picture of an ideal pope, a book of no small merit. This was the latest work of his life, and its concluding lines flowed forth from lips longing to give up the ghost. His usefulness continued to the last. His letters went on as usual; he exhorted his friends and pupils. But the shadow of defeat was on the man. It grew thicker and blacker each day. His letter to Andreas, written shortly before his death, shows how a monk can feel, and a man, whose word then shook the world, can be overcome. All his life

long he had looked to the west and found no comfort, as the rising luminary shed new day over the world. But even on his death-bed, cast down as he was, he gave proofs of that mysterious power the soul exerts over those decaying elements which it gathers about itself, a power remarkably shown in his whole life. While sick almost to death, scarce any strength left in him, Hillin, Archbishop of Friers, came to ask him to mediate between the people of Metz and the nobility of the neighbourhood. Bernard arose from his bed; forgot his weakness; forgot his pain; forgot his disappointment. His body seemed sinewy and strong beneath his mighty will. He met the delegates of the two parties on the banks of the Moselle. The haughty knights, flushed with victory, refused to listen to his terms, and withdrew, "not wishing the sick monk farewell." "Peace will soon come," said he. "It was foretold me last night, in a dream; for I thought I was celebrating mass, and was ashamed because I had forgotten the chant, Gloria in Excelsis; and so I sung it with you to the end." Before the time arrived for singing the chant a messenger came to say the knights were penitent! His words had done the work in silence. The two parties were reconciled, and the kiss of peace exchanged. He returned to Clairvaux, and his strong spirit soon left the worn-out frame, where it had long dwelt almost in defiance of the body's law. He had lived sixty-three years, and his spirit was mighty in the churches long after his death.

His biographer Alanus thus describes the last scene: "About the third hour of the day (August 20, 1153), this shining light of his age, this holy and truly blessed abbot, passed away from the body of death to the land of the living; from the heavy sobbings and abundant tears of his

friends, standing around him, to the chorus of angels chanting continually, with Christ at their head. Happy that soul, which rises by the excellent grace of its own merits; which is followed by the pious vows of friends, and drawn upwards by holy desire for things above. Happy that transition from labour to rest; from expectation to enjoyment of the reward; from the battle to the triumph; from death to life; from faith to knowledge; from a pilgrimage to his own home; from the world to the Father."

In stature Saint Bernard was a little below the common standard; his hair of a flaxen colour: his beard somewhat reddish, but both became gray as he grew old. The might of the man was shown in his countenance. Yet his face had a peculiar cheerfulness, more of heaven than of earth, and his eye at once expressed the serpent's wisdom with the simplicity of the dove. It was indifferent to him whether he drank oil, or wine, or water. He was dead to the pleasures of the table, and to all sensual delights. He could walk all day by the lake of Lucerne, and never see it. In summing up his character, we must allow him great acuteness of insight; a force of will, great and enduring almost beyond belief,-a will like that of Hannibal, or Simeon the Stylite, which shrunk at no difficulty, and held out Promethean to the end. He was zealous and self-denying; but narrow in his self-denial, and a bigot in his zeal. He was pious,-beautifully pious,-but superstitious withal. In a formal age, no man loved forms better than he, or clung closer to the letter when it served his end. His writings display a masculine good sense; *

* His works are, 744 Letters; numerous Sermons on all the Sundays and Festivals in the year; 86 Sermons on the Canticles; a Treatise, in five books, de Consideratione; another, de Officio Episcoporum, de Præcepto et Dispensatione; Apologia ad Gulielmum Abbatum; this contains some of his sharpest rebukes of the monks and clergy. De laude Nova Militæ, i. e. the new order of knights templars. De gradibus humilitatis et superbiæ, de gratia et libero arbitrio, de baptismo, de erroribus Petri Abelardi. De Vita S. Malachiæ, de Cantu. Besides these, there are many works attributed to him, which belong to others, known or unknown. Such are the famous "Meditations of St Bernard," which are sometimes printed in English in the same volume with Saint Augustine's Meditations. No writer of the middle ages has been so popular as Bernard. His works were read extensively before the art of printing was invented, and have often been published since then. The best edition is that of Mabillon, Paris, 1719, 2 vols. folio. A new edition has recently been published (Paris 1838, 4 vols. 8vo), which we have not examined. Besides, he

