It is impossible to say that Abélard sails faultlessly through these troubled waters, but his answer to her on this point is true and sound in substance. ‘God grant that it be so in thy soul as thou hast written,’ he says in his next letter. It is true that he is chiefly regarding her humility, and that he does not shed the kindly light of human wisdom on her soul which an earlier Abélard would have done; yet we can imagine what St. Bernard or Robert d’Arbrissel would have answered to such an outpouring. However, apart from the happy moderation of this reply, Abélard’s third letter only increases our sympathy with this woman who wanders in the desert of the twelfth century of the Christian era. The wild cry of the suffering heart has startled him. He becomes painfully ingenious in defending Providence and the monastic or Buddhistic view of life. As to his death, why should she be moved so strongly? ‘If thou hadst any trust in the divine mercy towards me, the more grievous the afflictions of this life seem to thee the more wouldst thou desire to see me freed from them! Thou knowest of a certainty that whoever will deliver me from this life will deliver me from a heavy penalty. What I may incur hereafter I know not, but there is no uncertainty as to that which I escape.’ And again, when he comes to her accusations of Providence: if she would follow him to ‘the home of Vulcan,’ why cannot she follow him quietly to heaven? As to her saying that God spared them in their guilt and smote them in their wedded innocence, he denies the latter point. They were not innocent. Did they not have conjugal relations in the holy nunnery of the Virgin at Argenteuil?[23] Did he not profanely dress her in the habit of a nun when he took her secretly to Pallet? Flushed with the success of his apology for Providence, the unlucky abbot goes from bathos to bathos. There was not merely justice but love in the divine ruling. They had merited punishment, but had, ‘on the contrary,’ been rescued from the ‘vile and obscene pleasures’ of matrimony, from the ‘mud and mire,’ and so forth. His mutilation was a skilful operation on the part of Providence ‘to remove the root of all vice and sordidness from him, and make him fitter for the service of the altar.’ ‘I had deserved death, and I have received life. Do thou, then, unite with me in thanksgiving, my inseparable companion, who hast shared both my sin and my reward.’ How fortunate it was that they married! ‘For if thou hadst not been joined to me in matrimony, it might easily have happened that thou wouldst have remained in the world’—the one thing that would have saved her from utter desolation. ‘Oh, how dread a loss, how lamentable an evil it had been, if in the seeking of carnal pleasure thou hadst borne a few children in pain to the world, whereas thou now bearest so great a progeny with joy to heaven.’ Again the ‘mud and mire,’ and the thanksgiving. He even lends his