A Protestant Looks At Lourdes Part 3.

One afternoon I sat on the terrace of the Cafe Royale, directly across from the entrance to the Domaine. Everybody “falls in” there at the end of a hard day. The brancardiers unharness. The directors of the pilgrimages lean back in their chairs and relax over coffee and little cakes. Some of the old priests enjoy a joke and a cigar with the younger men, and perhaps a thimble of cognac in their coffee.
The Hospital of the Sept Douleurs is just a few steps away, and stretcher-bearers and invalid carriages go by constantly. Buses swing by too, bearing crowds of singing pilgrims-the Basques and Italians waving a last good-bye to the Dutch and English in the cafe, with whom they have shared their five pilgrimage days. Traffic is terrific, as the different groups and organizations pour out of the Domaine after the Procession.
Suddenly, through all the hubbub and commotion, there is a swirl of figures over at the gateway, and the mighty roll of the Magnificat. All spring to their feet, rush to the pavement, cross themselves excitedly. Something is happening. A cure perhaps-a miracle? Then you see them.
Following the long line of stretchers and carriages returning to the hospital comes a jubilant little procession: a group of brancardiers forming a guard of honour for a radiant young girl who walks as if on air. She is one of the Dutch pilgrims, she had been carried down to the Grotto that afternoon on a stretcher, after four years in bed with a tubercular spine. She is returning on her own two feet, singing and praising God.
Everybody joins in the singing. The Dutch and Spanish women hug each other. The little boys throw their caps in the air and cheer. The waiters smile and bring a double order for everyone.
Was it a miracle, really? Time will tell. But that girl’s eyes-!
I recognized one of the “unbelieving” French doctors, standing at the curb quite near me. “Well, what did you think of it?” I asked casually.
“It was-” He suddenly turned and fled into a shop, handkerchief held up to his face. I didn’t realize until afterwards that he was weeping. Never again did he have anything derisive to say about miracles.
At dinner everybody talks about it. The Dutch are staying at our hotel, and one of their nurses tells the wonderful story over and over. She is impatient because the pilgrimage doctor still hesitates to admit a miracle. He wants to wait and see. “But it’s true!” the nurse insists. “I saw it with my own eyes! Four of us had to carry the girl to the bath. And after we had plunged her in, stiff as a board, I saw her arms and legs bend. And I saw her sit down on the edge of the bath and help us while we put her clothes back on again!”
“She left her cast and brace at the Grotto,” another verifies joyfully. “The other patients are enraptured. They had all been praying for this girl day and night-she was the worst of our cases.”
She is right. There is neither envy nor disappointment among the ambulant patients who have been denied their own cures. All round the big dining room there are faces alight, shining eyes and triumphal smiles of delight at their comrade’s good fortune. It is something to cherish and remember, for the joy in these facts, the spirit in this room, transcend description.
One might think the uncured would regard their pilgrimage as an unmitigated tragedy. Instead they seem to find at Lourdes a new hope and a new strength with which to bear their burdens. Some patients, of course, do return home disappointed and rebellious, and still passionately longing for the cure that was denied them. But they are rare.
They come to Lourdes weary and worn with pain, hardly able to make the dreadful journey, resenting their sickness and wondering why God has thus afflicted them-a burden to themselves and to those who bring them. At Lourdes station the humblest of them, the despairing and the lost, are warmly welcomed, gently transported, tenderly looked after. In their quarters they are surrounded with all that lavish care, love and devotion can give. At the shrine they find themselves in company with hundreds of other sick-many worse off than they-and the transformation begins. They start to think about their neighbour in the next bed or in the next little carriage. They pray for him and soon begin to long, above everything else, for his cure.
In sum, they forget themselves. They soon become absorbed in love of God and love for fellow man, the two great solvents for all human ills, as Jesus taught.
Time after time I have been told at Lourdes-by doctors, nurses, brancardiers, even by the man who sweeps the paths: “The sick? Oh, Madame, they've forgotten about their own cure. All they care about is that the man in the next row shall get well. . . . ‘Don’t bother about me-that fellow over there needs you more.’ . . . ‘Never mind, nurse, I can wait.’ . . . ‘Look after this poor lady in the next carriage-she really needs attention.’”
Naturally the pain comes back again, but it hasn’t the same hold. Their minds are not centered on it any longer. And when the time comes to go home, though they haven’t been physically cured, though they know what hardships and suffering yet another pilgrimage will mean, their one cry is: “If only I can come back next year! If only I can come again to Lourdes!”
During my study of this shrine, which occupied more than a year, I looked up several famous cures, or miracles, as they are called. Perhaps the most astonishing of them was Guy Leydet, whose restoration from hopeless idiocy first drew my attention to Lourdes.
Today Guy Leydet is a tall, nice-looking lad of 14. When I visited his home in St. Etienne, where his father is a professor in a local business college, I found him happily running off with his friends to play football. His mother, a charming and very pretty woman, was proud of his standing in his classes, said he hoped soon to go to England as an exchange student.
But less than ten years ago he had the brain of an idiot. Doctors had pronounced the dread word: “Incurable.”
Guy Leydet was a normal child till the age of five. Then he was stricken with acute meningo-encephalitis-a brain disease that can wreck the nervous system. It paralyzed both arms and legs, caused frequent convulsions and epileptic fits, and, worst of all, finally brought about complete idiocy. The child could no longer even recognize his parents, and could utter only guttural sounds. This condition lasted for two years, and the parents all but ruined themselves financially in fruitless efforts to find a cure.
Finally they went to Lourdes. At the piscine, compassionate nurses dipped the rigid little boy into the water. His mother, fearing another convulsion, stood near anxiously, and they handed him back to her.
Then suddenly it happened.
Guy Leydet opened his eyes, reached his arms toward his mother and in a clear, childish voice cried, “Mama!” He then began to count his fingers, naming them over, as French children do. Moreover, he moved his arms and legs perfectly.
Back home the Leydets called in their doctor, who gazed in stupefaction at his former patient. He admitted that he could not understand it at all. “Well-try to re-educate the boy,” he said, still incredulous.
It was easy. The child’s mind rapidly reawakened, and he soon learned to read and write as well as play vigorously like other children. On September 26, 1947- one year after his cure-he was examined by 40 doctors at the Medical Bureau. Dr. Robert Dailly, a child specialist of Paris, tested his mental development for two hours. Then he announced simply: “This child is normal.”
The case provoked long and heated discussion at the Medical Bureau, for the cure of such a condition-of postencephalitic idiocy-was unprecedented. One major question tantalized the doctors. As one of them bluntly put it: “With what brain does this child think? What brain was he using when he stood up and suddenly called to his mother? Was it a new brain or the partially destroyed idiot’s brain he had a moment before?”
Whatever the answer, it was contrary to all natural laws, and in the end the 40 doctors unanimously declared that the child had been supernaturally cured. The case was never proclaimed a miracle because the doctors who attended the boy before his visit to Lourdes have absolutely refused to submit any records or certificates.
“But what do we care about that?” said the mother. “We have our boy-happy and well. Our Te Deums are sung right here at home, every day!”
Another famous cure I visited was Fernand Legrand. He had come to Lourdes as a grand malade more than 20 years ago, but one of the brancardiers there still remembers him vividly. “The most terrible case I ever helped to carry,” he told me.
I went to see Legrand at his home in Gisors, a small town near Paris. He is a cobbler and lives in a narrow house behind his modest shop. We sat by the fire in the cheerful little sitting room, and I studied his fine face. He is a man of 50 with the face of an Emerson, the hands of a shoemaker. As customers dropped in at intervals to claim a pair of boots, Fernand Legrand told me his story.
When he was a husky young fellow of 26 he met with a hunting accident, and the lower part of his left leg had to be amputated. He recovered from the operation, but a year later severe pains began in that leg, followed by numbness which gradually spread all over his body. The trouble was diagnosed as polyneuritis, involving particularly the spinal nerves and the spinal cord itself.
All the classic treatments were tried, but Legrand only grew worse. His legs became gangrenous and greatly swollen, the rest of his body as thin as a skeleton. He suffered tortures, and finally his fiancee persuaded him to go to Lourdes.
