This cure was a pure act of grace, like alms, made to gratify the whim of the saint; and a man who could so control nature was more powerful than any other on earth. Bernard was such a man, and for this reason he was chosen by acclamation to preach the second crusade.
His sermons have perished, but two of his letters have survived,[115] and they explain the essential weakness of a military force raised on the basis of supernatural intervention. He looked upon the approaching campaign as merely the vehicle for a miracle, and as devised to offer to those who entered on it a special chance for salvation. Therefore he appealed to the criminal classes. "For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone, that the Omnipotent should deign to summon to his service, as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime?"[116]
Even had an army composed of such material been well disciplined and well led, it would have been untrustworthy in the face of an adversary like Nour-ed-Din; but Louis VII. of France was as emotional and as irrational as Saint Bernard. His father had been a great commander, but he himself had been educated in the Abbey of Saint Denis, and justified his wife's scornful jest, who, when she left him for Raymond de Poitiers, said she had married a monk. The whole world held him lightly, even the priests sneered at him, and Innocent II. spoke of him as a child "who must be stopped from learning rebellion." Indeed, the pope underrated him, for he appointed his own nephew to the See of Bourges in defiance of the king, and the insult roused him to resistance. Louis raised an army and invaded the County of Champagne, where the bishop had taken refuge. There he stormed and burnt Vitry, and some thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who had taken refuge in the church, perished in the flames of the blazing town. Horror seems to have unhinged his mind, absolution did not calm him, and at last he came to believe that his only hope of salvation lay in a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre. On Palm Sunday, 1146, when Bernard harangued a vast throng at Vézelay, the king was the first to prostrate himself, and take the cross from his hands.