enthusiastic students. He probably thought that
during the long years of his exile, the envy and hatred of his enemies
had died out; but he soon discovered that he was greatly mistaken. He
was too marked a character, and the tendency of his thought too
dangerous, for that. Besides, he emptied the schools of his rivals, and
adopted no conciliatory tone toward them. The natural result followed.
In the year 1140, his enemies, headed by St. Bernard, who had long
regarded him with suspicion, raised a cry of heresy against him, as
subjecting everything to reason. Bernard, who was nothing if not a
fanatic, and who managed to give vent to all his passions by placing
them in the service of his God, at once denounced him to the Pope, to
cardinals, and to bishops, in passionate letters, full of rhetoric,
demanding his condemnation as a perverter of the bases of the faith.

At that time a great ecclesiastical council was about to assemble at
Sens; and Abelard, feeling certain that his writings contained nothing
which he could not show to be strictly orthodox, demanded that he should
be allowed to explain and dialectically defend his position, in open
dispute, before it. But this was above all things what his enemies
dreaded. They felt that nothing was safe before his brilliant dialectic.
Bernard even refused to enter the lists with him; and preferred to draw
up a list of his heresies, in the form of sentences sundered from their
context in his works,--some of them, indeed, from works which he never
wrote,--and to call upon the council to condemn them. (These theses may
be found in Denzinger's 'Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum,' pp.
109 _seq._) Abelard, clearly understanding the scheme, feeling its
unfairness, and knowing the effect of Bernard's lachrymose pulpit
rhetoric upon sympathetic ecclesiastics who believed in his power to
work miracles, appeared before the council, only to appeal from its
authority to Rome. The council, though somewhat disconcerted by this,
proceeded to condemn the disputed theses, and sent a notice of its
action to the Pope. Fearing that Abelard, who had friends in Rome, might
proceed thither and obtain a reversal of the verdict, Bernard set every
agency at work to obtain a confirmation of it before his victim could
reach the Eternal City. And he succeeded.

The result was for a time kept secret from Abelard, who, now over sixty
years old, set out on his painful journey. Stopping on his way at the