d usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many
choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its
true work: and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully
performed. It is to this region that poetry, art and music--and even, if
I dare say so, philosophy--make their fundamental appeal. No life is
whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.

We must now go on--and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful
experience must lead us on--to the subject of suggestion, and its
relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in
conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an
idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes
fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its
far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact
of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual
life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through
man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which
govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must
serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to
success. Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is
hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either
wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our
conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such
hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our
environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant
factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is
auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is
implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly
accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and
silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.

A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion
shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however
impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort
accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology
expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the
will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the
primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand,