alive. They were inspired by the
highest motives, political and divine, and they made the fullest use of
their knowledge of spiritual things. Being under divine direction, they
could not allow any weak sentiment of pity or human consideration to
influence their judgment. Their only error was in their failure to
discern the authenticity of the girl's miracles, and we must call that a
venial error, since it has taken the Church nearly five centuries to
give a final decision on the point. The authenticity of miracles! Of all
questions that is the most difficult for a contemporary to decide. In
the case of Joan's judges, indeed, the solution of this mystery must
have been almost impossible, unless they were gifted with prophecy; for
most of her miracles were performed only after her death, or at least
only then became known. And as to the bare facts they knew of her
life--the realities that everyone might have seen or heard, and many
thousands had shared in--there was nothing miraculous about them,
nothing to detain the attention of theologians. They were natural
events.

For a hundred years the country had been rent and devastated by foreign
war. The enemy still clutched its very centre. The south-west quarter of
the kingdom was his beyond question. By treaty his young king was heir
to the whole. The land was depopulated by plague and impoverished by
vain revolution. Continuous civil strife tore the people asunder, and
the most powerful of the factions fought for the invader's claim. Armies
ate up the years like locusts, and there was no refuge for the poor, no
preservation of wealth for men or honour for women. Even religion was
distracted by schism, divided against herself into two, perhaps into
three, conflicting churches. In the midst of the misery and tumult this
girl appears, possessed by one thought only--the pity for her country.
Modest beyond all common decency; most sensitive to pain, for it always
made her cry; conscious, as she said, that in battle she ran as much
risk of being killed as anyone else, she rode among men as one of
themselves, bareheaded, swinging her axe, charging with her standard
which all must follow, heartening her countrymen for the cause of
France, striking the invading enemy with the terrors of a spirit. Just a
clear-witted, womanly girl, except that her cause had driven fear from
her heart, and occupied all her soul, to the exclusion of lesser things.
"Pity she isn't an Englishwoman!" sa