Yet write, oh, write all, that I may join
     Grief to thy griefs, and echo sighs to thine! 
     Years still are mine, and these I need not spare,
     Love but demands what else were shed in prayer;
     No happier task these faded eyes pursue,—­
     To read and weep is all I now can do.

Abelard replies to this touching letter coldly, but religiously, calling her his “sister in Christ,” but not attempting to draw out the earthly love which both had sought to crush.  He implores her prayers in his behalf.  The only sign of his former love is a request to be buried in her abbey, in anticipation of a speedy and violent death.  Most critics condemn this letter as heartless; yet it is but charitable to suppose that he did not wish to trifle with a love so great, and reopen a wound so deep and sacred.  All his efforts now seem to have been directed to raise her soul to heaven.  But his letter does not satisfy her, and she again gives vent to her passionate grief in view of the separation:—­

“O inclement Clemency!  O unfortunate Fortune!  She has so far consumed her weakness upon me that she has nothing left for others against whom she rages.  I am the most miserable of the miserable, the most unhappy of the unhappy!”

This letter seems to have touched Abelard, and he replied to it more at length, and with great sympathy, giving her encouragement and consolation.  He speaks of their mutual sufferings as providential; and his letter is couched in a more Christian spirit than one would naturally impute to him in view of his contests with the orthodox leaders of the Church; and it also expresses more tenderness than can be reconciled with the selfish man he is usually represented.  He writes:—­

“See, dearest, how with the strong nets of his mercy God has taken us from the depths of a perilous sea.  Observe how he has tempered mercy with justice; compare our danger with the deliverance, our disease with the remedy.  I merit death, and God gives me life.  Come, and join me in proclaiming how much the Lord has done for us.  Be my inseparable companion in an act of grace, since you have participated with me in the fault and the pardon.  Take courage, my dear sister; whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth.  Sympathize with Him who suffered for your redemption.  Approach in spirit His sepulchre.  Be thou His spouse.”

Then he closes with this prayer:—­

“When it pleased Thee, O Lord, and as it pleased Thee, Thou didst join us, and Thou didst separate us.  Now, what Thou hast so mercifully begun, mercifully complete; and after separating us in this world, join us together eternally in heaven.”

No one can read this letter without acknowledging its delicacy and its loftiness.  All his desires centred in the spiritual good of her whom the Church would not allow him to call any longer his wife, yet to whom he hoped to be reunited in heaven.  As a professed nun she could no longer, with propriety, think of him as an earthly husband.  For a priest to acknowledge a nun for his wife would have been a great scandal.  By all the laws of the Church and the age they were now only brother and sister in Christ.  Nothing escaped from his pen which derogates from the austere dignity of the priest.