man; in Héloïse, the saintly nun is but a veil assumed in loving
obedience to him, to conceal the deep-hearted, faithful, devoted
flesh-and-blood woman. And such a woman! It may well be doubted if, for
all that constitutes genuine womanhood, she ever had an equal. If there
is salvation in love, Héloïse is in the heaven of heavens. She does not
try to express her love in poems, as Mrs. Browning did; but her simple,
straightforward expression of a love that would share Francesca's fate
with her lover, rather than go to heaven without him, yields, and has
yielded, matter for a hundred poems. She looks forward to no salvation;
for her chief love is for him. _Domino specialiter, sua singulariter_:
"As a member of the species woman I am the Lord's, as Héloïse I am
yours"--nominalism with a vengeance!

But to return to Abélard. Permanent quiet in obscurity was plainly
impossible for him; and so in 1136 we find him back at Ste. Généviève,
lecturing to crowds of enthusiastic students. He probably thought that
during the long years of his exile, the envy and hatred of his enemies
had died out; but he soon discovered that he was greatly mistaken. He
was too marked a character, and the tendency of his thought too
dangerous, for that. Besides, he emptied the schools of his rivals, and
adopted no conciliatory tone toward them. The natural result followed.
In the year 1140, his enemies, headed by St. Bernard, who had long
regarded him with suspicion, raised a cry of heresy against him, as
subjecting everything to reason. Bernard, who was nothing if not a
fanatic, and who managed to give vent to all his passions by placing
them in the service of his God, at once denounced him to the Pope, to
cardinals, and to bishops, in passionate letters, full of rhetoric,
demanding his condemnation as a perverter of the bases of the faith.

At that time a great ecclesiastical council was about to assemble at