What we mean by having an open and childlike mind, then, is that one has this power of spiritual assimilation and, consequently, a power of growth.  The sceptic is afflicted with spiritual indigestion; he is an invalid who is quite certain that any food that is offered him is indigestible.  His soul withers away through its incapacity to believe.  The open-minded saint has a healthy spiritual digestion.  This does not mean that, in vulgar parlance, he can, “swallow anything”; it does mean a power of discrimination between food offered him,—­that he assimilates what is wholesome and rejects the rest.  The sceptic is pessimistic as to the existence of any wholesome food at all; he starves his soul for fear that he should believe something that is not true.  The saint, with the test of faith, sorts the food proposed to him, and grows in grace, and consequently in the knowledge and the love of God.

Open-mindedness is sensitiveness to spiritual impressions, readiness for spiritual advance, even when such impressions cut across much that has seemed to us well settled, and such advance involves the upset of his established ways of thought.  What distinguishes the evolution in the thought of the sceptic from that in the thought of the saint is that in the one case the result is destructive and in the other constructive.  The sceptic is like a man who starts to build a house, and then periodically tears down what he has so far built and begins again on a new plan; the saint is like the house builder who broadens his plan in the course of construction, and who finds that within the limits of his general scheme there is room for indefinite improvement.  The one never gets any building at all; the other gets a palace of which the last stages are of a more highly decorated school of architecture than he had conceived, or indeed, could conceive, when he began his work.

In S. Joseph’s case nothing could be more revolutionary in appearance than the truth he was asked to accept.  He was asked to believe in the virgin-motherhood of his bethrothed, and in the fact that the Child soon to be born was He Who was to save Israel from his sins.  He was asked to accept these incredible statements and to act upon them by taking Mary to wife as he had proposed.  And he did not hesitate to accept the evidence of a dream and act in accordance with it.  How could he do this?  Because the required action which seemed so revolutionary of all his previous notions was, in fact, quite in accordance with his knowledge of God and of the promises of God.  Though a simple man, perhaps because he was a simple man, he would know something of the teaching of the prophets.  That teaching would have given him thoughts about God which would have, unconsciously, prepared him for these new acts of God.  Though we cannot see before how a prophecy is to be fulfiled, after the event we can see that this is what is intended by it.  We were actually being prepared by the prophecy for what was to take place.  And thus, no doubt, S. Joseph’s mind, being filled with the teaching of the Scriptures which he had heard read in the Synagogue every Sabbath day, would find that this new act of God on which he was asked to rely was, in fact, but a new step in the unfolding of that Providence which had for centuries been shaping the history of his nation.