I have now to set out with care the story of that immortal love. But nine readers out of ten are minded to pass judgment on the acts and lives of those we recall from the dead. My function is to reconstruct the story as faithfully as the recorded facts allow. Yet I would make one more digression before doing so. What standard of conduct shall be used in judging Abélard? There are a thousand moral codes—that of the Hindu and that of the Christian, that of the twelfth century and that of the _twentieth_. In the twelfth century even the St. Bernards thought it just that a man who could not see the truth of the Church’s claims should be burned alive, and his soul tortured for all eternity; that a Being was just and adorable who tortured a twelfth century babe for Adam’s sin; that twelfth century Jews might be robbed because their remote ancestors had put Christ to death; that the sanctity of justice demanded, literally, an eye for an eye; and so forth. One may, of course, choose whatever standard of conduct one likes to measure Abélard’s, or anybody else’s, actions: Cardinal Newman, and such writers, have a fancy for judging him by the perfected code of the nineteenth. We cannot quarrel with them; though it is well to point out that they are not measuring Abélard’s subjective guilt, nor portraying his character, in so doing. And if any do elect to judge Abélard by the moral code of the twelfth century, it must be noted that this varied much, even on the point of sexual morality. St. Bernard and his like saw an inherent moral evil in sexual union; they thought the sanctity of the priestly character was incompatible with it, and that virginity was, in itself, and by the mere abstinence from sexual commerce, something holier than marriage. Apart from this, no doubt—if it can be set apart in the question—good men were agreed. But, as will appear presently, there were large bodies of men, even clerks, who not only differed from them in practice, but also in their deliberate moral judgment. We must approach closer still. When we have to determine an individual conception of the law, for the purpose of measuring real and personal guilt, we must have a regard to the surrounding influences, the current thoughts and prevailing habits, which may have impaired or obscured the feeling of its validity in any respect. It is well, then, first to glance at the morals of the time when one feels eager to measure Abélard’s guilt.