Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

FOUR TYPES OF SAINTHOOD. 143
beloved Clairvaulx. He was the greatest of the great monks
and the last of them. When he died an age died with him,
-and the old monachism lay buried in his grave. Monachism
as an institution lived on
;
the monks as great landlords and
scholars rendered noble service to agriculture and learning, but
the Coenobite as a vital power in Christian society
incarnate in St. Bernard.
If St. Bernard ends an age, St. Francis opens
was last
one. Bernard
gathered up the whole strength and nobleness of the popular
opinion of his times, and used it to serve his times. But he
was really a man of the past. Like Pompeius, he rooted his
life in an old and perishing order of things. Francis, like
Caesar, was the pioneer of a new order ;
when he died he left
behind him a new ecclesiastical world. The friars of St.
Francis would now play the chief part on the stage of the
Church till the era of the Reformation, opened in England
by John Wyclif. If the passionate desire of the monk was
to get out of the world, that of the friar was to get into
the world, and to mix freely with men. Wherever the throngwas
thickest, there was his work he
; mingled with the people
and lived by persuading them. By bringing the Gospel into
intimate contact with the daily life and busy occupations of
mankind, St. Francis leads on to St. Louis, in whom the
saintly character and life passed out into the secular sphere,
while on the other hand the teaching of the Franciscan school
formed the true link of connection between the Middle Ages
and the sixteenth century.
Between St. Bernard and St. Francis, a very remarkable
man, who earned as a saint an almost unique reputation,
played a leading part on the theatre of European history.
St. Thomas of Canterbury, better known to us as Becket,
was almost worshipped as saint and martyr for generations
after his death. But he was after all but an ecclesiastical
saint. He sought and he used the saintly character, quite