 Section 7 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3. John Smith, Foundations of a Christian Philosophy, Part 2. It is the highest testimony to the genius of the author that the estimate of his friends is found fully sustained by these discourses. Written so long ago and marked, like all the writings of the time, with many unaccustomed forms of language, they are yet instinct with a free, bright, and copious life of thought, which runs as freshly, or nearly as freshly, as it did to his contemporaries. The expression of Worthington that his mind was a bountiful and ever-bubbling fountain is exactly the expression suggested by their full, rich, and plentiful thoughtfulness. It is not mere eloquence and ability, the easy and large grasp of intellect as in Chillingworth, or Barrow, or Cudworth, which distinguishes them, but an ineffable light of spiritual genius shines in them all. They are clothed, as the Caldy Oracle quoted by Patrick says, with a great deal of mind, and deeply impregnated with divine notions. Powerful and massive in argument, they are everywhere informed by a divine insight which transcends argument. Calmly and closely reasoned, they are at the same time inspired. The breath of a higher diviner reason animates them all. The force of a logic nearly as direct and penetrating as that of Chillingworth directs an imagination as opulent as Jeremy Taylor's. The result is a delightful admixture of Christian philosophy and poetry. Profound glimpses of spiritual truth everywhere open to the reader as he advances, charmed with the rich unfoldings of inexuberant intelligence, rejoicing in the amplitude of its powers and the sweep and glory of its flight. The poetic richness of the style seldom or never, as with Taylor, overbalances the weight of the thought. It is ornate and picturesque, without being florid or tawdry. It is living, even through all the trappings and encumbrances of neoplatonical or other allusion. The rhetorical and rational, the imaginative and spiritual, are fused and blended into a common intellectual action which enlightens while it penetrates and touches with beauty and color the eminences of truth which it reveals. The main drawback of the discourses to the modern reader is the incessant recurrence of quotations. The free course of the author's thought is constantly interrupted by confirmatory statements and illustrations from the treasures of ancient opinion, and sometimes indeed, as in the third discourse on atheism, his line of exposition runs almost entirely along an ancient track. The effect is now and then to give an additional richness and interest to the exposition, but more frequently to mar its flow and originality. The native texture of the author's composition is here and there so overlaid and patched that it is barely distinguishable. It is like a rich garment covered with richer gems which, while they give a new wealth to the original, yet hide its natural hue and folds. To the scholar and antiquarian student, there is a special charm in this literary mosaic. They like the page studded with Greek and Latin quotations and the reverent caution which seeks to fortify its steps as it advances by sentences from the ancient masters, which carries the spolia opima of past thought with it as it ventures into new regions of inquiry. But our more direct habits of mind have made us impatient of such traditional ornaments of literature. The modern reader wishes to know what a man thinks himself or has got to say for himself rather than what Plato or Plutarch or Plotinus or Tully or Lucretius may have said ages ago. There is no in disposition to listen to these ancient sages. On the contrary, it may be said that there never was a time when any critical exposition of them was likely to be received with more interest or appreciation. But it is no longer accepted as a part of literary art to be able to weave their sayings into the texture of a theological or philosophical treatise, and still less is it supposed that any modern writer necessarily adds to the weight of his own opinions by fixing them with even the most ingenious and pregnant quotations from ancient authorities. The Cambridge Platonists carried the system of quotation to great excess. It was not merely a feature of their style but a characteristic, so to speak, of their mode of thought. They lent too fondly on the past and made too much of ancient wisdom. They were never able to throw off the weight of neoplatonic tradition or to rise superior to what appeared to them a sacred lore. The shadow of Plutinus haunts their highest conceptions and they escape too seldom into the clear daylight, the open heaven of speculation. Smith is perhaps less an offender in this respect than Cudworth and more. Which coat in his sermons offends least of all. He moves with a comparatively free and unembarrassed step. He had been more in the world than the others, and as he himself tells us, owed less to reading than to his own thought and invention. All the younger men of the school were more exclusively scholars and students. They gathered their thought more entirely from books, and, like all men who do so, they bear the trace of the library dust. They like to show the rare treasure dug from the ancient quarries in which they have worked with so much love and interest. The discourses are ten in all. The first six are closely connected and form, in fact, successive parts of a scheme of thought designed by the author in vindication of the main heads and principles of religion. Starting with the important question of the true way or method of obtaining divine knowledge, he passes, after the polemical manner of the time, to discuss