"What I can"t yet quite understand," said Monsignor, "is that point I mentioned the other day about Faith and Science. I don"t see where one ends and the other begins. It seems to me that the controversy must be unending. The materialist says that since Nature does all things, even the most amazing things must be done by her--that we shall be able to explain them all some day, when Science has got a little farther. And the theologian says that some things are so evidently out of the reach of Nature that they must be done by a supernatural power. Well, where"s the point of reconciliation?"
Father Jervis was silent for a while.
The two were sitting on the upper deck of an air-ship towards evening, travelling straight towards the setting sun.
He had grown almost accustomed to such views by now; and yet the sight that had been unrolling itself gradually during the last half-hour had held him fascinated for minute after minute. They had taken ship in Rome after a day or two more of sight-seeing, and had moved up the peninsula by stages, changing boats soon after crossing the frontier, for one of the high-flying, more leisurely and more luxurious vessels on which the more wealthy cla.s.ses travelled. They were due in Lourdes that evening; and, ever since the higher peaks of the Pyrenees had come into sight, had moved over a vision of bewildering beauty. To their left rose the mountains, forming, it seemed to them at the height at which they travelled, an enormous jagged and gigantic pile, hard-lined as steel, yet irradiated with long rays, patches, and pools of golden sunset-light alternated by amazing depths of the shadow whose tones ran from peac.o.c.k to indigo. Then from the feet of the tumbled pile there ran out what appeared a loosely flung carpet vivid and yet a soft green, patched here and there with white towns, embroideries of woodland, lines of silver water. Yet this too was changing as they watched the shadows grow longer with almost visible movement. New and strange colours, varying about a fixed note of blue according to the nature of that with which the earth was covered, slowly came into being. Here, in front, now and again a patch of water glowed suddenly, three thousand feet beneath, as it met the shifting angle between the eye and the sun; and beyond, far out across the darkening plain, shone the remote line of the sea, itself ablaze with gold, and above and about in every quarter burned the enormous luminous dome of sky.
"I can"t put it all accurately," said Father Jervis at last. "I mean I can"t tell you off-hand all the tests that are exactly applied to every case. But it"s something like this. . . ."
He paused.
"Yes, tell me," said the other, still staring out at the softly rolling landscape.
"Well, first," began the old priest slowly, "in the last fifty years we"ve cla.s.sified almost exhaustively everything that nature can do. We know, for instance, for certain, that in certain kinds of temperaments body and mind are in far greater sympathy than in others; and that if, in such a temperament as this, the mind can be fully persuaded that such and such a thing is going to happen--a thing within the range of natural possibility, of course--it will happen, merely through the action of the mind upon the body."
"Give me an instance."
"Well" (he hesitated again) . . . "well, I"m not a physician, and cannot define accurately; but there are certain nervous diseases--hysterical simulation, nervous affections such as St.
Vitus" dance--as well, of course, as purely mental diseases, such as certain kinds of insanity---"
"Oh, those," said the other contemptuously.
"Wait a minute. These, I say, given the right temperament and receptiveness to suggestion, can be cured _instantaneously_."
"Instantaneously?"
"Certainly--given those conditions. Then there are certain other diseases, very closely related to the nervous system, in which there have been changes of tissue, not only in the brain, but in the organs or the limbs. And these, too, can be cured by mere natural suggestion; but--and this is the point--not instantaneously. In cases of this kind, cured in this way, there is always needed a period, I won"t say as long as, but proportionate to, the period during which the disease had been developing and advancing. I forget the exact proportions now, but I think, so far as I remember, that at least two-thirds of the time is required for recovery by suggestion as was occupied by the growth of the disease. Take _lupus_. That certainly belongs to the cla.s.s I"m speaking of. Well, lupus has been cured in mental laboratories, but never instantaneously or anything like instantaneously."
"Go on, father."
"Finally, there are those physical states that have practically nothing to do directly with the nervous system at all. Take a broken leg. Of course the cure of a broken leg is affected by the state of the nervous system, since it depends upon the amount of vital energy, the state of the blood, and so on. But there are distinct processes of change of tissue that are bound to take a certain fixed period. You may--as has been proved over and over again in the mental laboratories--hasten and direct the action of the nervous energy, so that a man under hypnotic suggestion will improve more rapidly than a man who is not. But no amount of suggestion can possibly effect a cure instantaneously. Tuberculosis is another such thing; certain diseases of the heart---"
"I see. Go on."
