"I saw a sudden swirl in the crowd of heads beneath the church steps, and then a great shaking ran through the crowd ; but there for a few instants it boiled like a pot. A sudden cry had broken out, and it ran through the whole space; waxing in volume as it ran, till the heads beneath my window shook with it also; hands clapped, voices shouted, 'A miracle! A miracle!'"
The tension thus broken, of course other miracles fol- lowed. And Benson says he does not see what "sugges- tion" had to do with them !
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We feel no impulse to insist on the word, "suggestion" as if it were a magic formula, which accounts with com- pleteness for all the cures wrought at Lourdes. We should be perfectly willing to admit, on good reason being given for the admission, that, after all the cures which can be fairly brought under this formula have been brought under it, a residuum may remain for the account of which we should look further. We do not ourselves think that we are much advanced in the explanation of these residuum cases, if they exist, by postulating "a transferrence of vital- izing force either from the energetic faith of the sufferers, or from that of the bystanders" — as Benson intimates that Alexis Carrel was inclined to recommend.146 At bottom, this is only a theory, and it does not seem to us a very complete theory, of how "suggestion" acts. Let us leave that to further investigation. For our part, we prefer just to leave these residuum cases themselves, if they exist, to this further investigation. We feel no necessity laid on us to explain them meanwhile. Bertrin makes himself merry147 over the appeal, for their explanation, to the work- ing of "unknown forces" as a mere shift to avoid acknowl- edging the presence of the supernatural. But surely we cannot pretend to a complete knowledge of all the forces which may work toward a cure in such conditions as are present at Lourdes. Unknown forces are assuredly existent, and it is not unnatural to think of them when effects occur, the causes of which are unknown. Meanwhile residuum cases suggesting reference to them, if they exist at all, are certainly very few. Doctor E. Mackey in a very sensible article published a few years ago in The Dublin Review, us seems inclined to rest the case for recognizing their exist- ence on three instances. These are the cures of Pierre de Rudder, of a broken bone; of Joachine Dehant, of a dislo- cation ; and of Francois Macary, of a varicose vein. " Such cases," he says,149 . . . "cannot cure themselves, and no amount of faith and hope that the mind of man can imagine
118 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
will unite a broken bone, reduce a dislocation, or obliterate a varicose vein. Such cases cannot be paralleled by any medical experience, or imitated by any therapeutic resource, and are as far removed from its future as its present possi- bilities. To the sceptic we may give without argument the whole range of nerve disorders, but what explanation is there of the sudden and permanent cure of an organic lesion? What, but the working of the uncovered finger of God?"
The cases selected by Doctor Mackey are famous cases. That of Pierre de Rudder may be said, in fact, to be Lourdes's star case, and is found duly set forth in detail at the head of well-nigh every argument for the miraculousness of the Lourdes cures. Perhaps Doctor Mackey might just as well have contented himself with appealing to it alone. Its salient features are that what was healed in it was a frac- ture of long standing of both bones of the lower leg, just below the knee, the two parts of the broken bone piercing the flesh and being separated by a suppurating wound an inch long. The healing was instantaneous. We have never seen a satisfactory natural explanation of how this cure was effected. If the facts, in all their details as pub- lished— say in Bertrin's extended account, — are authentic, it seems fairly impossible to imagine how it was effected. Doctor Rouby, it is true, offers a very plausible explana- tion of the healing, but, to make it plausible, he is com- pelled to assume that some of the minor details are not quite accurately reported.150 We prefer simply to leave it, meanwhile, unexplained. Do you cry out that we are bound to supply a satisfactory natural explanation of it, or else acknowledge that a miracle has taken place in this case ? We feel no difficulty in declining the dilemma. The healing of Pierre de Rudder's leg is not the only thing that has occurred in the world of the mode of the occurrence of which we are ignorant. After all, inexplicable and mirac- V ulous are not exact synonyms, and nobody really thinks
. INEXPLICABLE AND MIRACULOUS 119