Clairvaux was founded in 1115, and fifteen years later Bernard had risen high in his profession. The turning-point in his life was the part he took in the recognition of Innocent II. In 1130, Honorius II. died, and two popes were chosen by the college of cardinals, Anacletus and Innocent II. Anacletus stayed in Rome, but Innocent crossed the Alps, and a council was summoned at Étampes to decide upon his title. By a unanimous vote the question was referred to Bernard, and his biographer described how he examined the evidence with fear and trembling, and how at last the Holy Ghost spoke through his mouth, and he recognized Innocent. His decision was ratified, and soon after he managed to obtain the adhesion of the King of England to the new pontiff. His success made him the foremost man in Europe, and when, in 1145, one of his monks was raised to the papacy as Eugenius III., he wrote with truth, “I am said to be more pope than you.” Perhaps no one ever lived more highly gifted with the ecstatic temperament than Saint Bernard. He had the mysterious attribute of miracles, and, in the twelfth century, the miracle was, perhaps, the highest expression of force. To work them was a personal gift, and the possessor of the faculty might, at his caprice, use his power, like the sorcerer, to aid or injure other men. One day as Saint Bernard was on his way to a field at harvest time, the monk who drove the donkey on which he rode, fell in an epileptic fit. “Seeing which the holy man had pity on him, and entreated God that for the future he would not seize him unaware.” Accordingly from that day until his death, twenty years after, “whenever he was to fall from that disease, he felt the fit coming for a certain space of time, so that he had an opportunity to lie down on a bed, and so avert the bruises of a sudden fall.”[114] This cure was a pure act of grace, like alms, made to gratify the whim of the saint; and a man who could so control nature was more powerful than any other on earth. Bernard was such a man, and for this reason he was chosen by acclamation to preach the second crusade. His sermons have perished, but two of his letters have survived,[115] and they explain the essential weakness of a military force raised on the basis of supernatural intervention. He looked upon the approaching campaign as merely the vehicle for a miracle, and as devised to offer to those who entered on it a special chance for salvation. Therefore he appealed to the criminal classes. “For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone, that the Omnipotent should deign to summon to his service, as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime?”[116]