Protestant religion to the Catholic religion. — 15° Pieces concerning a Project for the reunion of the Protestants of France and Germany to the Catholic Church. — First part: Regula circa christianorum omnium ecclesiasticam reunionem; — Cogitationes privatae de methodo reunionis Ecclesiae protestantum cum Ecclesia Romana catholica; — Project for reunion of Molanus, translated by Bossuet; — De scripto cui titulus: Cogitationes privatae, ejusdem episcopi Meldensis sententia; — Reflections of the Abbot Molanus; — De professoribus confessionis Augustana ad repetendum unitatem catholicam disponendis; — Explicatio ulterior methodi reunionis ecclesiastica; — Summa controversiae de Eucharistia, inter quosdam religiosos et Molanum; — Judicium Meldensis episcopi de summa controversiae de Eucharistia; — Executoria dominorum legatorum super compactatis data Bohemis; — Annotationes Leibnitzii in pacta cum Bohemis. — Second part: Forty-four letters of Bossuet, Leibnitz and Madame de Brinon, concerning the project for reunion. — 16° Memoir of what is to be corrected in the new library of ecclesiastical authors of M. Dupin. — 17° Remarks on the History of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, of M. Dupin.

## CONTROVERSY: CRITICISM. — JANSENISM. — QUIETISM.

1° Letters, Ordinance and Instructions on the version of the new Testament of Trévoux, — 2° Defense of tradition and the holy Fathers, against Richard Simon. — 3° Warning on the book of Moral Reflections. — 4° Letters on Quietism. — 5° On the authority of ecclesiastical judgments, where the authors of schisms and heresies are noted. — 6° Ordinance and pastoral instruction on the states of prayer. — 7° Instruction on the states of prayer, where the errors of the false mystics of our days are exposed. — 8° Acts of the condemnation of the Quietists: Bull of Innocent XI and Decree of the Inquisition of Rome. — 9° Tradition of the new mystics. — 10° Response to the difficulties of Madame de la Maisonfort. — 11° Response to a letter of His Grace the Archbishop of Cambrai. — 12° Declaration of the sentiments of His Graces of Noailles, Bossuet and Godet des Marais on the book which has for title: Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints, etc. — 13° Summary of the doctrine of the book: Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints, etc., of the consequences that follow, of the defenses and explanations that have been given there. — 14° Memoirs to M. de Cambrai on the Explanation of the Maxims. — 15° Preface on the Pastoral Instruction given at Cambrai, September 15, 1697. — 16° Response of Bossuet to four letters of the Archbishop of Cambrai. — 17° De nova quaestione tractatus tres: — Mystici in toto; — Scholis in tuto; — Quietismus redivivus. — 18° Relation on Quietism. — 19° Remarks on the response of His Grace the Archbishop of Cambrai to the remarks of His Grace of Meaux. — 20° Response of a theologian to the first letter of His Grace the Archbishop of Cambrai to His Grace the Bishop of Chartres. — 21° Response to the decisive prejudices of His Grace the Archbishop of Cambrai. — 22° The Passages clarified, or Response to the book entitled: The Principal propositions of the book of the Maxims of the Saints, justified by stronger expressions of the holy authors. — 23° Relation of the acts of the clergy carrying condemnation of the Maxims of the Saints. — 24° Mandate of His Grace the Bishop of Meaux for the publication of the Constitution of Pope Innocent XII against the book of the Maxims. — 25° Letters relative to the affair of Quietism. — 26° Last clarification on the response of His Grace the Archbishop of Cambrai to the remarks of His Grace of Meaux. — 27° De Quietismo in Galliis refutato.

## SERMONS, PANEGYRICS, FUNERAL ORATIONS.

1° Sermons. — A few hours before mounting the pulpit, Bossuet meditated on his text, threw on paper a few words, a few passages from the Fathers, to guide his path; then gave himself over to the inspiration of the moment and to the impression that he produced on his listeners. What has been collected of his sermons cannot therefore pass for the faithful expression of what he pronounced; however, his genius is found there. His sermon on the Vocation of the Gentiles was the one that made the most sensation, and the one on the Unity of the Church is, in the judgment of Cardinal Maury, the most magnificent work of this kind that has ever been composed in any language. — 2° Sermons for vows and professions. — The most remarkable is the sermon for the profession of Madame de la Vallière. — 3° Panegyrics of the Saints. — 4° Funeral orations. — That of Henrietta-Maria of France, Queen of England, of Madame, Duchess of Orleans, and of Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, are masterpieces. Bossuet rises, in these discourses, to a perfection of eloquence that had no model in antiquity, and that nothing has equaled since.

