For a few months Brother Peter struggled bravely with the hard task the fates had set him. He was probably wise enough to refrain from inveighing, in season and out of season, against the ‘intolerable uncleanness’ of Adam and his monks. Possibly he nursed a hope—or was nursed by a hope—of having another ‘cell’ entrusted to his charge. In spite of the irregularity of the abbey, formal religious exercises were extensively practised. All day and night the chant of the breviary was heard in the monastic chapel. There was also a large and busy _scriptorium_; the _archivium_ of the ancient abbey was a treasury of interesting old documents; and there was a relatively good library. It was in the latter that Brother Peter found his next adventure, and one that threatened to be the most serious of all. Seeing the present futility of his theological plans, he had turned to the study of history. There was a copy of Bede’s _History of the Apostles_ in the library, and he says that he one day, ‘by chance,’ came upon the passage in which Bede deals with St. Denis. The Anglo-Saxon historian would not admit the French tradition about St. Denis. He granted the existence of a St. Denis, but said that he had been Bishop of Corinth, not of Athens. The legend about the martyrdom of Denis the Areopagite, with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, at Paris in the first century, is now almost universally rejected by Roman Catholic historians, not to mention others. It is, however, still enshrined with honour in that interesting compendium of myths of the Christian era, the Roman breviary, and is read with religious solemnity by every priest and every monastic choir in the Catholic world on the annual festival. However, the abbey of St. Denis, the monastery that owed all its wealth and repute to its possession of the bones of ‘the Areopagite,’ was the last place in the world in which to commence a rationalistic attack on the legend. With his usual want of tact and foresight Brother Peter showed the passage in Bede to some of his fellow-monks, ‘in joke,’ he says; he might as well have cut the abbot’s throat, or destroyed the wine-cellar ‘in joke.’ There was a violent commotion. Heresy about the Trinity was bad, but heresy about the idol of the royal abbey was more touching. It is not quite clear that Abélard came to the opinion of modern religious historians, that the St. Denis of Paris was a much later personage than the Areopagite of the Acts of the Apostles, but he seems to hold that opinion. In any case, the monks felt that to be the substance of his discovery, and held it to be an attack on the glory of the abbey. Venerable Bede was, they bluntly replied, a liar. One of their former abbots, Hilduin, had made a journey to Greece for the special purpose of verifying the story.