ed. This is rather an achievement of faith than
reason but the Christian Church generally has held such a faith--a faith
sustained by the testimony which favours it and unaffected by the
testimony which challenges it. The scientific temper which seeks
economy in all its explanations and asks only for a cause sufficient for
the effect and which is, moreover, constantly trying to relate the
unknown to the known, takes another line and finds in faith healing just
one more illustration of the power of mind over body. This does not
exclude God but it discovers Him in resident forces and finds in law the
revelation of His method. The conclusions, then, to which we are
generally coming may not only be reconciled with a devout faith, they
may, when followed through, enrich faith; but they do subdue the whole
great matter to a sequence of cause and effect and they are gradually
finding a satisfactory explanation for what has heretofore been deeply
involved in mystery.

Just as Hypnotism, through the very dramatic abnormality of it, in
altering the sensitiveness of those physical tracts from which attention
is withdrawn or in producing physical effects through suggestive
focusing, has helped us to understand the part which attention plays in
the flux of physical states, so our later studies of the subconscious
help us here. We do know that a great deal may really take place in
personality of which consciousness takes no account. Consciousness in
its most active phases is alert, purposeful and preoccupied with the
immediate concern of the moment. Consciousness heeds commands and takes
account of such conditions as strongly assert themselves, but does not
in its full drive take much account of suggestion unless the suggestion
possesses unusual force. Suggestions usually need leisurely turning over
in the mind and the mind commonly refers them--often without knowing
it--to those regions of mental action which lie beneath the threshold of
strongly focused consciousness.

But suggestion does not thereby cease to work. It starts processes all
its own which go on till they are worked through. After a longer or
shorter period of incubation the outcome of suggestion is lifted into
the light of consciousness, often to produce results all the more
striking because we cannot explain them to ourselves or any one else.
All this does not withdraw such phenomena from the realm of law; it only
clothes them with the mystery of the unknown and ext