## WORKS OF PIETY AND MORALITY.

1° ELEVATIONS to God on the mysteries of the Christian religion. — 2° Moral and Christian thoughts on different subjects. — 3° Detached thoughts. — 4° Exhortations to the Ursulines of Meaux. — Ordinances; — Conference and Instruction. — 5° Opuscules of piety. — 6° Sacred poems and Reception speech to the French Academy.

## EDUCATION OF THE DAUPHIN.

1° De Institutione Ludovici Delphini ad Innocentium XI. — Brief of Innocent XI to Bossuet. — 2° Introduction to philosophy, or On the knowledge of God and of oneself. — 3° Logic. — Free will. — 4° Politics drawn from the very words of Holy Scripture. — 5° Discourse on universal history. — 6° Treatise on causes. — 7° Instruction to His Grace the Dauphin for his first communion. — 8° De Existentia Dei, serenissimo Delphino. — 9° De Incontinentia, serenissimo Delphino. — 10° Extracts from the morality of Aristotle. — 11° Sentences for His Grace the Dauphin. — 12° Latin grammar and Maxims of Caesar. — 13° Latin fable composed for His Grace the Dauphin. — 14° Abridgment of the History of France.

## PASTORAL WORKS.

1° Catechism of the diocese of Meaux. — 2° Ecclesiastical prayers for Sundays and feast days. — 3° Meditations for the time of the Jubilee. — 4° Statutes and Synodical Ordinances. — 5° Ordinance to repress the abuses that had been introduced on the occasion of the feast of the monastery of Cerfroid. — 6° Pieces concerning the state of the abbey of Jouarre. — 7° Regulation of the seminary of the daughters of the Propagation of the faith, established in the city of Metz. — 8° Mandatum illustrissimi ac reverendissimi Episcopi Meldensis, ad Censuram ac declarationem conventus cleri Gallicani anni 1700 promulgandam in synodo dioecesana die 1 sept. an. 1701.

9° Extract from the minutes of the Assembly of the clergy, held at Saint-Germain en Laye. — 10° Extract from the minutes of the General Assembly of the clergy of France of 1700. — 11° Decretum de morali disciplina. — 12° De doctrina concili Tridentini circa dilectionem in sacramentis poenitentiae requisitam. — 13° Memoirs on the printing of the works of the bishops.

## CORRESPONDENCE.

1° Various letters. — 2° Letters of piety and direction.

## THEOLOGICAL OPUSCULES.

1° Plan of a theology. — 2° Treatise on concupiscence, or exposition of these words of Saint John: "Do not love the world nor what is in the world". — 3° Treatise on usury. — 4° Dissertationculae IV adversus probabilitatem.

## GALLICANISM.

1° Cleri Gallicani de ecclesiastica potestate declaratio. — 2° Gallia orthodoxa, sive vindiciae scholæ Parisiensis totiusque cleri Gallicani adversus nonnullos. — De causis et fundamentis hujus operis praevia et theologica dissertatio. — 3° Appendix ad Galliam orthodoxam, seu Defensio declarationis cleri Gallicani de ecclesiastica potestate anni 1682. — 4° Epistola cleri Gallicani Parisiis congregati, anno 1682, ad SS. DD. N. Innocentium papam XI. — 5° Innocentii XI ad clerum Gallicanum responsa. — 6° Epistola cleri Gallicani, anno 1682, in comitiis generalibus congregati, ad omnes praelatos per Gallias consistentes et universum clerum. — 7° Epistola conventus cleri Gallicani anni 1682, ad universos praelatos Ecclesiae Gallicanae. — 8° Censura et Declaratio conventus generalis cleri Gallicani, congregati anno 1700 in materia fidei et morum. — 9° Censura propositionum. — 10° Declaratio de dilectione Dei in poenitentiae sacramento requisita, et de probabilitum opinionum usu. — 11° Epistola conventus cleri Gallicani anni 1700, ad cardinales, archiepiscopos, episcopos et universum clerum per Gallias consistentem. — 12° Memoir of Bossuet to the King against the book of Boccaberti, entitled: De Romani Pontificis auctoritate.