een expressed that, by such an application of the laws of
suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a
mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility.
But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides
us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not
consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of
well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and
correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this
correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied--or if
broken may often be restored--by good suggestions; it may be disturbed
by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is mind, not
chemistry, and mind is plastic to ideas. So too the life of the Spirit
is a concrete fact; a real response to a real universe. But this
concrete life of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its richly
various working of one principle in every aspect of existence, its
correspondences with the Eternal World, its definitely ontological
references, is lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic
life, and indeed his bodily life too--a truth which is embodied in
sacramentalism. Therefore, sharing as it does life's plastic character,
it too is amenable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by it. It
is indeed characteristic of those in whom this life is dominant, that
they are capable of receiving and responding to the highest and most
vivifying suggestions which the universe in its totality pours in on us.
This movement of response, often quietly overlooked, is that which makes
them not spiritual hedonists but men and women of prayer. Grace--to give
these suggestions of Spirit their conventional name--is perpetually
beating in on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the Divine
suggestion must be transformed by man's will and love into an
auto-suggestion; and this is what seems to happen in meditation and
prayer.

Everything indeed points to a very close connection between what might
be called the mechanism of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in
no way to minimize the transcendental character of prayer. In both
states there is a spontaneous or deliberate throwing open of the deeper
mind to influences which, fully accepted, tend to realize themselves.
Look at the directions given by all great teachers of prayer and
contemplation; and these two