ut 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 to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The last
circumstance of which we mu