first the counterfeits or oppositions to divine knowledge in the forms of superstition and of atheism. He then enumerates the main principles or articles of religious truth to be, one, the immortality of the soul, two, the existence and nature of God, and, three, the communication of God to mankind through Christ. He considers the first two subjects somewhat elaborately in successive discourses, but he did not live to enter upon the special treatment of the third. The discourse of prophecy, which is the last of the connected series, was meant merely to be an introduction to this part of his subject, but so many inquiries offered themselves to his thoughts in discoursing upon prophecy that he had only finished this topic when his term of office as dean and catechist in the college expired. He died in the following summer, and thus says Worthington, quote, He who designed to speak of God's communication of himself to mankind through Christ was taken up by God into a more inward and immediate participation of himself in blessedness. Had he lived, and had health to have finished the remaining part of his designed method, the reader may easily conceive what a valuable piece that discourse would have been. Close quote. Yet, he adds, that the reader, quote, may not altogether want the author's labors upon such an argument, I thought good in the next place to adjoin a discourse of the like importance and nature delivered here to fore by the author in some chapel exercises. Close quote. In point of fact, there are four discourses appended to that upon prophecy. The volume, therefore, consists of two parts. The first part representing, in some degree, a connected treatise, and the second, composed of such additional discourses, has seemed to Worthington so far fitted to carry out the author's design and to illustrate the special principles which he had intended to unfold in the sequel. In expounding our author's religious philosophy, we shall follow his own outline of thought. The same ideas recur frequently, and the necessities of his argument and strict sequence of its various parts are not very carefully preserved. The following are the special titles of the several discourses in the order in which they stand. One, of the true way or method of attaining to divine knowledge, two, of atheism, three, of superstition, four, of the immortality of the soul, five, of the existence and nature of God, six, of prophecy, seven, of legal and evangelical righteousness, eight, of the shortness of pharisaical righteousness, nine, of the excellency and nobleness of true religion, ten, of a Christian's conflicts with and conquests over Satan. End of footnote. The following may be said to be the particulars to which our attention is invited in succession. One, method of attaining divine knowledge, two, opposites of the divine, superstition and atheism, three, main principles of the divine, immortality, God, revelation, four, and finally, the true character of the divine revealed in Christ. On all these points the discourses throw some true and for the time original light. None of them is more significant or deserves more attention than the first, which unfolds in a manner the whole line of Smith's thought. One, this discourse of the true way or method of attaining to divine knowledge is in some respects the finest of the series. It gives, as we have said, nearly the keynote of all his system of thought, as indeed to know the method of any thinker is more or less to know the substance of his thought or the conclusions which he will reach. Are we to begin from without or from within? Are we to start with the senses or the soul and advance along the line of sensation or the line of reason? The alternative is as old as philosophy itself. Accordingly, as it takes the one path or the other, the subjective or the objective method, it falls into two great sections and sets up rival theories. To say that Smith was a Platonist is enough to settle the general character of his method. All knowledge to him, especially all higher divine knowledge, springs from the soul within. It is the reflection of our own souls, the interpretation of our own spiritual life. This will be found to be the pervading thought of the discourses, the central principle to which they all lead back. In its general philosophical aspect, this is known as the old doctrine of innate notions which Smith accepted without hesitation. This may be inferred from many of his expressions, but it is not in its general meaning so much as in its special theological application that he makes use of the principle. The kind of knowledge which he has everywhere in view is divine knowledge, the knowledge of God and of a sphere of truth beyond that of sensible experience. The idea that there may be no such knowledge at all, that the sphere of sensible experience exhausts the circle of knowledge, an idea now so familiar, is not polemically present to his mind. There is no trace of Hobbes in any of the discourses. The Leviathan was in fact only published the year before Smith's death, and if he knew it at all, he makes no allusion to it. There is none of that consciousness of a living presence of atheistic speculation or an antagonistic system of corporealism which meets us everywhere in the pages of Cudworth and Moore. The atheism which he describes is the atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius without any hint of its revival in his own day. Accordingly Smith does not think it necessary to vindicate the general philosophic basis on which he stands. He takes that more or less for granted and sets out confidently on the spiritual foundation from which all his thought