Abelard himself, however, was a genuine educator, and many bishops and other ecclesiastics, with nineteen cardinals and two popes, came from the ranks of his pupils. He loved liberty, although he loved it to that extent to which his own will—and no other authority, human or divine—restricted it. In this he differed from Anselm of Canterbury, who loved liberty, not according to license but according to law. Mere freedom to inquire, to complain, or to theorize, does not invariably carry with it profitable results. And Abelard—whose very freedom was in itself a noble revelation to the shackled intellects of his age—committed the grave error of supposing that the sweep of a free hand would certainly give lines of beauty and forms of grace. Something deeper than the mere distaste of false opinions is needful for this. Art, meditation, truth—all must lie beneath the O of Giotto or the masterly strokes of Apelles. And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the _Trivium_—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success. This is no place to criticise his “system,” if system it can be properly called. The _Sic et Non_—“Yes and No”—his most famous work, is really a mere challenge. He quotes the Bible against the Fathers and the Fathers against the Bible, touching on deep tideways and bogs and quicksands which he never attempts to ford, fathom, or bridge. The Arians, Sabellians, Nestorians and Pelagians are resuscitated in these pages. He flings their doubts before us like a gauntlet cast into the arena of debate. One may choose which side he will take. Such a man, arising in the nineteenth century and claiming sympathy with Christianity, would be by some suspected as a secret enemy and his vanity would loosen his armor for the entrance of many a venomed shaft. His genuine ardor would be misunderstood and his opinions would be heavily attacked before they could deploy at their full strength. If this be true to-day how infinitely more true must it have been of an age narrower, more illiterate, and with an arm which wielded not in vain the sword of excision against heretics!