have any difficulty in sinking down into the hidden life of faith, in realising practically with St. Francis of Assisi, that, "what we are in the sight of God, that we are and nothing more."

Aye, nothing more, and indeed nothing less also for this last point is almost as important as the other-namely, our duty of recognising not only our worthlessness but our worth, not only our degradation but our dignity. For God loves us. Dilexit me. The wonder, as I said, is that we are allowed to think of any other motive except this, to look to any eye but God's. Yet it is of the Hidden Life itself that the words are written: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and age and grace with God and men."

But He was God, and in Him, even as man, the fulness of wisdom abode: how could He increase in wisdom? He increased, as the sun increases in brightness from dawn to noon-the same sun, the same light-giving substance, yet so different in the effects of light and heat that it produces. The Incarnate God, "the hidden God, the Saviour" (Isaias XLV., 15) manifested more and more of His divine attributes as He advanced through the years of His Hidden Life.

Like Him, we too must increase in wisdom and grace, as in age. In age-ah, yes, certainly, whether we will or not; and so, too, must we advance in wisdom and grace, and this not only before God but before men. Not before men only for God forbid we should be hypocrites-our grace and wisdom must be true and real "before God who reads the heart, that God who seeth in secret may repay us." Nor yet before God only: for God Himself, who forbids us to let our left hand know what our right hand does, orders us nevertheless to let our light shine before men.

A great deal might be said about the proper manner of reconciling precepts like these which seem to clash with one another but which of course harmonise perfectly. But we must hasten to an end, and there are two other characteristics of the Hidden Life besides its hiddenness, on which our minds must rest a little while before coming to an end.

Thus in the second place the Hidden Life of Jesus was a life of poverty and labour. In the eighty-eighth psalm which refers prophetically to Christ, He is made to say, "I am poor and in labours from my youth." Laborious poverty was His lot during His Hidden Life which stretched far beyond His youth into His manhood; and, when He emerged from the Hidden Life, poverty

and labour were with im still. He had chosen poverty from the first, and He was consistent to the last.

But the poverty which God loves, the poverty of the first beatitude, the poverty of the Hidden Life, was not the poverty of sloth or idleness, but the poverty of hard and constant toil. Some may, without any fault of their own, be reduced to such a state of untoiling poverty as is sometimes branded as pauperism, and we must not judge harshly even of those who make mendicancy a trade; yet it is true that God's blessing falls on poverty, not pauperism: it does not fall on the poverty of drunkenness, and not so much on the poverty of beggary or of the poorhouse as on the decent, high-spirited poverty of honest hard work.

How poor must Jesus and Mary and Joseph have been, and how hard they must have worked in the Holy House of Nazareth! Before that, what privations the Holy Family must have endured during the exile in Egypt, depending for support on such work and such payment as St. Joseph received from strangers, the enemies of his race! And after their return they must still have fared very poorly, even while our Blessed Lord helped St. Joseph at his trade. That He did thus help him--that He was thus "poor and in labours from His youth "-we are not left to learn from tradition or from mere pious conjecture: for in St. Matthew's Gospel we read that, after our Lord had begun His public life, the Jews said to one another in surprise, "Is not this the carpenter's son?"—and in St. Mark they ask more plainly still, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary ?" We may imagine how rudely His employers often spoke in giving Him their orders for work; we may imagine what privations their scanty and perhaps ill-paid wages left to be endured in Mary's household; and in that modest household itself, besides the toils of the workshop, we may imagine all the humble services which the Son rendered to the Mother day by day.

When the devout mind sets itself to realise in devout contemplation what may have been and what must have been the actual everyday details of our Lord's Hidden Life, it is justified in drawing many necessary conclusions as to His outward demeanour and His internal feelings towards His Heavenly Father and towards the two who shared with Him the holy home of Nazareth.

There is one feature, however, of the Redeemer's

conduct during those secret years which the Holy Ghost will not allow us to overlook, inspiring the Evangelists to condense the history of by far the largest part of Our Lord's life into the one brief phrase, Erat subditus illis: "He was subject to them." He the Incarnate God of Wisdom and Power and Majesty was subject to two of His creatures, the highest and purest indeed of all His creatures, yet still is mere creatures, infinitely beneath Him in dignity and power. Yet, because Joseph was the shadow of the Eternal Father, He obeyed him; and the Blessed Virgin Mary He obeyed as His own true and beloved Mother. What a useful lesson for us in all positions and degrees-a lesson more necessary perhaps than ever nowadays when obedience and subordination and the gradations of society seem to be growing more and more irksome to men, and to need still more for their support supernatural motives and a divine sanction.

