pen, in his spiritual ecstasy, to the writing of this fearful calumny against himself: ‘Christ is thy true lover, not I; all that I sought in thee was the satisfaction of my miserable pleasure.’ Her passions are, like the artificially stimulated ones of the deacons in Gibbon and of Robert d’Arbrissel, a means of martyrdom. He had been spared all this, she had plaintively written; on the contrary, he urges, she will win more merit and reward than he. [23] The one from which the nuns had been driven ‘on account of the enormity of their life.’ I have given a full summary of the long epistle, because its psychological interest is great. We have seen the gradual transformation of Abélard—the steps in his ‘conversion’—from chapter to chapter. This letter marks the deepest stage of his lapse into Bernardism.[24] It offers an almost unprecedented contrast to the Abélard of 1115. And this is the man, I may be pardoned for repeating, who is held up by ecclesiastical writers (even such as Newman) to the blushes of the ages. Perhaps the age is not far off that will sincerely blush over him—not for his personal defects. [24] At a later date one of the censures passed by the doctors of the Sorbonne on this classic sinner of the twelfth century is that he finds a shade of sin in legitimate conjugal relations. Heloise was silenced. Whether the pious dissertation had really influenced her, or the proud utterance of her plaint had relieved her, or she closed in upon her heart after such a reply, it would be difficult to say. Her next letter is calm, erudite, dialectical. ‘To her lord as to species, her beloved in person’ is the quaint heading of the epistle. She will try to keep her pen within due bounds in future, but he knows the saying about ‘the fulness of the heart.’ Nevertheless, ‘just as a nail is driven out by a new one, so it is with thoughts.’ He must help her to dwell on other things. She and her nuns beg him to write a new rule for them and a history of the monastic life. There are points in the Rule of St. Benedict which are peculiarly masculine; she discusses them in early mediæval style. She would like her nuns to be permitted to eat meat and drink wine. There is less danger in giving wine to women; and she naïvely quotes (from Macrobius) Aristotle’s crude speculation on the subject. Then follows a long dissertation on wine, temperance, and intemperance, bristling with proofs and weighty authorities. Briefly, she quarrels with the ascetic view of life. She happily avoids the hard sayings in which Christ urges it on every page of the Gospels, and voices the eternal compromise of human nature. Who may become Abélard’s successor as their spiritual guide, she does not know. Let him appoint a rule of life for them, which will guard them from unwise interference, and let it concede a little in the way of soft clothing, meat, wine, and other suspected commodities.