when he says:93 "The really pious Catholic has a peculiar passion for miracles. The extremely numerous accounts of miraculous healings, not alone at Lourdes; the multi- plied promises, especially in the little Prayer and Pilgrim Books, of physical healing of the sick in reward for many offered prayers and petitions; the enormous credulity of the Catholic people, as it is revealed to us in the Leo Taxil swindle — all this manifests a disposition for miracle-seeking which is altogether unaffected by the modern scientific axiom of the conformity of the course of nature to law." To say that relics lie at the centre of the miracle-life of Catholicism is not far from saying that they lie at the centre of the Catholic religious life; for the religious life of Catholicism and its miracle-life are very much one. Hirn is thinking here,94 however, particularly of the or- ganization of Catholic worship ; and what he sees, or thinks he sees, is that the entirety of Catholic worship is so or- ganized as to gather really around the relic-chest. For the altar, as it has developed in the Roman ritual, has become, he says, in the process of the years, the coffin enclosing the bones of a saint; and that is the fundamental reason why the rule has long been in force that every altar shall con- tain a relic,95 and that a Gregory of Tours, for example, when speaking of the altar can call it, not "ara" or "altare," but "area," that is to say, box or ark. Catholic piety, thus expressing itself in worship, has found its centre in a sealed case; for the table for the mass is not a piece of furniture which has been placed in a building, but a nucleus around which the building has been formed, and the table for the mass has become nothing more or less than "a chest which guards the precious relics of a saint." Thus, "the ideas connected with the abode of the dead remain for all time bound up with the church's principal place of wor- ship." " Saint- worship has little by little mingled with the mass-ritual, and the mass-table itself has been finally transformed into a saint's shrine."96
102 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
Enthroned though it thus be at the centre of the miracle- life, and with it of the religious life, of the church of Rome,97 the cult of relics, nevertheless, does not absorb into itself the entirety of either the one or the other. It has one rival which shares with it even its central position, and in our own day threatens to relegate it, in some sec- tions of the Catholic world at least, to the background. This is the cult of the Virgin Mary, whose legend has in- corporated into itself all other legends,98 and whose power eclipses and seems sometimes almost on the point of super- seding all other powers. There is a sense in which it may almost be said that the saints have had their day and the future belongs to Mary. It is to her, full of grace, Queen, Mother of Mercy, our Life, our Sweetness, our Hope,99 that men now call for relief in all their distresses, and it is to her shrines that the great pilgrim-bands of the afflicted now turn their steps.100 These shrines are not ordinarily relic-shrines. Mary had her "assumption" as her divine Son had His "ascension"; she has left behind her no grave, no body, no bodily parts to be distributed severally through the earth. Her relics consist exclusively of ex- ternal things: of her hair, her milk, the clothes she wore, the house she dwelt in. They have had their part to play — a very great part — in the history of the relic-cult and of pilgrimages; as have also miraculous images of her. But the chief source of the newer shrines of Mary which have been founded one after another in these latter days, and have become one after another the goal of extensive pil- grimages and the seat of innumerable miracles of healing, has been a series of apparitions of Mary, which have fol- lowed one another with bewildering rapidity until they have almost seemed to become epidemic in France at least — in France, because France is the land of Mary as Italy is the land of the saints.
Let us put side by side these four apparitions: La Salette (1846), where the Virgin appeared as a "beautiful lady"
APPARITIONS OF MARY 103