Innocent, driven from his Italian dominions, sought a refuge in France; but Lewis, unwilling to decide precipitously upon so important a question, summoned a convocation of his prelates at Etampes, whither the Abbot Bernard received a special invitation to attend.

We would not insinuate that the circumstance of Anacletus having formerly been a monk of Cluni, had any share in inducing Bernard to take the decided part he did upon this occasion. It is more charitable, and perhaps as probable, to assume that he was actuated by a dislike to the private character of Peter, and also from the circumstance of his Jewish descent. However this may be, certain it is, that he espoused the cause of Innocent with the greatest zeal; and his activity, eloquence, and enthusiasm, increased every day that pope's partisans. St. Bernard, fully conscious of the danger he ran if the cause he advocated were unsuccessful, commenced his journey to Etampes, as he afterwards confessed, with no small trepidation. When, however, upon his arrival, the French king and all his bishops referred the matter to his decision, he pleaded the cause of Innocent with such fervour that from that instant the whole of France favoured his pretensions. From Etampes St. Bernard conducted his adopted superior to Chârtres, where Henry of England had convened a council for a similar purpose. There, however, the bishops espoused the cause of Anacletus, and Henry himself remained for a time obdurate to the entreaties of Bernard, but at length gave way, upon the eager monk exclaiming,-"What dost thou fear?-the sin of obeying Innocent? Do thou make thy peace with God for thy other sins, this one I will take upon my own shoulders."

Nor were these the only instances in which the abbot of Clairval successfully interposed his mediation between crowned heads. In the interview which Innocent afterwards had with Lothaire, Emperor of Germany, that prince, though he acknowledged him as Pope, vehemently insisted upon the restitution of the investitures, which the papal see had with great trouble and danger wrested from his predecessor. Bernard, to whom it was equally agreeable to reprove an emperor as to rebuke the meanest peasant, took upon himself to determine this dispute; and forthwith reproached Lothaire for his impiety, with such bitterness and severity of language, that that emperor, totally abashed, withdrew his claim. The grateful Pope, after seeing his power established principally through Bernard's exertions, throughout France, Germany, and England, thought he could not reward the abbot in a more suitable manner than by honouring him with a visit at his beloved monastery. Upon his arrival at Clairval, he was met, exultingly relates an eulogist and biographer of St. Bernard, not by monks adorned with purple and jewels, nor by begilded priests, but by meek and humble devotees, bearing aloft a rude cross of stone. He was received, not with the thunder of noisy trumpets, but with a

suppressed murmuring of prayer. It is stated that the Pope and his attendant bishops could not refrain from tears at the sight of this solemn and careworn band, at a time of such general rejoicing, slowly marching before them with their eyes bent incuriously upon the ground.

It would be foreign to the design of this brief biographical sketch of Bernard, to pursue him through the various journeys in which he was engaged during the following few years. These were principally undertaken in behalf of Innocent, and merely present him to our notice under the character of an animated and successful pleader for that pontiff. But though by the abbot's exertions, the cause which he advocated was every day gaining strength in the various courts of Europe, Peter of Leon still continued the struggle, and with such local success, that Innocent and those cardinals who favoured his pretensions, besought St. Bernard, whose influence was universally acknowledged, and who was treated both by friends and enemies with a deference which would have intoxicated a more ambitious man, to repair once more to Rome, and reanimate their tottering cause. This invitation, or rather command, Bernard, although he is represented as being extremely indisposed to quit his quiet retreat at Clairval for the turmoil and excitement of the papal capital, did not think proper to disobey; and the year 1140 accordingly found him supporting the cause of Pope Innocent at Rome, with his accustomed

success.

About this period, Roger, King of Sicily, willing to effect a division in favour of Anacletus, to whose interest he was strongly attached, and being defeated in an attempt to support him by the force of arms, endeavoured by a plausible assumption of candour to entrap the unsuspecting abbot. Pretending a great desire to be more rightly informed as to the relative merits of the two pretenders to the papal chair, he requested that the one should depute Bernard and the other the cardinal Pietro of Pisa to plead before him the cause of their respective masters. This proposal he made in the hope that Pietro, who we well know for his skill in dialectics, and for his profound knowledge in ecclesiastical jurisprudence, would utterly confound and put to shame his clever, but unpractised opponent.

