death. She did not ask to be cured, but to obtain the grace of a good death. At the cost of intense suffering she took the journey, and spent the first night before the grotto. The next evening, as she knelt and prayed, she felt a horrible pain, as if all her sinews were being strained. Was it a new crisis of her disease, or was it the death she had so long prayed for? She fell to the ground, and then, without knowing what she did, she who had so long been speechless, cried out with a loud voice, Cured! I am cured!" and set to work at once to sing. the Magnificat, accompanied by all around.

to fall back on a denial of the facts alleged, we have plenty more cases to refute his scepticism.

For instance, Mdme. André from Saales in Lorraine, the wife of a workman, was attacked in 1879 with paralysis. It was hereditary; her mother had suffered for fifteen years before it caused her death. One of her little children, ten years old, was also paralyzed. The poor woman applied for admittance to the hospital at Strasburg, but was sent back as incurable. She could scarcely see or hear at all with the left eye and ear; her leg dragged almost helpless along the ground, her left arm she could not move. As a last hope she took the advice of a good nun who visited her, to join the pilgrimage to Lourdes. There she was placed among the various invalids fronting the grotto. While praying there fervently, all at once she cried out, Sister Pauline, my fingers are moving!" A few moments after a sharp pain pierces her arm and side, and she. feels that she is cured. A moment after she stretches out in prayer without any difficulty the arm that had long hung helpless. But if the arm is healed, why not the leg also? She rises, and walks with perfect ease. The same afternoon she appears before the commission appointed to examine alleged miracles, and in the presence of two physicians walks, runs, carries heavy objects about with her left hand, sees perfectly with her left eye, and hears perfectly with her left ear. When she returned home, certain sceptics tried to account for the cure by the medicinal qualities of the water. Unfortunately for their intelligent solution, the woman had never been in the water at all! A newspaper which attempted to ridicule the cure evoked from her husband the following statement, which he inserted in a local journal-in the Impartial des Vosges.

I declare, upon my faith as an honest man and a good Christian, that my wife, who has had her left side paralyzed for seventeen months, and could no longer follow her ordinary occupations, has come back from Lourdes completely cured. Since her return she has been in perfect health, and I seem to be dreaming when I see her walk, run, carry heavy loads, cut up wood, wheel the barrow, etc., as if she had never been ill.

We pass over several of the most striking miracles because they were per

formed on ecclesiastics or religious. We will choose for our third instance one performed on a young man of twentythree; we select it because of the absurdity of attributing it to imagination, or indeed any human agency, and also because of the remarkable medical testimony which accompanies it.

M. Réné de Bil, of Hondschoote, near Dunkirk, had a white tumor on his left knee and was only able to walk with crutches. When the national pilgrimage was organized, he determined to take part in it. Arrived at Lourdes, he bathed in the sacred spring: the result was that the wounds and swelling completely disappeared; he left his crutches at the well, and can now walk with ease. A local paper having tried to explain away the miracle, M. Leys, who had been attending the sick man, wrote the following professional statement :

I the undersigned, Doctor of Medicine, declare that I have professionally attended M. Réné de Bil, aged 23 years, gentleman, living with his parents, who are land-owners at Hondschoote, near Dunkirk. The white tumor from which this young man was suffering was situated on the left knee, and was complicated by fistulous ulcers, with ankylosis of the knee, and curvature of the leg toward the thigh. After treating the disease for five years, I was convinced that it was incurable. On the 13th of August last, the day before his departure for Lourdes, I examined my patient,

and found him in the same serious condition.

To-day, the 3d of September. I declare that the white tumor, ulcers, and fistulous passage have disappeared, that the leg has become straight, and that the young man walks without the help of his crutches, which before were indispensable to him. For myself, as for any unprejudiced person, it is evident that so wonderful and sudden a cure can only be attributed to a miracle.

