Bellarion's reading had been prodigious. There was no branch of learning--from the Theological Fathers to Vegetius Hyginus on The Art of War'--to which he had not addressed his eager spirit. And his exhaustion of all immediately available material for study was one of the causes of his going forth from the peace of the convent of which he was a nursling, in quest of deeper wells of learning, to slake his hot intellectual thirst. Another cause was a certain heretical doctrine of which it was hoped that further study would cure him; a doctrine so subversive of theological teaching that a hundred years later it must have made him closely acquainted with the operations of the Holy Office and probably--in Spain certainly--have brought him to the fire. This abominable heresy, fruit of much brooding, was that in the world there is not, nor can be, such a thing as sin. And it was in vain that the Abbot, who loved him very dearly, sought by argument to convert him. 'It is your innocence that speaks. Alas, my child, in the world, from which hitherto you have been mercifully sheltered, you will find that sin is not only real but terribly abundant.' Bellarion answered with a syllogism, the logical formula to which he had reduced his doctrine. He presented it in the Socratic manner of inquiry, which was the method of argument he ever preferred. 'Are not all things in the world from God? Is not God the fount of all goodness? Can, therefore, any created thing be other than good?' 'And the devil, then?' quoth the Abbot. Bellarion smiled, a singularly sweet smile that had power to draw men's love and lead them into agreement with him. 'Is it not possible that those who invented the devil may have studied divinity in Persia, where the creed obtains that powers of light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, strive perpetually for mastery of the world? Surely, otherwise, they would have remembered that if the devil exists, God must have created him, which in itself is blasphemy, for God can create no evil.' Aghast, the Abbot descended at a stride from the theological to the practical. 'Is it not evil to steal, to kill, to commit adultery?' 'Ah, yes. But these are evils between men, disruptive of society, and therefore to be suppressed lest man become as the beasts. But that is all.' 'All? All!' The Abbot's deep-set eyes surveyed the youth with sorrow. 'My son, the devil lends you a false subtlety to destroy your soul.'