In our times Lourdes has become the scene of events which are founded on facts, and the miraculous character has been proven at least of some of them. Bertrin, in his “Histoire critique des evénéments de Lourdes,” deals with the attitude of the physicians toward the miracles. The believing physician can enter upon his investigation without prejudice: not so the unbelieving physician and scientist, who is shackled by his prejudice against the possibility of miracles. Of this a few examples:
“How did you get cured?” was the question put by a physician to a young woman who, after having suffered for four years from a suppurating inflammation of the hip joints, complicated by caries, had a few days previously suddenly regained her full health. Pains and sores had disappeared. “By whom was I cured? By the Blessed Virgin!” “Never mind the Blessed Virgin,” replied the physician. “Young woman, why don't you admit that you had been assured in advance that you would get well. You were told that, once in Lourdes, you would suddenly rise from the box wherein you were lying. That sort of thing happens—we call it suggestion.” The girl replied, unhesitatingly, that it did not happen this way at all. Finally the physician offered her money if she would admit having really been cured by suggestion. The girl declined the offer.—Another girl arrived in Lourdes, with a physician's attestation that she was a consumptive. She is cured after the first bath. At the bureau of verification her lungs were found to be no longer diseased. Her physician's statement having been very brief, a telegram was sent to him as a matter of precaution, asking him for another statement without, however, informing him of the cure. The physician immediately wired back: “She is a consumptive.” This was also the opinion of other physicians who had treated the girl. The girl joyfully returns home, and hurries to her physician, requesting him to certify to her cure. He does so quite reluctantly. Upon reading his certificate, she discovers that it said she had been cured, but only of a cough. The case of consumption of his original testimonial had changed into a cough. His dread of a miracle had induced this physician to commit a falsehood.
A. Rambacher, as he relates in a pamphlet, sent the scientific treatise on Lourdes by Dr. Boissarie to Prof. Haeckel, with the request to read [pg 248]it, in order to gain a better notion of the existence of a supernatural world. After some urging he finally received the following reply, which speaks volumes for the attitude of the natural scientist towards facts: “With many thanks I hereby return the book by Dr. Boissarie on the Great Cures of Lourdes which you sent me. The perusal of the same has convinced me anew of the tremendous power of superstition (glorified as ‘pious belief’) of naïve credulity (without critical examination), and of contagious collective suggestion, as well as of the cunning of the clergy, exploiting them for their gain.... The physicians, said to testify in behalf of the ‘miracles’ and the supernatural phenomena, are either ignorant and undiscerning quacks, or positive frauds in collusion with the priests. The most accurate description of the gigantic swindle of Lourdes I know of, is that of Zola in his well-known novel.... With repeated thanks for your kindness ... Ernst Haeckel.” Against all the facts in evidence this dogmatic scientist was safely intrenched behind the stone wall of his presumptions. He knew in advance that everything was superstition or the fraud of cunning priests, that all physicians who certified to cures were quacks and cheats. Zola's tendentious romance considered the best historical source! Mention should be made here how this celebrated novelist dealt with facts at Lourdes. In the year 1892, the time of the great pilgrimage, Zola went to Lourdes. He wanted to observe and then tell what he had seen. An historical novel it was to be; time and again he had proclaimed in the newspapers that he would tell the whole truth. At Lourdes all doors were opened to him; he had admittance anywhere; he could interview and obtain explanations at will. How he kept his promise to report the truth may be shown by a single instance: Marie Lebranchu came to Lourdes on August 20, 1892, suffering from incurable consumption. She was suddenly cured, and never had a relapse. One year after her cure she returned to the miraculous Grotto. The excellent condition of her lungs was again verified. Now, what does Zola make of this event? In his novel the cured girl suffers a terrible relapse upon her first return home, “a brutal return of the disease which remained victorious,” we read in Zola's book. One day, the president of the Lourdes Bureau of Investigation introduced himself to Zola in Paris, and asked him “How dare you let Marie Lebranchudie in your novel; you know very well that she is alive and just as well as you and I.” “What do I care,” was Zola's reply, “I think I have the right to do as I please with the characters I create.” If a romancer desires to avail himself of this privilege he certainly has not the right to proclaim his novels as truthful historical writings, much less may others see in such a novel the “most accurate description of the events at Lourdes.”
