Heloise survived her husband by twenty-one years. There is a pretty legend in the Chronicle of the Church of Tours that the tomb of Abélard was opened at her death and her remains laid in it, and that the arms of the dead man opened wide to receive her whose embrace the hard world had denied him in life. It seems to have been at a later date that their ashes were really commingled. At the Revolution the Paraclete was secularised, and the remains of husband and wife began a series of removals in their great sarcophagus. In 1817 they found a fitting rest in Père Lachaise. CHAPTER XV THE INFLUENCE OF ABÉLARD If the inquirer into the influence of the famous dialectician could content himself with merely turning from the study of Abélard’s opinions to the towering structure of modern Catholic theology, he would be tempted to exclaim, in the words of a familiar epitaph, ‘Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice.’ Abélard’s most characteristic principles are now amongst the accepted foundations of dogmatic theology; most, or, at all events, a large number, of the conclusions that brought such wrath about him in the twelfth century are now calmly taught in the schools of Rome and Louvain and Freiburg. Bernardism has been almost banished from the courts of the temple. The modern theologian could not face the modern world with the thoughts of the saint whose bones are treasured in a thousand jewelled reliquaries; he must speak the thoughts of the heretic, who lies by the side of his beloved, amidst the soldiers and statesmen, the actresses and courtesans, of Paris. The great political organisation that once found it expedient to patronise Bernardism has now taken the spirit of Abélard into the very heart of its official teaching. There are few in England who will read such an assertion without a feeling of perplexity, if not incredulity. Far and wide over the realm of theology has the spirit of Abélard breathed; and ever-widening spheres of Evangelicalism, Deism, Pantheism, and Agnosticism mark its growth. But it is understood that Rome has resisted the spirit of rationalism, and to-day, as ever, bids human reason bow in submission before the veiled mysteries of ‘the deposit of revelation.’