He who began this revolution was not a priest; he was a handsome young man, of brilliant and engaging qualities, and of noble race. No one, like him, could write love verses in the vulgar tongue, and he sang them himself; then his erudition was extraordinary for the times--he was the only man who knew Greek and Hebrew.[6] Perhaps he had frequented the Jewish schools (there were many of them in the south), or the rabbis of Troyes, Vitry, or Orleans. There were then two principal schools in Paris; the old episcopal school of Notre Dame, and that of St. Geneviève, on the mountain, where William of Champeaux was in the zenith of his fame. Abelard became one of his pupils, laid his doubts before him, puzzled his master, made sport of him, and put him to silence. He would have done the same with Anselm of Laon, had not the professor, who was a bishop, expelled him from his diocese. Thus did the knight-errant of dialectics go about unhorsing the most famous champions. He says himself that he renounced the other kind of tilting, that of the tournaments, only from his love for the war of words. Thenceforth, victorious and unrivalled, he taught at Paris and at Melun, where Louis the Fat resided, and where the lords were beginning to gather in great numbers. These knights encouraged a man of their own order, who had beaten the priests upon their own ground, and who put the most self-sufficient of the clerks to silence. The whole body of Christianity was at stake; it was attacked at its base. If original sin, as Abelard said, was not a sin, but a penalty, that penalty was unjust, and redemption was useless. Abelard defended himself from such a conclusion; but he justified Christianity by means of such feeble arguments, that he rather did it more damage by declaring that he had no better answer to give. He suffered himself to be brought to a stand by means of the _argumentum ad absurdum_, and then he appealed to authority and faith. And so, then, man was no longer guilty; the flesh was justified and restored to honour; all the sufferings with which men had immolated themselves were superfluous. What became of so many voluntary martyrs, so many fastings and mortifications--the vigils of monks, the tribulations of hermits, the countless tears shed before God? All was vanity--mockery. God was an amiable and easy God, who had nothing to do with all this.