In the government of the church Charles all through his reign took the keenest interest, and a large--as most modern readers would think a disproportionate--part of his Capitularies is dedicated to this subject. Speaking generally, it may be said that he strove, as his father before him had striven, to subdue the anarchy that had disgraced the churches of Gaul under the Merovingian kings. He insisted on the monks and the canonical priests living according to the rules which they professed: he discouraged the manufacture of new saints, the erection of new oratories, the worship of new archangels other than the well-known three, Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael. He earnestly exhorted the bishops to work in harmony with the counts for the maintenance of the public peace. While not slow to condemn the faults of the episcopacy he supported their authority against mutinous priests: and pre-eminently by the example which he set to Gaul in the powerful and well-compacted hierarchy which he established in Germany he strengthened the aristocratic constitution of the church under the rule of its bishops. At the same time there can be no doubt that by his close relations with the Roman Pontiff and by the temporal sovereignty which he bestowed upon him, he contributed, consciously or unconsciously, to the ultimate transformation of the western church into an absolute monarchy under the headship of the pope. That Charles, with all his zeal for the welfare of the church, was not blind to the faults of the churchmen of his day is shown by the remarkable series of questions--possibly drawn up from his dictation by Einhard--which are contained in a Capitulary of 811 written three years before his death: “We wish to ask the ecclesiastics themselves, and those who have not only to learn but to teach out of the Holy Scriptures, who are they to whom the Apostle says, ‘Be ye imitators of me’; or who is that about whom the same Apostle says, ‘No man that warreth entangleth himself with the business of this world’: in other words, how the Apostle is to be imitated, or how he (the ecclesiastic) wars for God?” “Further, we must beg of them that they will truly show us what is this ‘renouncing of the world’, which is spoken of by them: or how we can distinguish those who renounce the world from those who still follow it, whether it consists in anything more than this, that they do not bear arms and are not publicly married?”