nner in which I was
spending it with that in which the average believing Christian spends
Sunday afternoon. As a child, I used to walk with my father, and he used
to read and talk on religious subjects; on our return we used to have a
short Bible-class in his study. As an Anglican clergyman, I used to
teach in Sunday schools or preach to children. As a Catholic priest, I
used occasionally to attend at catechism. At all these times the
miraculous seemed singularly far away; we looked at it across twenty
centuries; it was something from which lessons might be drawn, upon
which the imagination might feed, but it was a state of affairs as
remote as the life of prehistoric man; one assented to it, and that was
all. And here at Lourdes it was a present, vivid event. I sat at an
ordinary glass window, in a soutane made by an English tailor, with
another Englishman beside me, and saw the miraculous happen. Time and
space disappeared; the centuries shrank and vanished; and behold we saw
that which "prophets and kings have desired to see and have not seen!"

Of course "scientific" arguments, of the sort which I have related, can
be brought forward in an attempt to explain Lourdes; but they are the
same arguments that can be, and are, brought forward against the
miracles of Jesus Christ Himself. I say nothing to those here; I leave
that to scientists such as Dr. Boissarie; but what I cannot understand
is that professing Christians are able to bring _a priori_ arguments
against the fact that Our Lord is the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever--the same in Galilee and in France. "These signs shall follow them
that believe," He said Himself; and the history of the Catholic Church
is an exact fulfilment of the words. It was so, St. Augustine tells us,
at the tombs of the martyrs; five hundred miracles were reported at
Canterbury within a few years of St. Thomas' martyrdom. And now here is
Lourdes, as it has been for fifty years, in this little corner of poor
France!

I have been asked since my return: "Why cannot miracles be done in
England?" My answer is, firstly, that they are done in England, in
Liverpool, and at Holywell, for example; secondly, I answer by another
question as to why Jesus Christ was not born in Rome; and if He had been
born in Rome, why not in Nineveh and Jerusalem? Thirdly, I answer that
perhaps more would be done in England, if there were more faith there.
It is surely a little unreasonable to ask that, in a c