rises. The beginning of divine truth is a vital sense or faculty within us which lays hold of its appropriate objects. Every art and science, he says, quote, must start from certain precognita and theology involves in its very nature the supposition of a power within us answering to, and apprehensive of, a power above us. This power or faculty must be vital of the nature of a higher sense. For divinity, he explains, is something rather to be understood by a spiritual sensation than by any verbal description, as all things of sense and life are best known by sentient and vital faculties. As the Greek philosopher hath well observed, everything is best known by that which bears a just resemblance and analogy with it. And therefore the scripture is want to set forth a good life as the prolepsis and fundamental principle of divine science. Wisdom hath builded her house and hewn out her seven pillars, but the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the foundation of the whole fabric. They are not always the best skilled in divinity that are the most studied in those pandax into which it is sometimes digested or that have erected the greatest monopolies of art and science. He that is most practical in divine things hath the purest and sincerest knowledge of them, and not he that is most dogmatical. Divinity indeed is a true efflux from the eternal light which, like the sunbeams, does not only enlighten, but heat and enliven, and therefore our saviour hath in his beatitudes connected purity of heart with a beatifical vision. And as the eye cannot behold the sun unless it be sun-like, and hath the form and resemblance of the sun drawn in it, so neither can the soul of man behold God unless it be God-like, hath God formed in it, and be made partaker of the divine nature. And the Apostle Saint Paul, when he would lay open the right way of attaining to divine truth, saith that knowledge puffeth up, but it is love that edifyeth. The knowledge of divinity that appears in systems and models is but a poor wan light, but the powerful energy of divine knowledge displays itself in purified souls. Here we shall find the true, as the ancient philosophy speaks, the land of truth. To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead. We do but in vain seek God many times in these, where his truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed. To know, intratequerie dame, seek for God within thine own soul. He is best discerned, as Plotinus phrased that, by an intellectual touch of him. We must see with our eyes and hear with our ears, and our hands must handle the word of life, that I may express it in Saint John's words. The soul itself hath its sense as well as the body, and therefore David, when he would teach us how to know what the divine goodness is, calls not for speculation but sensation, and see how good the Lord is. That is not the best and truest knowledge of God, which is wrought out by the labor and sweat of the brain, but that which is kindled within us by a heavenly warmth in our hearts. It is but a thin, airy knowledge that is got by mere speculation, which is ushered in by syllogisms and demonstrations. But that which springs forth from true goodness is as origin speaks, it brings such a divine light into the soul, as is more clear and convincing than any demonstration. The reason why, notwithstanding all our acute reasons and subtle disputes, truth prevails no more in the world is we so often disjoin truth and true goodness, which in themselves can never be disunited. They grow both from the same root and live in one another. We may, like those in Plato's deep pit, with their faces bended downwards, converse with sounds and shadows, but not with the life and substance of truth, while our souls remain defiled with any vice or lusts. Again, such as men themselves are, such will God himself seem to be. It is the maxim of most wicked men that the deity is some way or other like themselves. Their souls do more than whisper it, though their lips speak it not, and though their tongues be silent, yet their lives cry it upon the housetops and in the public streets. That idea which men generally have of God is nothing else but the picture of their own complexion. That archetypal notion of him, which hath the supremacy in their minds, is none else but such a one as hath been shaped out according to some pattern of themselves. Though they may so clothe and disguise this idol of their own, when they carry it about in a pompous procession to expose it to the view of the world, that it may seem very beautiful and indeed anything else rather than what it is. Jejun and barren speculations may be hovering and fluttering up and down about divinity, but they cannot settle or fix themselves upon it. They unfold the plicatures of truth's garment, but they cannot behold the lovely face of it. There are hidden mysteries in divine truth, wrapped up one within another, which cannot be discerned but only by divine apoptists. We must not think we have then attained to the right knowledge of truth when we have broken through the outward shell of words and phrases that house it up, or when biological analysis we have found out the dependencies and coherences of them one with another, or when, like stout champions of it, having well guarded it with the invincible strength of our demonstration, we dare stand out in the face of the world and challenge the field of all those that would pretend to be our rivals. We have many brave and reverend idolaters that worship truth only in the image of their own wits. That could never adore it so much as they may seem to do were it anything else but such a form of belief as their own