The church was then under the sway of a monk, a simple abbot of Clairvaux, St. Bernard. He was of noble birth, like Abelard, a native of Upper Burgundy. He had been brought up in the puissant house of Cîteaux, the sister and rival of Cluny, which sent forth so many illustrious preachers, and which, half a century afterwards, made the crusade against the Albigenses. But St. Bernard thought Cîteaux too splendid and too rich: he went into needy Champagne, and founded the monastery of Clairvaux in the “Valley of Wormwood.” There he was free to lead that life of sorrows that was needful to him: nothing could win him from it; never would he hear of being anything else than a monk, though he might have become archbishop and pope. Constrained to reply to all the kings who consulted him, he found himself all-potent in spite of himself, and condemned to govern Europe. A letter from St. Bernard made the army of the king of France withdraw from Champagne. When schism broke out, by the simultaneous elevation of Innocent II and of Anacletus, St. Bernard was appointed by the church of France to choose between them, and he chose Innocent. But these were not his greatest affairs, as his letters inform us; he lent, not gave, himself to the world; his love and his treasure were elsewhere. Living in the inward life, in prayer and sacrifice, no one could make himself more alone in the midst of bustle; the senses no longer spoke to him of the world. He walked a whole day, says his biographer, along the Lake of Lausanne, and in the evening he asked where the lake was. He drank oil for water, and took clotted blood for butter. He could hardly support himself erect, and yet he found strength to preach the crusade to a hundred thousand men. The multitude thought it was a spirit, rather than a man they saw, when he appeared thus before them, with his red and white beard, his fair and hoary hair; meagre and weak, with but a scarcely visible indication of life upon his cheeks. His sermons were terrible; mothers kept their sons away from them, and wives their husbands; they would else have all followed him to the monasteries. As for him, when he had sent forth the breath of life over the multitude, he returned with speed to Clairvaux, reconstructed his little hut of boughs and foliage near the convent, and assuaged a little his love-sick soul in writing the exposition of the “Song of Songs” which employed his whole life.