trary, being made especially for lazy, mediocre, superficial,
ignorant, and silly people, naturally find a great many supporters.
Well! a manager likes, above everything, whatever brings him in amiable
speeches and satisfied looks from his underlings, he likes things that
require no learning and disturb no accepted ideas or habits, which
gently go with the stream of prejudice, and wound no self-love, because
they reveal no incapacity; in a word, things which do not take too long
to get up.

SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

(1091-1153)

Born in 1091, at Fontaines, a castle of his father Tescelin, near Dijon,
France, and devotedly instructed by his pious and gentle mother Aleth,
Bernard of Clairvaux was from early childhood imbued with an active
religious enthusiasm. When the time came to choose his way of life,
instead of going into battle with his knighted brothers, he made them,
as well as his uncle the count of Touillon, join a band of thirty
companions, with whom he knelt in the rude chapel at Citeaux to beg the
tonsure from Abbot Stephen Harding. To rise at two o'clock in the
morning and chant the prayer-offices of the church until nine, to do
hard manual labor until two, when the sole meal of the day--composed of
vegetable food only--was taken, to labor again until nightfall and sing
the vespers until an early bedtime hour: such was the Cistercian's daily
observance of his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,--vows which
Bernard and his followers were to lay down only upon the cross of ashes
spread upon the hard cell floor to receive their outstretched,
dying bodies.

[Illustration: SAINT BERNARD]

Citeaux became famous from the coming of these new recruits. There was,
in those tough old days, a soldierly admiration for faithfulness to
discipline; and when Bernard was professed in 1114, Abbot Stephen was
obliged to enlarge the field of work. Bernard was sent in 1115 to build
a house and clear and cultivate a farm in a thickly wooded and
thief-infested glen to the north of Dijon, known as the Valley of
Wormwood. Here at the age of twenty-four, in a rude house built by their
own hands with timber cut from the land, the young abbot and his
companions lived like the sturdy pioneers of our Northwest, the earth
their floor and narrow wooden bunks in a low dark loft their beds. Of
course the stubborn forest gave way slowly, and grudgingly opened sunny
hillsides to the vine and wheat-sheaf. The name of the se