wandering speculations had at last met together in, were it not that they find their own image and superscription upon it. There is a knowing of the truth as it is in Jesus, as it is in a Christ-like nature, as it is in that sweet, mild, humble, and loving spirit of Jesus, which spreads itself like a morning sun upon the souls of good men, full of light and life." Still again in the same vein, divine truth is better understood as it unfolds itself in the purity of men's hearts and lives than in all those subtle niceties into which curious wits may lay at forth, and therefore our Savior, who is the great Master of it, would not, while he was here on earth, draw it up into any system or body nor would his disciples after him. He would not lay it out to us in any cannons or articles of belief, not being indeed so careful to stock and enrich the world with opinions and notions as with true piety and a god-like pattern of purity as the best way to thrive in all spiritual understanding. His main scope was to promote a holy life as the best and most compendious way to a right belief. He hangs all true acquaintance with divinity upon the doing God's will. If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." Then returning to his original thought, from which indeed he has never escaped, he once more sums it up in a definite sentence with the help of Plotinus. Divinity is not so well perceived by a subtle wit as by a purified sense, as Plotinus phrased it. The ancients, he says, were not unacquainted with this method of attaining to the knowledge of divine things. Aristotle thought young men, with their youthful affections as yet uncooled, unfit to enter upon ethical studies. Pythagoras tested the sedateness and moral temper of his scholars, quote, before he would entrust them with the sublimer mysteries of his philosophy. The Platonists were herein so wary and solicitous that they thought the minds of men could never be purged enough from those earthly dregs of sense and passion in which they were so much steeped before they could be capable of their divine metaphysics. And therefore they so much solicit a separation from the body in all those that would sincerely understand divine truth, for that was the scope of their philosophy. Close quote. As the attainment of divine truth involves a moral culture, we should seek it without dogmatism, neither committing ourselves to others' opinions nor too zealously opposing them. Quote. We should not, like rigid censurers, arraign and condemn the creeds of other men which we comply not with before a full and mature understanding of them, ripened not only by the natural sagacity of our own reason, but by the benign influence of holy and mortified affection. So neither should we overhastily subscribe to the symbols and articles of other men. They are not always the best men that blot most paper. A bitter juice of corrupt affections may sometimes be strained into the ink of our greatest scholars. Their doctrines may taste too sour of the cask they came through. We are not always happy in meeting with that wholesome food, as some are wont to call the doctrinal part of religion, which hath been dressed out by the cleanest hands. Some men have too bad hearts to have good heads. They cannot be good at theory who have been so bad at the practice, as we may justly fear too many of those from whom we are too apt to take the articles of our belief have been. Whilst we plead so much our right to the patrimony of our fathers, we may take too fast a possession of their errors as well as of their sober opinions. There are idola spacus innate prejudices and deceitful hypotheses that many times wander up and down in the minds of good men that may fly out from them with their graver determinations. We can never be well assured what our traditional divinity is, nor can we securely enough addict ourselves to any sect of men. That which was the philosopher's motto, we may a little enlarge and so fit it for an ingenious pursuer after divine truth. He that will find truth must seek it with a free judgment and a sanctified mind. He that thus seeks shall find. He shall live in truth, and that shall live in him. It shall be like a stream of living waters issuing out of his own soul. He shall drink of the waters of his own cistern and be satisfied. He shall every morning find this heavenly manna lying upon the top of his own soul and be fed with it to eternal life. He will find satisfaction within, feeling himself in conjunction with truth, though all the world should dispute against him." Divine truth is therefore the analog of the divine spirit in man. It is to be sought neither in books nor traditions of any kind, but in the light in which the pure soul looks forth upon reality. The science of the divine originates in a divine intuition which guarantees its own contents. Of the nature of a sense, this intuition is yet rational in the highest degree. It is the light of all our seeing. It is the spiritual eye with which we look out upon the spiritual world and by the culture and enlargement of which we see always more clearly the great objects of faith and hope and love. There is nothing imaginary in the truths thus made known to us. The common notions of God and virtue impressed upon the souls of men are more clear and perspicuous than any else, and if they have not more certainty yet have they more evidence and display themselves with less difficulty to our reflective faculty than any geometrical demonstrations. And these are both available to prescribe out ways of virtue to men's own souls and to force an acknowledgment of truth from those that oppose when they are well guided by a skillful hand. Truth