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 acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God.  Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful:  on the need of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating suggestions.  Then compare this with the method by which health-giving suggestions are made to the bodily life.  “In the deeps of the soul His word is spoken.”  Is not this an exact description of the inward work of the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming power?  I think that we may go even further than this, and say that grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting our soul’s life.  As we are commonly docile to the countless hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to us by all-penetrating Divine life.  What is generally called sin, especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living suggestions of the Spirit.  The opposing qualities, humility, love and purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.