It took six men to get him from the automobile into the pilgrimage train, for Legrand could make no movement of any kind. Each effort, each disturbance of the bedclothes even, gave him excruciating pain. The journey was a horror.
His own physician, Dr. Edouard Decrette of Vernon, accompanied him and described the case with such concern at Lourdes that the Medical Bureau appointed Dr. Marc Clement of Hyeres to examine Legrand. Together Drs. Clement and Decrette went to the hospital, where they found that Legrand had just returned from his first bath.
Dr. Clement took the right leg out of its cast and bandages. “Look here,” he said to Dr. Decrette, “you told me he had a swollen leg. This one isn’t swollen, and it is dry.”
“Impossible!” said Decrette. Then, as he looked, he gave a quick exclamation. “But-since when?”
“Since my bath,” said the patient. “When they dipped me in the water I felt a moment of agonizing pain, as-though my arms and legs were being broken to pieces. Then a heavenly warmth spread through my body, my legs could bend, and I no longer had any pain.” Dr. Decrette, who had seen Legrand in such a horrible condition for so long, was so moved that it was several minutes before he could even speak.
Legrand’s recovery was complete. He has since returned to Lourdes nearly every year as a brancardier.
“Doesn’t your artificial leg make it difficult for you?” I asked.
“Difficult!” he laughed. “Madame, you should see me. Since my cure I can run like a rabbit, wooden leg and all. None of the brancardiers with real legs can get ahead of me!”
One evening, I had dinner with Jeanne Fretel, one of the most famous of recent Lourdes cures. When I met her at the doors of the Sept Douleurs Hospital, she had been on duty there since six o’clock that morning. Yet as she came swinging along in her nurse’s uniform, a slim girl with big dark eyes, she was fresh, smiling and unfatigued. As she sat opposite me in the hotel restaurant a few minutes later, laughing and chatting over the meal, it was hard to imagine how desperate was her plight five years ago. But her case history, one of the most completely documented at Lourdes, contains 80 pages of detailed hospital reports, laboratory analysis, X-ray records, etc., to prove it.
Jeanne was born in 1914 in the town of Sougeal, near Rennes. She came of simple people. She had her way to make. She was a waitress, practical nurse, mother’s helper. From childhood on, her health was precarious. In January, 1938, when she was 24, she was operated on for appendicitis. This proved to be the first of 13 operations, for she developed tubercular peritonitis. Her abdomen gradually increased in size, became hard and intensely painful. Nothing helped, and her condition continued to grow worse.
She was put aboard the train of the Rosary Pilgrimage unconscious, and arrived at Lourdes on Tuesday, October 5, 1948. No improvement occurred during the first three days there. On Friday morning she was carried, dying, to the Mass for the Sick. The priest hesitated to give her Communion because of her constant vomiting and extreme weakness, but her brancardier insisted, and she was given a bit of the consecrated wafer.
“It was then,” said Jeanne Fretel, “that suddenly I felt well and became aware, for the first time. that I was at Lourdes. They asked me how I felt. I said I felt very well. My abdomen was still hard and swollen, but I was not suffering at all.
“After Mass they took me to the Grotto on my stretcher. After some minutes there I had a sensation as if someone took me under the arms to help me sit up. I found myself in a sitting position. I looked around to see who had helped me, but could see no one. Then I had the feeling that the same hands that had helped me to sit up now took my hands and put them on my abdomen. I perceived that it had become normal. And then I was seized with an extraordinary hunger.”
The journey home was accomplished without fatigue, although she was on her feet in the train much of the time, tending the other patients. When her own physician, Dr. Alphonse Pelle, saw her he was speechless, and left the room, overcome. When he came back a few minutes later, the tears were running down his cheeks. He then gave Jeanne a rigorous examination, but could hardly believe his findings.
An interesting sidelight is the fact that Dr. Pelle was an agnostic and unbeliever- “hostile” to religion, the Medical Bureau report says. But it was his precise records and certificates that established the case as a miraculous cure. “I have been a terrible blow to Dr. Pelle’s scientific self-respect,” Jeanne said.
Jeanne is in perfect health now, and the long hours of her work as a practical nurse do not affect her at all. The life of a miraculee isn’t easy, however. Her correspondence is tremendous. Letters come from all over the world-from doctors, from sick people, from unbelievers wanting to be reassured. If she sends typewritten replies, people are not satisfied. The letters must be in her own hand, and after her day’s work she frequently stays up far into the night writing them.
When she comes to Lourdes, everybody points her out. Her work in the hospital is interrupted time and again by visitors, by relatives of the sick who want to see her, to touch her. Six persons came up and spoke to her while we were dining together at the hotel. “I can’t refuse them,” Jeanne Fretel said. “I can’t refuse anything, after what has been done for me.”
All the miracles I know about-and I have talked with many of them-have certain characteristics in common.
First, they are simple people, the poor and the humble. Not one came from a wealthy or impressive family. “The Blessed Virgin does not interest herself much in the rich,” they say at Lourdes.
Second, they seem to be immune to illness after their cure. They don’t get sick at all, even with common colds or digestive troubles. They are in excellent health at all times.
Finally, they have a poise, an inner dignity, that comes from the desire to be worthy of the great thing they have experienced. They are completely unassuming, and have no wish to exploit the publicity which surrounds them. They just want to give, in gratitude for what has been done for them.
Whatever one may consider is the real source of their cure, there is no slightest doubt that a transcendental influence has laid its hand upon these people and blessed them-not merely with a physical cure but with enduring serenity, peace and deep joy. I count it a privilege to have known them. But now come the crucial questions: What is the origin, the cause of all these cures? How do you explain them? If they are not miracles-that is, produced by some supernatural power- what are they?
The answer of the sceptics, both lay and medical, is a flat, “I don’t believe it! It’s too fantastic.”
When I was a young reporter in Asia, people in remote Indian and Chinese villages did not believe in the New York skyline either. Nothing I could say would change their conviction that it was “only a picture.” They had never seen such a place. It was something outside their experience. Therefore it could not be.
“Before you enter into a discussion about Lourdes with anybody,” says Dr. Blanton, “it will save time and much useless argument if you find out first if the person you are talking to was ever there.” After the rationalist physician has actually seen a cure his scientific cocksureness is severely shaken. He no longer avoids the word “miracle.” Instead he uses it freely-almost involuntarily.
He does not, however, necessarily concede that the miracles have a supernatural origin. One of the favourite explanations of Lourdes cures by rationalist doctors is that they are produced by “unknown natural forces”-unknown today, but whose laws may be uncovered tomorrow.
Most of the doctors at the Medical Bureau discount this theory. They point out that the action of the forces of nature is always uniform and unchanging. The law of gravity, for example, works in exactly the same way for everybody. If “unknown natural forces” were responsible for Lourdes cures, they would have to act the same for all persons under similar conditions. But the exact opposite is true. The “unknown forces” act neither constantly nor uniformly. They act today, but not tomorrow; for some people, but not for others. One of the baffling things about Lourdes cures is their extreme variability and unpredictability.
What, then, is the cause of the miracles? Many ascribe it to prayer.
When the great scientist, Charles Steinmetz of General Electric, was asked by his colleagues what was the most important line of research for them to follow next, he answered without hesitation: “Prayer. Find out about prayer!” Alexis Carrel has stated his conviction that “the power of prayer is the greatest power in the world.”
Writing about the miracles, Carrel has noted that “patients have been cured almost instantaneously of various afflictions such as peritoneal or bone tuberculosis, abscesses, osteitis, suppurating wounds, cancer, etc. In a few seconds, or at the most a few hours, wounds are cicatrized, pathological symptoms disappear, appetite returns. The miracle is characterized by an extreme acceleration of the processes of organic repair. No scientific hypothesis up to the present accounts for the phenomena, but the only condition indispensable for its occurrence is prayer. The patient does not need himself to pray or to have any religious faith; but someone around him must be in a state of prayer.
Dr. Vallet, former president of the Medical Bureau, does not believe that prayer in itself is capable of releasing the process of healing. Summing it up, he says that prayer is necessary, “but it is also necessary that God agree to it. These cures are not the result of accident but of an all-powerful Will which hears this prayer and Whom nothing resists, neither sickness-nor death.”