needs not, at any time, fly from reason, there being an eternal amity between them. They are only some private dogmas that may well be suspected as spurious and adulterate that dare not abide the trial thereof. We must open the eye of the soul which indeed all have but few make use of. This is the way to see clearly. The light of the divine world will then begin to fall upon us, and those sacred elampses, those pure coruscations of immortal and ever-living truth will shine into us, and in God's own light shall we behold Him." He describes in conclusion the various degrees in which, in different orders of men, this spiritual faculty is cultivated. There is, first of all, what he calls the complex and multifarious man in whom sense and reason are so intermixed and twisted up together that his knowledge cannot be laid out into its first principles. And so he becomes the victim of custom and vulgar opinion. In such a man the higher notions of God and religion are, quote, so entangled with the bird-lime of fleshly passions and mundane vanity that he cannot rise to any but earthly conception of heavenly things, close, quote. Such souls, as Plato says, quote, are heavy behind and are continually pressing down to this world's center, and though, like the spider, they may appear sometime moving up and down aloft in the air, yet they do but sit in the loom and move in that web of their own gross fancies, which they fasten and pin to some earthly thing or other, close, quote. There is, secondly, the rationalist, or the man who, quote, thinks not fit to view his own face in any other glass but that of reason and understanding. In such a one, the communes notissier, or common principles of virtue and goodness, are more clear and steady, close, quote. But being unfed and unfilled with the practice of true virtue, they may be but poor, empty, and hungry things of themselves. Thirdly, there is the mystic, who has, quote, inward sense of virtue and moral goodness far transcended to all mere speculative opinions, but whose soul is apt too much to heave and swell with the sense of his own virtue and knowledge. An ill-ferment of self-love lying at the bottom, close, quote, frequently puffs up such a soul with pride, arrogance, and self-conceit. Lastly, there is, quote, the true metaphysical and contemplative man, who, running and shooting up above his own logical or self-rational life, pierces into the highest life. Such a one, by universal love and holy affection, abstracting himself from himself, endeavors the nearest union with the divine essence that may be, knitting his own center into the center of divine being. To such a one, the Platonists are want to attribute a true divine wisdom powerfully displaying itself in an intellectual life as they phrase it. Such a knowledge, they say, is always pregnant with divine virtue, which arises out of a happy union of souls with God and is nothing else but a living imitation of a God-like perfection drawn out by a strong, fervent love of it. This divine knowledge, as Plotinus says, makes us amorous of divine beauty, beautiful and lovely, and this divine love and purity reciprocally exalts divine knowledge. Such a life and knowledge as this is peculiarly belongs to the true and sober Christian, who lives in him who is life itself and is enlightened by him who is the truth itself and is made partaker of the divine unction and knoweth all things as St. John speaks. This life is nothing else but God's own breath within him and an infant Christ, if I may use the expression, formed in his soul. End of Chapter 3, Part 2. Section 8 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3. John Smith, Foundations of a Christian Philosophy, Part 3. 2. Superstition and Atheism are the two great antitheses of divine knowledge, or as Smith calls them, the anti-deities that are set up against it. The former is the darkening of the divine intelligence in man. Quote, Its true cause and rise is nothing else but a false opinion of the deity that renders him dreadful and terrible, austere and apt to be angry, yet impotent and easy to be appeased again by some flattering devotions, especially if performed with sanctimonious shows and a solemn sadness of mind. Quote. The picture of God which some Christians have drawn, wherein sourness and arbitrariness appear so much, too much resembles this. Though I should not dislike, says our author, quote, thoughts of future torment, which I doubt even good men may have caused to press home upon their spirits, yet I think it little commends God, and as little benefits us, to fetch all this horror and astonishment from the contemplations of a deity which should always be the most serene and lovely. Our apprehensions of the deity should be such as might ennoble our spirits and not debase them. A right knowledge of God would beget a freedom and liberty of soul within us, and not servility. Quote. It is strangely those who picture God as an angry deity, or mere power of vengeance, who are at the same time most ready to imagine him so impotently mutable that his favor may be won again by uncouthed devotions and formal praises. This composition of fear and flattery in the superstitious mind, especially impressed Smith, it is born, he says, of our guilty and selfish apprehensions. As the pure and enlightened soul beholds in God an image of all moral perfection, so the unhallowed mind interprets its own fears and waveredness into a deity of terror and caprice. Wherever God is apprehended as a mere power to be pleased, rather than as a living source of light and blessing to all who trust in him, superstition is more or less present. And worship, when directed to the outward