The season will shortly be coming round when, in sympathy with the resurrection of life around, some ebullience in the blood moves all sorts of people to be on the wander. Some will be lacing on nailed shoes and gripping sticks to get up into the hills; some will be fitting out small boats to be away to sea; some will be throwing handbags into dickys and luggage racks, or climbing, armed with a day’s rations, into charabancs. But one and all are moved by the same pleasantly impatient spirit: Wanderlust.

This brings to our mind one of the Church’s ‘Canonizations,’ one of the triumphs of that triumphant humanism by which it admits even the life we share with the animals to partake in acts of worship which it teaches have an eternal significance. It has canonized Wanderlust by the institution of pilgrimages to shrines. He is now ‘Saint Wanderlust.’ He has lesser forms in the everyday desire to be up and moving, if it be only up the hill or about the town, which the Church has canonized by such institutions as processions, or the round of the Stations in Rome, or the Stations of the Cross up the hill at Pantasaph —with the view at the top. He has one supreme form in the Spring Wanderlust, which the poet noted when he said that spring was the time of pilgrimages. So he has been taught the way to shrines.

There are, of course, things much more profound that lie behind the institution of shrines than this harnessing of a mere stirring in the blood. Sometimes, as at Lourdes, they are of immediate divine institution. Sometimes even when of human institution they are the occasion of the granting of many favours, even of the working of miracles, as is apparently the case at Carfin; and hence of a great increase of devotion.