who now intrigued against him. Without examining him,
without giving him a chance to discuss, justify, or explain his
doctrine, a council, assembled at Soissons in 1121, condemned his book,
not so much for what it taught, as because the author had presumed to
teach theology without definite authority from the Church. Summoned
before the council--the decision had been reached and the trial
conducted without his presence--Abelard was forced to throw his book
into the flames. As a confession of faith he was made to recite the
Athanasian creed, and, to humiliate him still further, they brought him
the text, as if he could not recite from memory that which was known by
every child. The man's overwrought nature gave way under this last
exhibition of petty malice. He tells us: "I read (the creed) as well as
I could for sobs and tears." He was then delivered to the abbot of
Saint-Medard to be confined to the monastery for an indefinite period.

He soon obtained permission to return to Saint-Denis, but here his
tongue once more got him into trouble. The patron saint of the abbey,
the patron saint of all France, was Saint Denis, whom the ignorant monks
of the abbey, jealous of the dignity of their patron, identified with
Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert of Saint Paul. Abelard pointed out
to them a passage in Bede which proved the whole thing a legend. Abelard
was perfectly right, but in the eyes of his brother monks he was
certainly a traitor, probably an emissary of the devil. His life at
Saint-Denis becoming unbearable, he fled at night to Champagne, and,
after some little opposition, was permitted to retire to a desert place
not far from Troyes. Here he built an oratory of reeds and thatch,
dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and here he dwelt as a hermit. But even
here pupils sought him out. To gain his living, he opened a school; and
the desert gave birth to scores of little huts and tents, in which his
eager hearers lived. His own little oratory being too small to
accommodate the crowds, the students built for him a new and larger
temple, which, in gratitude for the consolation he had found here, he
dedicated to the Trinity and named Paraclete, in honor of the Holy
Ghost, the Comforter.

But he was tormented by new dangers, or at least by new fears. A nature
so hypersensitive perhaps conjured up hobgoblins of persecution out of
pure imagination. "I could not hear of an assemblage of churchmen
without thinking that its obj