Nihil Obstat : W. M. Collins Censor Diocesan
Imprimatur :
 D. Mannix
Archiepiscopus Melbournensis 17th May, 1958
********

A Protestant Looks At Lourdes Part 2.

The International Medical Association of Lourdes, organized in 1927, has an enrollment of 5000 doctors, from 30 countries, who assist in the methodical checking of alleged cures.
All this does not mean there is no longer opposition or hostility. There is plenty. “But,” as Dr. A. Marchand wrote in his The Facts of Lourdes, “the time of systematic contempt has passed.”
“What is the most remarkable cure you've witnessed?” I asked one of the doctors at the Bureau, an old-timer who had been coming to Lourdes every year for 20 years.
“It’s hard to select,” he said. “But- well, there was Madame Augustine Augault-a remarkable case. I lived near her, knew the two surgeons who attended her, and also her parish priest. So I know that her cure was genuine.” This woman had been ill for 12 years with a fibroid tumor of the uterus. It had grown to such enormous proportions that the pressure had caused chronic gastric troubles and vomiting. A heart condition made an operation impossible, and the case had reached an apparently hopeless stage.
As a last resort Madame Augault decided to go to Lourdes. Her family physician strongly opposed this, telling her that she would never come back alive. But Madame Augault persisted.
She made the journey on a mattress, at the end of her strength and very close to death. Four injections were necessary to help her heart during the trip. A doctor who visited her on the train told the Medical Bureau later that he “had been startled by the dimensions of her abdomen.”
On the first morning at Lourdes she was taken to the baths on a stretcher. During the brief instant of her immersion she felt excruciating pain, then the pressure in her abdomen seemed to disappear. But she was very tired and continued to suffer terribly until she was carried on her stretcher to the Procession at four that afternoon. Then, at the precise moment when the Blessed Sacrament passed by, her sufferings vanished, and she was conscious of a rebirth of her energies. She stayed on her cot, however, and said nothing about how she felt. The next day she was again taken to the piscine.
The attendants who had bathed her before observed with amazement that her abdomen was entirely flat and apparently normal. Moreover, she was able to walk.
After this bath she was taken to the Medical Bureau and examined by some 30 doctors. The official record states: “On examination, the abdomen was found to be perfectly supple. The skin was ‘pleated’ like that of a woman who has had a child. The belt which the invalid wore on her arrival at Lourdes is now seven inches too large. The coat, on which the buttonholes show marks of stretching from the distension of the abdomen, has become much too big and now overlaps considerably.”
Madame Augault’s cure was permanent.
How are the cures verified? What safeguards are there against fraud? To, begin with, every pilgrimage is accompanied by one or more medical men, and no sick person is accepted without a medical certificate from his home physician stating his disease and present condition. When a supposed cure occurs, the pilgrimage doctor reports at once to the Medical
Bureau. The doctors there then examine the patient and discuss the case. Did the illness really exist? Is there a cure? If so, can it be explained naturally? Neurotic cases are ruled out completely. No case is accepted unless there has been some organic change-the healing of malignant tissue, the restoration of wasted nerves and muscles, the sudden knitting of chronic bone fractures.
If the case appears inconclusive, it is immediately dropped. If it is retained, the patient is kept under observation by a local physician for at least a year, and complete documentation, including X rays, laboratory reports, statements from attending physicians and other witnesses, is collected. Then the patient is brought back to Lourdes for another examination by doctors of the most varied backgrounds.
“The medical work at Lourdes is run entirely by doctors, never forget that,” Dr. Leuret, until his recent death the president of the Medical Bureau, told me. Dr. Leuret was a remarkable person: Legion of Honour, Croix de Guerre, professor of medicine and head of a large clinic in the worst section of Bordeaux.
“During my time here,” Dr. Leuret continued, “Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, Protestants of all sects, have been among our colleagues; atheists and unbelievers, too. It’s this study of the cures by men of such different viewpoints that guarantees our good faith.”
After the medical commission at Lourdes decides that a cure is outside the laws of nature, it is sent on to the medical commission at Paris. This commission, composed of 20 distinguished physicians and surgeons, then declares (or decides not to declare), “We find no natural or scientific explanation of this cure.” Only when this body has passed a case does it finally go to a Canonical Commission of the Church for final evaluation as a miracle.
How many have occurred at Lourdes? In nearly a century of the shrine’s existence 51 cases have been pronounced miraculous cures by the Church. This however, represents the most stringent selection. The Church does not deny the possibility of miracles “less complete,” of which there have been many; but it refuses to authenticate them. Among other stipulations a Canonical Commission’s requirements for a miraculous cure are:
1. That the malady was grave and not improving under medication. 2. That the cure was instantaneous, with no period of convalescence. 3. That the cure was perfect, and that there was no relapse.
A large number of actual cures go without official recognition because of insufficient data. Sometimes home physicians have not kept sufficiently precise data. Other doctors refuse point-blank to furnish X rays, diagnoses or laboratory reports. “If it’s Lourdes, we’re not interested,” they say. And scores of people who are cured do not report it simply because they dislike publicity. Indeed, many people who now enjoy the blessings of being well after years of agony care not at all that their cures are not recognized as miracles. They come to Lourdes and give thanks every year just the same.
The Medical Bureau at Lourdes has fairly complete records of 1200 cures which it recognizes as being “inexplicable under natural laws,” but which the Church, for one reason or another, has refused to authenticate as miracles. In addition it has notations and material concerning some 4000 other cases that are very probably complete and genuine cures. This may seem a small number, in view of the many thousands who come. But ten such cures -or even one-would be equally dumbfounding.
When a patient who has been cured returns to Lourdes for examination, one of the visiting doctors is often asked to officiate. An American, Dr. Smiley Blanton, directed the examination of one of the most famous cures-Charles McDonald. Thirty- two doctors at the Bureau studied this remarkable case, and Dr. Blanton later read an account of it before a joint session of the American Psychoanalytic and Psychiatric Associations.
Charles McDonald was brought to Lourdes from Dublin on September 6, 1936, with the Catholic Young Men’s Pilgrimage of Ireland. He was then 31 and had been ill since he was 20. His Dublin physician certified that he had tuberculosis of the spine, nephritis, and tuberculous arthritis of the left shoulder. For 15 months he had been completely bedfast, and had five large draining abscesses. He endured maddening pain, was unable to sit up for more than four minutes at a time, and was pronounced beyond medical aid.
No change in McDonald’s condition occurred during his first day at Lourdes. The next day he was bathed again and later carried to a service at the Grotto. It was then that he began to feel the first glow of health.
“It should be . . . remembered,” says Dr. Blanton, “that for 15 months the patient had been unable to move his hips or shoulders without severe pain. Now, lying on a stretcher at the Grotto, he experimented by moving his arm slightly. There was no pain. He loosened the brace strap on his shoulder and raised his shoulders from the pillow-still without pain.”
The next morning, when the doctors and nurses who had forbidden him to get up were out of the room, he got out of bed and dressed himself without help. That day he was taken to the Grotto in an invalid chair. Afterwards, though he had made not the slightest move without agonizing pain for more than a year, he walked up the steps into the Rosary Church and was able to make a genuflection and kneel at one of the benches.
When he returned to Dublin, McDonald had the supreme pleasure of dispensing with the ambulance which had been so vitally necessary one short week before. The pilgrimage physician, Dr. Christopher Hannigan, wrote on August 29, 1937: “I have seen Mr. McDonald twice since his return from Lourdes. I can declare definitely that there are no traces of his former illness. I am glad to testify to this cure, as when I first saw him I regarded his case as hopeless.”
On September 16, 1937, McDonald returned to Lourdes. Dr. Blanton and 32 other doctors then examined him, found him in excellent health (as he is to this day), and agreed that “No medical explanation, in the present state of science, can be given for his cure.”
In his report to his American confreres Dr. Blanton concludes: “We must lay aside as untenable the accusation that cases such as Charles McDonald’s are in any way ‘fixed’ or the histories ‘doctored.’ There does appear to be at this shrine a sudden quickening of the healing processes. The percentages of such cures are certainly too great to be laid to coincidence, nor do the details of the cures conform to the laws of recovery as we know them.
Even coincidental cures in our hospitals do not in the space of two or three days get up and walk without pain after 15 months in bed with continual pain. I believe that something does occur which is ‘on the margin of the laws of nature.’”
Many observers think the extraordinary emotional climate of Lourdes responsible for many of the cures achieved there. For the whole atmosphere of the shrine is one which intensifies faith.
One amazing aspect of Lourdes is the fact that the city has never had an epidemic. Two million travellers and 30,000 sick pass through there every year. Hundreds are given baths each day, and many persons suffering from all manner of diseases are immersed in the same water. Yet apparently no infection ever results.
The Lourdes water is a strange phenomenon. In the early days some canny Lourdes citizens had visions of exploiting the spring and turning the town into a flourishing thermal resort like Aix-les-Bains or Vichy.
They were bitterly disappointed when analysis revealed that the water contained no curative or medicinal properties whatever. It was found to be “similar in composition to most water found in mountainous areas where the soil is rich in calcium.”
However, a bacterial study of the bath waters did bring a remarkable discovery. The Medical Bureau, curious to learn why no infection resulted when one diseased patient after another was bathed in the same water, took samples from the baths and had them analyzed. The reports showed extreme pollution-streptococcus, staphylococcus, colibacillus, and all sorts of other germs. Yet, astonishingly, when guinea pigs were inoculated with this polluted water they remained perfectly healthy. At the same time, two out of three guinea pigs died when inoculated with water from the river Seine containing much the same bacilli.
Hence the shrine’s devotees have an extraordinary regard for Lourdes’ water, as is attested by the following dramatic footnote: At the end of the day the stretcher- bearers and nurses often dip a glass of water from the baths and drink it as an act of faith.
The service of these voluntary workers is lavish and untiring. Many of them are themselves cures of former years, and their mere presence-the fact that they are now obviously strong and well-gives tremendous inspiration and hope to the sick.
The brancardiers, as the stretcher- bearers are called, come from all walks of life-generals, mechanics, judges, clerks, bankers, civil servants. There are more than 2000 of them in the permanent association, each pledged to give a certain amount of time each year. They are on duty from dawn until midnight, and sometimes later. Their tasks are heavy, their meals uncertain, their rest slight and often broken by emergency calls, for during the busy season they must care for the sick from as many as 22 pilgrim trains a day.
Every brancardier is given a small handbook of rules, the last of which is: “He must pray without ceasing.” The brancardiers ask nothing for themselves but the privilege of serving. “In 30 years’ service,” the president of their order told me proudly, “I have never once been refused by a brother brancardier, or even heard a murmur from him, when I asked him to perform one more hard job at the end of the day.”
The volunteer nurses, of whom there are likewise about 2000 enlisted from all social classes, also work indefatigably. They run up and down long flights of stairs, carry bedpans, change fetid dressing, bathe malodorous wounds. They do it cheerfully, joyfully, and with constant prayer.
Indeed the devotion, the spirit of dedication and self-giving that permeates the whole place, is a powerful element in the Lourdes atmosphere. Hundreds of people look forward to giving up their vacation time to this work, year after year. The girl in the souvenir shop at my hotel comes from England every year and works in the shop mornings so that she can help at the baths in the afternoon. The girl at the Cook’s Travel Agency, who works all day, goes every evening to help at the Grotto until midnight.
All these people find the utmost happiness in such service. As one stretcher- bearer said, “These few days at Lourdes each August fix me up for the whole year. I live for 12 months on what I get here in just this one week!”
Early each morning you meet them swinging along the Esplanade on their way to the Mass-the leather-harnessed brancardiers carrying the stretcher cases, pushing the tragic little carriages. Among the “grands malades”-the very sick- are sights to wring the heart: a girl with beautiful classic features peering out from the plaster cast imprisoning her from head to foot; a priest, white and shrunken, in the last stages of tuberculosis; a woman in a black veil, trying to conceal a face covered with flaming red sores; an old man hobbling along on twisted stumps. But as they pass, you see their lips moving in prayer, you hear the nurses and brancardiers softly humming Ave Maria.
Once the patients are back from Mass, the trek to the baths begins. Volunteer nurses bathe the patients one by one, lotioning those too ill to be immersed, but carefully removing all bandages so that the water makes direct contact. All morning, and from two till four in the afternoon, the lines of stretchers and little carriages go to and from the pool. Behind the sick stands a tightly packed mass of friends and relatives, all praying earnestly. The prayer and faith perpetually going up as with one voice constitute an almost living force whose rhythms get into the blood. One would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it.
At four o’clock the bells peal, and the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament forms at the Grotto. The loud-speakers open up and a great hymn rolls out, the huge crowd joining in unison. The procession then makes its long and impressive way along the Esplanade, each pilgrimage under its own banner. In the square the sick are lined up in two long rows, and as the Blessed Sacrament approaches, the ardour of their prayer mounts. Then the officiating bishop, robed in white and gold, leaves the shelter of his golden canopy carrying the monstrance. The sick raise their terrible faces for the blessing, the great crowd falls to its knees, and the Host is raised above each one. This is the moment when a sick one sometimes rises and, pale but triumphant, follows the Procession with calm, victorious tread up the steps and into the Church.
Every evening at eight o'clock, when the torchlight procession begins, the Domaine becomes a blazing field of light. Everyone carries a paper-shaded candle to the Grotto, where the various pilgrimages gather under their illuminated signs. The tiny candle flames form larger and larger blocks of light until they become a huge wheel of fire about the Grotto. Then the procession starts out through the enveloping darkness like a moving serpent of fire. As it winds down the path, there is a great burst of singing under the stars. It is the “Song of Bernadette”-Ave, Ave Maria. The procession continues around the great horseshoe ramp, down the side of one Esplanade and up the other. The doors of the Hospital of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the Esplanade, are opened, and from the rows of beds the sick join in the song, each in his own tongue.
For two hours the marching and singing continue, and then the marchers mass in the square before the Rosary Church. At a signal from the bishop all singing stops. Then, declaring their belief in God in Latin, the universal language of the Roman Catholic Church, all burst into the majestic chanting of the Credo. It is an experience no one who shares it will forget.
Thus, even on a normal day, Lourdes is a tremendously exhilarating and inspiring place. When a possible miracle occurs, it becomes positively electrifying. I saw it happen.

