When denouncing Mariolatry (in his sermon at the opening of the Church Congress, October, 1905), the Bishop of London said: "It is not revealed that the cry to any saint or to the Virgin Mary ever reaches them at all." Apparently, therefore, the Bishop admits that appeals to the supernatural may be wasted, and this in spite of the suppliant being very much in earnest. Yet who would be prepared to say that the Roman Catholic who prays to the Virgin Mary and to innumerable saints does not derive quite as much benefit from the process as the Protestant who directs his worship solely to the Holy Trinity, or the Shintoist who invokes the benign spirits of his ancestors? [236] The effect of the suggestion is the same in each case, and has all the appearance of an answer to prayer. Again, putting aside abnormal phases of the mind, is it not, as Ralph Waldo Trine puts it (in his little book, Character Building: Thought Power), a simple psychological law that any type of thought, if entertained for a sufficient length of time, will, by and by, reach the motor tracts of the brain, and finally burst forth into action? There seems no need for the introduction of a supernatural hypothesis to explain the moral effect of prayer. So, also, with regard to faith, it is only natural that the believer, racked with doubt, should find reassurance in prayer. The Theist who lays store by the evidence from "religious experience" will do well to ponder over the following words of one of Professor James's critics: "Instead of producing anything that would strengthen the belief in extra-human spirit agents influencing human destinies, psychology has made intelligible, conformably to the rest of our organised knowledge, most, if not all, of the striking phenomena which have been the empirical props of the popular faith in spiritism, whether Christian or not. We refer to anæsthesias, analgesias, hallucinations, monitions, trances, the sense of illumination in ecstasy, etc., including the facts considered in Professor James' lectures. In making this statement, I do not forget the work of the Society for Psychical Research. Its achievements may be declared to have been so far, and without prejudice of the future, absolutely inconclusive with regard to spiritism." [237] In other words, psychical research, if conducted by the experimental method and without bias, may be pregnant with consequences hardly in accord with the hopes of either the spiritist or spiritualist (in its religious sense). For, should abnormal phenomena of all kinds admit of a natural explanation, their present obscurity will no longer furnish grounds for supernatural speculation. THE RELIGIOUS (?) EXPERIENCES OF INTOXICATION.