to two shepherd children, a girl and boy, aged respectively fifteen and eleven; Lourdes (1858), where she appeared as "a girl in white, no bigger than me," to a little country- bred girl of fourteen; Pellevoisin (1876), where she ap- peared as " the Mother All-Merciful " to an ill serving-maid ; Le Pontinet (1889), where she appeared as the Queen of Heaven, first to a little country girl of eleven, and then to a considerable number of others infected by her example. The last of these was disallowed by the ecclesiastical au- thorities, and has had no wide-spread effects.101 The other three are woven together in the popular fancy into a single rich chaplet for Mary's brow. "Each of the series of ap- paritions of the Blessed Virgin in this century," we read in a popular article published in the early nineties,102 "bears a distinct character. At La Salette Mary appeared in sorrow, and displaying the instruments of the Passion on her heart; at Lourdes, with a gold and white rosary in her hands, and with golden roses on her feet, she smiled at the child Bernadette; at Pellevoisin she appeared in a halo of light, surrounded by a garland of roses, and wearing on her breast the scapular of the Sacred Heart." In each instance a new cult has been inaugurated, a new shrine set up, a new pilgrimage put on foot with the highest en- thusiasm of devotion, and with immense results in miracles of healing— all of which accrue to the glory of Mary, the All-Merciful Mother of God.103
Among these apparitions, that at Lourdes easily takes the first place in point of historical importance. "Un- doubtedly the greatest stimulus to Marian devotion in recent times," writes Herbert Thurston,104 "has been af- forded by the apparition of the Blessed Virgin in 1858 at Lourdes, and in the numberless supernatural favors granted to pilgrims both there and at other shrines that derive from it." No doubt the way was prepared for this effect by previous apparitions of similar character, at La Salette, for example, and perhaps above all by those to Zoe Laboure
104 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
(Sister Catherine in religion) in 1836, the external symbol of which was the famous "Miraculous Medal," which has wrought wonders in the hands of the Sisters of Charity.105 And no doubt the impetus given by Lourdes has been re- inforced by similar movements which have come after it, as, for example, by that growing out of the apparitions at Pellevoisin — whose panegyrists, however, praise it sig- nificantly only as "a second Lourdes." Meanwhile, it is Lourdes which occupies the proud position of the greatest shrine of miraculous healing in the world. We may pre- dict the fading of its glory in the future, as the glory of other healing shrines in the past has faded. But there is nothing apparent to sustain this prediction beyond this bare analogy. We fear it is only the wish which has fathered the thought, when we find it put into somewhat exaggerated language by a French medical writer, thus:106 "Let us see what has happened during a century only, in the most venerated sanctuaries of France. No more mir- acles at Chartres ! Insignificant miracles at Notre Dame de Fourvieres at Lyons. La Salette, incapable of the smallest cure, after having shone with an incomparable lustre. Paray-le-monial become useless in spite of the chemise of Marie Alacoque. To-day it is Lourdes which is the re- ligious vogue; it is to Lourdes that the crowds demanding miracles go — waiting for Lourdes to disappear like the other shrines, when the faith of believers gradually fades like the flame of a candle coming to an end."
It must be admitted that the beginnings of Lourdes were not such as might have been expected of a great miraculous agency entering the world. It is possible to say, it is true, that they were better than has been the case in some similar instances. Bernadette Soubirous seems to have been a good child, and she seems to have grown into a good, if a somewhat colorless, not to say weak, and certainly very diseased, woman. The scandals of La Salette did not re- peat themselves in her case.107 And perhaps she cannot
THE APPARITION AT LOURDES 105