men, who _do_ need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
imitation.

All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
æsthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made
to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of
the Church.

We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of
least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic
Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the
intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The more