Towards the middle of the twelfth century, the greatest churchman in Europe, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, gives a doleful picture of the churches of Languedoc as without people ... “the people without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and Christians without Christ.” Granting that St. Bernard loved violence of statement and was something of a professional pessimist, still it was true that instead of saying, like proper Christians outside of Languedoc, “I had rather be a Jew” than do such and such mean or disgraceful act, the meridional would say, “I had rather be a priest.” When St. Bernard himself, with all his prestige, came South to preach, he failed even to get a respectful hearing on one important occasion. The atmosphere of some of these debates comes to us, with a flash of humour, in a story of St. Bernard’s preaching mission. As Lea tells it, the Saint ... “after preaching to an immense assemblage ... mounted his horse to depart, and a hardened heretic, thinking to confuse him, said, ‘my lord Abbott, our heretic, of whom you think so ill, has not a horse so fat and spirited as yours.’ ‘Friend,’ replied the Saint, ‘I deny it not. The horse eats and grows fat for itself, for it is but a brute and by nature given to its appetites, whereby it offends not God. But before the judgment seat of God I and your master will not be judged by horses’ necks, but each by his own neck. Now, then, look at my neck and see if it is fatter than your master’s and if you can justly reproach me.’ Then he threw down his cowl and displayed his neck, long and thin and wasted by maceration and austerities, to the confusion of the misbelievers.”[25] One has a vision of saints and heretics “matching necks” before the gate of Paradise, before an audience of admiring angels. Other stories, some remarkably like accounts of modern revivalist meetings, are told of the power of the Saint’s oratory. At Albi, after preaching to a throng which packed the cathedral, he called upon all who repented to raise their right hands, and all did so. But like modern revivalists again, with their spectacular “conversions,” St. Bernard seems to have accomplished nothing definite by his trip. After his departure we find the situation in Languedoc developing precisely as if he had never come.