he restraints of home. Only a dark and beclouded age could have upheld
such a policy. Upon the Church of the Middle Ages we lay the blame of
these false ideas. She is in a measure responsible for the follies of
Abelard and Heloise. They were not greater than the ideas of their age.
Had Abelard been as bold in denouncing the stupid custom of the Church
in this respect as he was in fighting the monks of St. Denis or the
intellectual intolerance of Bernard, he would not have fallen in the
respect of good people. But he was a slave to interest and
conventionality. He could not brave the sneers of priests or the
opinions of society; he dared not lose caste with those who ruled the
Church; he would not give up his chances of preferment. He was unwilling
either to renounce his love, or to avow it by an honorable, open union.

At last his intimacy created scandal. In the eyes of the schools and of
the Church he had sacrificed philosophy and fame to a second Delilah.
And Heloise was even more affected by his humiliation than himself. She
more than he was opposed to marriage, knowing that this would doom him
to neglect and reproach. Abelard would perhaps have consented to an open
marriage had Heloise been willing; but with a strange perversity she
refused. His reputation and interests were dearer to her than was her
own fair name. She sacrificed herself to his fame; she blinded herself
to the greatest mistake a woman could make. The excess of her love made
her insensible to the principles of an immutable morality. Circumstances
palliated her course, but did not excuse it. The fatal consequences of
her folly pursued her into the immensity of subsequent grief; and though
afterwards she was assured of peace and forgiveness in the depths of her
repentance, the demon of infatuated love was not easily exorcised. She
may have been unconscious of degradation in the boundless spirit of
self-sacrifice which she was willing to make for the object of her
devotion, but she lost both dignity and fame. She entreated him who was
now quoted as a reproach to human weakness, since the languor of passion
had weakened his power and his eloquence, to sacrifice her to his fame;
"to permit her no longer to adore him as a divinity who accepts the
homage of his worshippers; to love her no longer, if this love
diminished his reputation; to reduce her even, if necessary, to the
condition of a woman despised by the world, since the glory of his love
would mor