LET us return to Lourdes.
Time had proceeded on its course. Human hands had set to work in good earnest.
The approaches to the Grotto, in which the Virgin had appeared, were changed in appearance. Without losing aught of its grandeur, this wild and stern locality had assumed a graceful, pleasing and lively aspect. A superb Church―not yet finished, but swarming with workmen―proudly seated on the summit of the Rocks of Massabielle, towered joyously towards Heaven. The great slope, abrupt and uncultivated, formerly accessible only with difficulty even to the practiced feet of mountaineers, was covered with green turf and planted with shrubs and flowers. Amidst dahlias and roses, daisies and violets, beneath the shade of acacias and cytisuses, a vast path, broad as a road, winded in graceful curves and led from the Church to the Grotto.
The Grotto was closed with an iron railing, after the fashion of a sanctuary. A golden lamp was suspended from the roof. Under those wild rocks on which the Virgin had trodden with her divine feet, clusters of tapers burned night and day.
Outside this enclosed portion, the Miraculous Spring fed four massive basins of bronze. A piscina, concealed from observation by a small building erected over it, afforded the sick an opportunity of bathing in the blessed water.
The situation of the mill-stream of Sâvy had been altered, being thrown back up the stream in the direction of the Gave. The Gave itself had retreated to afford room for a magnificent road which led to these Rocks of Massabielle, formerly so totally unknown, but now so celebrated. On the banks of the river as it flowed downwards, the soil had been leveled, and a broad lawn bordered with elms and poplars formed a splendid promenade.
All these changes had been effected and were still being effected in the midst of an immense influx of believers. The copper coins thrown into the Grotto by the faithful, the grateful ex-votos of so many invalids who had been cured, of so many hearts which had been consoled, of so many souls which had been restored as it were from death to truth and life, sufficed to defray the expenses of these gigantic labors, the estimate of which was nearly two million francs. When God in his goodness condescends to call on man to co-operate directly in any one of his works, he employs neither soldiers nor gendarmes to collect the sums needful, and only accepts a purely voluntary assistance from the hands of his creatures. The Master of the world repudiates constraint, for He is the God of free souls, and the only tribute He consents to receive are the spontaneous gifts offered to him from a happy heart and entire independence by those by whom He is loved.
Thus was the Church being built; thus was the mill-stream and the river diverted into other courses; thus were the adjoining lands excavated or leveled, and roads laid around the celebrated Rocks where the Mother of Christ had manifested herself in her glory to the gaze of mortals.
