at the
door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and
bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of
the self.

As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.
They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred,
anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the
ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they
grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted
suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic
deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily
life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the
suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative
form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their
appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and
good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so
accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the
strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree
previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.

In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this
psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are
those ecstatics--some of them true saints, some only religious
invalids--whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced
in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less
extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that
eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer
which mediaeval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life
of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too,
to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious
suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love.