“Son,” says the inward voice to Thomas a Kempis, “My grace is precious, and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly consolations.  Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away impediments to grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof.  Ask for thyself a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....  This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual man."[102] Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a great self-realizing idea?  Such transfiguration has literally on the physical plane caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak:  and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest levels in the work of salvation.  When further a Kempis prays “Increase in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own health” is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation and manly use of them?  This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which, as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are “receptive of God.”

It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely to be received and realized by us.  These conditions, as psychologists have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of quiescence, attention and feeling:  outstanding characteristics, as I need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.

First, let us take Quiescence.  In order fully to lay open the unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by it.  The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be those of complete mental and bodily rest.  Here is the psychological equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet:  a state defined by one of them as “a rest most busy.”  “Those who are in this prayer,” says St. Teresa, “wish their bodies to remain motionless, for it seems to