We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man:  or that one of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind.  As the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.  It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility.  The more complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the symbols it employs, so much the more powerful—­for those natures able to yield to it—­the suggestion becomes.  Music, rhythmic chanting, symbolic gesture, the solemn periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to this, effect In churches of the Catholic type every object that meets the eye, every scent, every attitude that we are encouraged to assume, gives us a push in the same direction if we let it do its rightful work.  For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, and really ceremonial silence of the Quakers—­the hush of the waiting mind, the unforced attitude of expectation, the abstraction from visual image—­works to the same end.  In either case, the aim is the production of a special group-consciousness; the reinforcing of languid or undeveloped individual feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd.  This, and its result, is seen of course in its crudest form in revivalism:  and on higher levels, in such elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which are a feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week.  But the nice warm devotional feeling with which what is called a good congregation finishes the singing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order of phenomena.  The rhythmic phrases—­not as a rule very full of meaning or intellectual appeal—­exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers.  The authorized translation of Ephesians v. 19:  “speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” whatever we may think of its accuracy does as it stands describe one of the chief functions of religious services of the “hearty congregational” sort.  We do speak to ourselves—­our deeper, and more plastic selves—­in our psalms and hymns; so too in the common recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed.  We administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so long as we sing them with intention, a powerful suggestion to ourselves and every one else within reach.  We gather up in them—­or should do—­the whole tendency of our worship and aspiration, and in the very form in which it can most easily sink in.  This lays a considerable responsibility on those who choose psalms and hymns for congregational singing; for these can as easily be the instruments of fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as of charitable life-giving and constructive ideas.