136 AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY IV 



effect on the course of nature, outside ourselves, 

 and its effect within the region of the supplicator's 

 mind. 



It is a " law of nature," verifiable by everyday 

 experience, that our already formed convictions, 

 our strong desires, our intent occupation with 

 particular ideas, modify our mental operations to 

 a most marvellous extent, and produce enduring 

 changes in the direction and in the intensity of 

 our intellectual and moral activities. Men can 

 intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as 

 with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint 

 of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly 

 distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac pos- 

 session is mythical; but the faculty of being 

 possessed, more or less completely, by an idea 

 is probably the fundamental condition of what 

 is called genius, whether it show itself in the 

 saint, the artist, or the man of science. One 

 calls it faith, another calls it inspiration, a third 

 calls it insight ; but the " intending of the mind," 

 to borrow Newton's well-known phrase, the con- 

 centration of all the rays of intellectual energy 

 on some one point, until it glows and colours the 

 whole cast of thought with its peculiar light, is 

 common to all. 



I take it that the Bishop of Manchester has 

 psychological science with him when he insists 

 upon the subjective efficacy of prayer in faith, and 

 on the seemingly miraculous effects which such 



