In the first place, therefore, he wrote a circular letter ‘to all my lords and fathers, the venerable bishops and cardinals of the curia, from the child of their holiness.’ His secretary was to deliver a copy to each. ‘None will doubt,’ he says, ‘that it is your especial duty to remove all scandals from the kingdom of God.’ The Roman Church is the tribunal of the world: ‘to it we do well to refer, not questions, but attacks on the faith and dishonour of Christ: contumely and contempt of the fathers: present scandals and future dangers. The faith of the simple is derided, the hidden things of God are dragged forth, questions of the most sublime mysteries are rashly debated, insults are offered to the fathers.’ They will see this by the report. ‘And if you think there is just ground for my agitation, be ye also moved’—and moved to take action. ‘Let him who has raised himself to the heavens be crushed down to hell; he has sinned in public, let him be punished in public.’ It is the fulmination of the prophet of the age on the duty of the curia. Then came eight private letters to cardinals of his acquaintance, an interesting study in ecclesiastical diplomacy. To the chancellor of the curia, Haymerick, he speaks chiefly of Abélard’s boast of friends at court. He transcribes the passage from his letter to Innocent; and he adds the earlier allusion to the Roman deacon, Hyacinth, who was evidently a thorn in the side of the officials of the curia. To Guido of Castello, afterwards Celestine II., who was known to be a friend of Abélard, he writes in an entirely new strain. ‘I should do you wrong,’ he begins, ‘if I thought you so loved any man as to embrace his errors also in your affection.’ Such a love would be animal, earthly, diabolical. Others may say what they like of Guido, but Bernard is a man who ‘never judges anybody without proof,’ and he will not believe it. He passes to a mild complaint that ‘Master Peter introduces profane novelties in his books’; still ‘it is not I that accuse him before the Father, but his own book.’ But he cannot refrain from putting just a little _venenum in cauda_: ‘It is expedient for you and for the Church that silence be imposed on him whose mouth is full of curses and bitterness and guile.’