LOURDES" " Is.' men would, or could, detach themselves from
their own time and place, Lourdes would be the most interesting business in the world." These are the first words of Mr. Hilaire Belloc's preface to the latest book about the miraculous cures at Lourdes. Mr. Jorgensen and Mr. Belloc believe, and desire to prove, that " with every year the accumulation of cures admittedly insusceptible to suggestion increases." It is those, they tell us, who have not been to Lourdes who doubt this :— "All up and down Europe you will find men still living and
• Lourdes. By Johannes Tiirgensen. With Preface by Hilaire Bello°. Illustrated. London: Longmans and Co. [2s. 6d. net.1 iubmissible to your own judgment, men of the first intelligence and of the widest culture who have visited Lourdes and watched the thing, and who will tell you, if they are at one end of the line that they have seen Heaven open and the power thereof, if they are at the other end of the line that they have been 'wonderfully puzzled."
So far we have quoted the preface only, and, unlike so many prefaces, it prepares the reader to be deeply interested. Mr. Jorgensen's account of a short stay in this city of miracles is extremely graphic. He had several interviews with the doctor whose business it is to sift the evidence for each cure, and he was impressed, and succeeds in impressing the reader, with the doctor's bona fides. But if the reader is to be con- vinced of the miraculous nature of the cares described, he
must be content to accept as final a bare statement by un- known dootors as to what the patient was suffering from when he arrived at the city. None but a doctor on the spot
could, we think, be reasonably convinced, because none but a doctor could judge of the evidence. For instance, suppose we are told that So-and-so, suffering from pulmonary con- sumption, was cured. The fact that he left Lourdes well may be incontrovertible, but the evidence for the original disease is next to nothing—the nature of the disease cured rests, so far as this book is concerned, upon medical certifi- cates, whose authority seems to be accepted as infallible.
Nevertheless no one will read through the book and disagree with Mr. Belloc's statement. The reader who can detach
himself from his own time and place, who can let Mr. Jorgensen lead him back into the Middle Ages, will be intensely interested, and will hardly pat the book down without a strengthening of conviction that the influence of the mind over the body is hugely underrated by ordinary men
in the modern world. We have forgotten several truths which were patent in the Dark Ages.
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