to offer sacrifice for them, to visit them in sickness and in sorrow, as well as in their hours of gladness, and to be to them, at one and the same time, a friend, a father, and a protector.

In truth, when not engaged in the allimportant work of the confessional, the really good pastor can scarcely help being on his feet all day. Schools are to be looked after, erring parishioners to be seen to and admonished, the sick are to be comforted, confraternities organised and upheld, parochial abuses to be hunted up and corrected. Perhaps a new church is in progress, or an old one undergoing repair.

In both cases

he will have to superintend the work, and supply, in due course, the means of paying for it. Then, when indoors, at his own residence, he has to see and speak to all who call on him in quest either of charity or advice; he has frequently to maintain a heavy, and, perhaps, troublesome correspondence; he is occasionally called upon to

give practical proof of that spirit of hospitality, particularly towards his brethren in the priesthood, which so well becomes an Irish ecclesiastic; and, withal, preparation must be made, and carefully made, if he desires to be fruitful and effective, for his Sunday exhortations, and other pastoral addresses, throughout the year.

How on earth, then, can he find time for deep and prolonged study, and, above all, how can he manage, as a result, to write sound and useful books of piety and instruction?

Let the earnest and hard-working Archdeacon of Cashel answer the question. He has already given us, in quick succession, "The Dove of the Tabernacle," "The Angel of the Altar," "The Lamb of God," and "Mary Immaculate "-all standard works of devotion, as is fully attested by the fact that they have gone through numerous editions, while nearly all of them are to be found, beautifully brought out, in the French,

German, and Italian languages. To-day we have another valuable publication from his fertile and vigorous pen. "St. Joseph : His Life, his Privileges, Prerogatives, and Power," is the title of the Archdeacon's latest production; and having somewhat carefully perused it, I have no hesitation whatever in saying that my disappointment shall be great, indeed, if those capable of forming a just estimate of its merits do not pronounce it to be one of his most useful and edifying works.

There is, perhaps, no saint in the calendar of whom less is generally known than of St. Joseph. One out of every ten thousand otherwise well-informed Catholics could not tell you anything concerning him, beyond the fact that he was the reputed father of Our Lord and the husband of Our Blessed Lady; that he is supposed to have been a carpenter by trade, and that he contributed, as such, to the support of Our Divine Saviour during a considerable portion of his life.

Indeed, the Sacred Scripture speaks but seldom of him. It tells us, however, the all-sufficient truth that he was "the husband of Mary." It tells us, moreover, that an angel revealed to him the miraculous conception of the Incarnate Word; that he was present in the stable of Bethlehem when the Wise Men from the East came to adore their new-born King; that he was admonished by a celestial messenger to fly into Egypt with the Divine Infant and His Mother; that he did so; that, after a rather protracted stay in that country, he returned home; and that he was certainly alive when Our Lord had attained the twelfth year of His age.

But when he was born; how old he was when he espoused the Blessed Virgin; when and where he died and was buried; what became of his remains, of which absolutely no trace has been found; when precisely he was first publicly honoured as a saint in the Church these are points, together with

countless others, of greater or less consequence, on which the ordinary Catholic mind is wholly uninformed.

All these interesting questions are proposed in the Archdeacon's "Life of St. Joseph," and treated by him with much felicity of expression, singular clearness, great wealth of argument and illustration, and with that peculiar warmth, that compactness and solidity of construction for which his other literary efforts are so justly and so generally commended.

Besides the historical, and what may, perhaps, be termed the dogmatic aspect of the work, Part the Third supplies an admirable and much-needed manual of devotion in honour of St. Joseph. The month of March is St. Joseph's month, just as the month of May is the month of Mary; and for each of the thirty-one days of March there is a suitable meditation based on some special phase of the great Patriarch's life; and after each meditation comes a short form of