only God."[109] Here the directions are exact, and such as any
psychologist of the present day might give. So too, religious teachers
informed by experience have always ascribed a special efficacy to "short
acts" of prayer and aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind,
which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, faith or adoration,
and are really brief, articulate suggestions parallel in type to those
which Baudouin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well-being.[110]
The repeated affirmation of Julian of Norwich "All shall be well! all
shall be well! all shall be well!"[111] fills all her revelations with
its suggestion of joyous faith; and countless generations of Christians
have thus applied to their soul's health those very methods by which we
are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The
articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power;
for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact
throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the
peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the _mantra_ of the
Hindu or the _dikr_ of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which
causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal
repetition, not merely the silent reading of their daily office. Hence,
too, there is real educative value, in such devotions as the rosary; and
the Protestant Churches showed little psychological insight when they
abandoned it. Such "vain" repetitions, however much the rational mind
may dislike, discredit or denounce them, have power to penetrate and
modify the deeper psychic levels; always provided that they conflict
with no accepted belief, are weighted with meaning and desire, with the
intent stretched towards God, and are not allowed to become merely
mechanical--the standing danger alike of all verbal suggestion and all
vocal prayer.

Here we touch the third character of effective suggestion: _Feeling_.
When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be
realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the
emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the
unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying
the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to
increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will
never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps