The justification of this mode of procedure by its most able defender, Hincmar of Reims, is similar in spirit to the above form of adjuration. King Lothair, great-grandson of Charlemagne, desiring to get rid of his wife, Teutberga, accused her of the foulest incest, and forced her to a confession, which she afterwards recanted, proving her innocence by undergoing the ordeal of hot water by proxy. Lothair, nevertheless, married his concubine Waldrada, and for ten years the whole of Europe was occupied with the degrading details of the quarrel, council after council assembling to consider the subject, and the thunders of Rome being freely employed. Hincmar, the most conspicuous ecclesiastic of his day, stood boldly forth in defence of the unhappy queen, and in his treatise “De Divortio Lotharii et Teutbergæ,” although no one at the time seriously thought of impugning the authority of ordeals in general, it suited his purpose to insist upon their claims to infallibility. His line of argument shows how thoroughly the pagan custom had become Christianized, and how easily the churchman could find reasons for attributing to God the interposition which his ancestors had ascribed to Mithra, or to Agni, or to Thor. “Because in boiling water the guilty are scalded and the innocent are unhurt, because Lot escaped unharmed from the fire of Sodom, and the future fire which will precede the terrible Judge will be harmless to the Saints, and will burn the wicked as in the Babylonian furnace of old.”[890] In the Life of St. Ethelwold is recorded a miracle, which, though not judicial, yet, from its description by a contemporary, affords an insight into the credulous faith which rendered lawgivers ready to intrust the most important interests to decisions of this nature. The holy saint, while Abbot of Abingdon, to test the obedience of Elfstan the cook of the monastery, ordered him to extract with his hand a piece of meat from the bottom of a caldron in which the conventual dinner was boiling. Without hesitation the monk plunged his hand into the seething mass and unhurt presented the desired morsel to his wondering superior. Faith such as this could not go unrewarded, and Elfstan, from his humble station, rose to the episcopal seat of Winchester.[891]