Knock And Its Shrine by F.P. Carey. Part 4.

There are, however, other categories in which the intercession of Mary of Knock has worked wonders for her clients in need.
“My married brother, who has five young children was two years out of work,” runs an acknowledgement from County Limerick.”I made a novena to Our Lady of Knock for him, and the very next day he called to tell me that he had got a permanent job with good pay.” A mother attested from County Wicklow that, thanks to Our Lady of Knock, her son successfully passed an examination. Three special favours vouchsafed, one upon the day upon which a Cork pilgrim prayed at the shrine.”I have never ceased to pray that Knock would become the Lourdes of Ireland,” wrote a London lady who after making a pilgrimage had a wonderful answer to prayer. A Galway student, told by his teachers that he was hopelessly backward, and had no chance of success, put his trust; in the intercession of Our Lady of Knock, and passed the examination. The official publications in connection with the Shine suggest that spiritual favours, too, have been so numerous during the short period referred to as to be considered particularly characteristic of Knock.

In view of the references made in the above-quoted acknowledgements to Knock cement, it may be necessary to explain that this substance indicates the coating of the Church gable against which the Apparition was actually manifest. During the years immediately following upon the wonder, pilgrims made a habit of piously detaching portions which they availed of, as seen, in the character of a relic. But for obvious reasons, the practice had to be discontinued, so that pieces of the original wall-fabric are no longer obtainable. Pilgrims, however, are now accustomed to treasure clay taken from the Church enclosure in the near vicinity of the shrine, which, of course, is permissible. Knock water is the ordinary holy water contained in two large tanks placed adjacent to the Apparition Gable, and always accessible to pilgrims. Knock-Mhuire is situated in that part of East Mayo through which meanders the little River Glore, at a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles from Dublin, and at equal distance from Claremorris, Ballyhaunis, and Kiltimagh, a half dozen miles in either instance.
The journey is made by rail to one of the centres named, thence by bus, always in readiness in the case of organized pilgrimages, or by hired conveyance always easily to be procured by private pilgrims. Claremorris is invariably the railway destination of pilgrimages from the South of Ireland, and from the southernmost parts of the West, whilst Kiltirnagh serves for Northern seekers of the Shrine. Pilgrims from Dublin and the East detrain, as a rule, at Ballyhaunis, and come from the West generally by one or other of the railway branch lines connected with either of the termini named. In many cases it should be remarked, pilgrims resident in the nearer but still distant, parts of Connacht make the journey on foot, frequently returning to their homes by the same method.
The village is but one of the many such places characteristic of County Mayo, having in itself but a very small population, housed chiefly in cottages clean and comfortable, but of the olden peculiarly picturesque type. The fame of Knock, however, has pardonably stimulated modest town-planning ambitions in the breasts of its inhabitants, and the interests of the future in this regard are being championed and vigilantly guarded by the Mayo County Council. Grateful tribute is due to that body for having so promptly and so determinedly defeated the attempt to commercialize the possibilities offered by the continual stream of pilgrims at the hallowed place made by persons from outside parts soon after the devotional appeal of Knock had received the new impetus accorded it by the several forward developments of 1935. This action resulted in the removal of some stalls hastily erected for mercantile purposes upon the public road near the church and Shrine, and in the formulation of regulations which will prevent for all time the commercial exploitation of the appeal of Knock-Mhuire by any means. The powers sought and obtained by the Council will, it is pleasing to read, enable that body to negotiate with persons concerned for the purpose of acquiring the land necessary for the better laying out of a suitable surrounding for an Irish Shrine to Our Blessed Lady.

Historically, the village is non distinctive. Even though within hearing distance of Killala’s broad bay and places of like high sounding note in national story, Knock would appear to have slumbered in philosophic peace whilst the more strenuous chapters of Irish history were being written. Two years previous to the penning of these lines, the writer endeavoured to discover by casual enquiry upon the spot something of outstanding importance in the secular, or national history of the place, but the effort was unrewarded. Two or three men seemed to harbour an idea that something or other had happened in the neighbourhood during Ninety-Eight, though neither could refer informedly to any such occurrence, and all appeared indifferent in regard of its historical importance. Their attitude was a reproof, and though I did not immediately so recognize it, a well-deserved one. I was to have known, as I ought, and as all corners and goers in the village must know, that Knock was reserved for the one occurrence which was to raise its name high above all considerations of common historical import. Nothing meriting special record happened there until that Assumption octave-eve of holy renown. The only illustrious one concerned in extending the name of this Mayo village, and in the making of its fame, was Our Lady of Knock. Mary, the secret of its holiness, is also the secret of its history.

Knock, therefore, has no man-made memorials of village patriotism or prowess. Its parish church, scene of its one and incomparably-memorable event, disclose in its plain walls and slightly ornate bell-tower, the only architectural pretensions of the place. The edifice, which is of cruciform order, and not spacious, was built by Father Patrick O”Grady, P.P., in 1825, the tower, accommodating the principal entrance, being added by Archdeacon Cavanagh during the year following the Apparition. A later pastor, Father John J. Tuffy, considerably enlarged the building in the endeavour to meet the ever-increasing pilgrimage demands. The interior was greatly beautified as a result of further zealous activity upon the part of the same parish priest, though it had already been embellished by frequent gifts made by pilgrims vouchsafed favours at the Shrine. These are now many, the most remarkable being, perhaps, an elaborate banner of green satin,inscribed in letters of gold: “Toronto is Grateful.”

This was presented to the shrine by Most Rev. Dr. Lynch, Archbishop of Toronto, in order to perpetuate his thanksgiving for a favour received upon recourse to Our Lady of Knock very soon after the Apparition. He travelled from Canada in 1882, specially in order to make personal thanksgiving at the Shrine. Archbishop Lynch was probably the first apostle of devotion to Our Lady of Knock beyond the Atlantic, for he preached of her advocacy almost without cease to his own flock, and never failed to urge priests of his own archdiocese visiting Ireland to include in their itinerary a visit to Knock. Afterwards, he wrote an account of the deep impression which his own visit had made upon him, and expressed his conviction that ultimately the Shrine and its devotion would be given canonical approval. Gifts from two other Archbishops are also included among the votive offerings seen in the church interior. One, presented by the late Archbishop Murphy, of Hobart, Tasmania,-a painting in oils of the Apparition, nine feet by seven-is to be seen above the door upon the Epistle side, and, in the corresponding position upon the Gospel side, is a beautifully executed canvas of St. Joseph with the Holy Child, given by Most Rev. Dr. Clune, C.SS.R., Archbishop of Perth, Australia.
The church occupies an expansively enclosed space in mid-village, wherein the first object of interest is the gable (the end, or altar, wall) upon which the Apparition was seen. The hallowed space has now been railed in, but life- size figures of whitest marble have been arranged in reproduction of the wonder exactly as described by the witnesses. Other marble statues are to be seen at different points around the enclosure, the devotional aspect of which has latterly been brought to irresistible completion of appeal by the erection of Stations of the Cross, which are the happy outcome of a widely-circulated shilling-subscription list furthered by the members of the Society for the Promotion of the Cause of Knock Shrine.
Despite the glory of its three score years, and in fact of the almost hourly reports of marvellous graces and favours granted upon supplication of Almighty God through Our Blessed Lady in its name, Knock still, if even to fast diminishing extent, excites the objections of scepticism. Nevertheless, contention has been reduced to one note of challenge, namely that, contrary to the experience of St. Bernadette at Lourdes, and of favoured mediums of other heavenly manifestations, no word was heard by those to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared at Knock, no message given such as the plea for penance -addressed by the Mother of God to the little rustic maiden of 1858 from the Grotto above the waters of the Gave. Nor did the Apparition occur at any moment of import for the Faith, or for the world, it has been objected, such, as if in confirmation of the Definition of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in the case of Lourdes.
But spoken messages are not essential to the authenticity of claims to visions. Many saints have had visions of Our Divine Lord, of Our Lady, and of other Saints, in which no word was uttered. St. John of the Cross expressed the view that messages are sometimes apt to occasion difficulty in interpretation, the inference being that they are likely to be misunderstood by the average mortal hearer. The Cistercian Father already quoted has dealt with the objection put forward as upon this point, and the reasonableness of his rejoinder cannot but help to fortify the defences of the Knock devotion against further attacks by the sceptics:
The mission of Mary to Knock was not one of rebuke or complaint against our people as was the case at La Salette and Lourdes against the prevailing vices and abuses that were shaking the very-foundations of the Faith in France in those days. Neither was it a call to do penance, as on those occasions. No, Mary’s mission to her faithful Irish people that day was rather one of compassion and comfort in those dark days of their sorrow and sufferings, with an implied admonition, no doubt, of dangers ahead, and the imperative need of prayer.”

