ountry which
three hundred and fifty years ago deliberately repudiated Christ's
Revelation of Himself, banished the Blessed Sacrament and tore down
Mary's shrines, Christ and His Mother should cooperate supernaturally in
marvels that are rather the rewards of the faithful. "It is not meet to
take the children's bread and to cast it to the dogs"--these are the
words of our Lord Himself. If London is not yet tolerant enough to allow
an Eucharistic Procession in her streets, she is scarcely justified in
demanding that our Eucharistic Lord should manifest His power. "He could
do no mighty work there," says the Evangelist, of Capharnaum, "because
of their unbelief."

This, then, is the supreme fact of Lourdes: that Jesus Christ in His
Sacrament passes along that open square, with the sick laid in beds on
either side; and that at His word the lame walk and lepers are cleansed
and deaf hear--that they are seen leaping and dancing for joy.

Even now, writing within ten days of my return, all seems like a dream;
and yet I know that I saw it. For over thirty years I had been
accustomed to repeat the silly formula that "the age of miracles is
past"; that they were necessary for the establishment of Christianity,
but that they are no longer necessary now, except on extremely rare
occasions perhaps; and in my heart I knew my foolishness. Why, for those
thirty years Lourdes had been in existence! And if I spoke of it at all,
I spoke only of hysteria and auto-suggestion and French imaginativeness,
and the rest of the nonsense. It is impossible for a Christian who has
been at Lourdes to speak like that again.

And as for the unreality, that does not trouble me. I have no doubt that
those who saw the bandages torn from the leper's limbs and the sound
flesh shown beneath, or the once blind man, his eyes now dripping with
water of Siloe, looking on Him who had made him whole, or heard the
marvellous talk of "men like trees walking," and the rest--I have no
doubt that ten days later they sat themselves with unseeing eyes, and
wondered whether it was indeed they who had witnessed those things.
Human nature, like a Leyden jar, cannot hold beyond a fixed quantity;
and this human nature, with experience, instincts, education, common
talk, public opinion, and all the rest of it, echoing round it; the
assumption that miracles _do not happen_; that laws are laws; in other
words, that Deism is the best that can be hoped--well, it is little
wond