October 1927
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moral conditions and the plagues expressive of God’s wrath that they become more intense, finally reaching an awful climax. Dreadful as will be the tremor under the sixth seal, it will be light compared with this last one to ever disturb the earth. The time of this stupendous up heaval is fixed by the context and by Zechariah to occur when the feet of our Lord stand again on the Mount of Olives, which will cleave in the midst and part move north and part south, making a great valley. The new age is thus brought to the birth. The earth chasms will be so large that Jerusalem will be divided into three parts. This will certainly cause tremendous loss of life and property, but part of the city will be spared. The cities of the Gen tiles will all be razed. The horrors of those hours will be made more complete by raging fires. In the previous quake the mountains and islands were moved off their N the twelfth century there lived in France two monks, each bearing the name of Bernard. They were not related by ties of blood and were widely different-types of men. They were alike in one thing only: each wrote poems that have come down to us as a heritage greatly enriching our hymnology. Bernard of Clairvaux was at once a man of affairs and a mystic. He traveled over Europe like a firebrand, preaching the second crusade. He was a defender of the faith, an enemy of heretics, an organizer of monasteries. In connection with the latter activity it is said that mothers feared the magic of his personality and hid their sons lest he might enroll them for some new monastery he might be organizing. He arbitrated differences between kings, princes and popes, and was one of the outstanding per sonalities of his day, both in church and state. In striking contrast to this, in his cloister, he meditated on deep spiritual truth and wrote poems of an intimate nature on the name of Jesus and the sufferings of Christ on the cross. “Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts” is one of • our tenderest hymns, and “O Sacred Head now Wounded” is a classic among our passion hymns, and was used by Bach as a chorale in his great Passion Oratorio. Bernard of Cluny, though overshadowed by his more illustrious contemporary, the saintly Abbot of Clairvaux, was the greater poet of the two. Little is known of his life except that he lived quietly in Cluny, in one ;of the largest and finest monasteries in France, of which Peter the Venerable was Abbot, performing his daily monastic rounds, and in his leisure hours writing a Latin poem of three thousand lines in most difficult meter and rhyme. The magnitude' of this intellectual feat is seen in the opening lines-from this poem, the name of which is “De Contemptu Mundi.” “Hora novissima, tempora pessima, sunt vigilemus! Ecce minaciter, imminent arbiter, ille supremus.” The great difficulty of writing so long a poem with rhyme not only at the end of successive lines, but rhyme also between the first two clauses of each line, was recog nized by the author, and he humbly attributes his accom plishment of this great work to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
bases, but in this one every island will flee away and “mountains were not found,” the original says. It is clear that the topography of Palestine and possibly the whole world will be radically changed by the leveling or sinking of many mountains. Again Jehovah roars against His enemies and Babylon comes into remembrance to receive her cup of destruc tion. The fleeing blaspheming followers of .Antichrist will be plagued with falling hail stones weighing more than a hundred pounds. Every earthquake may not be a direct judgment from God, but Isaiah tells concerning Jerusalem , “IVoe to Ariel, to Ariel the city where David dwelt . . . Thou shalt be visited of the Lord o f hosts with thunder and with earth quake.” He laments, as Jeremiah did, over world conditions as he looked about him and saw the wickedness of men. He was overwhelmed' with despair. Seeing no relief except from above, and inspired with hope, he put into his poem, so true, and yet so black with earth woes, one hundred lines that shine out with contrasting brilliancy as he de scribes the Heavenly Country. Bernard of Cluny, through the writing of this poem, has placed his name first in rank of the later Latin poets, and has given us one of our sweetest hymns, that kindles our longing for the “City Made Without Hands.” The Latin metre cannot be successfully reproduced in English, but John Mason Neale has given a beautiful translation of portions of the famous one hundred lines, found in nearly every hymn-book, of which we give the first stanza : “Jerusalem the golden, With milk and honey blest, Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice op pressed : I know not, O I know not; What joys await us there, What radiancy of glory, What bliss beyond compare.”
afe afe afe The Two Bernards and Their Hymns B y P rof . J ohn B. T rowbridge
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