Foremost among them was a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little man. The face was white and worn with suffering, the form enfeebled with disease and exacting nervous exaltation; but there was a light of supreme strength and of joy in the penetrating eyes. He was a man who saw the golden city with so near, so living a vision, that he was wholly impatient of the trivial pleasures of earth: a man formed in the mould of world-conquerors and world-politicians, in whose mind accident had substituted a supernatural for a natural ideal: a man of such intensity and absorption of thought that he was almost incapable of admitting a doubt as to the correctness of his own judgment and purpose and the folly of all that was opposed to it: a man in whom an altruistic ethic might transform, or disguise, but could never suppress, the demand of the entire nature for self-assertion. This was Bernard of Clairvaux, who had founded the monastery in the deepest poverty ten years before. He was soon to be the most powerful man in Christendom. And he held that, if the instinct of reasoning and the impulse of love did indeed come from God and not from the devil, they were of those whimsical gifts, such as the deity of the Middle Ages often gave, which were given with a trust they would be rejected. The other new apostle was St. Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian canons. He had fruitlessly endeavoured to reform the existing order of canons, and had then withdrawn to form a kind of monastery of canons at Prémontré, not far from Laon, where he occasionally visited Anselm. His disciples entered zealously into the task of policeing the country. No disorder in faith or morals escaped their notice; and although Norbert was far behind Bernard in political ability, the man who incurred his pious wrath was in an unenviable position. He had influence with the prelates of the Church, on account of his reforms and the sanctity of his life; he had a profound influence over the common people, not only through his stirring sermons, but also through the miracles he wrought. Abélard frequently bases his rationalistic work on the fact, which he always assumes to be uncontroverted, that the age of miracles is over. Norbert, on the contrary, let it be distinctly understood that he was a thaumaturgus of large practice. Abélard ridiculed his pretensions, and the stories told of him. Even in his later sermons we find him scornfully ‘exposing’ the miracles of Norbert and his companions. They used to slip medicaments unobserved into the food of the sick, he says, and accept the glory of the miracle if the fever was cured. They even attempted to raise the dead to life; and when the corpse retained its hideous rigidity after they had lain long hours in prayer in the sanctuary, they would turn round on the simple folk in the church and upbraid them for the littleness of their faith. This poor trickery was the chief source of the power of the Premonstratensian canons over the people.