I am not going to speak this morning of the Chevalier de La Barre, to commemorate whose memory the nationalists of France have erected this monument, close to the Church of the Sacred Heart. He will be my theme on another occasion. In this lecture I shall confine myself to the story of Joan of Arc. And a strange story it is! A young girl of seventeen marches at the head of a dilapidated and demoralized army, and leads it on to victory against the best fighters of the world, the English, who, in the fifteenth century, were trying to annex France to England; she is captured by traitors, sold to the enemy for ten thousand pounds; and then she is handed over to the church to be tried for heresy. She is tried, convicted, and sentenced to be burned alive. This sentence, the most revolting on record, is carried out in all its literalness, and in broad daylight, and under the shadow of the Christian cross, and at the very doors of a great cathedral. All this transpired in the city of Rouen, on the thirtieth day of May, fourteen hundred thirty-one. In order that I may enter into the spirit of the thrilling events of which Rouen was the stage, I repaired to that city, and reverently visited the scenes of the trial and the martyrdom of this latest saint of the Catholic world. Words cannot convey to you the emotions which, like a storm, burst upon me suddenly as the conductor on my train called out, "Rouen!" It was then about a half hour to midnight, and, jumping into a carriage, I was quickly driven to my hotel. What thoughts, and how they crowded in upon me, as soon as I laid my head upon my pillow. My brain was too active to permit of sleep. I imagined I was living in _the year fourteen hundred thirty-one_, and that I had just reached this city on the eve of the martyrdom of Joan. "To-morrow," I whispered to myself, "Joan of Arc will be led to the stake." Again and again I repeated to my pillow this shuddering intelligence. "What," I exclaimed to myself, "a young woman who saved France by her courage is going to be committed to the flames in this very city _tomorrow!_" I could not believe it possible. I could not believe that there was folly enough, or hatred enough, or stupidity enough, in the world for so desperate a deed. But, alas, it was true. With my eyes closed, I fancied I saw the throngs marching through the streets--consisting of peasants, of merchants, of priests, of princes--to see a girl of nineteen burned in the fire, and in all that throng there was not one who had either a kind word or thought for her--her who had given them a country to live in. Abandoned, hated and spat upon, she was left to suffer the cruelest punishment that human _inhumanity_ could devise, or the most perverse imagination invent. A girl of nineteen burned alive! "Oh, God!" The words escaped my lips in spite of me. Then I turned about and called upon _Humanity_. But in the fifteenth century God and Humanity were both hard of hearing.