However, the verdict of divine and human law could never be really doubtful from the first, for the charges on which she was found guilty comprehended many grievous sins.  The inscription placed over her head as she stood while the flames were being kindled declared this Joan, who called herself the Maid, to be a liar, a plague, a deceiver of the people, a sorceress, superstitious, a blasphemer of God, presumptuous, a misbeliever in the faith of Christ, a boaster, idolatress, cruel, dissolute, a witch of devils, apostate, schismatic, and heretic.  It was a heavy crime-sheet for a mere girl, and there was no knowing into what a monster she might grow up.  So the Bishop of Beauvais could not well hesitate in pronouncing the final sentence whereby, to avoid further infection to its members, this rotten limb, Joan, was cast out from the unity of the Church, torn from its body, and delivered to the secular power, with a request for moderation in the execution of the sentence.  Accordingly she was burnt alive, and the Voices and Visions to which she had trusted did not save her from the agony of flames.

At first sight the contrast between these two scenes, enacted by the authority of the same Church, may appear a little bewildering.  It might tempt us to criticise the consistency of ecclesiastic judgment, did we not know that in theology, as in metaphysics, extreme contradictions are capable of ultimate reconciliation.  The Church’s attitude was, in fact, definitely fixed in January 1909 by the Papal proclamation declaring that the girl’s virtues were heroic and her miracles authentic.  One can only regret that the discovery was not made sooner, in time to save her from the fire, when her clerical judges came to the very opposite conclusion.  Yet we must not hastily condemn them for an error which, even apart from theological guidance, most of us laymen would probably have committed.

Let us for a moment imagine Joan herself appearing in the England of to-day on much the same mission.  It is not difficult to picture the contempt, the derision, the ribaldry, with which she would be greeted.  In nearly every point her reception would be the same as it was, except that fewer people would believe in her inspiration.  We have only to read her trial, or even the account given in Henry VI, to know what we should say of her now.  There would be the same reproaches of unwomanliness, the same reminders that a woman’s sphere is the home, the same plea that she should leave serious affairs to men, who, indeed, had carried them on so well that the whole country was tormented with perpetual panic of an enemy over sea.  There would be the same taunts of immodesty, the same filthy songs.  Since science has presumed to take the place of theology, we should talk about hysteria instead of witchcraft, and hallucination instead of demoniacal possession.  Physiologists would expound her enthusiasm as functional disorder of the thyroid gland.  Historians would