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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX. Delivered before the Morningside Literary Institute February 1875. Ladies and Gentlemen, I invite you to-night, to go back with me 750 years, and to spend an hour in endeavouring to estimate the character and to sympathise with the feelings and actions f of probably the greatest mind of the twelfth / century, and certainly one of the greatest minds of all time. Back 750 years It carries us to the central period of the middle ages ? to the very depths of what we somewhat superciliously call the Dark Ages, ofttimes forgetting that these centuries which now seem lost in the shadows of the past, had once lights all their own; that each, as it flitted over earth, showed a varied illumination, ?now ruddy with the lurid glare of passion and of war, with which, alas, our own country is only too familiar, ? and now pale yet piercing with Scholastic refinements and subtilties which our own age cannot equal alfid can scarcely understand. The middle ages What strange scenes and pictures do not the words recall ? The fortalice of the half savage Baron and the mean huts of his degraded serfs. The proud pomp and spiritual power of the haughty churchman, before which the strength of kings, and the might of feudalism was fain to kneel. The chivalry of Europe drained time after time to furnish forth the armies of the Crusaders. Religious excitements and revivals passing like prairie fires over Europe, and compared with which modern revivals, even the wildest, seem but the coldest marsh gleams. Strange and terrible diseases and epidemics, and plagues both bodily and mental, that mowed down millions as with the scythe of destruction. The spotted plague and the black death and the sweating sickness. The dancing mania, the barkingmania. The werewolf and the...