May God in his mercy preserve our country from listening to any siren voice, though far more sweet and seductive than our author's, which would propound such doctrines as these under the high-sounding name of the Politics of Christianity. The true Gospel does not teach us to rail at rulers, but to honour them; nor to account resistance a primary duty, but a rare and painful exception to the primary duty of willing and glad submission to their just authority. It is far indeed from degrading them into tools and drudges to do the low, vulgar, and revolting work of the prize-ring on a few criminals. On the contrary, it solemnly pronounces them to be vicegerents and deputies on earth of the King of kings, invested by Him with a god-like office, to go before their people in the ways of righteousness, to control all evil, and encourage all things pure and lovely, and both by authority and example to guide their footsteps in the heavenward pathway of life and peace.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAINT BERNARD.

The Life and Times of Saint Bernard, A.D. 1091–1153. By J. C. Morrison, M.A. London: Chapman and Hall. 1863. OUR readers may feel some surprise that we offer them a sketch of the life which Mr. Morrison has now more fully made known to us. That a Protestant and Evangelical periodical should present the biography of a monk, and should turn to monastic life and the Romish Church for an example, will at first sight seem strange. But we must always distinguish carefully between the Christianity of the middle ages, whether exemplified in secular or in regular life, and the corrupt system of faith and worship which took its final shape in the sixteenth century in the Catechism of the Council of Trent. The one was the Christianity of Scripture, encrusted, indeed, with many fancies of man, fond imaginations and errors, stuck like limpets on the rock, which they disfigured but did not overlay. This Christianity varied with the individual; and, strange as it may appear, was often the purest in the retirement of a monastery. For there, those who were touched by God's grace, and drawn to look for His will, found it in the study of His word, familiar to them, as in those days it was to the learned alone, by their use of the Latin tongue, and their study of the Latin Scriptures. Hence, in a barbarous age, when the world at large drifted helplessly, guided by the fancies which ignorant priests took from story-books of saints and fables of superstition, the inmates of a cloister-if, indeed, they escaped the snares of

which that life was full, temptations to indolence and somnolency, to pride and lust-had leisure thoroughly to read the Word of God, and to imbibe, under God's gracious teaching, the spirit of a self-denying faith. So, from time to time, and especially in the beginnings of a monastic order, examples of piety appear; and these specimens, brought to perfection without human help or corporate sympathy, standing alone and self-raised, sparkling on the dark ground of society, and among the vices and passions of the priests, are gems of purity. Hence it is that, in tracing minutely such a life, we find disclosed the secret of a deep faith and personal holiness.

Nor is such a lesson without especial value now. For so frequent and, as it were, easy is the profession of piety, so familiar to us by example and social custom is the holding of a true faith and the adoption of its nomenclature and fashions, that we are apt to forget how great and difficult is the change what it involves of severance from the thoughts and maxims of the world-how strange and hard a thing it is to pass from our own fixed selfishness and inherent evil into the new atmosphere of faith, repentance, and love. Thus it is well for us to trace, in the visible separation of a Christian from the world, and his retirement from its walks and ways into the cloister, what a hard thing it is to give up all for Christ, and to be willing to cut off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye, that we may win Him, and in Him be found. And this lesson will be safe as well as striking, if we add two safeguards. First, it offers no argument for a cloister; or for those separate communities into which, in our day, some members of our Church, unwarily, and never without serious mischief, have plunged. The results of monastic life are before us, and admit of no denial. They were notorious at the Reformation. They are palpable now. Only in the beginning of the experiment, and then under unusual circumstances, was it successful. As a practice, it failed, always, everywhere, and among all. To recur to this practice now, in the teeth of experience and the warnings of all nations, is madness. It is to invite an inevitable evil.

But even bad as the precedents are, they are inapplicable. The reasons which induced monastic life in the twelfth century do not exist now, but are reversed. Then, in a lawless age of feudal conflict and wild warfare, a thoughtful mind or peaceful spirit could scarce find security, except within the privileges and walls of a monastery. Everywhere now there is safety and peace; it is only in convents and monasteries, where men and women are shut up under irresponsible authority, apart from public observation, and secluded from the public eye, that there is suffering and wrong. Within convents especially, as modern example both in France and England has shown us,

can children or women, kidnapped by fraud, be shut up, and removed from society, without help or redress. In these places alone parents lose their children, husbands their wives, masters their servants-go to their closed doors seeking redress, and go in vain.

But there is another remark which must be interposed as a caution. The piety which earned for Bernard the title of Saint, was not derived from the teaching of his Church, nor from monastic discipline, but from the Word of God. It was in the diligent and constant study of this, that he found and kept his faith. Nor was it through the worship of the Virgin, nor through devotion to saints, that he became what he was. Neither his prayers nor his precepts turned in this direction. Among his contemporaries he was distinguished as the Saint of God. His first vows, devoting himself to the monastery, were made as in the presence of his Lord; his vow of reception was made with the prayer, "Receive me, O Lord! have mercy on me, O God!" His chief study was in the Word of God, from which he drew motives to self-denial, and rules of life. In dealing with a kinsman of his own, who shrunk from the austerities of monastic life, his appeal is to the Scripture alone: he quotes largely from the Gospels and the Psalms; appeals to him as a soldier of Christ; encourages him by the assurance that Christ would go before him, saying, "Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world." He adds,-" If Christ be for us, who can be against us? Safe indeed is warfare with and for Christ." There was thus a contrast between his contemporaries and himself; and far more between the practice of the Church of Rome in those days and now. In those days, when Romanism was in progress and indeterminate, there was freedom of opinion, and churches were left much to themselves. So that, while there was a general profession of obedience to the Roman See, the clergy were allowed to exercise a large discretion. Orders sprung up, formed by zealous devotees, each seeking, in his own way, after a more eminent sanctity; and these orders, diverse from each other, new in rules and practice, took each its own shape, without interference from the central power of Rome, which contented herself with sanctioning and embracing them. Within the limits of her supremacy and the orthodoxy of the Christian faith as set forth by the early Councils, new institutions, like new plants, were suffered to grow and cover the ground. When within these (as they were the chief centres of thought) any man appeared who surpassed his age in devotion or self-denial, the Papal See either left him free to take his own course, or marked him (if the reigning Pope was a man of a religious character) with signs of favour. Now all this is changed. The Reformation was the epoch, and, in some measure, the instrument, of the change. By putting forward specified doc

