stration; an hour afterwards they fear to have
deceived themselves.'"

Abelard was always, as he has been called, a scholastic adventurer,
a philosophical and theological freelance, and it was after the
Calamity that he followed those courses that resulted finally in
his silencing and his obscure death. It is almost impossible for us
of modern times to understand the violence of partisanship aroused
by his actions and published words that centre apparently around
the placing of the hermitage he had made for himself under the
patronage of the third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the
Spirit of love and compassion and consolation, and the consequent
arguments by which he justified himself. To us it seems that he was
only trying to exalt the power of the Holy Spirit, a pious action
at the least but to the episcopal and monastic conservators of the
faith he seems to have been guilty of trying to rationalize an
unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to
man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that
other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy
and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God
had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of
the sort seemed intolerable.

For a time the affairs of Abelard prospered: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis
was his defender, and he enjoyed the favor of the Pope and the
King. He was made an abbot and his influence spread in every
direction. In 1137 the King died and conditions at Rome changed so
that St. Bernard became almost Pope and King in his own person.
Within a year he proceeded against Abelard; his "Theology" was
condemned at a council of Sens, this judgment was confirmed by the
Pope, and the penalty of silence was imposed on the author--
probably the most severe punishment he could be called upon to
endure. As a matter of fact it was fatal to him. He started
forthwith for Rome but stopped at the Abbey of Cluny in the company
of its Abbot, Peter the Venerable, "the most amiable figure of the
twelfth century," and no very devoted admirer of St. Bernard, to
whom, as a matter of fact, he had once written, "You perform all
the difficult religious duties; you fast, you watch, you suffer;
but you will not endure the easy ones-you do not love." Here he
found two years of peace after his troubled life, dying in the full
communion of the Church on 21 April, 1142.

The problems of philo