uality by this release from competing, inhibiting
considerations. To say that the will now becomes organized toward unity
and that it acquires fresh power thereby is simply to name another
aspect of the one movement. This movement is ideational, emotional, and
volitional concentration, all in one, achieved by fixation of attention
upon the idea of God.

Persons who have been troubled with insomnia, or wakefulness or
disturbing dreams, have been enabled to secure sound sleep by merely
relaxing the muscles and repeating mechanically, without effort at
anything more, some formula descriptive of what is desired. The main
point is that attention should fix upon the appropriate organizing idea.
When this happens in a revival meeting one may find one's self
unexpectedly converted. When it happens in prayer one may be surprised
to find one's whole mood changed from discouragement to courage, from
liking something to hating it (as in the case of alcoholic drinks, or
tobacco), or from loneliness to the feeling of companionship with God.

This analysis of the structure of prayer has already touched upon some
of its functions. It is a way of getting one's self together, of
mobilizing and concentrating one's dispersed capacities, of begetting
the confidence that tends toward victory over difficulties. It produces
in a distracted mind the repose that is power. It freshens a mind
deadened by routine. It reveals new truth, because the mind is made more
elastic and more capable of sustained attention. Thus does it remove
mountains in the individual, and, through him, in the world beyond.

The values of prayer in sickness, distress, and doubt are by no means
measurable by the degree to which the primary causes thereof are made to
disappear. There is a real conquest of trouble, even while trouble
remains. It is sometimes a great source of strength, also, merely to
realize that one is fully understood. The value of having some friend or
helper from whom I reserve no secrets has been rendered more impressive
than ever by the Freud-Jung methods of relieving mental disorders
through (in part) a sort of mental house-cleaning, or bringing into the
open the patient's hidden distresses and even his most intimate and
reticent desires. Into the psychology of the healings that are brought
about by this psychoanalysis we need not go, except to note that one
constant factor appears to be the turning of a private possession into a
social possession,