This scheme, however plausible, signally failed of success; for the abbot, so far from being worsted in this encounter, so won upon his destined vanquisher by his reasoning and arguments, that the cardinal (partly, in all probability, convinced by attractive offers from Pope Innocent) came over to his side, and publicly renounced the declining cause of the anti-pope. The wily churchman selected, as it happened, a fortunate moment for his defection, for the death of Anacletus, who had for some time been gradually sinking, shortly afterwards occurred. His death is related by the author of a life of St. Bernard, to whom reference has already been made, with a degree of

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censoriousness and unchristian rancour that is strongly characteristic of the times. "The destroying angel,”—such is his language,coming to the house of Peter of Leon, found not upon the lintel the averting blood of the Lamb. He smote therefore that wretched man; who indeed for the space of two years nevertheless had opportunity for repenting! but he abused the patience of God, and died in his sin without hope."

With Anacletus expired all opposition to Innocent's quiet enjoyment of the papal chair; for his destined successor, sensible of the hopelessness of his cause, made a virtue of necessity, and peaceably resigned his pretensions. The wearied St. Bernard having had the satisfaction of seeing the long-contested tiara securely placed upon the brow of Innocent, did not linger at Rome to enjoy the honours everywhere pressed upon him, but hurried back to Burgundy and the company of his beloved monks.

It was in this same year, 1140, that one of the most celebrated of the polemic controversies, to which allusion has been already made, was brought to a conclusion. Every one in the slightest degree acquainted with English literature, must be perfectly familiar with the name of Abelard, but they would, in all probability, recognize him as the hero of an unfortunate love-tale, rather than as a philosophic casuist. For Pope's beautiful letters, though they may express the elegance and imaginative character of the penitent monk, do not paint him to our fancy the ingenious theorizer and profound thinker which he really was; and it is necessary to have recourse to the contemporary accounts of the age before we can realize the strength and vigour of his intellectual character.

Peter Abelard was a native of the little village of Le Palais, near Mantes; his father, Berengarius, although a soldier, was not untinctured with a taste for literature, and the young Abelard found no dissuasion from him, when he resolved to eschew the military garb for the doctor's gown. William of Champeaux, a Parisian professor of some eminence, instructed him in the first rudiments of logic and dialectics; and, as is often the case, became the bitter opponent of his too successful pupil, when he established a rival school at St. Genevieve. It was here, while he was filling his own lecture-room at the expense of his quondam preceptor, that Abelard became the tutor of the unfortunate Elöise, niece to Jubbert, a canon of Paris. Theirs is not the only instance in which, in a similar position, Minerva has been gradually neglected for Venus; and Abelard soon lost the authority of the teacher in the submission of the lover. himself, in a letter to a friend, tells us that "under the pretence of learning we learnt only to love! We opened indeed our books, but love, not the lesson, became the burthen of the discourse." A private marriage with his fair pupil was the termination of Abelard's tuition, and they fled from Paris to avoid the wrath of her uncle.

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He however proved so vindictive in his resentment, that they both agreed to embrace a monastic life. Abelard, accordingly, professed at St. Denys, and Elöisa at Argentevil.

There were at this time two distinct parties among the doctors of the Romish church. The one, at whose head was Bernard of Clairvaux, known by the name of Realists, cherished a mystical reverence for the church system as it then existed, and shrank with horror from innovating speculations; while the other, designated Nominalists, consisted of bolder spirits, and were desirous of upholding the church's dogmas, only so far as they were consonant to the light of human reason.

