ached its lowest depth of disaster,
its king uncrowned, its fairest regions overrun,--here by the English,
there by the Burgundians,--the whole kingdom in peril of being taken and
reduced to vassalage. Never before nor since had the need of a
deliverer been so vitally felt. The deliverer chosen of heaven was the
young peasant girl who walked that summer noon in her father's humble
garden at Domremy.

Young as she was, she had seen the horrors of war. Four years before the
village had been plundered and burnt, its defenders slain or wounded,
the surrounding country devastated. The story of the suffering and peril
of France was in all French ears. Doubtless little Joan's soul burned
with sympathy for her beloved land as she moved thoughtfully up and down
the garden paths, asking herself if God could longer permit such wrongs
and disasters to continue.

Suddenly, to her right, in the direction of the small village church,
Joan heard a voice calling her, and, looking thither, she was surprised
and frightened at seeing a great light. The voice, continued; her
courage returned; "it was a worthy voice," she tells us, one that could
come only from angels. "I saw them with my bodily eyes," she afterwards
said. "When they departed from me I wept and would fain have had them
take me with them." Again and again came to her the voices and the
forms; they haunted her; and still the burden of their exhortation was
the same, that she should "go to France to deliver the kingdom." The
girl grew dreamy. She became lost in meditation, full of deep thoughts
and budding purposes, wrought by the celestial voices into high hopes
and noble aspirations, possessed with the belief that she had been
chosen by heaven to deliver France from its woes and to disconcert its
enemies.

The times were fitting for such a conception. Two forces ruled mens'
minds,--ambition and trust in the supernatural. The powerful
depended upon their own arms for aid; the weak and miserable turned to
Christ and the Virgin for support; there were those who looked to see
God in bodily person; His angels and ministers were thought to deal
directly with man; it was an age in which force and fraud alike were
dominant, in which men were governed in their bodies by the sword, in
their souls by their belief in and dread of the supernatural, and in
which enthusiasm had higher sway than thought. It was enthusiastic
belief in her divine mission that moved Joan of Arc. It was trust