suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian
prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a
closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked
below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was
thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in
her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of
that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of
the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love."[99]

This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking
place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all
who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some
stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which
coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy
welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus
the French Carmelite Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus, once convinced that she
was destined to be a "victim of love," began that career of suffering
which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four.[100] The lives of
the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines:
exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas
or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition
"Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things be of good report, think on these things" is a piece of practical
advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals
with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.

Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of
self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and
those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of
religious experience, as "mere suggestion" are unfortunate in their