the sanctuary, the accused purged himself of the charge or proved his guilt by carrying or walking on a nine foot bar of heated iron, plunging his arms ‘for an ell and a half’ into boiling water, or being bodily immersed in a huge tank, cold, and carefully blessed and consecrated. [12] When Anselm’s guilt was ultimately proved, people were somewhat troubled as to the ill-success of their Providential detective service, until they heard that the goldsmith, in accusing the canon, had broken faith with him. These are familiar facts. The difficulty at Laon was that there was no accused to operate on. The Solomon Laudunensis was therefore called into judgment, and his proposal certainly smacks of the thoroughness of the systematic theologian. A baby was to be taken from each parish of the town, and tried by the ordeal of immersion. When the guilty parish had been thus discovered, each family in it was to purge itself by sending an infant representative to the tank. When the guilt had been thus fastened on a certain house, all its inmates were to be put to the ordeal.[13] [13] Luckily the citizen-parents were wiser than their Solomon for once. They proposed that the process should commence with the seven treasurers. In spite of preliminary experiments in private the canon was convicted. But the reader must go to the pious Geoffroy’s narrative (_Migne_, vol. 156, col. 1011) to read how the burglar was tortured, how he obtained release for a time by trickery, and how, being unable to sleep at night for a miraculous dove, he finally confessed and restored. We see Anselm in a very different light in an incident that occurred a year or two before Abélard’s arrival. Through the influence of the King of England and the perennial power of gold a wholly unworthy bishop had been thrust upon the people of Laon. Illiterate, worldly, and much addicted to military society, he was extremely distasteful to Anselm and the theologians. The crisis came when the English king, Henry I., tried to levy a tax on the people of Laon. The bishop supported his patron; Anselm and others sternly opposed the tax in the name of the people. Feeling ran so high that the bishop was at length brutally murdered by some of the townsfolk, and the cathedral was burned to the ground. Anselm immediately, and almost alone, went forth to denounce the frenzied mob, and had the unfortunate prelate—left for the dogs to devour before his house—quietly buried.