But those false, sophistical ideas which early entered into monastic life, and which perverted the Christianity of the Middle Ages, presented a powerful barrier against the instincts of nature and the ordinances of God.  Celibacy was accounted as a supernal virtue, and the marriage of a priest was deemed a lasting disgrace.  It obscured his fame, his prospects, his position, and his influence; it consigned him to ridicule and reproach.  He was supposed to be married only to the Church, and would be unfaithful to Heaven if he bound himself by connubial ties.  Says Saint Jerome, “Take axe in hand and hew up by the roots the sterile tree of marriage.  God permits it, I grant; but Christ and Mary consecrated virginity.”  Alas, what could be hoped when the Church endorsed such absurd doctrines!  Hildebrand, when he denounced the marriage of priests, made war on the most sacred instincts of human nature.  He may have strengthened the papal domination, but he weakened the restraints of home.  Only a dark and beclouded age could have upheld such a policy.  Upon the Church of the Middle Ages we lay the blame of these false ideas.  She is in a measure responsible for the follies of Abelard and Heloise.  They were not greater than the ideas of their age.  Had Abelard been as bold in denouncing the stupid custom of the Church in this respect as he was in fighting the monks of St. Denis or the intellectual intolerance of Bernard, he would not have fallen in the respect of good people.  But he was a slave to interest and conventionality.  He could not brave the sneers of priests or the opinions of society; he dared not lose caste with those who ruled the Church; he would not give up his chances of preferment.  He was unwilling either to renounce his love, or to avow it by an honorable, open union.

At last his intimacy created scandal.  In the eyes of the schools and of the Church he had sacrificed philosophy and fame to a second Delilah.  And Heloise was even more affected by his humiliation than himself.  She more than he was opposed to marriage, knowing that this would doom him to neglect and reproach.  Abelard would perhaps have consented to an open marriage had Heloise been willing; but with a strange perversity she refused.  His reputation and interests were dearer to her than was her own fair name.  She sacrificed herself to his fame; she blinded herself to the greatest mistake a woman could make.  The excess of her love made her insensible to the principles of an immutable morality.  Circumstances palliated her course, but did not excuse it.  The fatal consequences of her folly pursued her into the immensity of subsequent grief; and though afterwards she was assured of peace and forgiveness in the depths of her repentance, the demon of infatuated love was not easily exorcised.  She may have been unconscious of degradation in the boundless spirit of self-sacrifice which she was willing to make for the object of her devotion, but she lost both dignity and fame.  She entreated him who was