has been too often in the past—­in terms of misery, weakness, or disease.  We remember how the idea of herself as a victim of love worked physical destruction in Therese de L’Enfant Jesus:  and we shall never perhaps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashionable doctrines of predestination and of the total depravity of human nature.  All this shows how necessary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive conceptions before those whom we try to help or instruct; constantly suggesting to them not the weak and sinful things that they are, but the living and radiant things which they can become.

Further, this tendency of the received suggestion to work out its whole content for good or evil within the unconscious mind, shows the importance which we ought to attach to the tone of a religions service, and how close too many of our popular hymns are to what one might call psychological sin; stressing as they do a childish weakness love of shelter and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human life, a morbid preoccupation with failure and guilt.  Such hymns make devitalizing suggestions, adverse to the health and energy of the spiritual life; and are all the more powerful because they are sung collectively and in rhythm, and are cast in an emotional mould.[114] There was some truth in the accusation of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of the Christians insisted too exclusively on sin.  He said, “He who repeats again and again ‘I am bound!  I am bound!’ remains in bondage.  He who repeats day and night ‘I am a sinner!  I am a sinner!’ becomes a sinner indeed."[115]

I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psychological discovery which seems to be of extreme importance for the spiritual life.  Briefly this means, that when any suggestion has entered the unconscious mind and there become active, all our conscious and anxious resistances to it are not merely useless but actually tend to intensify it.  If it is to be dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere struggle but by the persuasive power of another and superior auto-suggestion.  Further, in respect of any habit that we seek to establish, the more desperate our struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will be our success.  In small matters we have all experienced the working of this law:  in frustrated struggles to attend to that which does not interest us, to check a tiresome cough, to keep our balance when learning to ride a bicycle.  But it has also more important applications.  Thus it indicates that a deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration:  for this anxious effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.  True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts of the self, keeping attention