while we admire thy worth
A means unto that Son not to proceed
In rigour with us for each sinful deed.

John Brereley, Priest (Vere Lawrence Anderton, S.J.) 1575-1643

PART TWO

CHAPTER XI

NAZARETH

And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was
subject unto them.

S. Luke II, 51.

The Holy Church acknowledges and confesses the pure Virgin
Mary as Mother of God through whom has been given unto us the
bread of immortality and the wine of consolation. Give
blessings then in spiritual song.

ARMENIAN.

After the rapid succession of fascinating pictures which are etched for
us in the opening chapters of the Gospel there follows a space of about
twelve years of which we are told nothing. The fables which fill the
pages of the Apocryphal Gospels serve chiefly to emphasise the
difference between an inspired and an uninspired narrative. The human
imagination trying to develop the situation suggested by the Gospel and
to fill in the unwritten chapters of our Lord's life betrays its
incompetence to create a story of God Incarnate which shall have the
slightest convincing power. These Apocryphal stories are immensely
valuable to us as, by contrast, creating confidence in the story of
Jesus as told by the Evangelists, but for nothing more.

We are left to use our own imagination in filling in these years of
silence in our Lord's training; and we shall best use it, not by trying
to imagine what may have occurred, but by trying to understand what is
necessarily involved in the facts as we know them. We know that the home
in Nazareth whither Mary and Joseph brought Jesus after the death of
Herod permitted them to return from Egypt was the simple home of a
carpenter. It would appear to have been shared by the children of
Joseph, and our Lady would have been the house-mother, busy with many
cares. We know, too, that under this commonplace exterior of a poor
household there was a life of the spirit of far reaching significance.
Mary was ceaselessly pondering many things--the significance of all
those happenings which, as the years flowed on without any further
supernatural intervention, must at times have seemed as though they were
quite purposeless. Of course this could not have been a settled feeling,
for the insight of her pure soul would have held her to the certainty
that such actions of God as she had experienced would some day reveal
the meaning