t
His glory be unassailed." But at the same time St. Bernard himself was
troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled
feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety. "We be fallen
upon very grievous times," he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; "the Lord,
provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge
the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His
equity, but not remembering His mercy. Do not the heathen say, 'Where is
now their God?' And who can wonder? The children of the Church, those
who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the
sword or dead of famine. Did we undertake the work rashly? Did we
behave ourselves lightly? How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious
voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments
be righteous; who doth not know it? But in the present judgment there is
so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is
not surprised and offended by it."

The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a
great subject of surprise. King Louis, on his way back to France, had
staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he
had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that
from which he had found it so difficult to get out. Suger, when he
became acquainted with this project, opposed it as he had opposed the
former; but, at the same time, as he, in common with all his age,
considered the deliverance of the Holy Land to be the bounden duty of
Christians, he conceived the idea of dedicating the large fortune and
great influence he had acquired to the cause of a new crusade, to be
undertaken by himself and at his own expense, without compromising either
king or state. He unfolded his views to a meeting of bishops assembled
at Chartres; and he went to Tours, and paid a visit to the tomb of St.
Martin to implore his protection. Already more than ten thousand
pilgrims were in arms at his call, and already he had himself chosen a
warrior, of ability and renown, to command them, when he fell ill, and
died at the end of four months, in 1152, aged seventy, and "thanking the
Almighty," says his biographer, "for having taken him to Him, not
suddenly, but little by little, in order to bring him step by step to the
rest needful for the weary man." It is said that, in his last days and
when St. Ber