was carefully packed and overawed.  The King was present; archbishops, bishops, abbots, and other prelates by the score; Bernard acted in person as the prosecuting attorney; the public outside were stimulated to threaten violence.  Abelard had less chance of a judicial hearing than he had had at Soissons twenty years before.  He acted with a proper sense of their dignity and his own by simply appearing and entering an appeal to Rome.  The council paid no attention to the appeal, but passed to an immediate condemnation.  His friends said that it was done after dinner; that when the volume of Abelard’s “Theology” was produced and the clerk began to read it aloud, after the first few sentences the bishops ceased attention, talked, joked, laughed, stamped their feet, got angry, and at last went to sleep.  They were waked only to growl “Damnamus—­namus,” and so made an end.  The story may be true, for all prelates, even in the twelfth century, were not Bernards of Clairvaux or Peters of Cluny; all drank wine, and all were probably sleepy after dinner; while Abelard’s writings are, for the most part, exceedingly hard reading.  The clergy knew quite well what they were doing; the judgment was certain long in advance, and the council was called only to register it.  Political trials were usually mere forms.

The appeal to Rome seems to have been taken seriously by Bernard, which is surprising unless the character of Innocent ii inspired his friends with doubts unknown to us.  Innocent owed everything to Bernard, while Abelard owed everything to Innocent.  The Pope was not in a position to alienate the French Church or the French King.  To any one who knows only what is now to be known, Bernard seems to have been sure of the Curia, yet he wrote in a tone of excitement as though he feared Abelard’s influence there even more than at home.  He became abusive; Abelard was a crawling viper (coluber tortuosus) who had come out of his hole (egressus est de caverna sua), and after the manner of a hydra (in similitudinem hydrae), after having one head cut off at Soissons, had thrown out seven more.  He was a monk without rule; a prelate without responsibility; an abbot without discipline; “disputing with boys; conversing with women.”  The charges in themselves seem to be literally true, and would not in some later centuries have been thought very serious; neither faith nor morals were impugned.  On the other hand, Abelard never affected or aspired to be a saint, while Bernard always affected to judge the acts and motives of his fellow-creatures from a standpoint of more than worldly charity.  Bernard had no right to Abelard’s vices; he claimed to be judged by a higher standard; but his temper was none of the best, and his pride was something of the worst; which gave to Peter the Venerable occasion for turning on him sharply with a rebuke that cut to the bone.  “You perform all the difficult religious duties,” wrote Peter to the saint who wrought miracles; “you fast; you watch; you suffer; but you will not endure the easy ones—­you do not love (non vis levia ferre, ut diligas).”