In the circumstances it makes little difference to the prestige of Abélard whether we succeed in proving a direct influence or no. There are few who will think less of him because he was beaten by St. Bernard in diplomatic manipulation of the political force of the Church. The times were not ripe for the acceptance of his particular criticisms, and the mystic school was the natural expression of this conservatism. We may even doubt if Deutsch is correct in saying that the thirteenth century was prepared to receive them, but that its attention was diverted to Spain. Renan has said that they who study the thirteenth century closely are astonished that Protestantism did not arise three hundred years earlier. That is the point of view of a logician. The Reformation was not in reality, though it seems such in theory to the student of the history of ideas, an intellectual development. No doubt it could not have succeeded without this development to appeal to, but it was a moral and political revolt. How little the world was prepared for such a revolt at the end of the thirteenth century may be gathered from a study of the life of that other rebellious monk, William Occam. This success the Anselms and Bernards achieved: they spread, with a moral renovation, a spirit of docility and loyalty to the Church. The subtlety and intellectual activity they could not arrest came to be used up in an effort to restate the older dogmas in terms which should be at once conservative and acceptable to the new rational demand.