As to the urgency of heavenly indication at the period in which the Apparition at Knock occurred, it need only he recalled that even as late as 1879, the peasant population of Ireland lived under conditions in regard of which an English writer stated humanity would shrink startled and appalled. Injustice trod cruelly upon Ireland. The Apparition of the Virgin Mother of God at Knock, proved then, the illumination of the temporal future of the Irish peasant or agricultural population. With what satisfaction may we got recall the inspiriting experience of having heard the utmost proof of that illumination, in the person of a Catholic Minister of an Irish native government (Mr. Tomas Derrig, Minister for Education) declare in a lecture on the Apparition, delivered in a Dublin theatre in December, 1936 “This bright light seems to have been the harbinger of better days for our people. World-wide sympathy was aroused. America, Australia, France, India, and Great Britain subscribed huge sums for relief. Seed was distributed; works were started; a good harvest followed. A tragedy, perhaps, as great as that of 1846 was averted. Michael Davitt established the Land League, and this was soon followed by a Land Act and other measures of amelioration. Since then conditions have been improving steadily, and, thank God, we are never likely to see the spectre of Famine in Ireland again.”

As we close this sketch, the sixtieth year since the Apparition at Knock has been completed. In the fact we find our concluding reflection. Does it not suffice as proof of the authenticity of the claim that even under the fire of ridicule, adverse criticism, and open hostility, the belief that Our Blessed Lady with St. Joseph and St. John Evangelist stood for two hours in the midst of those humble Mayo villagers has flourished as a flower of Irish Faith, sending forth its fragrance to the ends of the earth?

Knock And Its Shrine by F.P. Carey. Part 3.

All services rendered at Knock-Mhuire are voluntarily discharged. Doctors, Nurses, Stewards (or male volunteers for general duty) and Handmaids, which is the description accorded the ladies who come forward to help in the performance of the innumerable duties towards the comfort and convenience of invalids necessary during pilgrimage, are at their posts in pursuit of a labour of Christian love. All come to Knock and board there entirely their own expense.
Pilgrimage experiences are always highly edifying. It is at all rare to see non-pilgrimage visitors at Knock affected even to tears as quickly by the evidences of Irish Catholic Faith appreciable upon every hand as by the plight of the more helpless invalids, very many of whom stoically, and only too obviously, endure increase of pain, and even challenge discomfort and physical danger, in furtherance of their heroic piety and submissive spirit of hope.

Non-Catholic visitors frequently remain over a pilgrimage week-end in order to witness for themselves the singular scenes of which they shall have heard in the hotels and boarding houses of Claremorris and Ballyhaunis, the nearest neighbouring towns and cases have been known in which the experience has resulted in conversion to the True Faith of Christ.
The principal pilgrimage exercised is the traditional Station performed in full requirement by the active pilgrims, passively by the infirm invalids reposing upon bath-chairs and stretchers in front of the out-of-doors altar, though it is right to say that occasionally some of the latter insist upon being wheeled into the general procession, a wish honoured whenever advisable by the Handmaid, or Steward, on duty. The Station requires a preliminary visit to the Blessed Sacrament, after which the Stations of Cross are performed. The pilgrim next recites the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary as he moves around the exterior of church, an exercise most impressive when, as upon organised occasions, hundreds, sometimes thousands, join in processional performance. The Litany of the B.V.M. is then said at the Apparition gable as a prelude, so to speak, to return to the church for a concluding visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The order for organized pilgrimages is the same, with, however, the addition of hymns, including the Credo. Invariably in connection those more-public approaches of the Shrine the recitation of the entire Rosary, each five decades being said at pre-arranged intervals is extended throughout the period of the journeys to, and from Knock.

From the outset, all-night vigils have been peculiarly characteristic of the established devotions at the Shrine, and it has been suggested that the hallowed atmosphere of Knock-Mhuire may not fully be appreciated until one shall have participated in this impressive, if somewhat exacting exercise. It has transpired moreover, that many of the outstanding cures have taken place during the vigil, or immediately afterwards. Each vigil commences—with the celebration of the Eucharistic Hour from midnight. Private devotions for a further hour are then prescribed, and from two o‘clock until four the pilgrim is engaged in the performance of the traditional Station. This exercise concluded, individual devotion is again resorted to, in preparation for Mass and Holy Communion, whereupon the vigil ends. On the evening of each recurring twenty-first of August, the Apparition is commemorated by a procession in and around the church with lighted candles.

It would be manifestly impossible to include in a work of our present limited scope any recital even remotely approaching a full account of the graces and favours reported from Knock-Mhuire during—recent years. We may, however, briefly offer details of a few of the more arresting cures accounted during the short interval since the launching of the Crusade of Prayer in 1935. Possibly the most remarkable among these later claims was that of a London Sister of Charity, who had long suffered from an ear-trouble, having been attended without avail by several leading specialists. An operation was eventually performed, and the patient was ordered to bed for six months, the surgeon expressing but little hope for her survival, and none for her hearing. But on the following day, the Sister was out of bed, and apparently restored to normal vigour. A non-Catholic doctor, who had previously treated her, was then brought to examine her. He found the wounds healed, and the hearing perfect.”You are cured,” he said,”But it was nothing that I did!,” The Sister attributed her cure solely to the intercession of Our Lady of Knock, in whose honour she had commenced a Novena, applying a piece of cement from the Apparition gable to the affected part. On the fourth day of the Novena she rose in obedience, as she declared, to a voice, saying “Get up, Sister, you are cured!”
In 1936, a young Co. Mayo man was cured of an unsightly and painful rash of long-standing, after bathing his face with water in which a little clay brought from Knock had been placed This sufferer mentions in his thanksgiving that he had had no relief whatever from different methods of treatment, undergone in Dublin and London. A County Wexford child made in I937 marvellous recovery from an attack of meningitis, which had threatened him with imbecility, after his heart-broken parents had, as a last resource, bathed his head with holy water from Knock. From Cork a victim of a serious mastoid reported during the same year, how the wound had unaccountably begun to heal upon return from a pilgrimage to the Shrine, a complete cure being ultimately effected, despite the fact of earlier protracted surgical treatment, which had culminated in two unsuccessful operations. In this case, a slight injury to the face and one of the eyes, sustained during the second operation, was also cured after recourse to Our Lady of Knock. A Sligo pilgrim was cured of neuritis; a Kildare man reported how as a child he had been brought from stone-deafness to perfect hearing after performing the Station at the guidance of his parents; a Mayo mother pre served her baby from imminent danger of choking by sprinkling of Knock water; the crippled arm of a priest was miraculously restored to normality; an American devotee was cured of gangrene after the pious application of clay from near the Shrine; an Australian professional man attributed his recovery from pyorrhea and complete restoration to health, to the advocacy of Our Lady of Knock; a County Galway woman after visiting the shrine was cured of a serious nervous malady which doctors told her had baffled them. Cures as recently reported include also cases of leprosy, cancer, and advanced lung disease.

Lourdes by Robert Hugh Benson. Chapter 9.

Next morning I awoke with a heavy heart, for we were to leave in the motor at half-past eight, I had still a few errands to do, and had made no arrangements for saying Mass; so I went out quickly, a little after seven, and up to the Rosary Church to get some pious objects blessed. It was useless: I could not find the priest of whom I had been told, whose business it is perpetually to bless such things. I went to the basilica, then round by the hill-path down to the Grotto, where I became wedged suddenly and inextricably into a silent crowd.
    For a while I did not understand what they were doing beyond hearing Mass; for I knew that, of course, a Mass was proceeding just round the corner in the cave. But presently I perceived that these were intending communicants. So I made what preparation I could, standing there; and thanked God and His Mother for this unexpected opportunity of saying good-bye in the best way—for I was as sad as a school-boy going the rounds of the house on Black Monday—and after a quarter of an hour or so I was kneeling at the grill, beneath the very image of Mary. After making my thanksgiving, still standing on the other side, I blessed the objects myself—strictly against all rules, I imagine—and came home to breakfast; and before nine we were on our way.
    We were all silent as we progressed slowly and carefully through the crowded streets, seeing once more the patient brancardiers and the pitiful litters on their way to the piscines. I could not have believed that I could have become so much attached to a place in three summer days. As I have said before, everything was against it. There was no leisure, no room to move, no silence, no sense of familiarity. All was hot and noisy and crowded and dusty and unknown. Yet I felt that it was such a home of the soul as I never visited before—of course it is a home, for it is the Mother that makes the home.
    We saw no more of the Grotto nor the churches nor the square nor the statue. Our road led out in such a direction that, after leaving the hotel, we had only commonplace streets, white houses, shops, hotels and crowds; and soon we had passed from the very outskirts of the town, and were beginning with quickening speed to move out along one of those endless straight roads that are the glory of France’s locomotion.
    Yet I turned round in my seat, sick at heart, and pulled the blind that hung over the rear window of the car. No, Lourdes was gone! There was the ring of the eternal hills, blue against the blue summer sky, with their shades of green beneath sloping to the valleys, and the rounded bastions that hold them up. The Gave was gone, the churches gone, the Grotto—all was gone. Lourdes might be a dream of the night.
    No, Lourdes was not gone. For there, high on a hill, above where the holy city lay, stood the cross we had seen first upon our entrance, telling us that if health is a gift of God, it is not the greatest; that the Physician of souls, who healed the sick, and without whom not one sparrow falls to the ground, and not one pang is suffered, Himself had not where to lay His head, and died in pain upon the Tree.
    And even as I looked we wheeled a corner, and the cross was gone.