great acquaintance with the Scriptures, which he quotes in every paragraph, and with Augustine and Ambrose," with whom he would agree right or wrong."* He hated all tyranny but the tyranny of the Church. Yet his heart was by nature gentle; he could take pains to rescue a hen from the hawk; but would yet burn men at the stake for explaining the mystery of the Trinity. He was as ambitious as Cæsar; not that he cared for the circumstance and trappings of authority, but he loved power for itself, as an end. All the wax of Hymettus could not close his ears against this syren, not a whole Anticyra heal his madness. He lived in an age when new light came streaming upon the world. But he called on men to close their shutters and stir their fires. Greek and Roman letters, then beginning their glorious career in modern times, he hated as profane, and never dreamed of the wonders they were to effect for art, science, religion, yea, for Christianity itself. He was a man of the eleventh century, not of the twelfth. Its spirit culminated most beautifully in him. But he had no sympathy for those who, grateful for their fathers' progress, would yet carry the line of improvement still farther on. He did nothing directly to promote a pure theology, or foster philosophical views, and thus to emancipate mankind from their long thraldom. Yet he did much remotely. Frozen hands are best warmed in snow. Bernard was a mystic,† and the age was growing rational. But in his mystic flights he does not soar so sublime as the Pseudo-Dionysius, or Scotus Erigena, from whom his mysticism seems derived. Still less has he the depth of Saint Victor, Tauler, Eckart, and Nicolas of Basle, or the profound sweetness of Fenelon, the best, perhaps, of modern mystical Christians.

wrote a Summa Theologiæ not noticed by Mabillon, but commented on by Gerson, whose book thereon is called Floretus, published at Paris, 1494, 1 vol. 4to. This, by the way, is not in Dupin's edition of Gerson, 1706, 5 vols. fol. It is noticed in Fleury, Hist. Eccl. Vol. XIV. p. 444, ed. Nismes, 1779.

His reverence for the authority of the Church was most uncompromising. He thought it had power to change the words of Scripture, and make the Bible better by the change: "Cum in Scripturis divinis verba vel alterat, vel alternat, fortior est illa compositio quam positio prima verborum."-Sermon on the Nativity.

† On his mysticism, see Ammon, Fortbildung des Christenthums, Vol. II. 2nd edition, p. 355, seq.; Heinroth, Geschichte und Kritik der Mysticismus, p. 324, seq.; and Schmid, Der Mysticismus der Mittelalter, etc., p. 187, seq.

His practical tendency was lead to the wings of mystical contemplation, and the very strength of his will prevented him from seeing Truth as other mystics, all absorbed in contemplation. Yet he was a great man, and without him the world would not have been what it is. Well does he deserve the praise of Luther, "If there ever was a pious monk, it was Saint Bernard."

THOUGHTS ON LABOUR.*

"GOD has given each man a back to be clothed, a mouth to be filled, and a pair of hands to work with." And since wherever a mouth and a back are created, a pair of hands also is provided, the inference is unavoidable, that the hands are to be used to supply the needs of the mouth and the back. Now as there is one mouth to each pair of hands, and each mouth must be filled, it follows quite naturally, that if a single pair of hands refuses to do its work, then the mouth goes hungry, or, which is worse, the work is done by other hands. In the one case, the supply failing, an inconvenience is suffered, and the man dies; in the other he eats and wears the earnest of another man's work, and so a wrong is inflicted. The law of nature is this, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." Still further, God has so beautifully woven together the web of life, with its warp of Fate, and its woof of Freewill, that in addition to the result of a man's duty, when faithfully done, there is a satisfaction and recompense in the very discharge thereof. rational state of things, Duty and Delight travel the same road, sometimes hand in hand. Labour has an agreeable end, in the result we gain; but the means also are agreeable, for there are pleasures in the work itself. These unexpected compensations, the gratuities and stray gifts of Heaven, are scattered abundantly in life. Thus the * From the Dial for April, 1841.

In a

kindness of our friends, the love of our children, is of itself worth a thousand times all the pains we take on their account. Labour, in like manner, has a reflective action, and gives the working man a blessing over and above the natural result which he looked for. The duty of labour is written on a man's body; in the stout muscle of the arm and the delicate machinery of the hand. That it is congenial to our nature, appears from the alacrity with which children apply themselves to it, and find pleasure in the work itself, without regard to its use. The young duck does not more naturally betake itself to the water, than the boy to the work which goes on around him. There is some work, which even the village sluggard and the city fop love to do, and that only can they do well. These two latter facts show that labour, in some degree, is no less a pleasure than a duty, and prove, that man is not by nature a lazy animal who is forced by hunger to dig and spin.

Yet there are some who count labour a curse and a punishment. They regard the necessity of work as the greatest evil brought on us by the "Fall;" as a curse that will cling to our last sand. Many submit to this yoke, and toil, and save, in hope to leave their posterity out of the reach of this primitive curse!

Others, still more foolish, regard it as a disgrace. Young men, the children of honest parents, who living by their manly and toil-hardened hands, bear up the burthen of the world on their shoulders, and eat with thankful hearts their daily bread, won in the sweat of their face, -are ashamed of their fathers' occupation, and forsaking the plough, the chisel, or the forge, seek a livelihood in what is sometimes named a more respectable and genteel vocation; that is, in a calling which demands less of the hands than their fathers' hardy craft, and quite often less of the head likewise; for that imbecility which drives men to those callings has its seat mostly in a higher region than the hands. Affianced damsels beg their lovers to discover (or invent) some ancestor in buckram who did not work. The Sophomore in a small college is ashamed of his father who wears a blue frock, and his dusty brother who toils with the saw and the axe. These men, after they have wiped off the dirt and the soot of their early life,