‘Peter Abelard’, he wrote to the Pope, ‘is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether ... the man is great in his own eyes ... this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.’ The minds of the two men were indeed utterly opposed--types of conflicting human thought in all ages. St. Bernard, in spite of his frank denunciations of the sins of the Church, was docile to the voice of her authority, and hated and feared the pride of the human intellect as the deadliest of all sins. Abelard, by nature inquisitive and sceptical, regarded his deft brain as a surgeon’s knife, given him to cut away diseased or worn-out tissues from the thought of his day in order to leave it healthier and purer. As antagonists they were no match, for St. Bernard was infinitely the greater man, without any of the other’s petty vanity and worldliness to confuse the issue for which they struggled: he had behind him also the sympathy of mediaeval minds not as yet awakened to any spirit of inquiry, and so the Breton was driven into the retirement of a monk’s cell and his condemned works publicly burned. One of his pupils, Peter Lombard, adopted his master’s methods without arousing the anger of the orthodox by any daring feats of controversy, and produced a _Book of Sentences_ (_sententiae_ = opinions) that became the text-book for scholasticism, just as the _Decretum_ was the authority for students of Roman law. Without being a work of genius the _Sentences_ cleared a pathway through the jungle of mediaeval thought for more original minds, while the discovery in the latter half of the twelfth century of several hitherto unknown works of Aristotle gave added zest to the researches of the ‘Schoolmen’. Greatest of all these ‘Schoolmen’ was Thomas Aquinas, ‘the Angelic Doctor’, as he has sometimes been called.