The theory that St. Bernard had not occupied himself with the errors of Abélard until William of St. Thierry drew his attention to them is a very poor and foolish composition. We could as well imagine that Newman knew ‘little or nothing’ of Dr. Arnold’s views in the early thirties. Bernard and Abélard had been for many years the supreme representatives of the new ‘High’ and ‘Broad’ movements of the twelfth century; and Bernard had a far more intense dread of rationalism than Newman. Scarcely an event of moderate importance occurred in Church, school, or state, in France at least, that escaped the eye of the abbot of Clairvaux in those days. He was ‘acting-Pope’ to the Church of Christ, and he felt all the responsibility. And, amongst the multitudinous cares of his office, none gave him greater concern than the purity of the faith and the purification of the disquieting scholastic activity of the day. We have seen in a former chapter how largely antithetic his position was to that of Abélard, and that he was a man who could not doubt for a moment the truth of his own conception of religion. There was the same marked antithesis at the very bases of their theological conceptions, in the mental soil in which those conceptions took root. Bernard was more authoritative than Anselm of Laon, more mystic than Anselm of Canterbury. He had gone further than Anselm on the theory that ‘faith precedes reason’; Abélard had gone beyond Roscelin with the inverse proposition. Perhaps Bernard’s commentary on the ‘Song of Songs’ furnishes the best illustration of his frame of mind and his outlook. Towards the close of his life he devoted himself to long and profound meditation on that beautiful piece of Oriental literature. We must not forget, of course, that the Church is largely responsible for his extravagance on this point. It has indeed taken the civilisation of the West more than two thousand years to discover that its glowing verses are inspired only by the rounded limbs and sweet breath of a beautiful woman; and its most erotic passages are still solemnly applied to the Mother of Christ on her annual festivals. But Bernard revelled in its ‘mystic’ phrases. Day by day, for more than a year, he gathered his monks about him in the _auditorium_ at Clairvaux, and expounded to them the profound spiritual meanings of the ‘Song.’ Eighty-three long sermons barely exhausted the first two chapters. In the end he devoted three lengthy discourses, on successive days, to the elucidation of the words: ‘In my bed at night I have longed for him whom my soul loveth.’