It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry.  We can only reply again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests!  But there was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there is an eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like the headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of action suggested by a third party.  Nor is there anything to lead us to believe that the movement was not spontaneous.  It is little likely, indeed, that the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any inspired maid, any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so.  But the ideas of the fifteenth century were widely different, and witchcraft and heresy were the most enthralling and exciting of subjects, as they are still to whosoever believes in them, learned or unlearned, great or small.

It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who loved Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths by this catastrophe.  We have no sympathy with those who compare the career of any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and passion of our Lord.  Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous element the disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery of the first disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators who had watched with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah.  Had it failed? had all the signs come to nothing, all those divine words and ways, to our minds so much more wonderful than any miracles?  Was there no meaning in them?  Were they mere unaccountable delusions, deceptions of the senses, inspirations perhaps of mere genius—­not from God at all except in a secondary way?  In the three terrible days that followed the Crucifixion the burden of a world must have lain on the minds of those who had seen every hope fail:  no legions of angels appearing, no overwhelming revelation from heaven, no change in a moment out of misery into the universal kingship, the triumphant march.  That was but the self-delusion of the earth which continually travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the most terrible of all despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest nothing should be true.

But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself.  Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her “voices” delusions, had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the servant?  It was a stupor which quenched every voice—­a great silence through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours.  The Compiegne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do not mention Jeanne at all.  We need not immediately take into account the baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest who might be secretly rejoicing.  The entire country, both friends and foes, had come