ill you go down to the grotto, or would you sooner
watch a few more cases?"

"I think I'd sooner stay here," said the other, "at least for
an hour or two."

(IV)

It was the hour of the evening procession and of the
Benediction of the Sick.

All day long the man who had lost his memory had gone to and fro
with his companions, each wearing the little badge that gave them
entrance everywhere; they had lunched with Dr. Meurot himself.

If Monsignor Masterman had been impressed by the social power of
Catholicism at Versailles, and by its religious reality in Rome,
he was ten thousand times more impressed by its scientific
courage here in Lourdes. For here religion seemed to have
stepped down into an arena hitherto (as he fancied) restricted
to the play of physical forces. She had laid aside her oracular
claims, her comparatively unsupported assertions of her own
divinity; had flung off her robes of state and authority and was
competing here on equal terms with the masters of natural
law--more, she was accepted by them as their mistress. For there
seemed nothing from which she shrank. She accepted all who came
to her desiring her help; she made no arbitrary distinctions to
cover her own incapacities. Her one practical desire was to heal
the sick; her one theoretical interest to fix more and more
precisely, little by little, the exact line at which nature
ended and supernature began. And, if human evidence went for
anything--if the volumes of radiophotography and sworn testimony
went for anything, she had established a thousand times over
during the preceding, half-century that under her aegis, and
hers alone, healing and reconstituting forces were at work to
which no merely natural mental science could furnish any
parallels. All the old quarrels of a century ago seemed at an
end. There was no longer any dispute as to the larger facts. All
that now remained to be done by this huge organization of
international experts was to define more and more closely and
precisely where the line lay between the two worlds. All cures
that could be even remotely paralleled in the mental
laboratories were dismissed as not evidently supernatural; all
those which could not be so paralleled were recorded, with the
most minute detail, under the sworn testimonies of doctors who
had examined the patients immediately before and immediately
after the cure itself. In a series of libraries that abutted on
to the Place, Monsignor Masterman