upright; and the crowd smiled and roared and sobbed. Five times I saw
that swirl and rush; the last when the _Te Deum_ pealed out from the
church steps as Jesus in His Sacrament came home again. And there were
two that I did not see. There were seven in all that afternoon.

Now, is it of any use to comment on all this? I am not sure; and yet,
for my own satisfaction if for no one else's, I wish to set down some of
the thoughts that came to me both then and after I had sat at the window
and seen God's loving-kindness with my own eyes.

The first overwhelming impression that remained with me is this--that I
had been present, in my own body, in the twentieth century, and seen
Jesus pass along by the sick folk, as He passed two thousand years
before. That, in a word, is the supreme fact of Lourdes. More than once
as I sat there that afternoon I contrasted the manner in which I was
spending it with that in which the average believing Christian spends
Sunday afternoon. As a child, I used to walk with my father, and he used
to read and talk on religious subjects; on our return we used to have a
short Bible-class in his study. As an Anglican clergyman, I used to
teach in Sunday schools or preach to children. As a Catholic priest, I
used occasionally to attend at catechism. At all these times the
miraculous seemed singularly far away; we looked at it across twenty
centuries; it was something from which lessons might be drawn, upon
which the imagination might feed, but it was a state of affairs as
remote as the life of prehistoric man; one assented to it, and that was
all. And here at Lourdes it was a present, vivid event. I sat at an
ordinary glass window, in a soutane made by an English tailor, with
another Englishman beside me, and saw the miraculous happen. Time and
space disappeared; the centuries shrank and vanished; and behold we saw
that which "prophets and kings have desired to see and have not seen!"