Lourdes has its fill; and yet, little by little, in the long run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about the Grotto is diminishing.

It is dying out, if not in the religious world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting, who must be convinced.

And our Lord thinks it desirable to revive attention to the benefits dispensed by His Mother.
"Lasserre was not such an instrument as could renew the half-exhausted vogue enjoyed by Lourdes.

The public was soaked in his book; it had swallowed it in every vehicle and in every form; the end was achieved; this budding-knife of miracles was a tool that might now be laid aside.
"What was now wanted was a book entirely unlike his; a book that would influence the vaster public, whom his homely prosiness would never reach.

Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please.