Renan at one time said: “Oh, if we just once might have a miracle brought before professional scientists! But, alas! this will never happen!” He borrowed this saying from Voltaire, with the difference that the latter demanded God to perform a miracle before the Academy of Sciences, as if there were need for miracles in a physical or chemical laboratory. Those who desire in earnest to investigate miracles ought to go where they are performed. And even there, where the eyes can [pg 249]see them, it also takes good will to acknowledge them. In this respect an interview is instructive which Zola once had with an editor. The latter asked: “If you were witness to a miracle, that would occur under strictest conditions suggested by yourself, would you acknowledge the miracle? Would you then accept the teachings of the faith?” After a few moments of serious thought, Zola replied: “I do not know, but I do not believe I would” (Bertrin). On April 7, 1875, there came to the Belgian sanctuary, Oostacker, a Flemish labourer, by name Peter de Rudder, whose leg had eight years before been broken below the knee, and who was then suffering from two suppurating cancerous sores, that had formed at the place of the fracture and on the foot. He suddenly was entirely cured. The case was investigated in a most exact way. In 1900 a treatise concerning the case was published by three physicians. E. Wasmann had as early as 1900 published a short extract of it in the “Stimmen aus Maria Laach.” In February, 1907, when, at Berlin, he delivered his lectures which were followed by a discussion, his opponents, headed by Prof. Plate, did not know of this article. When they learned of it, some time afterwards, he was put under the ban because he “had degraded himself to the position of a charlatan by vouching with his scientific repute for the happening of a miraculous cure”; and they said “they would fight him in the same way as they would fight every quack, but as a scientist he was discarded.” Plate had on the evening of the discussion asked of the assembled scientists the question: “Have we ever observed anything like a suspension of the natural laws? The reply to it is an unconditional ‘we have not’; consequently Theism becomes inadmissible to the natural scientist.” Here, in the de Rudder case, is found the required instance. But Plate knows, in advance of any investigation, that it is a fairy tale, believed without critical examination. And Prof. Hansemann, another opposing speaker of that evening, subsequently sent word to Wasmann that: “One can pretty well judge what to think of a natural scientist who publishes such stuff. For this reason I now declare that I shall never in future, no matter how or where, enter into discussion of matters of natural science with Mr. Wasmann.” When on a certain occasion Hegel was advised that some facts did not agree with his philosophical notions, he replied: “The more pity for the facts.”
The English natural scientist, W. Thomson, once said before the British Society at Edinburgh: “Science is bound by eternal honour to face fearlessly every problem that can be clearly laid before it.” The equally famous Faraday, in the name of empirical research, demands of its adherents the determination to stand or to fall with the results of a direct appeal to the facts in the first place, and with the strict logical deductions therefrom in the second. In general these principles are adhered to so long as religious notions are not encountered. [pg 250] But as soon as these are sighted, the engine is reversed, and all scientific principles are forgotten.
A science led by this spirit will set out to emancipate man's moral conduct of life from God and religion. Indeed, the first postulate of modern ethics directs that morality must be independent of religion. That God and eternal salvation is the end of man, the ultimate norm of his moral life, that God's Command is the ultimate reason of the moral obligation, and divine sanction its strongest support, it does not want to acknowledge. Here, too, we find the principle of natural causality in operation. “As in physics God's will must not be made to serve as an explanation, so likewise in the theory of moral phenomena. Both the natural and the moral world, as they exist, may point beyond themselves to something transcendental. But we cannot admit the transcendental ... a scientific explanation will have to be wholly immanent, and anthropological” (Paulsen). According to this approved principle of ignoration, the supreme aim and law of a morality without religion is man, his earthly happiness, and his culture.
Its aims, according to Prof. Jodl, one of its noted champions, are: “Promotion of moral life, fostering of a refined humanity, development of a true fellow-feeling, without the religious and metaphysical notions upon which mankind hitherto has mostly built its ethical ideals.” Kant was the pioneer here: “In so far as morality is based on the conception of man as a free, being, it requires neither the idea of a superior being to make him cognizant of his duties, nor any motive but the law itself in order to observe it ... hence morality for its own sake does not by any means need religion.” This is the viewpoint of the autonomous man, who is his own law. “From the viewpoint of authority,” so tells us E. von Hartmann, “autonomy does not mean anything else but that in ethical matters I am for myself the highest court without appeal.... The God, Who in the beginning spoke to His children from a fiery cloud ... has descended into our bosom, and, transformed into our own being, speaks out of us as a moral autonomy.” Diis extinctis successit humanitas.
“Although an individual representative of science may be a believer in God in his private life,” so argues the English philosopher, W. James, “at any rate the times have passed when it could be said that the heavens announce to science the glory of God, and that the heaven shows the works of His hands.” [pg 251] The flight from divinity, atheism open or disguised, is the psychological effect of the liberal principle. Free thought aims to free man of all authority, it aims at severing from religion his entire existence, marriage, state, schools, and likewise science. “It is undeniable,” we hear from the lips of champions of modern man, standing on the pinnacle of religious liberalism, “that there is a certain forsakenness in this existence of man, as compared to a life brightened by the idea of a God,” but that forsakenness is not purchased too dearly, for “it is the solitude of autonomy, a possession so precious that no price for it could be too high” (Carneri).
Indeed, these modern men use even plainer language: science is applauded for having at last freed man from God. With Kant's principle that we cannot know anything of the supernatural, we are told, there “were thrown overboard the cosmogonic notions of the Semitic races, notions that have so severely oppressed our science and religion, and are still oppressing them.... By this insight an idol is smashed. In a previous chapter I called the Israelites the worshippers of abstract idols; now, I believe, I shall be fully understood.” Indeed, we understand. It means: Away with God. “This German metaphysics frees us from idolatry and reveals to us the living divinity in our own bosom” (Chamberlain).
This is the manner in which this free thought, within science and without, is fulfilling the earnest admonition of the Psalmist: “Seek ye the Lord and be strengthened: seek His face evermore” (Ps. civ. 4), and it turns into irony the words: “This is the generation of them that seek Him, of them that seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Ps. xxiii. 6).