The archbishop then stepped forward to put an end to the confusion. ‘It is well,’ he said, making a tardy concession to conscience, ‘that the brother have an opportunity of defending his faith before us all.’ Abélard gladly prepared to do so, but Alberic and Lotulphe once more opposed the idea. No further discussion was needed, they urged. The council had finished its work; Abélard’s errors had been detected and corrected. If it were advisable to have a profession of faith from Brother Peter, let him recite the Athanasian Creed. And lest Abélard should object that he did not know the Creed by heart, they produced a copy of it. The politic prelates were easily induced to take their view. In point of fact the archbishop’s proposal was a bare compliance with the canons. Abélard’s book had been condemned on the ground that it had been issued without authorisation; nothing had been determined as to the legitimacy of its contents. The canons still demanded that he should be heard before he was sent out into the world with an insidious stigma of heresy. But charity and justice had no part in that pitiful conventicle. Archbishop and legate thought it politic to follow the ruling of Alberic to the end, and the parchment was handed to Abélard. And priest and prelate, monk and abbot, shamelessly stood around, whilst the greatest genius of the age, devoted to religion in every gift of his soul, as each one knew, faltered out the familiar symbol. ‘Good Jesus, where wert thou?’ Abélard asks, long years afterwards. There are many who ask it to-day. So ended the holy Council of Soissons, Provincial Synod of the arch-diocese of Rheims, held under the ægis of a papal legate, in the year of grace 1121. Its _acta_ are not found in Richard, or Labbé, or Hefele: they ‘have not been preserved.’ There is an earlier ecclesiastical council that earned the title of the _latrocinium_ (‘rogues’ council’), and we must not plagiarise. Ingenious and audacious as the apologetic historian is, he has not attempted to defend the Council of Soissons. But his condemnation of it is mildness itself compared with his condemnation of Abélard.