Champions were not wanting to the church against the innovators. The Lombards, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, both of them archbishops of Canterbury, combated Bérenger and Rosselin. St. Anselm, an original genius, anticipated the famous argument of Descartes, for the existence of God: “If God did not exist, I could not conceive him.” It was a great delight for him to have made this discovery, after a long fit of sleeplessness. Another conflict of an intellectual kind, and one of a much graver nature, was about to begin, so soon as the question should have come down from politics to theology and morals, and the very morality of Christianity should have been brought in question. Thus, Pelagius came after Arius, and Abelard after Bérenger. The church seemed at peace; the school of Laon and that of Paris were occupied by two pupils of St. Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Laon, and William of Champeaux. Great signs and tokens, however, were appearing; the Vaudois had translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue; the _Institutes_ were also translated, and law was taught, simultaneously with theology, at Orleans and at Angers. The mere existence of the school of Paris was an immense innovation and danger. The ideas which, till then, had been dispersed, and exposed to close inspection in the various ecclesiastical schools, were about to converge to a centre. The conquests of the Normans and the First Crusade had carried that potent philosophic idiom everywhere--into England, into Sicily, into Jerusalem. This circumstance alone gave France, especially central France and Paris, an immense attractive force. The French of Paris became gradually proverbial; feudalism had found its political centre in the royal city, and that city was now about to become the capital of human thought.