Many a man would have wheeled around and left the ingrate. But Peter’s revenge was handsome and characteristic. He summoned a general chapter of his order; and it was held at the time that Innocent, recognized at length, was going away to Rome. There were “two hundred priors and a thousand ecclesiasts,” delegates from France, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy. These cheerfully and promptly agreed to accept a more stringent rule in all their religious houses. And thus Innocent, and his Warwick of a Bernard, could see for themselves the strength and the charity, and the sincere purpose of the man whom they were setting aside. I feel that I must here add the exact words in which Morison, St. Bernard’s best biographer, justifies this estimate of the character of Peter the Venerable. “The relations between Peter and Bernard throughout their lives,” he says (p. 222, _note_), “give rise to contrasts little favorable to the latter. Peter nearly always is gentle, conciliating, and careful not to give offence, even when as here (in the case of the Bishop of Langres) sorely provoked. Bernard too often made return by hard and even violent language and conduct.” With such a stately and well-balanced person in our mind’s eye, we cannot be surprised to find that he had plenty of solid pluck, that he was “mild as he was game, and game as he was mild.” In 1134, returning from the Council of Pisa against Anacletus, he and his followers were attacked by robbers. The abbot tucked up his sleeves, and took the sword of the Church militant on the spot. Perhaps he was glad to let his big thews and sinews have full play. At all events he so dashed and smote these ungodly men, that he beat them actually back, and had therefrom considerable glory. I never read that he or his abbey was much meddled with afterward. About this date his visits to Spain drew his attention to the Koran. He was struck by the religious efficiency of it, and in order to meet it better he prepared for a full translation of it. Peter of Toledo, Hermann of Dalmatia, and an Englishman named Robert Kennet, or perhaps (says the _Histoire Litteraire_) de Retines, were selected for this duty. To them were added an Arab scholar and Peter of Poitiers, the abbot’s favorite private secretary. They were to render the Koran into Latin directly; and at it they went, accomplishing their task between 1141 and 1144, at the time of an epidemic in the monastery. Then Peter himself joined with them in a refutation of its errors—albeit his Latinity was not first-rate, being rather that of a man of affairs than of a student. There was another Latin refutation of the Koran by Brother Richard, a Dominican who lived in the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century. Luther translated that into German in 1542.