Bernard was a fair child, and
his history, as seen from the perspective of his monkish historian,
shows that even in his earliest youth he was predestined for saintship.
Even before he could walk, the little child would join his hands in the
attitude of supplication, and murmur words which might have been
prayers. While still very young, he brought in a book one day and
asked his mother to teach him to read, and when she would not, or could
not, he wept, for the books in which even then he delighted were the
prayer-books of the church.

He grew up bright and beautiful, and his father was proud of him, and
determined that he should take his part in public life. But Bernard's
thoughts ran in other channels. He spent his moments in copying
psalms, and in writing down the words of divine service which he heard.
Even in his seventh year he began to practice austerities and
self-castigation, which he kept up through his life. He chose for his
model Saint Nicholas, the saint who through the ages has been kind to
children. Him he resolved to imitate, and to walk always in his steps.

The University of Paris had been founded by Charlemagne more than a
century before, and this university was then the Mecca of all ambitious
youth. To the University of Paris his father decided to send him. But
his mother feared the influence of the gay capital, and wished to keep
Bernard by her side. But the boy said, "Virtue has too deep a root in
my heart, mother, for the air of Paris to tarnish it. I will bring
back more of science, but not less of purity." And to Paris he went.
Here he studied law, to please his father, and theology, to please
himself. "As Tobias lived faithful in Nineveh," so the chronicle says,
"thus lived Bernard in Paris." In the midst of snares unnumbered, he
only redoubled his austerities--"_in sanctitate persistens, studiosus
valde_," so the record says.

[Illustration: Monks of the Great Saint Bernard.]

His thoughts ran on the misery of humanity, which he measured by the
abasement to which Christ had submitted in order to effect its
redemption. A great influence in his life came from Germain, his
tutor, a man who had lived the life of a scholar in the world, and who
had at last withdrawn to sanctity and prayer. Although Bernard knew
that his father expected a brilliant future for him, and that he hoped
to effect for him a marriage in some family of the great of those days,
yet he took upon himself th