To get at the origin of these immoralities, so widely spread in the present day, we must put royalty itself upon the culprit’s stool, and exhibit it on the scaffold where it expiated the guilty inconsistency which made it defy those moral laws, the observance of which was its most sacred title to the veneration of subjects. When the dynasty of the Mérovingians was implanted in our soil, a conquest to Rome, civilization, and Christianity, the Gallican bishops, it is true, made the haughty Sicambrians bow their heads to regenerate them in the water of baptism. But these men of the sword and blood did not leave all their pollutions there, because their moral sense was not sufficiently developed to understand the purity of practice, the holiness of the Christian teaching. The Church tolerated in these barbarous kings and their enervated sons, the Roman system of concubinage which, be it observed, by determining the lot of the woman and the child, guarded against the crimes resulting from irresponsible profligacy. Nevertheless, absolute power would have brought its customary abuses in its train if, in the Church, it had not found a moderator invested with the noble mission of giving a sanction to justice by making the principle of marriage triumph for the protection of the weak against the brutal caprices of the strong; history ought to bless those pontifical fulminations which hovered constantly over the head of royal culprits from the moment they had taken their passions as their rule of conduct.[40]