trines as types of Christianity, the Reformers forced the Popes to bring forward opposite doctrines as types of Romanism. In declaring these last to be true, Rome anathematized the contrary doctrines as false; and the errors which before floated loosely on the surface, were henceforth fixed as foundations of the fabric. Now, any one who is a man of mark within the Roman Church must embrace error. Those only who, being obscure, are unobserved, may adhere to truth. Some there have been at all times, sheltered by the reserve of their character, or unnoticed from their low estate, who, by God's gracious guidance, have escaped all the pitfalls of superstition, and reached the standing-place of a true faith in Christ. But to put forth, since the Reformation and the decisions of the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome as holding like doctrines with our own Church, and resting on the same foundations, is to betray a profound ignorance of history and fact. A belief in the unity of God is the doctrine of Mahometanism, and in one sense ours. But Mahometanism is typified by the Koran and the Prophet. A belief in the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, and His Atonement, is shared by the Church of Rome along with the Church of England. But Rome is typified by very different doctrinesby the worship of the Virgin, by prayers to Saints, and belief in salvation by works. These doctrines are avowed by her, by us denied. He that holds these is, in Rome, one of the faithful; he that denies them is a heretic. Such cautions seem needful to be premised before we handle the biography of a Romish saint. Subject to these, we believe that his history will be useful, interesting as a record of past times, and full of instruction.

St. Bernard was born in the year 1091, not far from Dijon, in that pleasant country where the range of the Côte d'Or spreads its terraces of vines and gentle hills to the sun of the South. On one of these heights was seated the castle of Fontaines. Its possessor was rich in broad lands and serfs; himself a feudal retainer of the Duke of Burgundy, a knight, and his companion in war. Where he followed his master, men remarked that victory attended his banner. Thus brave, he was so gentle, so blameless of life, so just, and so full of piety, that his suzerain turned to him as his companion and bosom friend. Such a man was Tepelin, and his wife was worthy of her lord. She bore him seven children, one daughter and six sons. In humbleness of mind and devout observance, she was eminent; her charity was constant and strong. In days when the rich and poor were far apart, she lived to help her poorer neighbours; she sought them out in their hovels, heard their tales of sorrow, and relieved their wants. With the same spirit of self-sacrifice she ministered to them with her own hands; and simple in attire, eschewing

worldly pleasures, she laboured as a gentle visitor among the suffering and the sick. Later in life, as her family grew up, she gave herself more and more to a religious life; and by vigils of prayer and fasting and austerities, aimed at the life of holiness for which her spirit yearned.

From such parents, and in the presence of such home examples, the boy grew. He was born in a stirring age. The dull atmosphere of the darkest portion of the dark age of Europe was past. The gleam of the coming dawn appeared. The first sign of thought was in that burst of religious feeling which took its shape in a crusade to the Holy Land. In the year 1095 Peter the Hermit traversed Europe on his mule. In November of that year, Pope Urban II. uttered his voice at Clermont, and his words thrilled through Europe. Men eager for their salvation hurried to Palestine, and half a million of souls perished on the plains of Asia Minor. The last year of that century saw the small remnant of the crusaders mount the walls of Jerusalem; and the first year of the new century saw half a million more of men in arms pass to the Holy Land. The Duke of Burgundy was one of the leaders of the second army of the crusade, and Tepelin and his wife witnessed his remains brought back in their coffin, to rest, according to his wish, in the cemetery of the small monastery lately established on his lands at Citeaux. There a few poor monks settled, not far from Dijon; and there the great Duke had been used to resort for communion with these holy men, to meditate and pray.

In 1105, in the midst of these events, the little Bernard was sent to school at Chatillon, near his father's lands. There he satisfied his mother's wishes by his studious habits and his proficiency. But the literature which engaged him had special attractions for him, and inspired him with a strong desire to obtain literary fame. While he was full of these wishes, the death of his saintly mother, to whom he was much attached, came to check and to sober him. Her earnest wish recurred to his mind, that he might seek piety within a monastery. The thought was with him when, at the age of nineteen, he had to choose a profession. His two elder brothers had chosen theirs. They were knights in the service of their feudal lord the Duke of Burgundy; in a country divided by feudal chiefs, as France then was, they were engaged in perpetual conflict. Into this life of war, if he chose the profession of arms, Bernard would have to enter; but for such a life, though endowed with personal beauty, he was not well fitted, for his frame was slight and his constitution delicate. But though little qualified for the profession of arms, there was a calling now open to him which promised high distinction. The impulses which, bursting forth in the crusades, marked the revival of religious