nd with a despairing farewell to life, he let
himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the
struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother
earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting
arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the
hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its
precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.

The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by
letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran
justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is
within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care
nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little
private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is
there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined
optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the
abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter
whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a
medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.[54]

[54] The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new
nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The
pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind-curers) is by the
merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self,
the spirit of the universe (which is your own "subconscious" self), the
moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The
medico-materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act
more freely where they are left to act automatically by the
shunting-out of physiologically (though in this instance not
spiritually) "higher" ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in
inhibiting results.--Whether this third explanation might, in a
psycho-physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the
others may be left an open question here.

When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall
learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word
about the mind-curer's METHODS.

They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of
environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education.

But the word "suggestion," havi