the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to
speak: and it seems to me that it is to be observed operating on highest
levels in the work of salvation. When further a Kempis prays "Increase
in me more grace, that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine own
health" is he not describing the right balance to be sought between our
surrender to the vivifying suggestions of grace and our appropriation
and manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence and merely infantile
dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the
indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of
prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which,
as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive of God."

It is, then, worth our while from the point of view of the spiritual
life to inquire into the conditions in which a suggestion is most likely
to be received and realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists
have so far defined them, can be resumed under the three heads of
quiescence, attention and feeling: outstanding characteristics, as I
need not point out, of the state of prayer, all of which can be
illustrated from the teaching and experience of the mystics.

First, let us take _Quiescence_. In order fully to lay open the
unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must
be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious
language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by
it. The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery
controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be
those of complete mental and bodily rest. Here is the psychological
equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state
defined by one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who are in this
prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of
imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or
our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in
simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state
of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping
silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
receptiv