The narration of miracles is always liable to be tedious, and we will, therefore, inflict no more of them upon our readers, though there are many which we would fain adduce. We will conclude our testimony for Lourdes with a professional document, emanating from the pen of a well-known Paris physician, and one, too, who has made therapeutic springs and medical waters his speciality. The most sceptical can hardly refuse to concede to his authority an assent they would naturally deny to women and priests. Dr. Constantine James writes thus in the Journal de Paris :

I have visited Lourdes with the same spirit

of inquiry and the same reserve which I have carried with me in all my excursions to wellknown watering-places. To speak only of facts which have come under my own observation-I mean, which affected my own patients I declare that I have seen sick persons return

cured from Lourdes under circumstances which led my professional brethren and myself to judge their condition beyond the resources of nature and of art. To the facts alleged the answer made consists in insults, and those of the coarsest kind. For our materialists and atheists every pilgrim is a “ clerical," that is to His disease is say, an impostor and a knave.

a sham, and its cure a farce. There is, according to them, a theatrical scene worthy of Robert Houdin, and the inclosure where the miraculous cures are wrought is but parody of the ancient Court of Miracles.

Of all this diatribe I will take up only one word the diseases are pretended. Be so good as to tell me how one can pretend to have a tumor in the breast; how one can pretend to have an ulcerated tongue; how one can pretend to have a decay of bone, mortification, a white tumor-all of them maladies which have obtained their cure at Lourdes? Now if these were real diseases, and they must indeed have been so, their cure ought to be regarded as a miracle, since no one has ever seen attacks of this kind heal of their own accord.

CONSTANTINE JAMES.

After such evidence as this, what more can we do to convince the incredulous ? If they do not choose to accept such irrefragable testimony, we must simply leave them in their unbelief. If they will not give in their assent to the miracles, at least we may ask them to leave off talking nonsense about our credulity and fanaticism. At least we have a right to our opinion, without heing branded by them as poor silly dupes or designing knaves. At least they might give us credit for having some notion of the laws of evidence, and of the criteria. of a tenable hypothesis. Do not Catholic priests study Logic? Ay, and far more carefully than many of our assailants.

Have we not tested our conclusions re

specting Lourdes and La Salette and St. Januarius' blood, by the various excellent" methods" proposed by John Stuart Mill? Our witnesses are not the uneducated and the unlearned, but skilled witnesses; we do not dig up our testimony from the records of an un. critical age, but we bring them out into the full light of this nineteenth century, and we challenge our opponents to adduce any reasonable hypothesis which they can pretend, with any show of truth, to substitute for our explanation

of the phenomena. They cannot deny the facts. They can, if they choose, talk about some yet undiscovered law of nature-but the said law is one which will simply be a complete reversal of all human experience, from the beginning until now. The very supposition of such a law is an insult to the intelligence of their hearers. Who ever heard of an undiscovered law upsetting and destroying laws tested by the uniform experience of ages? Electricity, steam, galvanism, are but a carrying out into new fields of laws already familiar, and which had long been gradually dawning on mankind, whereas in miracles there is no carrying out but a reversal of the old laws. What thaumaturge ever made such a demand on human credulity as does this suggestion of our enlightened sceptics? Their incredulity is nothing less than the grossest credulity. If we were to take them off their guard, and tell them that a new mineral spring had been discovered, one plunge into which would cure a cancerous or scrofulous sore in an instant, and cover the ulcer with soft supple skin; nay, that this spring was of such efficacy that he who knelt in its vicinity found paralysis disappear as if by magic, and he who drank a few drops of it at a distance was healed by its wondrous power, would they not denounce us as liars or silly fools? Yet such is the alternative to which they are themselves forced if they deny that through this spring, sanctified as it is by the presence of God's Immaculate Mother, His supernatural power is manifesting itself to the world.

