Contemporaneously with the foundation in Palestine of the order of the Templars--a hospitaller and military order, which had no connection with the monastic orders, and which for a long time devoted all its energies to defending the holy places by prayer and force of arms--St. Norbert, the reformer of the regular canons of the St. Augustine order, founded the Premonstrants in Picardy; Stephen of Muret, a contemplative cenobite of Limoges, founded the order of Grandmont in his province; another Frenchman, Aimeric Malefaye, Patriarch of Antioch, being alarmed at the relaxation of discipline in the monasteries of Asia Minor, introduced some useful reforms into the establishment upon Mount Carmel; while Stephen Harding, third abbot of the Cistercians, an active propagator of the rules which Robert de Molême drew up under the title of “Charte de Charité,” entrusted to his pupil, St. Bernard, the destinies of the new communities which sprang from this glorious cradle. It was in the middle of the twelfth century that there appeared upon the scene one of the brightest lights of the Church, namely, St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (Fig. 254), which he founded, and which was called _the third_ daughter of the Cistercians. He was an admirable orator, a savant of the first rank, a brilliant writer, and an eminent statesman; he had under his control all the interests and secrets of Christendom and of the sovereign papacy, and he never used them for purposes of worldly ambition. He sent forth vast armies of Crusaders to the East, but he adhered to his character of monk and apostle, by devoting his energies to combating the Oriental heretics by verbal arguments; to preventing schisms; to appeasing the scholastic quarrels, in which the famous Abelard was one of the disputants; to aiding with his counsels the popes and the monarchs; and to pouring forth, from diocese to diocese, from council to council, and from synod to synod, that fervid and powerful eloquence which won him all hearts. The death of the illustrious abbot of Clairvaux, in 1153, was a terrible blow to the Church, and an irreparable loss for monastic institutions; for there was no one to take his place or to continue his work of reformation in the monasteries of the Benedictine order. [Illustration: Fig. 256.--A Beguin.--From an Engraving in the “Histoire de l’Origine des Béguines Belges,” by Hallman.]