William, it turned out, was too original and bold in some of his assertions concerning the Trinity and kindred topics, which were not allowed to pass unchallenged. A letter to St. Bernard from William, abbot of St. Thierry,[153] shows the attitude of William of Conches’ opponents. The abbot first says,--with the assumption of superior seriousness and dignity characteristic through all time of conservatives, bigots, and pompous persons subconsciously aware of their own stupidity--that anyone who knows William of Conches personally is aware of his levity and will not take his vanities too seriously, and that he is to be classed with Abelard in the presumptuousness of his opinions. The abbot then devotes most of his letter to an attack upon William’s discussion of the Trinity, taking umbrage at his discussing questions of faith at all, especially upon a philosophical basis, and at his distribution of the three faculties, power, will, and wisdom, among the Three Persons. The abbot more briefly objects to William’s physical account of the creation of man, saying: “First he says that man’s body was not made by God but by nature, and the soul was given him by God afterwards, and forsooth that the body was made by spirits whom he calls demons and by the stars.” This doctrine the abbot regards as on the one hand dangerously close to the opinion “of certain stupid philosophers who say that there is nothing but matter and the material, and that there is no other God in the world than the concourse of the elements and the system of nature”; and on the other hand as manifestly Manichean, affirming that the human soul is created by a good God but the body by the prince of darkness. Finally the abbot complains that William “stupidly and haughtily ridicules history of divine authority,” and “interprets in a physical sense” the account of the creation of woman from one of Adam’s ribs. [Sidenote: Extent of William’s retraction in the _Dragmaticon_.]