Roscelin replied directly to Abélard, besides writing to Girbert. The letter is no less characteristic of the time, though probably an equally unsafe indication of the character of the writer. ‘If,’ it begins, in the gentle manner of the time, ‘you had tasted a little of that sweetness of the Christian religion which you profess by your habit, you would not, unmindful of your order and your profession, and forgetful of the countless benefits you received from my teaching from your childhood to youth, have so far indulged in words of malice against me as to disturb the brethren’s peace with the sword of the tongue, and to contemn our Saviour’s most salutary and easy commands.’ He accepts, with an equally edifying humility, Abélard’s fierce denunciation: ‘I see myself in your words as in a mirror. Yet God is powerful to raise up out of the very stones,’ etc. But he cannot long sustain the unnatural tone, and he suddenly collapses into depths of mediæval Latin, which for filth and indecency rival the lowest productions of Billingsgate. The venerable canon returns again and again, in the course of his long letter, to Abélard’s mutilation, and with the art of a Terence or a Plautus. As to the proposed debate, he is only too eager for it. If Abélard attempts to shirk it at the last moment, he ‘will follow him all over the world.’ He finally dies away in an outburst of childish rage which beats Abélard’s peroration. He will not continue any longer because it occurs to him that Abélard is, by the strictest force of logic, a nonentity. He is not a monk, for he is giving lessons; he is not a cleric, for he has parted with the soutane; he is not a layman, for he has the tonsure; he is not even the Peter he signs himself, for Peter is a masculine name. These were the two ablest thinkers of Christendom at the time. Fortunately for both, the battle royal of the dialecticians did not take place. Possibly Roscelin had not lodged the rumoured complaint at all. In any case Girbert was spared a painful and pitiful scene. A short time afterwards, however, Alberic and Lotulphe found an excellent opportunity to take action. Some time in the year 1121 a papal legate, Conon, Bishop of Praeneste, came to Rheims. Conon had been travelling in France for some years as papal legate, and since it was the policy of Rome to conciliate France, in view of the hostility of Germany, the legate had a general mission to make himself as useful and obliging as possible. Archbishop Ralph, for his part, would find it a convenient means of gratifying his teachers, without incurring much personal responsibility. The outcome of their conferences was, therefore, that Abélard received from the legate a polite invitation to appear at a provincial synod, or council, which was to be held at Soissons, and to bring with him his ‘celebrated work on the Trinity.’ The simple monk was delighted at the apparent opportunity of vindicating his orthodoxy. It was his first trial for heresy.