    How is it possible to end such a story without bathos? I think it is not possible, yet I must end it. An old French priest said one day at Lourdes, to one of those with whom I travelled, that he feared that in these times the pilgrims did not pray so much as they once did, and that this was a bad sign. He spoke also of France as a whole, and its fall. My friend said to him that, in her opinion, if these pilgrims could but be led as an army to Paris—an army, that is, with no weapons except their Rosaries—the country could be retaken in a day.

    Now, I do not know whether the pilgrims once prayed more than they do now; I only know that I never saw any one pray so much; and I cannot help agreeing with my friend that, if this power could be organized, we should hear little more of the apostasy of France. Even as it is, I cannot understand the superior attitude that Christian Englishmen take up with regard to France. It is true that in many districts religion is on a downward course, that the churches are neglected, and that even infidelity is becoming a fashion;[7] but I wonder very much whether, on the whole, taking Lourdes into account, the average piety of France, is not on a very much higher level than the piety of England. The government, as all the world now knows, is not in the least representative of the country; but, sad to relate, the Frenchman is apt to extend his respect for the law into an assumption of its morality. When a law is passed, there is an end of it.
    Yet, judging by the intensity of faith and love and resignation that is evident at Lourdes, and indeed by the numbers of those present, it would seem as if Mary, driven from the towns with her Divine Son, has chosen Lourdes—the very farthest point from Paris—as her earthly home, and draws her children after her, standing there with her back to the wall. I do not think this is fanciful. That which is beyond time and space must communicate with us in those terms; and we can only speak of these things in the same terms. Huysmans expresses the same thing in other words. Even if Bernadette were deceived, he says, at any rate these pilgrims are not; even if Mary did not come in 1858 to the banks of the Gave, she has certainly come there since, drawn by the thousands of souls that have gone to seek her there.
    This, then, is the last thing I can say about Lourdes. It is quite useless as evidence—indeed it would be almost impertinent to dare to offer further evidence at all—yet I may as well hand it in as my contribution. It is this, that Lourdes is soaked, saturated and kindled by the all but sensible presence of the Mother of God. I am quite aware of all that can be said about subjectivity and auto-suggestion, and the rest; but there comes a point in all arguments when nothing is worth anything except an assertion of a personal conviction. Such, then, is mine.
    First, it was borne in upon me what a mutilated Christianity that is which practically takes no account of Mary. This fragmentary, lopsided faith was that in which I myself had been brought up, and which to-day still is the faith of the majority of my fellow-countrymen. The Mother of God—the Second Eve, the Immaculate Maiden Mother, who, as if to balance Eve at the Tree of Death, stood by the Tree of Life—in popular non-Catholic theology is banished, with the rest of those who have passed away, to a position of complete insignificance. This arrangement, I had become accustomed to believe, was that of Primitive Christianity and of the Christianity of all sensible men: Romanism had added to the simple Gospel, and had treated the Mother of God with an honour which she would have been the first to deprecate.
    Well, I think that at Lourdes the startling contrast between facts and human inventions was, in this respect, first made vivid to my imagination. I understood how puzzling it must be for “old Catholics,” to whom Mary is as real and active as her Divine Son, to understand the sincerity of those to whom she is no more than a phantom, and who yet profess and call themselves Christians. Why, at Lourdes Mary is seen to stand, to all but outward eyes, in exactly that position in which at Nazareth, at Cana, in the Acts of the Apostles, in the Catacombs, and in the whole history of Christendom, true lovers of her Son have always seen her—a Mother of God and man, tender, authoritative, silent, and effective!
    Yet, strangely enough, it is not at all the ordinary and conventional character of a merely tender mother that reveals itself at Lourdes—one who is simply desirous of relieving pain and giving what is asked. There comes upon one instead the sense of a tremendous personage—Regina Coeli as well as Consolatrix Afflictorum—one who says “No” as well as “Yes,” and with the same serenity; yet with the “No” gives strength to receive it. I have heard it said that the greatest miracle of all at Lourdes is the peace and resignation, even the happiness, of those who, after expectation has been wrought to the highest, go disappointed away, as sick as they came. Certainly that is an amazing fact. The tears of the young man in the piscine were the only tears of sorrow I saw at Lourdes.
    Mary, then, has appeared to me in a new light since I have visited Lourdes. I shall in future not only hate to offend her, but fear it also. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of that Mother who allows the broken sufferer to crawl across France to her feet—and then to crawl back again. She is one of the Maries of Chartres, that reveals herself here, dark, mighty, dominant, and all but inexorable; not the Mary of an ecclesiastical shop, who dwells amid tinsel and tuberoses. She is Sedes Sapientiæ, Turris Eburnea, Virgo Paritura, strong and tall and glorious, pierced by seven swords, yet serene as she looks to her Son.
    Yet, at the same time, the tenderness of her great heart shows itself at Lourdes almost beyond bearing. She is so great and so loving! It affects those to whom one speaks—the quiet doctors, even those who, through some confusion of mind or some sin, find it hard to believe; the strong brancardiers, who carry their quivering burdens with such infinite care; the very sick themselves, coming back from the piscines in agony, yet with the faces of those who come down from the altar after Holy Communion. The whole place is alive with Mary and the love of God—from the inadequate statue at the Grotto to the brazen garlands in the square, even as far as the illuminated castle and the rockets that burst and bang against the steady stars. If I were sick of some deadly disease, and it were revealed to me that I must die, yet none the less I should go to Lourdes; for if I should not be healed by Mary, I could at least learn how to suffer as a Christian ought. God has chosen this place—He only knows why, as He, too, alone chooses which man shall suffer and which be glad—He has chosen this place to show His power; and therefore has sent His Mother there, that we may look through her to Him.
    Is this, then, all subjectivity and romantic dreaming? Well, but there are the miracles!

ENDNOTES

    [Endnote: 1] The epithet is deliberate. He relates in his book, “Lourdes,” the story of an imaginary case of a girl, suffering from tuberculosis, who goes to Lourdes as a pilgrim, and is, apparently, cured of her disease. It breaks out, however, again during her return home; and the case would appear therefore to be one of those in which, owing to fierce excitement and the mere power of suggestion, there is a temporary amelioration, but no permanent, or supernatural, cure. Will it be believed that the details of this story, all of which are related with great particularity, and observed by Zola himself, were taken from an actual case that occurred during one of his visits—all the details except the relapse? There was no relapse: the cure was complete and permanent. When Dr. Boissarie later questioned the author as to the honesty of this literary device, saying that he had understood him to have stated that he had come to Lourdes for the purpose of an impartial investigation, Zola answered that the characters in the book were his own, and that he could make them do what he liked. It is on these principles that the book is constructed. It must be added that Zola followed up the case, and had communications with the miraculée long after her cure had been shown to be permanent, and before his book appeared.
    [Endnote: 2] La Voix de Lourdes , a semi-official paper, gives the following account of her, in its issue of the 23rd: “... Marguerite Vandenabeele, 10 ans , de Nieurlet, hameau de Hedezeele, ( Nord ), est arrivée avec un des trains de Paris, portant un certificat du Docteur Dantois, daté de St. Momeleu ( Nord ) lé 25 mai , 1908, la déclarant atteinte d’atrophie de la jambe gauche avec pied-bot équin . Elle ne marchait que très difficilement et très péniblement . A la sortie de la piscine , vendredi soir, elle a pu marcher facilement . Amenée au Bureau Médical, on l’a débarrassée de l’appareil dans lequel était enfermé son pied. Depuis , elle marche bien , et parait guérie.”
    [Endnote: 3] This was written in the autumn of the year 1908, in which this visit of mine took place.
    [Endnote: 4] Since 1888 the registered cures are estimated as follows: ’88, 57; ’89, 44; ’90, 80; ’91, 53; ’92, 99; ’93, 91; ’94, 127; ’95, 163; ’96, 145; ’97, 163; ’98, 243; ’99, 174; 1900, 160; ’01, 171; ’02, 164; ’03, 161; ’04, 140; ’05, 157; ’06, 148; ’07, 109.
    [Endnote: 5] My notes are rather illegible at this point, but I make no doubt that this was Marie Cools.
    [Endnote: 6] The official numbers of those at the afternoon procession were 341.
    [Endnote: 7] It must be remembered that this was written six years ago, and is no longer true.

Lourdes by Robert Hugh Benson. Chapter 8.

The moment Benediction was given, the room began rapidly to fill; but I still watched the singing crowd outside. Among others I noticed a woman, placid and happy—such a woman as you would see a hundred times a day in London streets, with jet ornaments in her hat, middle-aged, almost startlingly commonplace. No, nothing dramatic happened to her; that was the point. But there she was, taking it all for granted, joining in the Magnificat with a roving eye, pleased as she would have been pleased at a circus; interrupting herself to talk to her neighbour; and all the while gripping in a capable hand, on which shone a wedding ring, the bars of the Bureau window behind which I sat, that she might make the best of both worlds—Grace without and Science within. She, as I, had seen what God had done; now she proposed to see what the doctors would make of it all; and have, besides, a good view of the miraculés when they appeared.
    I suppose it was her astonishing ordinariness that impressed me. It was surprising to see such a one during such a scene; it was as incongruous as a man riding a bicycle on the judgment Day. Yet she, too, served to make it all real. She was like the real tree in the foreground of a panorama. She served the same purpose as the Voix de Lourdes, a briskly written French newspaper that gives the lists of the miracles.
    When I turned round at last, the room was full. Among the people present I remember an Hungarian canon, and the Brazilian Bishop with six others. Dr. Deschamps, late of Lille, now of Paris, was in the chair; and I sat next him.
    The first patient to enter was Euphrasie Bosc, a dark girl of twenty-seven. She rolled a little in her walk as she came in; then she sat down and described the “white swellings” on her knee, with other details; she told how she had been impelled to rise during the procession just now. She was made to walk round the room to show her state, and was then sent off, and told to return at another time.
    Next came Emma Sansen, a pale girl of twenty-five. She had suffered from endo-pericarditis for five years, as her certificate showed; she had been confined to her room for two years. She told her story quickly and went out.
    There followed Sister Marguérite Emilie, an Assumptionist, aged thirty-nine, a brisk, brown-faced, tall woman, in her religious habit. Her malady had been mal de Pott, a severe spinal affliction, accompanied by abscesses and other horrors. She, too, appeared in the best of health.

