THE latter portion of
the Hidden Life, which begins after the mystery of which we have last
spoken, may be considered as in some respects different in character
from that which preceded it. It seems that the age of twelve, which
our Lord had now reached, was the time at which the young Jews, if
they did not exactly enter life for themselves as in ripe manhood,
were considered in many respects no longer children, and as able to
choose for them selves, in some measure, the path of life along which
they were to walk. They were no longer so de pendent on their parents
as before. If our Lord had been intended, like St. Paul, to follow a
course of study in Jerusalem with a view to his future career as a
teacher, He might now have left His home for the Holy City. In many
respects He would now be considered adolescent, and thus any choice
He might now make with regard to the arrangement of His life, would
not have been thought an extraordinary assumption of independence on
His part.
It is perhaps with some
reference to this that the Evangelist has told us, of this last
period of the Hidden Life in particular, that He went down with His
parents to Nazareth and was subject unto them. This implies naturally
that He did not continue that course which He had adopted on the
occasion of this visit to the Temple, but that He returned to His
former way of living, and this although He had just shown that He
might freely leave them at any moment, in obedience to some call from
His Father, He did not actually do this. We must therefore infer that
as it had been the call of His Father which had made Him leave them,
so now 7 it was the call of His Father that made Him remain with
them. For it is impossible to suppose that He would, as it were, have
asserted a kind of independence of them, and then return with them,
for any other reason than that which had prompted His departure from
them for a time. But the Evangelist adds to the statement about His.
going down with them to Nazareth the other statement that He was
subject unto them, as if this required mention, as being the
description of the kind of life, which He now adopted after the
attainment of the age at which He might have adopted any other. It
seems to mean that, instead of following this or that line of
conduct, as might have been the case at the age which He had now
attained, He chose as His vocation, if we may so speak, as the kind
of service to His Father which was the normal and regular conduct for
Him during the remainder of the Hidden Life, the line of perfect and
continual submission and obedience to His parents. So that while it
might have been said of Peter, for instance, that he became a
fisherman, or of Nathanael that he became a Scribe, or that Matthew
entered the career which led on to his being a publican, it would be
said of our Lord that the line of life which He now adopted was to
live in subjection to His parents. He served them with as perfect a
submission as if He had taken in their household the place of a hired
servant.
This is the marvellous
choice of God for His Incarnate Son, not simply when He was a little
Child, but when He was in the eyes of the world becoming a fullgrown
youth, and drawing on to wards manhood. This is the deliberate choice
of the Sacred Heart, guided in all things by the Holy Ghost, and it
certainly adds an emphasis to this instruction that it should follow
so immediately on the narrative of the remaining of our Lord in
Jerusalem. There are no details at all given us as to the service and
submission which were now exercised, for in such exercises it is not
the kind of work that is performed that is important, but only the
principle and motive on which the service is rendered. These were as
perfect as they could be, whatever it might have been that our Lord
was occupied upon out of His submission and obedience. It is this
that characterizes the work, and gives it its merit, not the
substance of the work itself. Year after year was to roll on, a
longer period was to pass than had already elapsed since He became
Man in the womb of Mary, and still the same was the answer to the
question, what is the Incarnate God occupied upon? The answer was
always the same, He is being subject.
In the service of God
which is rendered to Him by His saints on earth, it is often said
that it is obedience that is the great virtue of all, planting all
other virtues in the soul and preserving them when they are already
planted, the great method and most certain security of rapid progress
and high perfection. Thus our Lord adopted the most safe and most
powerful method of perfection, practising this method as if He had
ever fresh heights of perfection to which He aspired to attain,
though indeed He could not rise in perfection, having been from the
moment of the Hypostatic Union full of all grace and all virtue. But,
as we have seen else where, He could grow in the experimental
practice of the virtues, and He could manifest more and more the
perfection of virtue which was in Him from the beginning. We cannot
be wrong in thinking that this choice which He made was made with a
view to us, and to instruct us, as nothing else could instruct us, in
the value which He attaches to imitation of Himself in this chief and
paramount matter.
With regard to our
Blessed Lady, who is our more direct subject of consideration here,
we may see, in the first place, how wonderfully she must have
profited by this most stupendous example of our Lord as to His
favourite virtue, the virtue in which she also was so conspicuous a
follower of Him. The depths of the humility and subjection which she
saw in Him must have revealed to her ever new and new beauties in
this great virtue. It may also be remembered that there is no school
of humility, after the constant practice of subjection, which admits
of greater advance in this virtue than the practice of having to act
as Superior over others better than ourselves. Those who are the
confessors of saints must learn immensely from their penitents, and
those who are the Superiors of saints are in the same position of
great spiritual advantage if they can use their privileges rightly
and humbly. Thus we may consider this time as one at which our
Blessed Lady would probably have made enormous strides in the
knowledge and practice of every virtue, if it were only that during
this time she had to act as the Superior of her Son. She would have
constantly before her eyes the profound example of humility of which
the Apostle speaks when he describes the mind and character of our
Lord, the self-annihilation before the Majesty of God, the perpetual
humiliation in word and deed and thought, the intense penetration of
the truth of the utter worthlessness and nothingness of the creature,
who has received every gift from God, and has of his own nothing at
all. To this perfect pattern of humility Mary had day after day to be
acting as ruler and guide in the place of God. No wonder if there
should have been no limit to her self-abasement and humiliation, and
to her charity also, for every stage of humility should be a fresh
stage of charity, and of closer union with God and of growth in every
virtue.
