We can most of us, I have no doubt, find by searching somewhere in our religious practice parallel attitudes toward truth.  We have settled many questions in a sense that is agreeable to us.  We cannot tell just how we got them settled, but settled they are.  Take a very familiar matter which greatly concerns us in this parish dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the question of the honour and reverence due to our Blessed Mother.  We had got settled in our practice that certain things were right and certain wrong.  I doubt if a very intelligent account of this—­why they were right or wrong—­could, in many cases have been given.  But the settled opinion and practice was there.

And then came the demand for a review; that we look our practice squarely in the face and ask, “What is the ground of this?  Does it correspond with the teaching of Scripture and of the Catholic Church?  And if it does not, what am I going to do about it?  Have I only a collection of prejudices there where I supposed that I had a collection of settled truths?  Do I see that it is quite possible that I may be wholly wrong, and that I am hindered by pride from reversing my attitude?” For there is a certain pride which operates in these matters of belief and practice as well as elsewhere.  We are quite apt to pride ourselves on our consistency and think it an unworthy thing to change our minds.  That is rather a foolish attitude; changing one’s mind is commonly not a mark of fickleness but of intellectual advance.  It means oftentimes the abandonment of prejudice or the giving up of an opinion which we have discovered to have no foundation.  This is rather a large universe in which we live, and it is improbable that any man’s thought of it at any time should be adequate.  Intellectual progress means the assimilation of new truths.  The Christian Religion is a large and complex phenomenon, and any individual’s thought of it at any time must be, in the nature of things, an inadequate thought.  Progress in religion means the constant assimilation of new truths—­new, that is, to us.  Surely it is a very peculiar attitude to be proud of never learning anything, making it a virtue to have precisely the same opinions this year as last!  I should be very much ashamed of myself if a year were to pass in which I had learned nothing, had changed my mind about nothing.  In religion, one knows that the articles of the Faith are expressed in the dogmatic definitions of the Church; but one will never know, seek as one will, all that these mean in detail, all that they demand in practice.  And our only tolerable attitude is that of learners constantly seeking to fill up the lacunae in our beliefs and practice.