    We began then to hear a doctor give news of a certain Irish Religious, cured that morning in the piscines; but we were interrupted by the entry of Emile Lansman, a solid artisan of twenty-five who came in walking cheerfully, carrying a crutch and a stick which he no longer needed. Paralysis of the right leg and traumatism of the spine had been his, up to that day. Now he carried his crutch.
    He was followed by another man whose name I did not catch, and on whose case I wrote so rapidly that I am scarcely able to read all my notes. His story, in brief, was as follows. He had had some while ago a severe accident, which involved a kind of appalling disembowelment. For the last year or two he had had gastric troubles of all kinds, including complete loss of appetite. His certificate showed too, that he suffered from partial paralysis (he himself showed us how little he had been able to open his fingers), and anæsthesia of the right arm. (I looked over Dr. Deschamps’ shoulder and read on the paper the words lésion incurable). It was certified further that he was incapable of manual work. Then he described to us how yesterday in the piscine, upon coming out of the bath, he had been aware of a curious sensation of warmth in the stomach; he had then found that, for the first time for many months, he wished for food; he was given it, and he enjoyed it. He moved his fingers in a normal manner, raised his arm and let it fall.
    Then for the first time in the Bureau I heard a sharp controversy. One doctor suddenly broke out, saying that there was no actual proof that it was not all “hysterical simulation.” Another answered him; an appeal was made to the certificate. Then the first doctor delivered a little speech, in excellent taste, though casting doubt upon the case; and the matter was then set aside for investigation with the rest. I heard Dr. Boissarie afterwards thank him for his admirable little discourse.
    Finally, though it was getting late, Honorie Gras, aged thirty-five, came in to give her evidence. She had suffered till to-day from “purulent arthritis” and “white swellings” on the left knee. To-day she walked. Her certificate confirmed her, and she was dismissed.
    It was all very matter-of-fact. There is no reason to fear that Lourdes is all hymn-singing and adjurations. It is a pleasure to think that, on the right of the Rosary Church, and within a hundred yards of the Grotto, there is this little room, filled with keen-eyed doctors from every school of faith and science, who have only to present their cards and be made free of all that Lourdes has to show. They are keen-brained as well as keen-eyed. I heard one of them say quietly that if the Mother of God, as it appeared, cured incurable cases, it was hard to deny to her the power of curing curable cases also. It does not prove, that is to say, that a cure is not miraculous, if it might have been cured by human aid. And it is interesting and suggestive to remember that of such cases one hears little or nothing. For every startling miracle that is verified in the Bureau, I wonder how many persons go home quietly, freed from some maddening little illness by the mercy of Mary—some illness that is worthless as a “case” in scientific eyes, yet none the less as real as is its cure?
    Of course one element that tends to keep from the grasp of the imagination all the miracles of the place is all this scientific phraseology. In the simple story of the Gospel, it seems almost supernaturally natural that a man should have “lain with an infirmity for forty years,” and should, at the word of Jesus Christ, have taken up his bed and walked; or that, as in the “Acts,” another’s “feet and ankle-bones should receive strength” by the power of the Holy Name. But when we come to tuberculosis and mal de Pott and lésion incurable and “hysterical simulation,” in some manner we seem to find ourselves in rather a breathless and stuffy room, where the white flower of the supernatural appears strangely languid to the eye of the imagination.
    That, however, is all as it should be. We are bound to have these things. Perhaps the most startling miracle of all is that the Bureau and the Grotto stand side by side, and that neither stifles the other. Is it possible that here at last Science and Religion will come to terms, and each confess with wonder the capacities of the other, and, with awe, that divine power that makes them what they are, and has “set them their bounds which they shall not pass?” It would be remarkable if France, of all countries, should be the scene of that reconciliation between these estranged sisters.
    That night, after dinner, I went out once more to see the procession with torches; and this time my friend and I each took a candle, that we might join in that act of worship. First, however, I went down to the robinets—the taps which flow between the Grotto and the piscines—and, after a heart crushing struggle, succeeded in filling my bottle with the holy water. It was astonishing how selfish one felt while still in the battle, and how magnanimous when one had gained the victory. I filled also the bottle of a voluble French priest, who despairingly extended it toward me as he still fought in the turmoil. “Eh, bien!” cried a stalwart Frenchwoman at my side, who had filled her bottle and could not extricate herself. “If you will not permit me to depart, I remain!” The argument was irresistible; the crowd laughed childishly and let her out.
    Now, I regret to say that once more the churches were outlined in fairy electric lamps, that the metallic garlands round our Mother’s statue blazed with them; that, even worse, the old castle on the hill and the far away Calvary were also illuminated; and, worst of all, that the procession concluded with fireworks—rockets and bombs. Miracles in the afternoon; fireworks in the evening!
    Yet the more I think of it, the less am I displeased. When one reflects that more than half of the enormous crowd came, probably, from tiny villages in France—where a rocket is as rare as an angelic visitation; and, on the carnal side, as beautiful in their eyes—it seems a very narrow-minded thing to object. It is true that you and I connect fireworks with Mafeking night or Queen Victoria’s Jubilee; and that they seem therefore incongruous when used to celebrate a visitation of God. But it is not so with these people. For them it is a natural and beautiful way of telling the glory of Him who is the Dayspring from on high, who is the Light to lighten the Gentiles, whose Mother is the Stella Matutina, whose people once walked in darkness and now have seen a great Light. It is their answer—the reflection in the depths of their sea—to the myriad lights of that heaven which shines over Lourdes. Therefore let us leave the fireworks in peace.
    It was a very moving thing to walk in that procession, with a candle in one hand and a little paper book in the other, and help to sing the story of Bernadette, with the unforgettable Aves at the end of each verse, and the Laudate Mariam, and the Nicene Creed. Credo in ... unam sanctam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam. My heart leaped at that. For where else but in the Catholic Church do such things happen as these that I had seen? Imagine, if you please, miracles in Manchester! Certainly they might happen there, if there were sufficient Catholics gathered in His Name; but put for Manchester, Exeter Hall or St. Paul’s Cathedral! The thought is blindingly absurd. No; the Christianity of Jesus Christ lives only in the Catholic Church.
    There alone in the whole round world do you find that combination of lofty doctrine, magnificent moral teaching, the frank recognition of the Cross; sacramentalism logically carried out, yet gripping the heart as no amateur mysticism can do; and miracles. “Mercy and Truth have met together.” “These signs shall follow them that believe.... Faith can remove mountains.... All things are possible to him that believes.... Whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in My Name.... Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.” There alone, where souls are built upon Peter, do these things really happen.
    I have been asked lately whether I am “happy” in the Catholic Church. Happy! What can one say to a question like that? Does one ask a man who wakes up from a foolish dream to sunshine in his room, and to life and reality, whether he is happy? Of course many non-Catholics are happy. I was happy myself as an Anglican; but as a Catholic one does not use the word; one does not think about it. The whole of life is different; that is all that can be said. Faith is faith, not hope; God is Light, not twilight; eternity, heaven, hell, purgatory, sin and its consequences—these things are facts, not guesses and conjectures and suspicions desperately clung to. “How hard it is to be a Christian!” moans the persevering non-Catholic. “How impossible it is to be anything else!” cries the Catholic.
    We went round, then, singing. The procession was so huge that it seemed to have no head and no tail. It involved itself a hundred times over; it swirled in the square, it humped itself over the Rosary Church; it elongated itself half a mile away up beyond our Mother’s garlanded statue; it eddied round the Grotto. It was one immense pool and river of lights and song. Each group sang by itself till it was overpowered by another; men and women and children strolled along patiently singing and walking, knowing nothing of where they went, nothing of what they would be singing five minutes hence. It depended on the voice-power of their neighbours.
    For myself, I found myself in a dozen groups, before, at last, after an hour or so, I fell out of the procession and went home. Now I walked cheek by jowl with a retired officer; now with an artisan; once there came swiftly up behind a company of “Noelites”—those vast organizations of boys and girls in France—singing the Laudate Mariam to my Ave Maria; now in the middle of a group of shop-girls who exchanged remarks with one another whenever they could fetch breath. I think it was all the most joyous and the most spontaneous (as it was certainly the largest) human function in which I have ever taken part. I have no idea whether there were any organizers of it all—at least I saw none. Once or twice a solitary priest in the midst, walking backward and waving his arms, attempted to reconcile conflicting melodies; once a very old priest; with a voice like the tuba stop on the organ, turned a humorously furious face over his shoulder to quell some mistake—from his mouth, the while issuing this amazingly pungent volume of sound. But I think these were the only attempts at organization that I saw.
    And so at last I dropped out and went home, hoarse but very well content. I had walked for more than an hour—from the statue, over the lower church and down again, up the long avenue, and back again to the statue. The fireworks were over, the illuminations died, and the day was done; yet still the crowds went round and the voice of conflicting melody went up without cessation. As I went home the sound was still in my ears. As I dropped off to sleep, I still heard it.

Lourdes by Robert Hugh Benson. Chapter 4.