Among this latter party, Abelard, young, enthusiastic, and deeply imbued with the learning of the heathen philosophers, eagerly threw himself, and became at once from his transcendent talents their oracle, and the abomination of the more orthodox in the church, who indeed viewed the application of philosophy to religion with still greater prejudice, from the remembrance, not yet effaced, of the heresies of Berenger upon Transubstantiation, and of Roscerinus, (who if not the founder was the chief ornament of the Dialecticians), as regarded the Trinity.

Abelard, in endeavouring to prove the truth of the Scriptures by means of logic and human reasoning, adopted a course which secured him the suffrages of the young and ardent in the church, who accordingly embraced with avidity and in large numbers his bold and original positions.

He was no friend to the substitution of enthusiastic faith for diligent inquiry and impartial conviction. A strict investigation, he argued, into the nature of the Divine, although a knowledge human in its origin, and therefore not meritorious, was still not unprofitable in its results; for the more the mind was cultivated and refined by philosophy before conversion, the higher degree of excellence in divine knowledge it would subsequently be capable of obtaining. But though he thus called in the aid of philosophy and logic to establish the Christian religion upon a reasonable and intelligent basis, he was fully conscious of the incapability of conviction alone to satisfy the cravings of men's minds after the perception of divine truth; and he judiciously acknowledged a distinction between the credere et intelligere, which were, according to his system, attainable in this mundane state, and the cognoscere, which was reserved for a future and more perfect existence.

Abelard's investigation into the nature of the Trinity led him into expressions which his rivals in theology reviled as dangerous heresies, and which later critics have designated as the rankest socinianism. He distinguished the persons of the Trinity, according to Alexander Natalis, from whom Milner borrows his statement, in this manner,"that God the Father was Full Power, the Son a Certain Power, the VOL. II. (1843) No. I.

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Holy Spirit No Power-the Son was to the Father as a certain power to power, as a species to genus, as materiatum to materia, as man to animal, as a brazen seal to brass."

This explanation (if such it may be termed!) Abelard, anxious as he was to demonstrate that the doctrine of the Trinity was a truth that might be elaborated by the efforts of human genius, endeavoured to deduce from the writings of the ancient philosophers; and it was especially from Plato and his followers that he attempted to evolve the germ of this article of faith.

Had Abelard been able to pursue to its logical conclusion his fundamental position of the divine illumination of some of the heathen writers, Neander pronounces that he would have been compelled to deviate from the Catholic doctrines, and would have arrived at the conclusions afterwards held by Zuinglius and Ecolampadius. In this, however, the time was not yet ripe, and he only succeeded in exciting the indignation of his fellow Errorists, without arriving at the truth himself.

But if the opinions of Abelard in points of doctrinal tendency were not more correct than those of the other theologians of the day, he perceived and reprobated with honest zeal the practical evils of the system as it then existed. Like St. Bernard, he bitterly inveighs against the sensuality and worldliness of the clergy, and endeavours to pique them into decency, by presenting the example of his favourite heathen philosophers. Against indulgencies too, and the practice of besieging the deathbed for donations to the church or testamentary bequests, Abelard was fierce in his indignation. Neither was he more merciful (a salient contrast in this respect to the superstitious Bernard!) in his ridicule of the pretended miracle-mongers of his time,not that he denied their former existence, but he considered that the requisite degree of faith for their manifestation was no longer to be found among mankind.

The first persecution against Abelard arose from the private jealousy of two professors of Rheims, Alberic and Lotulf, who persuaded Conon, the papal legate, to summon him before the synod of Soissons in the year 1121. He was here charged with tritheism; and having by the advice of the amiable Godfrey, Bishop of Chartres, who perceived the spirit in which the proceedings were instituted, burnt his book with his own hand, he was, after a short confinement, set at liberty. He was not however long suffered to remain at peace, but driven out of his monastery of St. Denys, betook himself to Provence, where, in a retired spot, he built a little chapel, and devoted himself to an eremitic life. His numerous scholars however, who idolized their persecuted teacher, followed him in crowds to his retreat-built little cells round his Hermitage-and erected a church for him in the vicinity, on which Abelard, touched by their considerate kindness, bestowed the name of Paraclete.