to go and fetch the cross from the church of St. Sauveur, the chief door of which opened on the Vieux-Marche, and to hold it “upright before her eyes till the coming of death, in order,” she said, “that the cross whereon God hung might, as long as she lived, be continually in her sight;” and her wishes were fulfilled.  She wept over her country and the spectators as well as over herself.  “Rouen, Rouen,” she cried, “is it here that I must die?  Shalt thou be my last resting-place?  I fear greatly thou wilt have to suffer for my death.”  It is said that the aged Cardinal of Winchester and the Bishop of Beauvais himself could not stifle their emotion—­and, peradventure, their tears.  The executioner set fire to the fagots.  When Joan perceived the flames rising, she urged her confessor, the Dominican brother, Martin Ladvenu, to go down, at the same time asking him to keep holding the cross up high in front of her, that she might never cease to see it.  The same monk, when questioned four and twenty years later, at the rehabilitation trial, as to the last sentiments and the last words of Joan, said that to the very latest moment she had affirmed that her voices were heavenly, that they had not deluded her, and that the revelations she had received came from God.  When she had ceased to live, two of her judges, John Alespie, canon of Rouen, and Peter Maurice, doctor of theology, cried out, “Would that my soul were where I believe the soul of that woman is!” And Tressart, secretary to King Henry VI., said sorrowfully, on returning from the place of execution, “We are all lost; we have burned a saint.”

A saint indeed in faith and in destiny.  Never was human creature more heroically confident in, and devoted to, inspiration coming from God, a commission received from God.  Joan of Arc sought nothing of all that happened to her and of all she did, nor exploit, nor power, nor glory.  “It was not her condition,” as she used to say, to be a warrior, to get her king crowned, and to deliver her country from the foreigner.  Everything came to her from on high, and she accepted everything without hesitation, without discussion, without calculation, as we should say in our times.  She believed in God, and obeyed Him.  God was not to her an idea, a hope, a flash of human imagination, or a problem of human science; He was the Creator of the world, the Saviour of mankind through Jesus Christ, the Being of beings, ever present, ever in action, sole legitimate sovereign of man whom He has made intelligent and free, the real and true God whom we are painfully searching for in our own day, and whom we shall never find again until we cease pretending to do without Him and putting ourselves in His place.  Meanwhile one fact may be mentioned which does honor to our epoch and gives us hope for our future.  Four centuries have rolled by since Joan of Arc, that modest and heroic servant of God, made a sacrifice of herself for France.  For four and twenty years after her death, France