Here one has the plain reversal. We must first understand in order to believe. Doubtless the demands of Abaelard’s students to have the principles of the Christian Faith explained, that they might be understood and accepted rationally, echoed the master’s imperative intellectual need. Not that Abaelard would breathe the faintest doubt of these verities; they were absolute and unquestionable. He accepted them upon authority just as implicitly (he might think) as St. Bernard. Herein he shows the mediaeval quality of deference. But he will understand with his mind the profoundest truths enunciated by authority; he will explain them rationally, that the mind may rationally comprehend them. Men of an opposite cast of mind foresaw the outcome of this rationalization of dogma more surely than the subtle dialectician for whom this process was both peremptory and proper. And the Church acted with a true instinct in condemning Abaelard in spite of his protestations of belief, just as with a like true instinct Friar Bacon’s own Franciscan Order looked askance on one whose mind was suspiciously set upon observation and experiment--and cavilling at others. _Celui-ci tuera cela!_ The ultra-scientific spirit is dangerous to faith--and Bacon’s asseverations that no knowledge was of value save as it helped the soul’s salvation, was doubtless regarded as a conventional insincerity. Yet Roger Bacon had his mediaeval deferences, as will appear.[426] Neither one extreme view nor the other was to represent the attitude of thoughtful and believing Christendom; not William of St. Thierry and St Bernard, nor yet (on these points) Abaelard and Friar Bacon should prevail; but the all-balancing and all-considering Aquinas. He will draw the lines between faith and reason, and bulwark them with arguments which shall seem to render unto reason the things of reason, and unto faith its due. Yet it is actually Roger Bacon who accuses Thomas of making his _Theology_ out of dialectic and very human reasonings. It was true; and we are again reminded how variant views shaded into each other in the Middle Ages, and all within certain lines of similarity. Practically all mediaeval thinkers defer to authority--more or less; and all hold to some principle of faith, to the necessity of _believing_ something, for the soul’s salvation. There is likewise some similarity in their attitudes toward intellectual interests. For all recognized their propriety, and gave credit to the human desire to know. Likewise all saw that salvation, the _summum bonum_ for man, included more than intellection; and felt that it held some consummation of other human impulses; that it held love--the love of God along with the intellectual ardour of contemplation; and well-nigh all recognized also that the faith held mystery, not to be solved by reason. Thus all were rational--some more, some less; and all were devotional and believing, pietistic, ardent--some more, some less;