ABSTRACT
A S earlier chapters have fitly shown how undutiful it is to do violence to one’s spiritual fathers, I shall perhaps add something to them about how uncivilized it is to break the code of good behaviour and vex one’s kind parents, distressing those to whom Nature herself continually encourages obedience, a quality which among the beasts is seen in 802tigers and storks. By the same kind of natural instinct, the latter not only revive their progenitors with food, once old age has caught up with them, but shelter them from the cold when their feathers begin to drop. 1 I bring forward, then, an instance which is germane to this passage, of how one may stray from a natural law of this kind, and then again, with the aid of Him who framed Nature, return to it. Among other examples we have a lesson of great piety concerning Dagobert, king of the Franks. This monarch had earned the anger of his father, King Clotaire, because he had dishonoured one of his advisers by striking him and shearing off his locks. Dagobert fled for refuge to the church of Saint-Denis in Paris and, since nothing could remove him from there, he had always a place in his heart for that site. 2 At length, when his father was dead and he had succeeded to the throne, he completely set his life to rights, as his subsequent public confession bears witness. If the oppressors of churches had an eye to such repentance and imitated it at the proper time, perhaps they themselves, their offspring, and their people would live in pleasanter tranquillity and, when they encountered their final fate, depart from this world with a more carefree conscience, as I explain in the next chapter.
