162 THE GREAT SECRET
Our era has no longer any feeling for the sublime or any understanding of heroes. Our politicians see Garibaldi as a not very funny incarnation of Don Quixote.
He is a sober clown who, after beating a few commissaries and after the crafty have played cat and mouse with him, will end up one day by being carried off by the Devil to the great amusement of the spectators.
‘The world is without religion’, said Count Joseph de Maistre, and it is for this reason, let us add, that it stands in need of marvels and jugglers.
When folk no longer believe in the priest they will believe in the sorcerer and we have written our books chiefly for priests so that, having become genuine magicians, they need no longer fear the illegal rivalry of the sorcerer. The author of this book belongs to the great sacerdocal family and has never forgotten it.
Let the priests become men of science once more and astonish the degenerate world by their grandeur of character; let them put behind them petty interests and passions; let them perform miracles of philanthropy and they will have the world at their feet: let them lay their hands on the sick and heal them as the zouave Jacob has done: in a word let them learn how to fascinate and they will learn how to reign.
Fascination has a big role to play in medicine, a doctor’s big reputation heals his patients in advance. A blunder by Mr Nelaton (if the celebrated practitioner were capable of such a thing) might do more good than all the skill of an ordinary surgeon. The story is tokiof a famous physician who, on handing his prescription for a plaster to the nurse looking after a man in great pain, said, ‘Apply this to his chest at once’. The good woman, who was not very bright, thought he was talking about the prescription itself and slapped it hot with a little iinseea oil on her patient. The latter felt rdieved straight away and by the next day}e was cured.
This is how big doctors heal our bodies and how accredited priests are able to cure our souls.
When I speak in this chapter of the beginning of a human decline, I am only talking of the phenomena which have come under my observation and I am not concluding that the entire species is in a state of decay on the evidence of he enfeeblement of a race. In spite of so many sad symptoms, I hope that there may
Copyrighted material