It must remain astonishing, in any event, that miracles should be frequently incomplete. We should a priori ex- pect miraculous cures to be regularly radical. No doubt we are not judges beforehand how God should work. But it is not wrong, when we are asked to infer from the very nature of an effect that it is the immediate work of God, that we should be disturbed by circumstances in its nature which do not obviously point to God as the actor. The reasons which Bertrin presents for the imperfections in the effects do not remove this difficulty. They bear the ap- pearance of "covering reasons" — inventions to remove offenses. After all is said and done, it is mere paradox to represent the imperfections in the cures as evidences of the divine action. We may expect imperfections to show them- selves in the products of second causes; we naturally ex- pect perfection in the immediate operations of the First Cause. Bertrin strikes back somewhat waspishly when Zola makes one of the physicians at the Bureau of Consta- tation ask "with extreme politeness," why the Virgin con- tented herself with healing a sore on a child's foot, leaving an ugly scar, and had not given it a brand-new foot while she was about it — since "this would assuredly have given her no more trouble." Here, too, Bertrin says133 that the
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scar was left that it might be a standing proof of the reality and greatness of the miracle of healing that had been wrought, and adds, somewhat unexpectedly it must be confessed at this point, that whatever God does, He does well. Whatever God does, He certainly does well; and it assuredly is our part only to endeavor to understand His ways. But when the question is, Did God do it? we are not unnaturally puzzled if it does not seem obvious that what He is affirmed to have done, has been well done. The physician's question was not foolish. It was the perhaps not quite bland expression of a natural wonder — wonder at the limitations which show themselves in these alleged miracles. Why, after all, should miracles show limita- tions?134
We are far from wishing to suggest that the cures at Lourdes are not in the main real cures. We should be glad to believe that the whole of the four to eight thousand which are alleged to have taken place there, have been real cures, and that this great host of sufferers have been freed from their miseries. Probably no one doubts that cures are made at Lourdes ; any more than men doubt that similar cures have from the beginning of the world been made in similar conditions elsewhere — as of old in the temples of Asclepius, for example, and to-day at the hands of the Christian Scientists. So little is it customary to deny that cures are made at Lourdes that even free- thinking French physicians are accustomed to send patients there. Doctor Maurice de Fleury in his much-admired book, La Medecine de l' Esprit,135 writes: "The faith that heals is only suggestion; that makes no difference, since it heals. There is no one of us who has not sent some sick woman to Lourdes, expecting her to return well." The same in effect is said by Charcot,136 Dubois,137 even the polemic Rouby. Rouby even goes to the length of pointing out a function which Lourdes, according to him, may serve in the advance of medical science. "Lourdes has not been without its
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value to contemporary physicians," he writes;138 "they have had in it a great field for the study of hysterosis, which a large number of them have misunderstood or only par- tially understood. Lourdes has put neurosis before them in a striking way. Those of our colleagues who have written into their certificates a diagnosis of incurability, have been profoundly disturbed when they saw their pa- tients return cured; and those of them who have not be- lieved in a miraculous cure have asked themselves the true account of these cures. They have come into actual touch at Lourdes with what they had read in their treatises on various diseases. They have learned what hysterosis really is, and what a great role it has played and will play still in the production of miracles; and they will sign no more cer- tificates on which the Bureau of Constatation can depend for establishing the miraculous character of cures. This ignorance of hysterosis on the part of physicians, which has more than anything else made the fortune of the pil- grimage, will, it is to be hoped, no longer exist." 139