Meanwhile, by some chance, his ‘History of Calamities’ fell into the hands of Heloise at the Paraclete, was devoured with breathless interest, and rekindled the flame that seemed to have smoldered in her bosom for thirteen long years.  Overcome with compassion for her husband, for such he really was, she at once wrote to him a letter which reveals the first healthy human heart-beat that had found expression in Christendom for a thousand years.  Thus began a correspondence which, for genuine tragic pathos and human interest, has no equal in the world’s literature.  In Abelard, the scholarly monk has completely replaced the man; in Heloise, 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, Heloise 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 Heloise I am yours”—­nominalism with a vengeance!

But to return to Abelard.  Permanent quiet in obscurity was plainly impossible for him; and so in 1136 we find him back at Ste. Genevieve, 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 Sens; and Abelard, feeling certain that his writings contained nothing which he could not show to be strictly orthodox, demanded that he should be allowed to explain and dialectically defend his position, in open dispute, before it.  But this was above all things what his enemies dreaded.  They felt that nothing was safe before his brilliant dialectic.  Bernard even refused to enter the lists with him; and preferred to draw up a list of