Imagine with what grief such a man must have heard of Abelard’s success--of the usurpations of logic over religion; the prosaic victory of reasoning over faith; the flame of the sacrifice becoming stifled and extinguished in the world. It was robbing him of his God. St. Bernard was not to be compared with his rival as a logician; but the latter himself wrought his own downfall. He undertook to deduce its consequences from his doctrine, and he applied it to his conduct in life. He had reached that excess of prosperity in which the infatuation common to our nature plunges us into some great fault. Everything succeeded with him; men held their peace before him; women all regarded with looks of love an engaging, invincible young man, beautiful in face and all-powerful in mind, who had a whole people for his followers. “I had reached such a pass,” he says, “that honour what woman I would with my love, I had no refusal to fear.” Rousseau says precisely the same thing in his _Confessions_ in relating the success of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_. [Sidenote: [1115-1140 A.D.]] The Héloïse of the twelfth century was the niece of the canon Fulbert, very young, beautiful, learned, and already celebrated; she was intrusted by her uncle to the teaching of Abelard, who seduced her. This fault had not even love for its excuse; it was deliberately, in cold blood, by way of pastime, that Abelard betrayed the confidence of Fulbert. We know that he was cruelly punished by mutilation for his crime; he renounced the world, and became a Benedictine at St. Denis, about the year 1119. Thither he was pursued by ecclesiastical persecutions, and he found no rest there. The archbishop of Rheims, the friend of St. Bernard, assembled a council against him at Soissons; Abelard was like to have been stoned by the people; he was frightened, shed many tears, burned his books, and said whatever they pleased. He was condemned without inquiry, his enemies alleging that it was enough that he had taught without the authority of the church.