He must have been born in 1092 or 1094—the earlier date being more probable; and when he was sixteen or seventeen (1109) he became a monk of Cluny. These were the “black” monks;—as the Cistercians of Citeaux and Clairvaux were the “white.” He had six brothers, most of whom took similar vows. What else indeed was there to do? You must either hack and hew your way with a battle-axe, and risk your neck and your castle, or you must become a monk. There was no middle course. Peace-loving, studious people—those who aimed to help the world up toward God—had no other choice. Nowadays we should find plenty of room for Peter; but he did what was then best, and entered Cluny. At thirty years of age he was its abbot. This was in 1122. It happened by reason of Pontius, the former abbot, a self-sufficient and imperious man, being forced to resign his office and go on pilgrimage to Palestine; he even promised not to come back at all. Then the monks of Cluny elected another abbot; and as he died almost immediately, they were compelled to choose a third, namely Peter. But it was in a hard seat that they placed him; he had a mismanaged property, and a body of men who needed a good deal of attention. Let us picture him to us in the fashion and habit of his appearance. He had a “happy face,” a “majestic figure,” and “plenty of those other unfailing signs of virtues” which justified his name “The Venerable.” It was such a big-hearted, big-bodied style of man who now undertook this reformation. By the help of Matthew, Prior of St. Martin in the Fields, near Paris, he effected it in about three months. Then there was a period of peace. But, all of a sudden, here comes Pontius, with soldiers at his heels, when Peter is absent, wanting his old place again. He bursts in the gates, forces the monks who remain to swear allegiance, carries off crosses and candlesticks and whatever was worth anything for melting down into money, and plays robber-baron over all the neighborhood. Peter himself tells the story: “He came in my absence.... With a motley crowd of soldiers and women rushing in together, he marched into the cloisters. He turned his hand to the sacred things.... He raided the villages and castles around the abbey, and, trying to subdue the religious places in a barbaric way, he wasted with fire and sword all that he could.” It was certainly a very serious matter. Peter did the best he could with it—this resulting in Honorius II. despatching a legate from Rome with a great curse, ready-baked and smoking-hot, for the soul’s benefit of that “sacrilegious, schismatic, and excommunicate usurper,” Pontius. I have not read the curse; but I am positively certain that Pontius and Pontius Pilate must have been elaborately compared in its sentences. Such anathemas were supposed to dry the blood and wither the brain. Pontius trembled and restored his ill gotten gains and vanished to his own place. And Peter had peace at last.