eachers who
prepared the way for the great lights of the Reformation.

Anselm had successfully battled with the rationalism of Roscelin, and
also had furnished a new argument for the existence of God. He secured
the triumph of Realism for a time and the apparent extinction of
heresy. But a new impulse to thought was given, soon after his death, by
a less profound but more popular and brilliant man, and, like him, a
monk. This was the celebrated Peter Abelard, born in the year 1079, in
Brittany, of noble parents, and a boy of remarkable precocity. He was a
sort of knight-errant of philosophy, going from convent to convent and
from school to school, disputing, while a mere youth, with learned
teachers, wherever he could find them. Having vanquished the masters in
the provincial schools, he turned his steps to Paris, at that time the
intellectual centre of Europe. The university was not yet established,
but the cathedral school of Notre Dame was presided over by William of
Champeaux, who defended the Realism of Anselm.

To this famous cathedral school Abelard came as a pupil of the veteran
dialectician at the age of twenty, and dared to dispute his doctrines.
He soon set up as a teacher himself; but as Notre Dame was interdicted
to him he retired to Melun, ten leagues from Paris, where enthusiastic
pupils crowded to his lecture room, for he was witty, bold, sarcastic,
acute, and eloquent. He afterwards removed to Paris, and so completely
discomfited his old master that he retired from the field. Abelard then
applied himself to the study of divinity, and attended the lectures of
Anselm of Laon, who, though an old man, was treated by Abelard with
great flippancy and arrogance. He then began to lecture on divinity as
well as philosophy, with extraordinary _eclat_. Students flocked to his
lecture room from all parts of Germany, Italy, France, and England. It
is said that five thousand young men attended his lectures, among whom
one hundred were destined to be prelates, including that brilliant and
able Italian who afterwards reigned as Innocent III. It was about this
time, 1117, when he was thirty-eight, that he encountered Heloise,--a
passage of his life which will be considered in a later volume of this
work. His unfortunate love and his cruel misfortune led to a temporary
seclusion in a convent, from which, however, he issued to lecture with
renewed popularity in a desert place in Champagne, where he constructed
a vast edi