Abelard, the most talented dialectician of his day, gifted with wonderful learning, and armed with a rational theology which he made intelligible, assigned a different origin and a different mode of action to each of the three persons of the Trinity. The divines at once prepared to combat his views, and St. Bernard constituted himself their champion. Abelard, when condemned, repented, and, on his knees before his judges, burnt the books which contained his heretical theories; he showed himself, indeed, even a greater man by this expiatory act than he had ever done by the brilliancy of his teaching. Bishop Gilbert de la Porrée, a scholastic heresiarch like Abelard, also met a terrible antagonist in the gifted Abbot of Clairvaux, and, bowing his head, he confessed his guilt, leaving his disciples to maintain that the attributes of God ought to be considered as distinct from his essence. Arnold of Brescia attacked the temporal power, upon the ground that the Church should be stripped of her property, that the wallet of St. Peter should be given back to the pope, and the ancient Roman Republic proclaimed in the pontifical city. Valdo went still further; he advised the Christians to renounce all kinds of property, in order to render their lives more spiritual. The Albigenses (Figs. 310 and 311) and the Waldenses, who were Manicheans under another name, eventually embodied in themselves all the heresies which, towards the close of the twelfth century, had spread over Europe and chiefly throughout the south of France. In the following chapter (“The Inquisition”), the account of the crusade preached against them is related at length. From every quarter of Christendom, but chiefly from Germany, Flanders, and France, crusaders were enlisted beneath the banner of the faith. [Illustration: Fig. 311.--Entry of Louis VIII., King of France, and of Cardinal St. Angelo, the Pope’s Legate, upon the 12th of September, 1226, into Avignon, which had just capitulated after a three months’ siege.--After a Miniature in the “Chroniques de Hainaut” (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels).] [Illustration: Fig. 312.--Heresy of the Flagellants.--The Latin inscription upon the streamer borne by the Bishop of Hippona signifies, “They sacrifice to Satan, and not to God.”--Fac-simile of a Miniature in the “Cité de Dieu,” by St. Augustine (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in St. Geneviève Library, Paris).] This campaign was begun in 1196. The council which condemned the new Manichean heresy met at Montpellier in December of that year, and the first effect of the repressive measures which it very promptly employed was to drive back into the Cevennes, the Alps, and the Vosges, and towards the Rhône, the Moselle, and the Rhine, a host of heretics who endeavoured to teach publicly in the free towns of Germany.