I awoke to that singing again, in my room above the door of the hotel; and went down presently to say my Mass in the Rosary Church, where, by the kindness of the Scottish priest of whom I have spoken, an altar had been reserved for me. The Rosary Church is tolerably fine within. It has an immense flattened dome, beyond which stands the high altar; and round about are fifteen chapels dedicated to the Fifteen Mysteries, which are painted above their respective altars.
    But I was to say Mass in a little temporary chapel to the left of the entrance, formed, I suppose, out of what usually serves as some kind of a sacristy. The place was hardly forty feet long; its high altar, at which I both vested and said Mass, was at the farther end; but each side, too, was occupied by three priests, celebrating simultaneously upon altar-stones laid on long, continuous boards that ran the length of the chapel. The whole of the rest of the space was crammed to overflowing; indeed it had been scarcely possible to get entrance to the chapel at all, so vast was the crowd in the great church outside.
    After breakfast I went down to the Bureau once more, and found business already begun. The first case, which was proceeding as I entered, was that of a woman (whose name I could not catch) who had been cured of consumption in the previous year, and who now came back to report a state of continued good health. Her brother-in-law came with her, and she remarked with pleasure that the whole family was now returning to the practice of religion. During this investigation I noticed also Juliette Gosset seated at the table, apparently in robust health.
    There followed Natalie Audivin, a young woman who declared that she had been cured in the previous year, and that she supposed her case had been entered in the books; but at the moment, at any rate, her name could not be found, and for the present the case was dismissed.
    I now saw a Capuchin priest in the room—a small, rosy, bearded man—and supposed that he was present merely as a spectator; but a minute or two later Dr. Boissarie caught sight of him, and presently was showing him off to me, much to his smiling embarrassment. He had caught consumption of the intestines, it seemed, some years before, from attending upon two of his dying brethren, and had come to Lourdes almost at his last gasp in the year 1900 A. D. Here he stood, smiling and rosy.
    There followed Mademoiselle Madeleine Laure, cured of severe internal troubles (I did not catch the details) in the previous year.
    Presently the Bishop of Dalmatia came in, and sat in his chair opposite me, while we heard the account of Miss Noemie Nightingale, of Upper Norwood, cured in the previous June of deafness, rising, in the case of one ear at least, from a perforation of the drum. She was present at the piscines, when on a sudden she had felt excruciating pains in the ears. The next she knew was that she heard the Magnificat being sung in honour of her cure.
    Mademoiselle Marie Bardou came in about this time, and passed through to the inner room to be examined; while we received from a doctor a report of the lame child whom we had seen on the previous day. All was as had been said. She could now put her heels to the ground and walk. It seemed she had been conscious of a sensation of hammering in her feet at the moment of the cure, followed by a feeling of relief.
    And so they went on. Next came Mademoiselle Eugénie Meunier, cured two months before of fistula. She had given her certificate into the care of her curé, who could not at this moment be found—naturally enough, as she had made no appointment with him!—but she was allowed to tell her story, and to show a copy of her parish magazine in which her story was given. She had had in her body one wound of ten centimetres in size. After bathing one evening she had experienced relief; by the next morning the wound, which had flowed for six months, was completely closed, and had remained so. Her strength and appetite had returned. This cure had taken place in her own lodging, since her state was such that she was forbidden to go to the Grotto.
    The next case was that of a woman with paralysis, who was entered provisionally as one of the “améliorations.” She was now able to walk, but the use of her hand was not yet fully restored. She was sent back to the piscines, and ordered to report again later.
    The next was a boy of about twelve years old, Hilaire Ferraud, cured of a terrible disease of the bone three years before. Until that time he was unable to walk without support. He had been cured in the piscines. He had been well ever since. He followed the trade of a carpenter. And now he hopped solemnly, first on one leg and then on the other, to the door and back, to show his complete recovery. Further, he had had running wounds on one leg, now healed. His statements were verified.
    The next was an oldish man, who came accompanied by his tall, black-bearded son, to report on his continued good health since his recovery, eight years previously, from neurasthenia and insanity. He had had the illusion of being persecuted, with suicidal tendencies; he had been told he could not travel twenty miles, and he had travelled over eight hundred kilometres, after four years’ isolation. He had stayed a few months in Lourdes, bathing in the piscines, and the obsession had left him. His statements were verified; he was congratulated and dismissed.
    There followed Emma Mourat to report; and then Madame Simonet, cured eight years ago of a cystic tumour in the abdomen. She had been sitting in one of the churches, I think, when there was a sudden discharge of matter, and a sense of relief. On the morrow, after another bath, the sense of discomfort had finally disappeared. During Madame Simonet’s examination, as the crowd was great, several persons were dismissed till a later hour.
    There followed another old patient to report. She had been cured two years before of myelitis and an enormous tumour that, after twenty-two years of suffering, had been declared “incurable” in her certificate. The cure had taken place during the procession, in the course of which she suddenly felt herself, she said, impelled to rise from her litter. Her appetite had returned and she had enjoyed admirable health ever since. Her name was looked up, and the details verified.
    There followed Madame François and some doctor’s evidence. Nine years ago she had been cured of fistula in the arm. She had been operated upon five times; finally, as her arm measured a circumference of seventy-two centimetres, amputation had been declared necessary. She had refused, and had come to Lourdes. Her cure occupied three days, at the end of which her arm had resumed its normal size of twenty-five centimetres. She showed her arm, with faint scars visible upon it; it was again measured and found normal.
    It was an amazing morning. Here I had sat for nearly three hours, seeing with my own eyes persons of all ages and both sexes, suffering from every variety of disease, present themselves before sixty or seventy doctors, saying that they had been cured miraculously by the Mother of God. Various periods had elapsed since their cures—a day, two or three months, one year, eight years, nine years. These persons had been operated upon, treated, subjected to agonizing remedies; one or two had been declared actually incurable; and then, either in an instant, or during the lapse of two or three days, or two or three months, had been restored to health by prayer and the application of a little water in no way remarkable for physical qualities.

    What do the doctors say to this? Some confess frankly that it is miraculous in the literal sense of the term, and join with the patients in praising Mary and her Divine Son. Some say nothing; some are content to say that science at its present stage cannot account for it all, but that in a few years, no doubt ... and the rest of it. I did not hear any say that: “He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils”; but that is accounted for by the fact that those who might wish to say it do not believe in Beelzebub.
    But will science ever account for it all? That I leave to God. All that I can say is that, if so, it is surely as wonderful as any miracle, that the Church should have hit upon a secret that the scientists have missed. But is there not a simpler way of accounting for it? For read and consider the human evidence as regards Bernadette—her age, her simplicity, her appearance of ecstasy. She said that she saw this Lady eighteen times; on one of these occasions, in the presence of bystanders. She was bidden, she said, to go to the water. She turned to go down to the Gave, but was recalled and bidden to dig in the earth of the Grotto. She did so, and a little muddy water appeared where no soul in the village knew that there was water. Hour by hour this water waxed in volume; to-day it pours out in an endless stream, is conducted through the piscines; and it is after washing in this water that bodies are healed in a fashion for which “science cannot account.” Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it is not intended. But there are things besides science, and one of them is religion. Is not the evidence tolerably strong? Or is it a series of coincidences that the child had an hallucination, devised some trick with the water, and that this water happens to be an occasion of healing people declared incurable by known means?
    What is the good of these miracles? If so many are cured, why are not all? Are the miraculés especially distinguished for piety? Is it to be expected that unbelievers will be convinced? Is it claimed that the evidence is irresistible? Let us go back to the Gospels. It used to be said by doubters that the “miraculous element” must have been added later by the piety of the disciples, because all the world knew now that “miracles” did not happen. That a priori argument is surely silenced by Lourdes. “Miracles” in that sense undoubtedly do happen, if present-day evidence is worth anything whatever. What, then, is the Christian theory?
    It is this. Our Blessed Lord appears to have worked miracles of such a nature that their significance was not, historically speaking, absolutely evident to those who, for other reasons, did not “believe in Him.” It is known how some asked for a “sign from heaven” and were refused it; how He Himself said that even if one rose from the dead, they would not believe; yet, further, how He begged them to believe Him even for His work’s sake, if for nothing else. We know, finally, how, when confronted with one particular miracle, His enemies cried out that it must have been done by diabolical agency.
    Very good, then. It would seem that the miracles of Our Lord were of a nature that strongly disposed to belief those that witnessed them, and helped vastly in the confirmation of the faith of those who already believed; but that miracles, as such, cannot absolutely compel the belief of those who for moral reasons refuse it. If they could, faith would cease to be faith.
    Now, this seems precisely the state of affairs at Lourdes. Even unbelieving scientists are bound to admit that science at present cannot account for the facts, which is surely the modern equivalent for the Beelzebub theory. We have seen, too, how severely scientific persons such as Dr. Boissarie and Dr. Cox—if they will permit me to quote their names—knowing as well as anyone what medicine and surgery and hypnotism and suggestion can and cannot do, corroborate this evidence, and see in the facts a simple illustration of the truth of that Catholic Faith which they both hold and practise.
    Is not the parallel a fair one? What more, then, do the adversaries want? There is no arguing with people who say that, since there is nothing but Nature, no process can be other than natural. There is no sign, even from heaven, that could break down the intellectual prejudice of such people. If they saw Jesus Christ Himself in glory, they could always say that “at present science cannot account for the phenomenon of a luminous body apparently seated upon a throne, but no doubt it will do so in the course of time.” If they saw a dead and corrupting man rise from the grave, they could always argue that he could not have been dead and corrupting, or he could not have risen from the grave. Nothing but the Last Judgment could convince such persons. Even when the trumpet sounds, I believe that some of them, when they have recovered from their first astonishment, will make remarks about aural phenomena.
    But for the rest of us, who believe in God and His Son and the Mother of God on quite other grounds—because our intellect is satisfied, our heart kindled, our will braced by the belief; and because without that belief all life falls into chaos, and human evidence is nullified, and all noble motive and emotion cease—for us, who have received the gift of faith, in however small a measure, Lourdes is enough. Christ and His Mother are with us. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. Is not that, after all, the simplest theory?