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, under the guidance of Dom Adrian Bennett, had spent a couple of hours this afternoon in examining the most striking of the records and photographs preserved there.  He was amazed to find that even by the end of the nineteenth century cures had taken place for which the most modern scientists could find no natural explanation.

Ten minutes ago he had taken his place in the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, with the monk’s last word still in his head.

“It is during the procession itself,” he had said, “that the work is done.  We lay aside all deliberate knowledge as the Angelus rings, and give ourselves up to faith.”

* * * * *

And now the procession had started, and already, it seemed to him, he had begun to understand.  It was as he himself emerged, a few paces in front of the Blessed Sacrament Itself, walking with the prelates, that that understanding reached its climax.  He paused at the head of the steps, to wait for the canopy to come through, and his heart rose within him so mightily that it was all he could do not to cry out.