bottom of the matter, he laid down the ultimate law of the universe as his starting-point:  “All that God does,” he said, “He wills necessarily and does it necessarily; for His goodness is such that it pushes Him necessarily to do all the good He can, and the best He can, and the quickest He can ...  Therefore it is of necessity that God willed and made the world.”  Pure logic admitted no contingency; it was bound to be necessitarian or ceased to be logical; but the result, as Bernard understood it, was that Abelard’s world, being the best and only possible, need trouble itself no more about God, or Church, or man.

Strange as the paradox seems, Saint Bernard and Lord Bacon, though looking at the world from opposite standpoints, agreed in this:  that the scholastic method was false and mischievous, and that the longer it was followed, the greater was its mischief.  Bernard thought that because dialectics led wrong, therefore faith led right.  He saw no alternative, and perhaps in fact there was none.  If he had lived a century later, he would have said to Thomas Aquinas what he said to a schoolman of his own day:  “If you had once tasted true food,”—­if you knew what true religion is,—­“how quick you would leave those Jew makers of books (literatoribus judaeis) to gnaw their crusts by themselves!” Locke or Hume might perhaps still have resented a little the “literator judaeus,” but Faraday or Clerk-Maxwell would have expressed the same opinion with only the change of a word:  “If the twelfth century had once tasted true science, how quick they would have dropped Avicenna and Averroes!” Science admits that Bernard’s disbelief in scholasticism was well founded, whatever it may think of his reasons.  The only point that remains is personal:  Which is the more sympathetic, Bernard or Abelard?

The Church feels no doubt, but is a bad witness.  Bernard is not a character to be taken or rejected in a lump.  He was many-sided, and even toward Abelard he showed more than one surface.  He wanted no unnecessary scandals in the Church; he had too many that were not of his seeking.  He seems to have gone through the forms of friendly negotiation with Abelard although he could have required nothing less than Abelard’s submission and return to Brittany, and silence; terms which Abelard thought worse than death.  On Abelard’s refusal, Bernard began his attack.  We know, from the “Story of Calamity,” what Bernard’s party could not have certainly known then,—­the abject terror into which the very thought of a council had for twenty years thrown Abelard whenever he was threatened with it; and in 1140 he saw it to be inevitable.  He preferred to face it with dignity, and requested to be heard at a council to meet at Sens in June.  One cannot admit that he felt the shadow of a hope to escape.  At the utmost he could have dreamed of nothing more than a hearing.  Bernard’s friends, who had a lively fear of his dialectics, took care to shut the door on even this hope.  The council