In the meantime other things did not matter much, seeing she had Jesus, the object of endless love.  Every mother dreams over the baby she cares for and looks out into the future with trembling hope; so S. Mary’s thoughts would go out following the hints of prophecy and angelic utterances, unable to understand how the light and shadow which were mingled there could find fulfilment in her Child.  But like any other mother the thought would come back to her present possession, the satisfaction of her heart that she had in Jesus.  With the growth of Jesus there would come the unfolding of the answering love, which was but another mode in which the love of God she had experienced all her life was manifesting itself.  Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and we are able to enter a little into the over-flowing love of Mary as she watched the advance, this unfolding from day to day.  The wonder that was hers in guiding this mind and will, in teaching our Lord His first prayers, in telling Him the story of the people of whom He had assumed our nature!  There was here no self-will, no resistance to guidance, no perversity to wound a mother’s heart.  In the training of an ordinary child there are from time to time hints of characteristics or tendencies which may develop later into spiritual or moral disaster.  There are growls of the sleeping beast which make us tremble for the future:  there are hours of agony when we think of the inevitable temptations which must be met, and suggestions of weakness which colour our imagination of the meeting of them with the lurid light of defeat.  But as Mary watched the unfolding character of Jesus she saw nothing there that carried with it the least suggestion of evil growth in the future, no outcropping of hereditary sin or disordered appetite.  A constantly unfolding intelligence, and growing interest in the things that most interested her, an eagerness to hear and to know of the will and love of the eternal Father, these are her joy.  That would have been the centre—­would it not?—­of the unfolding consciousness of Jesus:  the knowledge of the Father.

Training by love, so we might describe the life in the Home at Nazareth.  And we must not forget the grave ageing figure who is the head of the household. The Holy Family—­that was the perfect unity that their love created.  There is a wonderful picture of these three by Sassaferato which catches, as no other Holy Family that I know of does, the meaning of their association.  S. Mary whom the artistic imagination is so apt, after the Nativity, to transform into a stately matron, here still retains the note of virginity which in fact she never lost.  It is the maiden-mother who stands by the side of the grave, elderly S. Joseph, the ideal workman, who is also the ideal guardian of his maiden-wife.  And Jesus binds these two together and with them makes a unity, interpreting to us the perfection of family life.