Book Description

I HAVE found it very hard to choose a name for this new book about St. Joseph, and the name chosen at last needs an excuse. I t was suggested by a story that is told of one of his most devoted clients, whose greatest glory is perhaps the part she has had in promoting the glory of St. Joseph. Our Lord, it is said, appeared one day to St. Teresa in the form of achild, and asked her name. "I call myself Teresa of Jesus." "And I," said the Divine Child, "call Myself Jesus of Teresa." Copying this model, I have dared to call the subject of this book St. Joseph of Jesus and Mary.My title-page goes on to describe the book as made up of" priedieu papers" about St. Joseph. Some of them have appeared in The Irish Monthly, in the series of short and simple essays on spiritual subjects to which that name is given in the magazine-a name taken from the French word for genuflexorium or praying-stool.The word is included in Webster's English Dictionary, and defined "a kind of desk at which to kneel for prayer." It may be so far naturalised among us as to be pronounced preedew, without trying to bring out the French sound exactly. Some such local arrangement to remind us of our duty of morning and night prayer, and to help us at our prayers, might well be an item of bedroom furniture in a Catholic household.In French periodicals the editorial responsibility is sometimes limited in these terms: Pour les articles non signls le Grant. I might, by a similar formulary, make myself responsible for all that follows in these pages, whenever there is no other signature attached. There is an exception, however: the two opening papers owe to kind and gifted friends-the first to the Very Rev. P. A. Sheehan, P.P. of Donerailc, and the second to Father John Fitzpatrick, O.M.I. And yet their names are not appended: first, because I have been allowed to make changes and adaptations for which the writers are not responsible; and, secondly, in order that my book might not have, from the start, the appearance of being less original, more of a compilation, than it really is. Even these items, like most of the verses in the Appendix, are original in the sense of being now published for the first time as a fresh tribute of affectionate devotion to St. Joseph.The collection of original and selected "Poems in praise of the Foster-father" of our Divine Redeemer, which was published a year ago under the name of SaintJoseplls Anthology, has received a warm welcome from the clients of the Saint. And now again I venture to offer to them a prose book written in his honour, which may perhaps win readers not only for itself but for its companion volume. Something may happen like what happened to two little boys, who, with older folk, once climbed up a certain Croagh Shee with straw hats on their heads. One of these hats was blown suddenly away out of sight down the stony side of the mountain, and was lost to view behind some rock or within some little hollow. None of the party could tell exactly in what direction it had gone, and therefore someone proposed that the other straw hat should be allowed to flyaway too, but that its course should be watched very carefully. So was it done, and both hats were recovered. After I had in my mind applied this little autobiographical incident to this second book about St. Joseph, which I send after Saint Joseph's Anthology, I find that Shakespeare has forestalled me in the first scene of "The Merchant of Venice." In my school days, when I had lost one shaftI shot his fellow of the self·same flightThe self· same way with more advised watch,To find the other forth; and by adventuring bothloft found both."