On once more entering his kingdom, Louis, who, at a distance, had sometimes lent a credulous ear to the complaints of the discontented or to the calumnies of Suger’s enemies, did him full justice and was the first to give him the name of Father of the country. The ill success of the crusade and the remembrance of all that France had risked and lost for nothing, made a deep impression upon the public; and they honored Suger for his far-sightedness whilst they blamed St. Bernard for the infatuation which he had fostered and for the disasters which had followed it. St. Bernard accepted their reproaches in a pious spirit: “If,” said he, “there must be murmuring against God or against me, I prefer to see the murmurs of men falling upon me rather than upon the Lord. To me it is a blessed thing that God should deign to use me as a buckler to shield Himself. I shrink not from humiliation, provided that His glory be unassailed.” But at the same time St. Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety. “We be fallen upon very grievous times,” he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; “the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy. Do not the heathen say, ‘Where is now their God?’ And who can wonder? The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine. Did we undertake the work rashly? Did we behave ourselves lightly? How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it? But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it.”