in thy wit and in thy will but 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 less rational faith.  Thus the state of corporate suggestibility generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends, is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is made.  And, on higher levels, we see that the transfigured lives and heroic energies of the great figures of Christian history all represent the realization of an idea of which the heart was an impassioned love of God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses and powers of the inner man, “If you would truly know how these things come to pass,” said St. Bonaventura, “ask it of desire not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of the schools."[112] More and more psychology tends to endorse the truth of these words.