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XXXVII. THE TRIAL OF JEANNE DARC, COMMONLY CALLED JOAN OF ARC. EOME refuses to canonize the Maid of Orleans. At the beginning of the year 1876, Monseigneur Dupan- loup, bishop of the diocese in which she began her career in arms, went to Rome, and asked, on behalf of his Catholic countrymen, that the maiden who, four hundred and fifty -three years ago, assisted to restore the inde- pendence of France, might be added to the roll of the saints. The power that sent the golden rose unasked to Isabella of Spain refused this costless favor to the urgent request of Frenchmen. It had no other choice. The Historical Society of France has given to the reading world the means of know- ing what power it was that consigned her to the fire. It was no other than the Church which so recently was asked to canonize her. After a five months' trial, in which sixty ecclesiastics, and none but ecclesiastics, par- ticipated, she was condemned as an " excommunicated heretic, a liar, a seducer, pernicious, presumptuous, credu- lous, rash, superstitious, a pretender to divination, blas- phemous toward God, toward the saints male and the saints female, contemptuous of God even in His sacra- ments, distorter of the Divine law, of holy doctrine, of ecclesiastical sanctions, seditious, cruel, apostate, schis- matic." It were much, even after the lapse of four hun- dred and fifty years, to forgive such sins as these. The proceedings of this long trial were recorded from (440)