Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/232

 Sacrament of Unity, our highest act of intercession. Thus our Lord enjoined upon His disciples the duty and the efficacy of combined spiritual effort. There is a power intensive, as well as extensive, in collective prayer. In this, as well as in other activities of the spirit, the total effect gained is larger than the sum total of units of effort. There is a sort of analogy here with the force of collective suggestion, which we have been considering above: but we must not expect to find a complete philosophical explanation of any great spiritual principle. Our personal experience verifies the value of corporate prayer. If it were not so, religion would be an individual matter alone; it would lack its most universal expression, that of common worship. It is because the Church in our country lost for a long period her corporate consciousness, at least in a large degree, that she lost sight of the power of corporate intercession for the sick members of the Body of Christ. (Of the faithful departed we may not here speak.) But her formulas and liturgy have been a standing witness against such obliviousness, with which the Church of to-day can hardly be taxed, and those who profess their belief in the Communion