Charles had one lamentable failing—he was too careless of the teachings of Christianity about the relation of the sexes. He divorced his first wife over-lightly, and when his third wife died he took to himself three concubines at once, who bore him many bastard children. There were scandals at his court, and two of his own daughters were known to be living in open sin with two of his courtiers. Charles treated their offence lightly, and never visited them with any rebuke. Not so his son, Lewis the Pious, who regarded his sisters’ shame as so heinous that he banished them when he came to the throne. It was the shortcomings of the great king in respect of sexual morality which prevented the Church from decreeing the beatification of its protector after his death. The spirit of the times was well shown by the strange vision of the monk Wettin of Reichenau, who, falling into a trance and wandering through the other world, saw Charles in Purgatory, kept in purifying flames for a space, till this sin should be purged from his soul. So much do the chronicles tell us concerning the person and the manner of life of Charles the Great; but there are other points which impress us more than they did the contemporary observer. Considering that he was so far in advance of his age in the cultivation of literature, art, science, and architecture, that in administration and organisation of his realm he so far surpassed all that had lived before him, and that he rose in most of his conduct to such a high conception, alike of his kingly office and of his personal responsibility for all his actions, it is disappointing, though not surprising, to find that in some matters he was not above the standard of his time. We have already alluded to his loose living, but a worse failing was his occasional liability to outbursts of inhumanity. The most savage of them was his massacre of 4500 unarmed prisoners of war at Verden, in 782. If the majority of his wars were defensive, or at least necessary, there were a few—notably the Lombard war—in which aggressive ambition was the main operating cause, but this was a small failing in the unscrupulous eighth century. On the whole we stand amazed at the magnanimity of the man, and are so much struck with his splendid qualities, that we are perhaps in danger of doing him wrong by judging him from our own moral standpoint. He rises so far above that of the Dark Ages, that it scarcely occurs to the historian to judge him by their low standard. Yet it is by remembering what was the spirit of those times that his greatness is most readily recognised.