§ 132. THE SERMON.
repentance and sharply rebuked the clergy for their worldliness, themselves wept and brought their hearers to tears.
Bernard enjoys the reputation of being, up to his time, the most brilliant luminary of the pulpit after the days of Gregory the Great. Luther held his sermons in high regard and called him "the golden preacher" — der gilldene Prediger. Among the preachers of France he is placed at the side of Bourdaloue and Bossuet. He has left more than two hun dred and fifty discourses on special texts and themes in addition to the eighty -six homilies on the Song of Solomon.1 The subjects of the former range from the five pebbles which David picked up from the brook to the most solemn myste ries of Christ's life and work. The sermons were not written out, but delivered from notes or improvised after meditation in the convent garden. For moral earnestness, flights of imagination, pious soliloquy, and passionate devotion to reli gious themes, they have a place in the first rank of pulpit productions. " The constant shadow of things eternal is over them all," said Dr. Storrs, himself one of the loftiest figures .in the American pulpit of the last century. One of the leading authorities on his life, Deutsch, has said that Ber nard combined in himself all the qualities of a great preacher, a vivid apprehension of the grace of God, a profound desire to help his hearers, a thorough knowledge of the human heart, familiarity with the Scriptures, opulence of thought, and a faculty of magnetic description.2
Fulke of Neuilly, pastor in Neuilly near Paris, was a man of different mould from Bernard, but, like him, his eloquence is associated with the Crusades.3 He was a born orator. His sermons on repentance in Notre Dame and on the streets of Paris were accompanied with remarkable demonstrations, the people throwing themselves on the ground, weeping and scourging themselves. Usurers " whom the devil alone was
lSee Vacandard, S. Bernard, I. 474 sqq., and Storrs, St. Bernard, pp. 355-427, Migne, 183. 73-747, 784-1105.
2 Art. Bernard, in Herzog, II. 634.
« A. Charasson, Un cure plebeien au XHe siecle Foulqiies, cure Hv X<-uiUyr Paris, 1905.
856 THE MIDDLE AGES, A.I). 1049-1294.
able to make," fallen women, and other offenders turned from their evil ways. Called forth by Innocent III. to proclaim the Fourth Crusade, Fulke influenced, as he himself esti mated, no less than two million to take the cross. He did not live to hear of the capture of Constantinople, to which event unintentionally he made so large a contribution.
The great preachers of the thirteenth century were the product of the mendicant orders or, like Grosseteste, sym pathized with their aims and methods. The Schoolmen who belonged to these orders seem all to have been preachers, and their sermons, or collations, delivered in the convents, many of which are preserved, received the highest praise from con temporaries, but partook of the scholastic method. Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura were preachers, Bonaventura1 being a great preacher. Albertus' thirty-two sermons on the eucharist, leased upon Proverbs 9 : 5, consti tute one of the first series of discourses of the Middle Ages.
To the mendicant orders belonged also the eminent popu lar preachers, Anthony of Padua, John of Vicenza, and Berthold of Regensburg. Anthony of Padua, 1195-1231, born at Lisbon, entered the Franciscan order and made Northern Italy the scene of his labors. He differed from Francis in being a well-schooled man. He joined himself to the Conventual party, at whose head stood Elias of Cortona. Like Francis he was a lover of nature and preached to the fishes. He preached in the fields and the open squares. As many as thirty thousand are reported to have flocked to hear him. He denied having the power of working miracles, but legend has associated miracles with his touch and his tomb. The fragments of his sermons, which are preserved, are mere sketches and, like Whitefield's printed discourses, give no clew to the power of the preacher. Anthony was canonized the year after his death by Gregory IX. His re mains were deposited, in 1263, in the church in Padua reared
1 Peltier's ed., XIII. 1-636, etc. For Thomas' sermons, see Bourin, La predication en France et les sermons de Thomas, Paris, 1882. Vaughan is fulsome in praise of Thomas as a preacher. Life, etc., I. 459 sq., II. 104 sqq.,
112-117.