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.

The impression we get of S. Joseph is that of a man of great simplicity and gentleness of character—­that childlikeness which was later praised by his foster Son.  Such qualities do not produce much impression on the superficial observer, but they are of great spiritual value.  They are the concomitants of a special type of open-mindedness.  Open-mindedness is a quality much praised and little practiced.  But the open-mindedness which is commonly praised is not the open-mindedness which is praiseworthy.  What is at present meant by open-mindedness is in reality failure to have any mind at all upon a given subject.  It is the attitude of doubt which never proceeds so far as to arrive at a solution.  To have an open mind means to the contemporary man to hold all conclusions loosely, to consider all things open to question, to be ready to abandon what now appears to be true in favour of something which to-morrow may appear to be more true.  In other words, we are invited to base life on pure scepticism.

Now no life can be so conducted.  We live by a faith of some sort, whether it be a faith in God or no.  The most sceptical mind has to believe something to act at all.  It cannot even doubt without affirming a belief in its own intellectual processes.  The open mind that never reaches any certainty to fill it is a very poor possession indeed.  And it is not at all what we mean when we say of S. Joseph that he was open-minded.  We mean that he was receptive of new spiritual impressions and capable of further spiritual development.  There are minds, and they are not unusual among people of a certain degree of spiritual development, which we can best describe as having reached a given stage of growth and then shut up.  Or, to vary the figure, they impress one as having a certain capacity, and when that has been reached, being able to contain nothing further.  They come to a stop.  From that point they try to maintain the position they have acquired.  But that is impossible:  they inevitably fall away unless they are going forward.  When the power of spiritual assimilation is dead, we are spiritually in a dying condition.