The "virtue" resides in certain rites and formularies.

These, as we have seen, are especially liable to harden into mere mechanism when they are of the negative and precautionary type.

The spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, which is especially associated with the positive and active functions of life, tends to read will and personality into the wonder-working powers that it summons to man's aid.

The will and personality in the worshippers are in need not so much of implements as of more will and personality.
They get this from a spiritual kind of religion; which in one way or another always suggests a society, a communion, as at once the means and the end of vital betterment.
To say that religion works by suggestion is only to say that it works through the imagination.

There is good make-believe as well as bad; and one must necessarily imagine and make-believe in order to will.
The more or less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the mind, however, need to be supplemented by the power of articulate reasoning, if the will is to make good its twofold character of a faculty of ends that is likewise a faculty of the means to those ends.