We may take Abélard’s statement literally. Bernard and Norbert were doing the work of his rivals, and were doing it effectively. They who had supported him at Soissons or afterwards were being poisoned against him. Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Chartres are probably two whom he had in mind. He feels that the net is being drawn close about him through the calumnies of these ubiquitous monks and canons. The peace of the valley is broken; he becomes morbidly sensitive and timorous. Whenever he hears that some synod or conventicle has been summoned he trembles with anxiety and expectation of another Soissons. The awful torture of that hour before the council comes back to him, and mingles with the thought of the power of his new enemies. He must fly from France. Away to the south, over the Pyrenees, was a land where the poor monk would have found peace, justice, and honour. Spain was just then affording ‘glory to God in heaven, and peace to men of good-will on earth’: it had been snatched from the dominion of Christianity for a century or two. So tolerant and beneficent was the reign of the Moors that even the Jews, crushed, as they were, by seven centuries of persecution, developed their finest powers under it. They were found in the front rank of every art and science; in every field where, not cunning and astuteness, but talent of the highest order and industry, were needed to command success. The Moors had happily degenerated from the fierce proselytism of their religious prophet—whilst the Christians had proportionately enlarged on that of theirs—and their human character was asserting the high natural ideal which it always does when it breaks away from the confining bonds of a narrow dogma. It was towards this land that Abélard turned his thoughts. It seemed useless for him to exchange one Christian land for another. A few years before, a small group of French monks had created a centre of education in a humble barn on the banks of the Cam; but was England more tolerant than France? He remembered Roscelin’s experience. There were famous schools in Italy; but some of his most brilliant pupils at the Paraclete, such as Arnold of Brescia, had little good to say of Italy. The evil lay in Christianity itself—in that intolerance which its high claim naturally engendered.