Bernard of Clairvaux, the Times, the Man, and His Work; An Historical Study in Eight Lectures (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1901. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... LECTURE VIII. BERNARD OP CLAIRVAUX: IN HIS RELATION TO GENERAL EUROPEAN AFFAIRS. In a brilliant passage in the twentieth chapter of his History of England Lord Macaulay presents what he esteems a signal illustration of the progress of modern civilization, measuring that progress by the estimate which the world now puts upon mental force as distinguished from physical, the sovereignty which it assigns to the inspiring soul rather than to the trained and powerful body. He is contrasting William of Orange, then king of England, and the Duke of Luxemburg, then marshal of France, with other leaders of historical hosts. "At Landen," he says," two poor, sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. But their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind. It is probable that among the 120,000 soldiers who were marshalled around Neerwinden, under all the standards of western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England." 1 Certainly, this is vigorously put; and the characteristic elegance and force of the statement may perhaps beguile one, as sometimes happens in reading Macaulay, to the acceptance of a conclusion which would hardly be entirely just to the earlier time. It is by no means to be admitted that bodily size or muscular strength had always been requisite in the preceding centuries, even...