CHAPTER XXI
VISIONS AND MIRACLES OF MARY"
I have multiplied visions."—Hos. xii. 10.
OUR LADY reigns with Christ in Heaven, but Catholics rejoice to know that throughout the long centuries which have elapsed since her glorious Assumption, she has, when God saw fit, deigned to visit and console her children upon the earth.
Human beings, devoured by a fierce and insatiable curiosity with regard to the unseen world, and not content yet awhile to see as in a glass darkly, have too often attempted by dark and forbidden ways to pry into the invisible. From the earliest ages to the present day, attempts have been made by means of various kinds of necromancy to enter into relations with the disembodied souls of the departed. All such attempts are sternly forbidden in the Scriptures both of the Old and New Testament, and by the Church of God in every age of her history. Men and women who disregard this prohibition do so at their own peril and run the greatest dangers both for soul and body. The inevitableness of gross delusion, the risk of becoming the victims either of impostors or of evil spirits, consequent relaxation of the moral fibre, a strange weakening of the power of the will, not seldom deplorable lapses into sensuality, and, in the case of Catholics, the greatest of all evils, the loss of the Faith itself—such are amongst the woeful miseries which follow in this matter upon disregard of the warnings of the Church and defiance of her commands. Witchcraft and all superstitions are abhorrent to God. But, though the Divine Law strictly forbids Christians, whose vocation it is here below to walk not by sight but by faith, thus to attempt through sinful curiosity to raise before the time the veil that hangs between this world and the other, still it has pleased the Almighty Lord of both Heaven and earth, when He sees that it will benefit His people, to draw back the curtain for a few brief moments, with His own Hand, and on occasion to permit the spirits of the departed to visit their friends still detained upon the earth.