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Let us, then, study patiently and diligently in the school of Nazareth. Let us try to learn some of this humility and lowliness, this love of poverty and labour-as far as our state of life calls for them or allows them--this spirit of prayer, this obedience and charity, and all the other virtues of the Hidden Life. Jesus, our hidden God, our Saviour," not only died for us; He lived for us, and each incident of His life has its own lesson for us. Nothing happens by accident in any life, and least of all in this "life of our Life." The External Wisdom "ordered all things. in it sweetly from end to end," from the crib to the cross-nay, earlier and later than crib and cross, from the womb of the Immaculate Virgin to the tomb hewn out of the virgin rock.

Our divine Redeemer had special wise ends in view in coming amongst us precisely as He came. In fulfilling His eternal promise, "Behold I come," He might have come in ways that would have dispensed with the Hidden Life. Hc might have come in full maturity, in all the power and majesty of perfect manhood transfigured by His Divinity. He might have come as visible King of Ilis own creation. He might have come as a glorious and bloodless Conqueror, some wondrous leader of men, more eloquent than His poor creature Cicero, more intellectual than His poor creature Aristotle, more masterful than His far poorer creature Napoleon. He might have come in the manifest plenitude of all the mental and corporal gifts that are parcelled out amongst the most gifted of the human race. Thus and in many other conceivable ways

He might have come; but He did not come thus. Ah! if knowing only the fact and the objects of His coming, we had set ourselves to conjecture the circumstances that might accompany it, never should we have been able to guess the manner in which He actually came. He came as the unborn and the new-born Child of Mary, girded round with all those pathetic circumstances of poverty and feebleness on which pious contemplation loves to ponder tenderly with adoring awe; and then He spent thirty years in the lowliness and seeming inaction of the Hidden Life.

Verily to repeat for the last time the prophetic exclamation of Isaiah-" verily thou art a hidden God, a Saviour." Thou hast hidden thyself, O Lord, under many disguises in order to be our Saviour; and we must recognise Thee under all Thy disguises, and we must imitate Thy hidden life if we would be saved. If we would share in "the revelation of Christ's glory," those other words of St. Paul to the Colossians must be verified in us also: "You are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God". even as Christ's own life, during the years which have here been brought before our minds, was hidden in God with Saint Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

M. R.

TASSO AT FERRARA.

MAY I not see Thy blue and gold and green,

-

The blossom-tints of dawn, nor at the close
Of sunny days the ripe-fruit shade that shows
Low i' the West, whose flame is as a screen
Crossing the glory eye hath never seen,—

Nor watch the budding and the dying rose,
The ripple o'er the grass when Caurus blows,
Elm bole and leaf with the young moon between?

Then will I lift mine eyes above the hills;

For lo, what beauty bordering the divine

Steals ever through these narrow window-bars!
The light of dawn my waking vision thrills,
And through the hours the shifting heavens shine,
And, all the lone night long, God's pool of stars.
DAVID BEARNE, S.J.

VOL. XXV. No. 291

35

Jo's

A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.

O'S face was very young and familiar, and she was always interesting. One morning she introduced a stranger with the remark: "I have been showing her where she would get the biggest penn'orth of sweets."

The strange face was younger than Jo's in all save expression, but the eyes, which were large and dark, seemed almost to absorb it, and they spoke of knowledge which it was sad to see in a child's face.

Who is she, Jo? Where did you find her?"

"Don't you know?" cried Jo with some surprise. "She is one of the show people!"

"Oh! is there a show in town?"

"It has been here since Monday!" This a little impatiently, "You will be a lady-interviewer one of these days, Jo, if you get your chances." (She was associated with Journalism). But the comment was unspoken; what Jo heard was a murmur which sounded apologetic for ignorance.

"Would you care to come?" she enquired.

"It would scarcely do, I am afraid, the show is only for little people, I suppose."

"I saw people bigger than you there."

Jo did not mean to be sarcastic, and we had ceased to be sensitive about the shortness of our stature.

"How did you manage to get there yourself, Jo?"

"Big Bob took me."

The reproof in our eyes seemed to abash Jo and she amended that by adding, "Mr. Kearney I mean."

This old man was the children's public benefactor and slave, of whom there seems to be one everywhere, in almost every generation. What is called misfortune, bereavement perhaps or deformity, may have deprived them of most of the joys of life; yet the days cannot be very dull upon which are shed the light of children's eyes and smiles, and golden gleams of their hair, and his heart must keep warm and young who has the power of winning a child's confiding affection. Every child in the place knew Mr. Kearney-knew what to expect at sight of him-smiles, caresses