To me it is a blessed thing that God should deign to use me as a buckler to shield Himself.

I shrink not from humiliation, provided that His glory be unassailed." But at the same time St.Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety.

"We be fallen upon very grievous times," he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; "the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy.

Do not the heathen say, 'Where is now their God ?' And who can wonder?
The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine.

Did we undertake the work rashly?
Did we behave ourselves lightly?
How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it?
But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it." The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise.