And this forced
itself upon his mind like a brutal fact: the simple faith of the child
who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young people, bowed down by
an awe born of their ignorance, was dead. Though thousands of pilgrims
might each year go to Lourdes, the nations were no longer with them; this
attempt to bring about the resurrection of absolute faith, the faith of
dead-and-gone centuries, without revolt or examination, was fatally
doomed to fail. History never retraces its steps, humanity cannot return
to childhood, times have too much changed, too many new inspirations have
sown new harvests for the men of to-day to become once more like the men
of olden time. It was decisive; Lourdes was only an explainable accident,
whose reactionary violence was even a proof of the extreme agony in which
belief under the antique form of Catholicism was struggling. Never again,
as in the cathedrals of the twelfth century, would the entire nation
kneel like a docile flock in the hands of the Master. To blindly,
obstinately cling to the attempt to bring that to pass would mean to dash
oneself against the impossible, to rush, perhaps, towards great moral
catastrophes.
And of his journey there already only remained to Pierre an immense
feeling of compassion. Ah! his heart was overflowing with pity; his poor
heart was returning wrung by all that he had seen. He recalled the words
of worthy Abbe Judaine; and he had seen those thousands of unhappy beings
praying, weeping, and imploring God to take pity on their suffering; and
he had wept with them, and felt within himself, like an open wound, a
sorrowful fraternal feeling for all their ailments.
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