on the same lines:  exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas or passionate desires.  We see therefore that St. Paul’s admonition “Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things be of good report, think on these things” is a piece of practical advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.

Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp:  and those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of religious experience, as “mere suggestion” are unfortunate in their choice of an adjective.  If then we wish to explore all those mental resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life, this is one which we must not neglect.  The religious idea, rightly received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself.  “Receive His leaven,” says William Penn, “and it will change thee, His medicine and it will cure thee.  He is as infallible as free; without money and with certainty.  Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all things new:  new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new works, a new life and conversation."[101] This is fine literature, but it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology:  and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of character which are the romance and glory of the religious life.  Pascal’s too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the same truth.

Fears have been 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