VISION, IN SACRED AND OTHER HISTORY. 



85 



explain the phenomena of the vision and audition in terms 

 of the sciences of things seen and heard ; and I do not myself 

 imagine that anything was really present to eye or ear ; the 

 sights and sounds I accept as creations of her mental conscious- 

 ness, and so far " subjective." But there is no subject without 

 an object, neither word lias any meaning unless the otlier word 

 is involved in it, just as neither thing has existence till both are 

 there to create it. And the object to which the consciousness 

 of Joan was subjective was no less than the Power by whom 

 all things are made. Her soul was in communion with that 

 Power by her self-sacrifice, and this was the mode in which 

 it communicated itself and she received it, her human conscious- 

 ness made its response to divine fact according to the laws 

 of human consciousness, under which laws we men can only 

 know things by seeing and hearing or by an activity of the 

 mind which is a reflection upon the brain of such impressions 

 as have fallen on the nerve of eye or ear. The mind of Joan 

 communed witfi the mind of God by an activity of her brain 

 which reflected impressions furnished to her senses by her 

 expeiience, such as pictures or images of Michael, Margaret, 

 and Catherine in a village church and the current news of 

 France's need of deliverance. By what laws of man's body 

 and spirit the impact on her soul of the touch of heaven was 

 translated into a sight and a sound which yet were, in our 

 understanding of them, no actual vibration of light or air 

 upon the physical organs of eye and ear, is a question for the 

 psychologists but not here for us. We are equipped with an 

 instrument of our present research if we are satisfied that the 

 vision of Joan was a communication, conveyed by whatever 

 channel, from the Divine Keality to a human soul, and that this 

 communication was made possible by an act of faith or a self- 

 interchange between the soul of this woman and Him by whom 

 all souls are made. 



So I come to put the tale of Joan the Maid beside that of 

 Mary the Virgin, and to ask if the act of that person who was 

 the human instrument of the supreme fact for man, the 

 Incarnation of Jesus Christ which began to be in the vision 

 of an angel, Gabriel, is not more interpretable by the light of 

 that other act, incomparably less but not unlike in kind, which 

 was wrought by this other woman and began in a vision of an 

 archangel, Michael. 



I am led then to say that the cause of the Incarnation, 

 meaning by " cause " the first antecedent in the train of human 

 circumstance set in motion by that divine event, was the vision 



