Anselm of
Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort
on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held
up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out--"Where is
the archbishop?" he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse,
gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was
transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging
permission to kiss the old man's hand and to offer him a noble escort
to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of
prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the
hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the
bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices
from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money,
and to make and unmake kings.

The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw
the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France,
religious houses--the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Citeaux,
Clairvaux--sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all
stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord,
"adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by
their purity and righteousness."

St. Bernard, the terror of mothers and of wives, by his austerity, his
loving-kindness,[42] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his
absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate
eloquence, carried all before him and became the dictator of
Christendom. He it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father,
his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of
Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the
beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the
very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and
comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than
seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth
century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to
wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting
garments[43] looked like harlots rather than monks.

[Footnote 42: He was said to be "kind even to Jews."]

[Footnote 43: The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad
_artatis clunibus et protensis natibus_.]

In the polluting atmosphere of Philip's reign matter