"Spend your life in honouring St. Joseph, and your love and homage will never equal the love and homage paid to him by Mary; it will approach never so distantly to the obedience, the love, the homage paid to him for thirty years on earth by the Son of God. But in proportion as your heart grows towards him in the reverence and unbounded confidence of a son will you trace in your soul a more faithful copy of the Incarnate Word."-Letter on Devotion to St. Joseph, by Herbert, Bishop of Salford, 1877. Passages from the visions and revelations of saints and holy contemplatives-St. Bridget, Sister Maria of Agreda, and others-have been interwoven with the.narrative, simply in the way of illustration, and not as being invested with authority, except in the sense in which, after due examination, they have been favoured with ecclesiastical approval: namely, as containing nothing contrary to faith. and morals, and affording pious and profitable helps to meditation. Finally, observations and reflections have been introduced as occasion offered which were suggested by various authors whose works have been consulted, or which occurred to the writer's own mind from consideration of the materials before him. It is no uncommon idea, even among Catholics, that the devotion paid to St. Joseph and the lofty estimate of his prerogatives now prevailing in the Church are innovations of comparatively modern date, and that they have no precedent or sanction in antiquity. But this is far from being the case. In the writings of the ancient Fathers are to be found, not only what' may be called prolific germs, but also positive and explicit statements of doctrine, which sufficiently show how deep in the consciousness of the Church lay the belief of Joseph's exalted dignity and sanctity, and how definite a shape it had assumed even in the early ages. The devotion paid to him has, it is true, been much more distinctly formulated in later centuries, when his place in the celestial hierarchy came to be more fully recognised; but from the first this great Saint had a peculiar attraction for many holy and gifted souls, who regarded him with singular veneration and affection, as the citations given abundantly testify.

(Anna Maria Taigi 1769 - 1837) St. Alphonsus writes: "a single bad book will be sufficient to cause the destruction of a monastery." Pope Pius XII wrote in 1947 at the beatification of Blessed Maria Goretti: "There rises to Our lips the cry of the Saviour: 'Woe to the world because of scandals ' (Matthew 18:7). Woe to those who consciously and deliberately spread corruption-in novels, newspapers, magazines, theaters, films, in a world of immodesty " We at St. Pius X Press are calling for a crusade of good books. We want to restore 1,000 old Catholic books to the market. We ask for your assistance and prayers. This book is a photographic reprint of the original. The original has been inspected and many imperfections in the existing copy have been corrected. At Saint Pius X Press our goal is to remain faithful to the original in both photographic reproductions and in textual reproductions that are reprinted. Photographic reproductions are given a page by page inspection, whereas textual reproductions are proofread to correct any errors in reproduction.