Rapid as have been our visits to the sanctuaries which we have described, and incomplete as have been our recitals, the result of them is, as the reader will allow, an historical fact of great importance. It is that, not only at Rome, the center of Catholicity, in the famous Vatican Basilica, but in France, at Montreuil-les-Dames, at Montreuil-sous-Laon and at Tours; in Spain, at Jaen, at Osa de la Vega and at Alicante; in Italy, at Lucca, the worship rendered to the sorrowful Face of our Lord Jesus Christ has shone for centuries with a splendor which Popes and Kings, Bishops and Magistrates have been pleased to enhance by the authority of their words and their example. Is there anything, in fact, more eminently conformable with, catholic piety than to turn our eyes and our hearts towards the Face of our Lord, so unworthily outraged by sinners and yet so compassionate and merciful? The Holy Face of Jesus in His Passion has been, and will always be the symbol of suffering and of pardon; always and everywhere souls will have recourse to it in order to seek for consolation, light and strength.

That great Christian of modern times, the Holy Man of Tours, the venerable M. Dupont, was therefore really inspired by God when he asked for and received from Rome a copy of the veil of Veronica, and when he set it up in his private oratory as the standard of reparation and a principle of solvation. In union with the Roman Church, he felt that his devotion was true and safe; be foresaw the extension it would receive after his death, and be read with delight some of the historical notices of which we have given an abstract. He believed, and we believe with him, that the worship of the Holy Face is not new to the Church, but that it rests upon the most trustworthy and best authorized traditions.

Following his example, and walking in his footsteps, let every fervent Catholic strive to extend and to propagate this precious means of deliverance and of expiation! The events taking place at Tours, in the oratory of the Holy Face, seem prepared by Providence to revive, with respect to many different points, what is tending to become weak or to fall into desuetude; to reunite into one great whole the precious elements which are scattered abroad, and thus to form in the midst of our own age, which is in such a strange state of convulsion and rupture, a new race of Christians, a vigorous and heavenly minded generation; the one which the Prophet announced when he exclaimed— Behold the generation of them that seek the Lord, of them that seek the Face of the God of Jacob (Ps. xiii, 6).