It is a quality to cultivate, this simple open-mindedness which is ready to respond to new spiritual impulses.  It is precisely what prevents that deadly attitude of soul which proceeds as though religion were for us exhausted:  as though we had reached the limit of expectancy.  But to expect nothing is to receive nothing, because it is only expectancy that perceives what is offered.  We move in a world which is thronged with spirtual impulses and energetic with spiritual powers.  God is trying to lead us on to new spiritual experiences by which we may attain to a better understanding of Him.  There is no assignable limit to our possible growth.  But we fix a limit when we close our souls to further experiences by the practical denial that they exist.  If we are childlike, we are always expecting new things of our Father; if we are open-minded we are alive to the activities of the spiritual world.  We are conscious of possessing a growing religion, a religion truly evolutionary, constantly bringing to our knowledge unsuspected riches stored in the very principles whose meaning we had assumed that we had exhausted.

Perhaps one of the treasures of our religion of which we have not achieved full consciousness is God’s choice of us to be the guardians of His revelation.  It is our charge “to keep the faith.”  I suppose that this responsibility is commonly regarded as belonging to some vaguely imagined Church which hands it on from generation to generation, to us among others, but without imposing on us an obligation of any active sort.  But we are the Church—­members in particular of the Body of Christ.  And in the dissemination of the faith the last appeal is to us, not to some outside tribunal.  When the Church wishes to discover its faith and make it articulate, its place of search is in the minds and hearts of the faithful.  Our responsibility is to testify to the Catholic Faith, not so much by positively asserting it as by making it active and vivid in our lives so that its presence and power can by no means be mistaken.  You, for instance, in common with the rest of the faithful, are the custodians of this truth of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  It may seem a small matter, but it is not.  That it is not is readily seen from this fact, that when the perpetual virginity of our Blessed Mother is denied then also the Incarnation of her Son is denied or is held only in a half-hearted way.  The Church stresses such facts, not only because they are facts, but because by their character they form a hedge about the truth of the Incarnation of our Lord.  And we who are Catholic Christians must feel an obligation to hold fast this fact.  We ought actively to show our firm adherence to it.  How?  Chiefly by our attitude towards Blessed Mary herself, by the devotion that we show her.  If we are quite indifferent to devotion to Blessed Mary, if we show her no honour, if we likewise fail in honour to her guardian, S. Joseph, is it not to