But before I left the Church of the Sacred Heart there was a lighted candle upon her altar. I lighted it. Approaching one of the candle tables, of which there are half a dozen in the building, I purchased a long, tapering candle, white as the lily, and I touched it with fire--I kindled it and set it in one of the sockets to burn before the kneeling Joan. I left my flaming candle in the Church of the Sacred Heart! I, a non-Catholic, offered my fire to Joan, not because she had been canonized--for I never wait for the consent or the approval of the Pope before paying homage to anybody--but because her sweet, sad story is one of the most moving of modern times, and her vindication one of the most stupendous conquests of modern thought. The Church of the Sacred Heart is one of the most beautiful in Paris. It is built on the highest point in the city and commands a wonderful view. As I have told you before, I have two friends who dwell on this summit--really, a superb location. It is approached by a long flight of stairs, or by a cog-wheel train. Before it, and all around it, sweeps the Paris of to-day, as did the Paris of Clovis and Charlemagne, nearly fifteen hundred years ago; the Paris of Julian, Emperor of Rome, older still; the Catholic Paris, when kings and parlements bowed low to kiss the great toe of the Italian Christ, or his vicar; the Paris of the Medici--red and bloody; the Paris of the Huguenots, of Henry of Navarre, of Conde and Colligny--sad, desolate, and in the throes of a new faith; and the Paris of the philosophers, whose smile softened its barbarities, lit up its darkness, and made it a city of light--_La ville Lumiere!_ There, on that splendid elevation, live my two young friends. They are both at the age of nineteen. One of them a lad, the other a maid. The girl is housed; the boy is exposed. Joan of Arc lives in the church--the cathedral is her home. The Chevalier de La Barre stands on the edge of the hill, with sun and shower falling upon his head. The Catholic Church burnt them both at the stake--the boy and the girl; the one because he did not tip his hat to the priest at a street procession, the other because she believed in herself! But modern thought has vindicated both of these outcasts. Joan now dwells in a white church, perfumed and lighted; and the Chevalier crowns the brow of the hill with his youthful figure and appealing gesture. The chain which tied these children to the stake in a dark age has flowered! Is not that wonderful? I believe in the forces, the ideas, the movement--the thought that can cause a chain to flower!