84 



RKV. JOHN HUNTLEY SKEINE, D.D., ON 



impossible. She achieved this task, and that not solely by a 

 moral inspiration of the soldiery, who were the practical instru- 

 ments of the achievement, but by actual guidance in strategic 

 council and leadership in battle and an astonishing aptitude for 

 details of the military science, in especial the management of 

 artillery, to which emphatic testimony was given by high 

 authorities on war. The whole fact which we have to con- 

 template and analyse is not an apparition of Michael and a 

 summons to redeem France, but that vision in all its repetitions 

 a7id this solid mass of practical consequence from which the 

 vision cannot be dissevered. 



Contemplating then as a whole this fact of Joan's deed, the 

 visions and the activities together, I say that we can only judge 

 the former to be either the cause of the latter or else a joint 

 effect of something which was cause of both. The full truth, 

 one does not doubt, is this last : vision and action are but the 

 two sides of one fact, the inward and the outward, the 

 subjective and the objective of that fact. Neither one nor 

 other is intelligible until we discern the nature of the underlying 

 fact. What then do we discern as the fact for which Joan the 

 Maid has become the name ? Unmistakably to my mind we 

 are contemplating an act of faith ; the most signal act of faith 

 recorded in human history with one only exception, the act of 

 Mary of Nazareth. By an act of faith I understand an act of 

 concurrence between a human will and the divine. And this 

 concurrence I would analyse more closely, and describe it by 

 the figure of an interchange of the two selves, a mutual self 

 giving between the divine and the human term in the relation 

 of Creator and Creature. 



Here, no doubt, I am taking the fact of the Frenchwoman's 

 career out of the category of human history, as history is 

 commonly understood, and am placing it in the category of 

 spiritual history. In this I shall not be followed except by 

 those who agree that the cause of sensible phenomena is to be 

 found ultimately only in supra-sensible fact. But these will, I 

 think, go on with me and seek for an interpretation of the vision 

 in sacred story where they have found that of the vision in the 

 secular record. 



We have then interpreted Joan's vision of Michael and the 

 Saints as a part of the whole occurrence of her career from her 

 call to her death : it is the first moment in her act of faith, 

 that sacrifice of herself to the Divine Will, which I have 

 ventured to call by a more abstract terminology the Self- 

 Interchange of divine and human. I make no attempt to 



