Chroniclers have left to our imagination the confusion that followed, and we may leave it to that of the reader. Although the bishops afterwards made a show of disputing it, the appeal was quite canonical, and was admitted at Rome. But it was a course which had not entered into the thoughts of the most astute of them, and which completely upset their plans. They could not now touch the person of Abélard. Bernard, indeed, did not deprive the great audience of the discourse he had ‘not prepared,’ although it was now quite safe from contradiction. We have it, some say, in his later letter to the pope, a most vehement denunciation and often perversion of Abélard’s teaching. He gained an easy victory, as far as Sens was concerned. The next day the prelates met together, condemned Abélard’s teaching as heretical, and forwarded a report, submitting his person and his works, to Rome. The question why Abélard behaved in so extraordinary a manner has had many answers. The answer of the godly, given by Bernard’s monkish biographer, is of the transcendental order. Brother Geoffrey relates that Abélard confessed to his intimate friends that he mysteriously lost the use and control of his mind when Bernard began. Bishop Otto of Freising says that he feared ‘a rising of the people.’ He would be more likely to provoke one by thus affronting their great cathedral and prelates. The true interpretation is that the assembly was a play, covering an unworthy intrigue, and he had been secretly informed of it. The bishops had drawn up their verdict, over their cups, on the preceding day. Desperate efforts are made, of course, to destroy an interpretation which does not leave the discredit on Abélard, but it has now been based on incontrovertible evidence. In the first place the bishops ingenuously confess it themselves in their eagerness to evade a different accusation. In order to influence the judgment, or rather the decision, of the pope, they told him that they had found Abélard’s teaching to be heretical. How, then, were they to reconcile this with the notice of Abélard’s appeal to Rome? ‘We had,’ they say in their report, ‘already condemned him on the day before he appealed to you.’ It matters little who wrote this report—whether Bernard[31] or Henry’s secretary—because it was signed by the bishops. They reveal their secret conclave of the Sunday evening. Henry was particularly anxious to justify them, at all costs, on the charge of disregarding the appeal, because he had been suspended by Innocent for that offence a few years previously. [31] It is singular that Mr. Poole, who credits Bernard with writing the report, should speak of the words as a deliberate ‘lie of excuse,’ especially as he adopts the witness of Bérenger to a previous condemnation. We are not only compelled by independent evidence to take them as correct, but one imputes a lesser sin to Bernard (from the Catholic point of view) in doing so.