and offers Himself to us with all the benefits of His life and death;
and then having offered Himself "He makes as though he would go
farther," and he does actually go, unless we are awake to our spiritual
opportunity, and constrain Him, saying, "abide with us, for it is toward
evening and the day is far spent."

We think of S. Joseph then, as with a relieved and rejoicing heart he
enters upon his new realised vocation as the head of the Holy Family.
The marriage which he had been upon the point of abandoning he now
enters that he may give S. Mary and her coming Child his full
protection.

So S. Joseph "took unto him his wife; and knew her not till she had
brought forth her first-born Son." These words have been so
misunderstood as to imply that the marriage of S. Joseph and S. Mary was
consummated after the birth of our Lord. Grammatically they convey no
such implication; the mode of expression is perfectly simple and well
known by which a fact is affirmed to exist up to a certain time without
any implication as to what happens after. And the meaning of the passage
which is not at all necessitated by its grammatical construction is
utterly intolerable in Catholic teaching. The constant teaching of the
Church is the perpetual virginity of Mary--that she was a virgin "before
and in and after her child-bearing." There was to be sure an heretic
named Helvidius who taught otherwise, but he was promptly repudiated by
all Catholic teachers and but served to emphasize the depth and
clearness of the Catholic tradition. Upon this point there has never
been any wavering in the mind of the Church, and to hold otherwise shows
a lamentable lack of a Catholic perception of values and but a
superficial grasp upon what is involved in the Incarnation.