it has also more important applications. Thus it indicates that a
deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome some moral weakness, to keep
attention fixed in prayer, will tend to frustration: for this anxious
effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and sense of
helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, not on the desired end.
True, if this end is to be achieved the will must be directed to it, but
only in the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires and acts
of the self, keeping attention orientated towards the goal. The pull of
imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of
prayer. "If your thought," she says to her daughters, "runs after all
the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and
continue in your quiet ... if you seek by force of arms to bring it to
you, you lose the strength which you have against it."[116]

This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who
declare that man can "do nothing of himself," that mere voluntary
struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by
yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which
flow in, but are not dragged in. Indications of its truth meet us
everywhere in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehme says, "Because
thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest
thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing."[117] So too the
constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all
invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine
suggestions their chance. The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid
on every level of life; and warns us against the error of making
religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Certainly in all life of the
Spirit the will is active, and must retain its conscious and steadfast
orientation to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must form an