The practical authority of Norbert was mainly limited to Germany, but the influence of Bernard, confined to no class or country, proved something almost unique in the whole of Christian history. While Bernard lived the simple and self-denying life of a Cistercian in his Burgundian monastery, his activity took in the whole of Christendom. His correspondence was enormous, his works numerous and varied, and his authority hardly questioned. Through his influence the white robe of the Cistercians became familiar in the remotest valleys of Christendom, and the simple and struggling order, which he had joined but a few years before, attained a world-wide celebrity. Every sort of dispute and difference was brought before his tribunal. The rulers of Church and State flocked to the rude huts of Clairvaux as to an oracle. In his frequent journeys throughout France, the Rhineland and Italy, he was welcomed as Pope or Emperor was never welcomed. It was Bernard who drew up the rule for the Knights Templars, who ended the papal schism of 1130, and procured the recognition of Innocent II. as Pope. Innocent II. set the example of deference to his authority which subsequent Popes obsequiously continued, till at last a simple Cistercian became Pope Eugenius III., merely because he was the friend of Bernard. Bernard joined with Norbert in reprobating the rationalism that sprang from the teaching of an Abelard or Gilbert de la Porrée or Arnold of Brescia, and strove with sublime unreasonableness to put down the new questioning spirit. More open heresy, like that of Peter de Bruys, found in him an equally implacable foe. He upheld every doctrine of hierarchical power, and scrupled not to rebuke kings and emperors if they gainsaid him. He rekindled the crusading spirit when it seemed growing cool, and persuaded the two greatest princes of Christendom to set forth on the ill-fated Second Crusade. Stern, unyielding, rigid, dogmatic, blind to all things which in his view did not immediately promote the kingdom of God, Bernard represents the very triumph of the older monastic spirit with its completeness of self-renunciation, its terrible asceticism, its strange and almost inhuman virtues. Even in his own day, his spirit was not that of the whole Church, and bold voices were found to lament his obstinacy, his narrowness, his obscurantist hatred of secular learning. But with all his faults he is a great and noble figure, and as the supreme representative of a dying type, his career marks a transition to a newer, brighter and more progressive world, than the gloomy realm over which he had reigned so long as unquestioned sovereign. Yet it shows that the days of brute force were over, when a simple monk, whose singleness of purpose and zeal for righteousness were never so much as questioned, could rule with such astounding power over the minds of men. Even more than the authority of the great Popes, the power of Bernard