But even the successive rebels against dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled in groups, and caused to perform the same acts.

This is so because as we have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is engaged in performing corporate acts.

The soldiers' drill is essential to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of the Church.
We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind.

As the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of least resistance, and suggests to them all that she desires them to be.
It is interesting to note how perfectly adapted the rituals of historic Christianity are to this end, of provoking the emergence of the intuitive mind and securing a state of maximum suggestibility.

The more complex and solemn the ritual, the more archaic and universal the symbols it employs, so much the more powerful--for those natures able to yield to it--the suggestion becomes.