Note 109 — Chapter II

Charles Martel was not over-nice, it would appear, in the bestowal of ecclesiastical preferments and estates; it mattered very little indeed to him whether the recipient was a priest or a layman, or even whether he could read and write. He also laid his impious hands repeatedly upon the revenues of the church, and applied them to the necessities of the state, or to pay his soldiers. No wonder then that a sainted bishop of the times, Eucherius, of Orleans, should have been indulged with a pleasant vision of the body and soul of the wicked prince burning in the deepest abyss of hell—rather scurvy treatment, though, on the part of a Christian clergy, of a prince who, whatever might be his foibles as a man, and his vices as a king—(and it must be admitted, he had a goodly share of them)—had yet the merit of being the saviour of Christendom. (A synod held at Quiercy, in 858, had the calm impudence to communicate this interesting and flattering statement, accompanied by some others of the same stamp, to Lewis, King of Germany, grandson of Charlemagne!)