Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/304

 simpler. Instead of sending out our subconsciousness (the phraseology is necessarily materialistic and fearfully inadequate) to work on that of another, we merely commission it to work on the seat of our own malady. The method now becomes one of auto-suggestion, i.e. the healing suggestion is made by us to ourselves. We know the power of this process in the moral sphere; we know how, by fixing our minds on lofty and ennobling ideas, we can break the power of temptation, not by a frontal attack, but by getting round it and above it to a higher level of life and thought. This, in fact, is the main purpose and effect of meditation as ordinarily practised. The scope of meditations only have to be slightly extended in order to apply to our physical as well as our moral troubles. But, although this method of healing becomes simpler in procedure, because applied to ourselves, yet for the same success it demands still greater humility and purity of intention. If, when we pray for others, it is hard for us to believe that the prayer may be really and effectually answered in other ways than by the removal of the physical suffering, it is still harder for us to recognise this in our own case. To meet this difficulty, it will be well that prayer for our own relief should be as much as possible silent prayer. We shall