“Struggling Christendom,” he says, “sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms to knock and blow horns at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival popes, and cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.” Yet with all this he is a profound scholar, and his comments on Scripture are of a mystical, and often of a serenely spiritual and thoughtful kind, as though no intrusion could jar the harmony and poise of his soul. His was that strange contradiction of nature which found its calm in tumult and its ecstasy in conflict. Obstructions pass away. Like that later mystic, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), there are no hindrances in his communion with the unseen world; he could, perhaps, do as Novalis did when Sophie Kühn died. For the poor fellow records in his diary: “Much noise in the house. I went to her grave and had a few wild moments of joy.” And of him also Just declares: “No spirit-dream was too high, no business detail too low;” for Novalis in 1799 was “Assessor and Law-adviser to the Salt Mines of Thuringia.” Pegasus in harness appears no worse a contradiction than a mystic in a salt-pan, or a Bernard epistolizing the Count of Champagne about a drove of stolen pigs. Prose and poetry, poetry and prose! And yet the brain and soul that can do good work in the one are by no means disqualified for the other; and your truest mystics are not likely to wear long hair and talk raving nonsense among impractical neologists. For Bernard, even though he made converts wherever he went, and drew increasing numbers into cloister walls, exerted a potent and prevalent influence upon his time. He is one of the lighthouses, as we sail down the coast of the Middle Ages; and not until we pass him and his compeers, do the real darkness and the dull ignorance, the shoals and the unmarked rocks appear, ready to wreck the ventures of the mind. How gladly one would linger over these fascinating incidents in this remarkable career! The man’s life was expressed in some of his own aphorisms. They are such as these: “There is no truer wretchedness than a false joy.” “He does not please who pleases not himself.” “You will give to your voice the voice of virtue if you have first persuaded yourself of what you would persuade others.” “Hold the middle line unless you wish to miss the true method.”