acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the
other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God.
Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on
surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need
of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating
suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving
suggestions are made to the bodily life. "In the deeps of the soul His
word is spoken." Is not this an exact description of the inward work of
the self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer of quiet
into the unconscious mind, and there experienced as a transforming
power? I think that we may go even further than this, and say that
grace, is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual affecting
our soul's life. As we are commonly docile to the countless
hetero-suggestions, some of them helpful, some weakening, some actually
perverting, which our environment is always making to us; so we can and
should be so spiritually suggestible that we can receive those given to
us by all-penetrating Divine life. What is generally called sin,
especially in the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of charity and the
indulgence of the senses, renders us recalcitrant to these living
suggestions of the Spirit. The opposing qualities, humility, love and
purity, make us as we say accessible to grace.

"Son," says the inward voice to Thomas a Kempis, "My grace is precious,
and suffereth not itself to be mingled with strange things nor earthly
consolations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away impediments to
grace, if thou willest to receive the inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself
a secret place, love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation of
none other ... put the readiness for God before all other things, for
thou canst not both take heed to Me and delight in things transitory....
This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift of God, and a
proper sign of the chosen children of God, and the earnest of
everlasting health; for God lifteth up man from earthly things to love
heavenly things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual
man."[102] Could we have a more vivid picture than this of the
conditions of withdrawal and attention under which the psyche is most
amenable to suggestion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a
great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has literally on the
physical plane caused