Wiser than the Church of those days, and anticipating the wisdom of the modern Church of Rome, Abélard saw the great danger to the faith itself of the Anselmian maxim, _Fides praecedit intellectum_. He argued that, as the world had somehow outlived the age of miracles, God must have intended rational evidence to take its place. In any case, there was an increasingly large class of youths and men who clamoured for ‘human and philosophic grounds,’ as he puts it, who would lie to their consciences if they submitted to the current pietism. Abélard believed he would render valuable service to the Church if he could devise rational proofs, or at least analogies, of its dogmas. It was in this frame of mind, not in a spirit of destructive scepticism, that he raised the standard of rationalism. He at once applied his force to the most preterrational of dogmas, and wrote his famous _Treatise on the Unity and Trinity of God_. A manuscript of the treatise was discovered by Stölzle a few years ago. It is unnecessary to inflict on the reader an analysis of the work. It is perfectly sincere and religious in intention, but, like every book that has ever been penned on the subject of the Trinity, it contains illustrations which can be proved to be heretical. We may discuss the point further apropos of the Council of Soissons. CHAPTER VII THE TRIAL OF A HERETIC The swiftly multiplying charges seem to have impaired Abélard’s health. He became much more sensitive to the accusation of heresy than the mere injustice of it can explain. We have an evidence of his morbid state at this period in a letter he wrote to the Bishop of Paris. The letter must not be regarded as a normal indication of the writer’s character, but, like the letter of Canon Roscelin which it elicited, it is not a little instructive about the age in which the writers lived. There are hypercritical writers who question the correctness of attributing these letters to Abélard and Roscelin, but the details they contain refer so clearly to the two masters that any doubt about their origin is, as Deutsch says, ‘frivolous and of no account’; he adds that we should be only too glad, for the sake of the writers, if there were some firm ground for contesting their genuineness.