Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

FAITH AND REASON. 167
of his fellow men. Who shall measure the anguish
of the
travail through which the new order is born ? No sympathy
is due to those who whimper over the sufferings entailed
by the opening up new paths for men. The pioneers must
expect to suffer, but they ought to persist and to conquer.
No man who dares not suffer for men, is fit either to
lead or to reign. There is no justification for the senseless
antagonism which is raised in these days between faith
and science, reason and revelation, religion and culture,
Hellenism and Hebraism call them how we will. The
two are as needful to each other as the right hand and
the left, nay, as the man and the woman in the order of
human society. It is the shameful putting asunder of
that which God has joined, that is the fatal spring of
all the most bitter miseries which afflict the world. The
life which is kindled by faith quickens and moves men ;
the thought which is lit by reason rules them and guides.
The Bernards inspire and energise the great community ;
the Abelards light it to its tasks, widen its horizon, open
its paths of progress, and lift higher and yet higher through
the ages the standard of its aims and hopes. What we
need is the blending of the influence which they severally
represent. Neither the faith without the reason nor the
reason without the faith, but the two in concert and con
cord, conspiring, breathing together, like loyal helpmeets,
having learnt that their internecine strife is shame and
confusion, will one day bring
reign.
back to earth the Saturnian
One other great enterprise St. Bernard was destined to
accomplish before his work was done ;
he was to preach
the second Crusade. The Crusades were perhaps the most
purely ideal enterprises ever undertaken by man. None
can understand the movement who has no eye for the great