One word in conclusion. It must be remembered that not every one who goes to Lourdes is cured, even of those who go with an ardent faith and confidence. Every good Catholic makes only a conditional request for temporal benefitsthe condition being if it is the will of God. He in His divine omniscience sees whether it is for the spiritual good of the sufferer. Once upon a time a

an

Besides this, we must bear in mind that false and true, wheat and tares, are ever mingled in the field of the Church. Impostures will never cease, and among modern miracles there are sure to be some counterfeit wonders, some base imitations of the genuine article. On these sceptics seize with greedy avidity, and fancy that the discovery of one of them is sufficient justification for the rejection of all those that are real. They might as well say that a knowledge of Judas' guilt was sufficient justification for condemning all the Apostles, or that the detection here and there of a base coin was reason enough for refusing all gold and silver money.

If any of my readers wish to learn the truth about modern miracles, I advise them by all means to go to Lourdes and examine, with a fair and unprejudiced mind, the wonders which are said continually to happen there. They will find among the missionaries of the Immaculate Conception, who are attached to the church, one at least who speaks English, and has resided for some time in England, and who will show the greatest courtesy and attention to an English visitor, and will give him every opportunity of searching out the matter for himself. If the visitor goes with a hearty desire for truth, there can only be one result of his inquiry. He will say with the Queen of Sheba when she went to visit King Solomon: I did not believe them that told me, till I came myself and saw with my own eyes, and have found that the half hath not been told me."-The Nineteenth Century.

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their feet, Dukes, editors, prime ministers, waited their convenience on their staircases; whole theatres rose up en masse to greet the gifted creators of this and that immortal tragedy. The authoresses themselves, to do them justice, seem to have been very little dazzled by all this excitement. Hannah More contentedly retires with her maiden sisters to the Parnassus on the Mendip Hills, where they sew and chat and make tea and teach the village children. Dear Joanna Baillie, modest and beloved, lives on to peaceful age in her pretty old house at Hampstead, looking through tree-tops and sunshine and clouds toward distant London. Out there, where all the storms are,'' I heard the children saying yesterday as they watched the overhanging gloom of smoke which veils the city of metropolitan thunders and lightning. Maria Edgeworth's apparitions as a literary lioness in the rush of London and of Paris society were but interludes in her existence, and her real life was one of constant exertion and industry spent far away in an Irish home among her own kindred and occupations and interests." We may realize what these were when we read that Mr. Edgeworth had no less than four wives, who all left children, and that Maria was the eldest daughter of the whole family. Besides this, we must also remember that the father whom she idolized was himself a man of extraordinary powers, brilliant in conversation (so I have been told), full of animation, of interest, of plans for his country, his family, for education and literature, for mechanics and scientific discoveries; that he was a gentleman widely connected, hospitably inclined, with a large estate and many tenants to overlook, with correspondence and acquaintances all over the world; and, besides all this, with various schemes in his brain, to be eventually realized by others, of which velocipedes, tramways, and telegraphs were but a few of the items.

One could imagine that under these circumstances the hurry and excitement of London life must have sometimes seemed tranquillity itself compared with the many and absorbing interests of such a family. What these interests were may be gathered from the pages of a

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very interesting memoir from which the writer of this essay has been allowed to quote. It is a book privately printed and written for the use of her children by the widow of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and is a record, among other things, of a faithful and most touching friendship between Maria and her father's wife-"a friendship lasting for over fifty years, and unbroken by a single cloud of difference or mistrust. Mrs. Edgeworth, who was Miss Beaufort before her marriage, and about the same age as Miss Edgeworth, unconsciously reveals her own most charming and unselfish nature as she tells her stepdaughter's story.

When the writer looks back upon her own childhood, it seems to her that she lived in company with a delightful host of little playmates, bright, busy, clever children, whose cheerful presence remains more vividly in her mind than that of many of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear disconnectedly as children do in childhood, when friendship and companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up people. Now and again came little cousins or friends to share our games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, ever to be relied upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly companions-simple Susan, lame Jervas, Talbot, the dear Little Merchants, Jem the widow's son with his arms round old Lightfoot's neck, the generous Ben, with his whipcord and his useful proverb of waste not, want not "-all of these were there in the window corner waiting our pleasure. After Parents' Assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever, came Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room of an apartment in an old house in Paris, and as we opened the boards, lo! creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. All Mr. Edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and delight our play-time, and