Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/183

Rh the sincerity, the spirituality of man's desire. Into that fountain of influences true prayer ascends as a cry. It is heard as such, felt as such, responded to as such. We do not know how many ways of influx it may open, nor how powerfully they may affect all our spiritual associates, including those who are present in our desire and thought. We only know that if offered in acknowledgment and submission to the Divine will it is in harmony with Divine order; and that the revealed laws of spiritual association and influx are manifold, including ourselves and all whom we can pray for; and that the movements of these laws are exact, and the atmosphere in which they operate is more quick and alive than that electric fluid, which, every time you make connection by the faintest impulse at any point, reports the tick at every station in a circuit of a thousand miles.

The question, therefore, is not as to the influence of mind upon the body, nor of the effect of one mind upon another as a means of reaching and affecting bodily disease, nor as to the efficacy of prayer as a means in this change and re-adjustment of mental and thus of bodily states; but only as to the orderly use