Charlemagne’s private life has always been described as remarkably pure; his enactments against immorality are terribly stringent, placing illicit connections between unmarried persons on the same footing as the breaking of the marriage vow; and more than once he published these enactments, intended to restrain the license of the nobles, in person, in full council of bishops and the nobles themselves, who, had his own morals been assailable, would not have hesitated to tell him, in their very outspoken way, to mend his practice before preaching to others. There is no record of even a murmur of the kind. Also during the time when, according to his detractors now, he was living in sin, he was the close friend and pupil of two holy Popes—St. Adrian I and St. Leo III, consulting them at every step and following their advice with devout punctiliousness; we know that the Roman Pontiffs never stood on ceremony when it was necessary to remonstrate with Sovereigns as to their morals; yet neither of these saints, supreme in Christendom, ever addressed a word of reproach to Charlemagne. On the contrary, they showed, in their relations with him, the greatest affection and respect. The question of his canonisation, in spite of his heroic virtues and the miracles worked at his intercession, the Church left where it was when Frederick Barbarossa, in the second half of the Twelfth Century, succeeded in having him canonised by one of the anti-Popes, Paschal III, an invalid proceeding, of course. But the Church calls him “The Blessed Charlemagne” and permitted his feast to be kept in numberless Churches of France and Germany; until our own days several French colleges celebrated it by a banquet at which the professors mingled on an equal footing with the most promising of their students. He founded the two great universities of Paris and Pavia, was deeply versed in theology and in such classical literature as was available in the Ninth Century; and is perhaps best known to us moderns by his hymn to the Holy Ghost, which the Church uses not only at Pentecost, but on almost every day of the year, the immortal “Veni Sancte Spiritus” so dear to us all.
It would be too long a task to enumerate his labours and conquests for the faith; these are set forth in detail in the old Breviaries of France; it took him thirty-four years to subdue the idolatrous Saxons, alone, and the only penalty he imposed for the half of a lifetime spent in arduous struggles was that they should listen to instruction and embrace Christianity. Always hard on himself, fasting often for a week at a time, wearing, except on great occasions, rough, simple garments which, we are told, made him appear like one of the humblest of his subjects, his charity was all-embracing and reached to the confines of the known world. His honest humility made it dangerous to attempt to flatter him about his achievements. If any one spoke of his victories, he would point to the lance with which Longinus pierced the Saviour’s side and which he always carried with him, and say, “Give God the glory—_that_ is what overcame!”