they inevitably fall away unless they are going forward. When the power
of spiritual assimilation is dead, we are spiritually in a dying
condition.

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