morals of the secular clergy. At the same time, austere men exerted
themselves to rekindle the fervor of monastic life, re-established rigid
rules in the cloister, and refilled the monasteries by their preaching
and example. St. Robert of Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St.
Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux,
which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse; St. Hugo,
St. Gerard, and others besides gave the Abbey of Cluni its renown; and
ecclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful
laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal
welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in
the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole
families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the
severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the
perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the
same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried
and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of
teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and
every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils
of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by
the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of
individual thought in opposition to the authority of established
doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate
to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and
freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that
fervent faith and fervent piety were.

This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the
beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward
tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here