g all hearts to fanatical
enthusiasm. Whoever heard him preach forsook his worldly possessions and
took the cross, clamouring for Peter himself to lead all Christendom.
"Countless numbers flocked to his banner, towns and castles stood
forsaken and there was hardly one man to seven women. The wives were
made widows during the lifetime of their husbands." Thus Bernard wrote
to the Pope, travelling through Germany, healing the sick by his mere
presence, and preaching to the people in a tongue no one could
understand. But the personality of this physically delicate man, whose
body was only kept alive by his spirit, touched all hearts. The prudent
Emperor, Conrad, resisted for a long time, and would have nothing to do
with such an aimless enterprise. But Bernard's first sermon in the
cathedral at Speyer, on Christmas Day, moved him to tears. Bernard left
the pulpit and pinned the cross on the shoulder of the kneeling emperor.
By this symbolical act the metaphysical spirit of the time, of which the
Church had obtained control for her own purposes, visibly became master
of political common-sense.

The Crusades were one of the great movements matured by the
newly-awakened metaphysical yearning. The same spirit in another,
profounder, way, manifested itself in the efforts of religious reform
which were being made here and there. "The appearance and spread of
heresy has always been the gauge by which the religious life of the
individual must be measured," says Buettner very pertinently in his
preface to his edition of Eckhart. For the first time since the days of
Christ true religious feeling was again quickening the hearts of men;
the ecclesiastical dogma, which until then had represented absolute
truth, no longer satisfied their need. Soon opposition, timidly at
first, made itself felt. Laymen ventured to interfere in the domain of
religion. All knowledge--and consequently all tradition and
religion--had been for a thousand years the exclusive possession of the
clergy; those laymen who had any culture at all knew a little Latin and
a few scholastic propositions. All this was changing. Despite reiterated
ecclesiastical prohibitions, parts of the Bible were translated into
the vulgar tongue and eagerly studied by ignorant folk; everywhere men
appeared to whom religion was a matter of vital importance, men who
strove to find God in their own souls, instead of blindly accepting the
God of foreign doctrine.

The more obvious cause