We have supposed that
during these long years of the Hidden Life our Blessed Lady, in some
way or other, whether entirely preternaturally or by conversation
with her Blessed Son, was made acquainted with the principal and
characteristic features of the New Law which He was to introduce and
the Kingdom which He was about to found. If the main outlines and
principles of the Christian society as such were laid before her, in
any way or measure, it is not probable that she would be left in
ignorance of the beautiful creations of the religious spirit, which
were all to be founded, with whatever variety of individual design,
on the virtue of humility, especially on obedience, and on the
poverty and chastity of which the Holy House of .Nazareth was the
home. Such a contemplation would have set before our Blessed Lady the
fairest and most fruitful portion of the future Kingdom, rich in
treasures of sanctity in itself, and in blessings of example and
beneficence for the whole world around it. At all events it must
always be a legitimate consolation to the religious soul, to consider
how exactly the great principles of the life which it aims at leading
for the glory of God are to be found exemplified in the life of the
Holy Family at Nazareth. And when our Lady afterwards saw the first
shootings of this goodly plant in the garden of the young Church, she
might well recognize in this the springing up of a seed that had been
first committed to the soil in these years of which we speak.
In this respect we may
consider that the years which followed on the mystery of the
remaining in the Temple, were more directly significant than the
years which preceded them. For it was at this time that our Lord had
proclaimed most fully, that every step of His conduct was taken as a
distinct fulfilment of some behest of His Father, and in the interest
of His Father, and was thus raised above the level of natural duty to
that of supernatural duty. And it was now that the principle and
supreme motive of all He did is described as being subjection. These
features are not excluded from ordinary Christian lives, but it is in
the religious life that they find their most formal and enduring .and
unvarying expression. Thus when the blessed dwellers in Heaven look
down upon the Christian world, and discern there the repetition of
what was first practised in Nazareth, they see this if many a
Christian home at least partially and intermittently, but they see it
embodied and consecrated by an irrevocable dedication to God in the
holy homes of the religious life.
There is yet another
feature which is to be found in the later years of the Hidden Life,
which is constantly repeated in Christian society, and forms an
occasion of numberless beautiful charities and self-sacrifices, while
it derives its blessing and its charm from its consecration by the
Holy Family. For we are told that some years before the close of this
blessed time it pleased God to permit His favoured servant St. Joseph
to be tried by a succession of serious and painful illnesses, which
reduced him to a state of chronic suffering, and made him unable any
longer to labour as he had laboured hitherto for the sustenance of
the holy home. This dispensation of Providence gave that great saint
the opportunity of accumulating new merits daily, by his patience and
conformity to the Divine will, while at the same time it enabled our
Lady and our Lord to show towards him all the most delicate and
tender refinements of the most exquisite charity in their
ministrations to him. Thus .was suffering of this kind consecrated in
the life of our Lord, and by the active exercise of the most careful
devotion by Himself and by His Blessed Mother. If this had not been
so, then human life would have lacked this blessing which is involved
in the fact that every common office of duty and charity has been
hallowed by Him in the course of His sojourn amongst us. Pain,
indeed, and hunger and weariness, He has consecrated sufficiently by
having undergone them in His own Person, but He could not, or it was
not convenient that He should, endure sickness. He has hallowed this
too, and also set us the most perfect example of the charity which it
ought to call forth in us, both by this feature in the holy years of
His home life, and by the tenderness with which He relieved every
kind of disease and infirmity when the time came for His mixing among
men as the Teacher of truth.
The long illness of St.
Joseph ended, as it seems, some few years before the termination of
the Hidden Life, and thus it was arranged that our Lord should live
for some space of time alone with His Blessed Mother after her
bereavement. Christian contemplation has often dwelt with wondering
love over the parting moments of the blessed Spouse of Mary, and
endeavoured to enter into her sorrow, and to imagine the details of
the first and most perfect Christian death-bed. It was then that she
became for the first time the Mother of the dying, the special
patroness and protector of the children of the Church in the last and
most momentous passage of their existence. St. Joseph shows us all
the resignation, and patience, and faith, and confidence in God,
which are the virtues which adorn the last time of our trial, when
the soul has the opportunity of turning what under our present
condition is the necessity of nature, into an occasion of almost
priceless merit and homage to the majesty and the justice of God. Our
Lord is there, the fountain of all graces whether for life or for
death, and our Lady is by His side, with all the boundless efficacy
of her intercession for the parting soul. And thus too all our
ordinary and natural sorrows are assuaged by finding their echo in
the hearts of our Lord and His Mother, whose love for the dying soul
was boundless, and whose natural sorrows were in proportion to their
love and the closeness of the ties which bound them to the husband
and foster-father, by whose side they watched as the moment of death
drew nigh.
Such are some of the
features which belong more especially to this, the longest and most
hidden stage of the existence of our Blessed Lady in the holy home.
All that she had learnt and gained in the years which had preceded
these formed a part of her life in this period, and the new features
of which we have been speaking were added to others which have come
more particularly before our sight in the earlier stages of her
ministrations to our Lord as His Mother. The Hidden Life was the time
which our Lord devoted, under the Providence of His Father, to the
preparation for His great work among souls in the way of preaching,
instructing, converting, as well as for that which was to come
immediately on the close of the Public Life, the work of the Passion
for the satisfaction for sin to the justice of God. This time was
also the preparation of our Blessed Lady for the part she was to have
in both of these great works, a part not the same as that which He
alone could undertake and perform, but nevertheless a part of utmost
importance in the designs of God and of utmost fruitfulness to men.
Not one of the days of all that long time but had done its part in
the increase of her immense sanctification, her intelligence of our
Lord and His work, her imitation of Him, and her cooperation with
Him. It was to be the same, as we shall see, with the years of His
active Life, which was now on the eve of its commencement, and that
again was to prepare her for the still more wonderful work which was
to be committed to her when the time came for the Passion itself.
