16 September, 1914, which
contains no evidence of genuineness and must therefore meanwhile be
regarded merely as an ingenious literary conceit.

3

All these, on examination, leave but a worthless residuum; but the
prophecies of the Rector of Ars and of Leon Sonrel are more curious
and worthy of a moment's attention.

Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector of Ars, was, as everybody knows,
a very saintly priest, who appears to have been endowed with
extraordinary mediumistic faculties. The prophecy in question was
made public in 1862, three years after the miracle-worker's death, and
was confirmed by a letter which Mgr. Perriet addressed to the Very
Rev. Dom Grea on the 24th of February, 1908. Moreover, it was printed,
as far back as 1872, in a collection entitled, _Voix prophetiques, ou
signes, apparitions et predictions modernes_. It therefore has an
incontestable date. I pass over the part relating to the war of 1870,
which does not offer the same safeguards; but I give that which
concerns the present war, quoting from the 1872 text:

"The enemies will not go altogether; they will return again
and destroy everything upon their passage; we shall not
resist them, but will allow them to advance; and after that
we shall cut off their provisions and make them suffer great
losses. They will retreat towards their country; we shall
follow them and there will be hardly any who return home.
Then we shall take back all that they took from us and much
more."

As for the date of the event, it is stated definitely and rather
strikingly in these words:

"They will want to canonize me, but there will not be time."

Now the preliminaries to the canonization of Father Vianney were begun
in July, 1914, but abandoned because of the war.

I now come to the Sonrel prediction. I will summarize it as briefly as
possible from the admirable article which M. de Vesme devoted to it in
the _Annales des sciences psychiques_.[9]

On the 3rd of June, 1914--observe the date--Professor Charles Richet
handed M. de Vesme, from Dr. Amedee Tardieu, a manuscript of which
the following is the substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July, 1869, Dr.
Tardieu was strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend
Leon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of
natural philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a
kind of vision in the course of which he predicted various