"Well, then, science has fixed certain periods in all these various matters which simply cannot be lessened beyond a certain point. And miracle does not begin--authorized miracle, I mean--unless these periods are markedly shortened. Mere mental cures, therefore, do not come under the range of authorized miracle at all--though, of course, in many cases where there has been little or no suggestion, or where the temperament is not receptive, practically speaking, the miraculous element is most probably present. In the second cla.s.s--organic nervous diseases--no miracle is proclaimed unless the cure is instantaneous, or very nearly so. In the third cla.s.s, again, no miracle is proclaimed unless the cure is either instantaneous, or the period of it very considerably shortened beyond all known examples of natural cure by suggestion."
"And you mean to say that such cures are frequent?"
The old priest smiled.
"Why, of course. There is an acc.u.mulation of evidence from the past hundred years which----"
"Broken limbs?"
"Oh yes; there"s the case of Pierre de Rudder, at Oostacker, in the nineteenth century. That"s the first of the series--the first, I mean, that has been scientifically examined. It"s in all the old books."
"What was the matter with him?"
"Leg broken below the knee for eight years."
"And how long did the cure take?"
"Instantaneous."
There was silence again.
Monsignor was staring out and downwards at the flitting meadow-land far below. A flock of white birds moved across the darkening grey, like flying specks seen in the eye, yet it seemed with extraordinary slowness and deliberation, so great was the distance at which they flew. He sighed.
"You can examine the records," said the priest presently; "and, better than that, you can examine some of the cases for yourself, and the certificates. They follow still the old system which Dr.
Boissarie began nearly a century ago."
"What about Zola?" demanded Monsignor abruptly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Zola, the great French writer. I thought he had . . . had advanced some very sharp criticisms of Lourdes."
"Er--when did he live?"
"Why, not long ago; nineteenth century, at the end."
Father Jervis shook his head, smiling.
"I"ve never heard of him," he said, "and I thought I knew Lourdes literature pretty well. I"ll enquire."
"Look," said the prelate suddenly; "what"s that place we"re coming to?"
He nodded forward with his head to where vast white lines and patches began to be visible on the lower slopes and at the foot of long spurs that had suddenly come into sight against the sunset.
"Why, that"s Lourdes."
(II)
As the two priests came out next morning from the west doors of the tall church where they had said their ma.s.ses, Monsignor stopped.
"Let me try to take it in a moment," he said.
They were standing on the highest platform of the pile of three churches that had been raised over a hundred years ago, now in the very centre of the enormous city that had grown little by little around the sacred place. Beneath them, straight in front, approached from where they stood by two vast sweeps of bal.u.s.traded steps, lay the _Place_, perhaps sixty feet beneath, of the shape of an elongated oval, bounded on this side and that by the old buildings where the doctors used to have their examination rooms, now used for a hundred minor purposes connected with the churches and the grotto. At the farther end of the Place, behind the old bronze statue of Mary, rose up the comparatively new _Bureau de Constatations_--a great hall (as the two had seen last night), communicating with countless consulting- and examination-rooms, where the army of State-paid doctors carried on their work. The whole of the open Place between these buildings crawled with humanity--not yet packed as it would be by evening--yet already sufficiently filled by the two ever-flowing streams--the one pa.s.sing downwards to where the grotto lay out of sight on the left, the other pa.s.sing up towards the lower entrance of the great hall. It resembled an amphitheatre, and the more so, since the roofs of the buildings on every side, as well as the slope up which the steps rose to the churches, adapted now as they were to accommodate at least three hundred thousand spectators, were already beginning to show groups and strings of onlookers who came up here to survey the city.
On the right, beyond the Place, lay the old town, sloping up now, up even to the medieval castle, which fifty years ago had stood in lonely detachment, but now was faced on hill-top after hill-top, at its own level, by the enormous nursing homes and hostels, which under the direction of the Religious Orders had gradually grown up about this shrine of healing, until now, up to a height of at least five hundred feet, the city of Mary stood on bastion after bastion of the lower slopes of the hills, like some huge auditorium of white stone, facing down towards the river and the Holy Place.