for letters and philosophy. He abandoned
his birthright to his brothers, and returned
to his studies with renewed assiduity. He
had soon mastered all, and more than he
could be taught in the schools of Brittany,
and accordingly removed to the University
of Paris; where he studied under William of
Champeaux, afterwards bishop of Chalons-
sur-Marne, and who subsequently became a
monk of Citeaux. This reverent man was
the most renowned dialectician of his time,
but he soon found a rival, and next a master,
in Abelard. Warm friends at first, their
friendship changed to the bitterest enmity:
a public quarrel took place between them, in
consequence of which Abelard removed from
Paris, first to Melun and next to Corbeil; in
both of which retreats he was followed by
crowds of admiring and enthusiastic scholars.
After a sojourn for the benefit of his health
in his native Brittany, he returned to Paris,
having been absent two years. A reconciliation
was effected between him and William
de Champeaux, and Abelard next opened a
school of rhetoric. It speedily became the
most famous school in Europe. Of this
school were Guy de Chatel, afterwards cardinal
and pope under the title of Celestine the
Second; Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris;
Godefroye, bishop of Auxerre; Berenger,
bishop of Poitiers; and the holy abbot of
Clairvaux, the great St. Bernard himself. In
this school Abelard taught logic, metaphysics,
physics, mathematics, astronomy, morals, and
philosophy. His lectures were attended by
all that Paris could boast of nobility, of
beauty, of learning and piety.

If Abelard had died in his golden prime,
at thirty-nine years of age, it would have
been well. But Wisdom had decided otherwise.
Pride was to be humbled, the mighty
were to fall, and wisdom and learning were
to be a mockery, a warning and an example
to the meanest.

It is not my purpose to tell the miserable
love story of Abelard and Heloïse. I
wish to treat of Peter Abelard, the scholar
and the philosopher—of that phase of his
character which has been obscured and
almost extinguished by the ghastly brilliancy
of his passion for the niece of the Canon
Fulbert. All who know the names of Abelard
and Heloïse know the tragical history of their
loves.

After his marriage the forlorn, broken, and
ruined victim, who had once been the
renowned Maitre Pierre, retired to the Abbey
of St. Denis, to hide in the cloister his misery
and his remorse. He became a Benedictine
monk. Previous to his inclaustration,
however, he prevailed upon Heloïse to take
the veil. She obeyed the mandate of him
whom she yet loved with all the fondness and
fervour of their first fatal passion; but she
did so with a breaking heart. The cloister
was a refuge to Abelard; to Heloïse it was a
tomb. Young (not twenty years old), beautiful,
accomplished, she felt her life in every
limb—she saw herself condemned to a
living death. She who had pictured to
herself a life of refined luxury and splendour; of
being, perchance, with him to whom she had
given her whole heart, the ornament of courts
and cities, had before her the dreary prospect
of a life-long dungeon.

The sojourn of Abelard in the Abbey of St.
Denis was not long and not happy. Now
that his glory was departed; that his reputation
for sanctity and purity of manners was
tarnished; those who had long been his
enemies, but whose carpings and croakings had
been rendered inaudible by the trumpet voice
of his eloquence, arose in numbers around
him, and attacked him with that persevering
ferocity which cowards only possess. He was
assaulted by the weakest and most contemptible.
The most ignorant monks of the ignorant
brotherhood of Saint Denis hastened in
their presumption to challenge his arguments
and to question his orthodoxy. He was
accused of heresy, of deism, of pantheism, of
Arianism—of a host of doctrinal crimes, and
eventually expelled the order. The dispute
which led to his removal or rather expulsion
from St. Denis, was as ridiculous as it was
savagely pursued, and its relation will serve
to show the futilities of monastic erudition in
the days of Abelard.

One day as Maitre Pierre was reading the
Commentary of the Venerable Bede upon the
Acts of the Apostles, he came to a passage
in which the holy commentator stated that
Denis the Areopagite was bishop of Corinth,
and not of Athens. Now the founder of the
abbey of St. Denis (the saint with his head
under his arm) was according to the showing
of his own "Gesta," bishop of Athens; and
according to the monks of St. Denis he was
also that same Areopagite whom St. Paul
converted. Abelard quoted Bede to show
that the Areopagite was bishop of Corinth; the
monks opposed their authority, one Hilduin,
who had been abbot of St. Denis in the reign
of Louis le Debonnaire. Maitre Pierre
contemptuously replied that he could not think
of allowing the testimony of an ignorant friar
to weigh against that of a writer who was
revered for his learning and piety by princes,
and kings, and pontiffs. This so enraged the
monks that they complained to the king and
to the archbishop of Paris. They drew down
upon the unfortunate Abelard royal reproofs
and ecclesiastical censures; and not content
with this, they positively scourged him as a
heretic and blasphemer!

New troubles were yet to come. A book
he had written, called The Introduction to
Theology, was declared by his enemies to
be full of heresies. He was cited before the
Council of Soissons, badgered with interrogatories,
threatened, rebuked; and was
compelled to burn the obnoxious book with his
own hands. It is upon record that Abelard
wept. It must have been no ordinary sorrow