life and examples have become an influence of every day and moment, during the past eighteen hundred years, how many mothers have found light and strength in the virtues which shine forth to the attentive eye within the lowly abode of Mary at Nazareth?" — (Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church, pp. 235, 236.) As to Joseph, the blessed head of that holy household of Nazareth, the Gospel makes no further mention of him. He lived to rear, to the first years of manhood, that Jesus who loved to call him father. He died, as became one privileged beyond all men, blessed and loved, tended and cheered by the two beings to whom he had given his life. No Christian man and woman can think of the holy and devoted foster-father of the Saviour, and of the virtues which shine forth in his conduct, without saying that he was as "blessed among men" as Mary, his beloved companion, was "blessed among women."
IV.
It was natural that our Lord, during the eighteen last years of His life at Nazareth, should prepare His Mother for the trials which awaited them both in the fulfilment of His public mission. All through these three years it is probable that Mary lived habitually either in her own home at Nazareth, or at Capharnaum among her near relatives, the two sisters, mothers, respectively, of the Apostles James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and of James the younger and Jude, the sons of Alpheus, As to her occupation during this period, a twofold testimony, that of Celsus, an enemy of the Christian name, and that of Tertullian, throws some light upon the matter. The former says that Mary was one who supported herself by manual labor; the latter affirms substantially the same fact. Like her husband, Joseph, like the Incarnate Word, her Son, Mary helped to elevate, in her own person, the condition of the laborer, to make of labor itself a something sacred and divine.
Her first appearance, in the public life of our Lord, was in connection with the Marriage Feast in Canna — a town situated a few miles westward of Nazareth. This marriage was the occasion of bringing together our Lord and His Mother with the first disciples, who had openly acknowledged Him as the Messiah: these were Peter and Andrew, two brothers, and Philip and Nathanael — Galileans all four of them — and the nucleus of that band of believers, recruited chiefly from Galilee, who were to be, under God, the founders of Christianity in the East and West.
The marriage at Cana took place a few months after the Baptism of our Lord by John, the solemn proclamation of His Mission by the Precursor to the crowd near the Jordan, and the public miracle by which the Father and the Holy Spirit manifested His Sonship and Divinity. Then He retired into the wild mountain tracts near the river to spend forty entire days and nights in solitude, prayer, and abstinence from all food — setting to all apostolic men to the end of time an example which they must follow, if they would continue His work with fruit. Christianity, the divinity of Christian life, the spread of God-like Christian holiness — all are based upon self-denial, self-sacrifice, and habitual prayer. Prayer is the very soul of holiness.
It has been the sense of the Church from the days of the apostles to our own, that this first miracle of our Lord, performed at the urgent solicitation of His Mother, gave a new and solemn sanction to the institution of matrimony. The sanctity and happiness of family life, the unity and permanence of the tie which, in the Christian home, binds to each other the father and the mother, the parents and the children, is the foundation of Christian society, Christian civilization. Christ, by assisting with His Mother and His disciples, at this marriage ceremony and feast, and by sanctioning them with a public and stupendous miracle, wished us — the Church teaches — to understand that He thereby raised the primitive matrimonial ordinance to the rank of a Sacrament — " a Great Sacrament," as S. Paul calls it — blessing the whole stream of human existence in its source, by infusing into it His own blood and the merits of His passion, and nourishing the souls of regenerated humanity with the spiritual energy divinely connected with His sacraments.
It is but the simple truth to say, that Mary by her presence at this Marriage Feast, and by her active part in obtaining the stupendous miracle performed on the occasion, showed herself to be the true Mother of the New Life, the Second Eve whose pleading with the Second Adam resulted, not in the ruin, but in the elevation and sanctification of the human family.
One word about the seeming rebuke which our Lord addressed on this occasion to her. The festivities, as usual in the country and in that age, had lasted several days, and to them all, the near relatives, at least, of the wedded pair and their families had been invited. The wine — the home-made, wholesome growth of each farm throughout the land — gave out. Mary's watchful eye detected this, and the secret prompting of the Holy Spirit urged her to say to her Son: " They have no wine." It was a womanly and motherly 'act. He, however, for the sake of His future fellow-workers there present, as well as for the instruction of us all, will have her understand that what He is going to do, what she evidently expects Him to do, belongs to the Divine Order, in which the claims or obligations of flesh and blood must never influence the dispensers of God's mysteries. " And Jesus saith to her: Woman (lady, rather), what is it to Me and to thee? My hour is not yet come. His Mother saith to the waiters: Whatsoever He shall say to you, do ye." "The solemn hour, indeed, for proclaiming from the cross, at the very consummation of His mediatorial office, that she is His Mother and that He is her son, has not yet come. That was to be the hour of supreme love for both, of love united in the oblation and consummation of such suffering as the hearts of mother and son never endured before or since. It is clear that she does not take His answer for a rebuke The eloquence of the miracle accomplished at her suggestion and entreaty should explain the " What is it to Me and to thee?" and do away with the obscurity or apparent harshness of the idiomatic expressions of a foreign language, or the style of address among a people so different in every way from ourselves.
On the other hand, the petition of the Blessed Mother has been held up as a model of the confidence and humility which should ever be found in prayer. She knows to Whom she pleads, she states in the simplest terms the need of her friends, and leaves the rest to the Almighty Goodness.
Such is also the way in which Martha and Mary represent the case of their brother Lazarus: "Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick. ' ' In both cases, a miracle is asked for; in both it is granted; whereas it would have been refused, if the asking it had been deemed an unwarrantable interference with the power of the Man-God.
" This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him. After this He went down to Capharnaum, He and His Mother, and His brethren, and His disciples; and they remained there not many days. And the Pasch of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem."
The miracle just performed naturally bound His own kinsfolk to the Master. Accompanied by these " His brethren," and by His
