At Lourdes there is nothing to attract the scoffer, and thousands of hearts filled with reverence and devotion reënforce each year the already powerful vibrations, and leave the place the better and richer for their presence.
How few people realize that they have never seen themselves? How many can tell what they really look like?
A very, very few can, and I am amongst the number.
I wakened one morning in summer, and opened my eyes on my sunlit bedroom at home. Instantly I saw something which thrilled me with vivid interest. I saw myself!
I was emerging out of a corner of the room, and composedly approaching the bed. There was no doubt as to recognition. I knew instantly I was looking on my own face for the first time, and it was something of a shock to discover that I was more or less of a stranger to myself. I saw how false a looking-glass can be. I had not begun to know myself.
With absorbed interest I stared very hard, in my intense desire to imprint on my memory my own image. I approached the bed, and as I did so, I seemed to shrink, fade, and waver. Then suddenly I vanished--into my recumbent body.
For a few minutes afterwards I was too concerned with my physical condition to ponder on the vision of my real self. I was tossing violently in the bed, in an inner distraughtness which was most disturbing. Then, as my nervous system began to calm down, I strove to imprint on my memory the recollection of what I really looked like.
My face, even in the wonder of those few moments in which I had seen it, expressed emotions I had never seemed to know. Nothing was as I had believed it to be. All the traits that went to form my character needed readjusting, and all seemed curiously imperfect. I could not remember how I was clothed, though I had seen myself from head to foot. I suppose I was too engrossed in studying my face to think of my body.
The vision left me with a blank sense of utter disillusionment and failure. Nothing in me was finished or complete. My expression suggested a character which was horribly crude, imperfect and rudimentary. Looking at myself afterwards in the mirror, I came to the conclusion that it lied, or that in waking life I wear a mask.
It is salutary to behold one's spiritual portrait, a thing not visible to the mind alone but to the physical sight. In a flash comes the knowledge that dwelling in us are forces, not yet grasped by mortal mind, that cry for recognition. There have been moments in all lives, I believe, when a glimpse is caught of the Olympian heights to which it is possible to rise. Glimpses, alas! of the evanescent thing we know ourselves in truth to be.