The infidels of the East having taken Edessa in 1146, the power of the Christians in the Holy Land was broken; and Eugenius III., who had been a monk of Clairvaux, appointed Bernard to preach a new crusade.  He set on foot a vast host under the personal leadership of Louis VII. and Conrad the Emperor, accompanied by Queen Eleanor and many noble ladies of both realms.  The ill fortunes which attended this war brought to Bernard the greatest bitterness of his life.  So signal was the failure of the Second Crusade, that but a pitiful remnant of the brilliant army which had crossed the Bosphorus returned to Europe, and Bernard was assailed with execration from hut and castle throughout the length of Europe.  His only answer was as gentle as his life:  “Better that I be blamed than God.”  He did not neglect, however, to point out that the evil lives and excesses of those who attempted the Crusade were the real causes of the failure of the Christian arms.

In Languedoc in 1147 he quelled a dangerous heresy, and silenced Gilbert, bishop of Poitiers, at the Council of Rheims.

In 1148 Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, who nine years before had visited Clairvaux and formed a lasting friendship for Bernard, came there again to die in the arms of his friend.  It is related that the two saints had exchanged habits upon the first visit, and that Malachy wore that of Bernard on his death-bed.  The funeral sermon preached by Bernard upon the life and virtue of his Irish comrade is reputed to be one of the finest extant.  It seemed as if the Gael had come to show the Goth the way of death.  Bernard’s health, early broken by self-imposed austerity and penances, had never been robust, and it had often seemed that nothing but the vigor of his will had kept him from the grave.  In the year 1153 he was stricken with a fatal illness.  Yet when the archbishop of Treves came to his bedside, imploring his aid to put an end to an armed quarrel between the nobles and the people of Metz, he went cheerfully but feebly to the field between the contending parties, and by words which came with pain and in the merest whispers, he persuaded the men who were already at each other’s throats to forget their enmities.

He died at Clairvaux on January 12th, 1153, and was buried, as he wished, in the habit of Saint Malachy.  In 1174 he was sainted, and his life is honored in the liturgy of the church on the 20th of August.

The marks of Saint Bernard’s character were sweetness and gentle tolerance in the presence of honest opposition, and implacable vigor against shams and evil-doing.  His was the perfect type of well-regulated individual judgment.  His humility and love of poverty were true and unalterable.  In Italy he refused the mitres of Genoa and Milan in turn, and in France successively declined the sees of Chalons, Langres, and Rheims.  He wrote and spoke with simplicity and directness, and with an energy and force of conviction which came from absolute command