Censura doctorum parisiensium; ex editione Andreae Quercetani (André Duchesne)_.] which asked one hundred and fifty-eight questions on all kinds of subjects. The famous champion of orthodoxy, St. Bernard, examined the book, and at the Council of Sens in 1140 obtained a verdict against its author. He said that poor Abélard was an infernal dragon who persecuted the Church, that Arius, Pelagius, and Nestorius were not more dangerous, as Abélard united all these monsters in his own person, and that he was a persecutor of the faith and the precursor of Antichrist. These words of the celebrated Abbot of Clairvaux are more creditable to his zeal than to his charity. Abélard's disciple Arnold of Brescia attended him at the Council, and shared in the condemnations which St. Bernard so freely bestowed. Arnold's stormy and eventful life as a religious and political reformer was ended at Rome in 1155, where he was strangled and burnt by order of the Emperor Frederick, his ashes being cast into the Tiber lest they should be venerated as relics by his followers. St. Bernard described him as a man having the head of a dove and the tail of a scorpion. Abélard was condemned to perpetual silence, and found a last refuge in the monastery of Cluny. Side by side in the graveyard of the Paraclete Convent the bodies of Abélard and Heloise lie, whose earthly lives, though lighted by love and cheered by religion, were clouded with overmuch sorrow, and await the time when all theological questions will be solved and doubts and difficulties raised by earthly mists and human frailties will be swept away, and we shall "know even as also we are known." CHAPTER II. FANATICS AND FREE-THINKERS. Quirinus Kuhlmann--John Tennhart--Jeremiah Felbinger--Simon Morin--Liszinski--John Toland--Thomas Woolston--John Biddle--Johann Lyser--Bernardino Ochino--Samuel Friedrich Willenberg. The nympholepts of old were curious and unhappy beings who, while carelessly strolling amidst sylvan shades, caught a hasty glimpse of some spirit of the woods, and were doomed ever afterwards to spend their lives in fruitlessly searching after it. The race of Fanatics are somewhat akin to these restless seekers. There is a wildness and excessive extravagance in their notions and actions which separates them from the calm followers of Truth, and leads them into strange courses and curious beliefs. How far the sacred fire of enthusiasm may be separated from the fierce heat of fanaticism we need not now inquire, nor whether a spark of the latter has not shone brilliantly in many a noble soul and produced brave deeds and acts of piety and self-sacrifice. Those whose fate is here recorded were far removed from such noble characters; their fanaticism was akin to madness, and many of them were fitter for an asylum rather than a gaol, which was usually their destination.