vesture of religion, rather than its inward spirit, is of the nature of superstition. We by no means get rid of it, as some imagine, when we have expelled it out of our churches or expunged it out of our books. Quote. No, for all this superstition may enter into our chambers and creep into our closets. It may twine about our secret devotions and actuate our forms of belief and orthodox opinions when it hath no place else to shroud itself or hide its head in. We may think to flatter the deity by these, and to bribe it with them when we are grown weary of more pompous solemnities. Nay, it may mix itself with the seeming faith in Christ. As I doubt it doth now in too many, who, laying aside all sober and serious care of true piety, think it sufficient to offer up the active and passive righteousness of their Saviour to a severe and rigid justice to make expiation for those sins they can be willing to allow themselves in. Quote. Atheism is closely akin to superstition, so much so that it may seem to have the same father with it. Superstition could be well content if there were no God to trouble or disquiet it, and atheism thinks there is none. And as the former is engendered by a base opinion of the deity as cruel and tyrannical, so the latter arises where the same sour and ghastly apprehension of God comes in contact with more stout and surly natures, and provokes them to negation and defiance. Such a false conception of the divine either subdues men to fear or exasperates them, and stirs them up to, quote, contend with that being which they cannot bear, and to destroy that which would deprive them of their own liberty. Atheism could never have so easily crept into the world had not superstition made way and opened a back door for it. It could not so easily have banished the belief of a deity had not that first accused and condemned it as destructive to the peace of mankind, and therefore it hath always justified and defended itself by superstition. If the superstitious man thinks that God is altogether like himself, which indeed is a character most proper to such, the atheist will soon say in his heart, there is no God, and will judge it, not without some appearance of reason, to be better there were none. The character of atheism may be gathered from, quote, the confessions of the Epicureans, who, though they seemed to acknowledge a deity, yet I doubt not, but those that search into their writings will soon embrace Tully's censure of them, close, quote. Their great maxim was to rid the world of superstition by getting quit of all objects of superstitious dread. Observing the apprehensions of men in the view of the stupendous events and effects of nature, Lucretius, following the steps of his great master, quote, undertakes so to solve all those knots into which superstition was tied up by unfolding the secrets of nature, as that men might find themselves loosened from those Savi Domini and Cordeles Tarani as he calls the vulgar creeds of the deity, close, quote. But rightly viewed, there is no inconsistency betwixt the widest knowledge of natural causes and true religion. While such a knowledge would indeed disperse superstition, it would only confirm a just and wise view of divine agency, quote. Herein all the Epicureans, who are not the true but fosterfathers of that natural philosophy they brag of, and of which indeed Democritus was the first author, do miserably blunder themselves. For though a lawful acquaintance with all the events and phenomena that show themselves upon this mundane stage would contribute much to free men's minds from the slavery of dull superstition, yet would it also breed a sober and amiable belief of the deity as it did in all the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and other sects of philosophers, if we may believe themselves, and an ingenuous knowledge hereof would be as fertile with religion as the ignorance thereof in affrighted and base minds is with superstition, close, quote. The Epicurean theory of nature, being a conjuries of atoms moving to and fro in empty space, even if accepted, furnishes no explanation of the origin of things. For it takes for granted the chief thing to be explained, namely the principle of motion underlying all phenomena. Cicero says Smith pointed this out long ago, and so stopped the wheel of this overhasty philosophy. Granting the primordials of Lucretius, atoms and the void, the original movement of the atoms still requires to be explained. And supposing we allow this power of motion to be seated in nature, we should still inquire how such a force and power could subsist in nature, and further, quote, how these movable and rambling atoms come to place themselves so orderly in the universe, and observe that absolute harmony and decorum in all their motions, as if they kept time with the musical laws of some almighty mind that composed all their lessons and measured out their dances up and down in the universe, close, quote. To suppose all this marvelous conservation of force and beauty and order of movement without an intelligent first cause originating and controlling all is, according to Smith, quote, as if one that undertakes to analyze any learned book should tell us how so many letters, meeting together in several combinations, should beget all that sense that is contained therein without minding that wit that casts them all into their several ranks, close, quote. The secret of atheistic thought is frequently to be found in a sort of half-knowledge when men, attracted by the course of scientific discovery and the outside of nature, unlearn their original and inbred notions of religion without rising to any higher or more luminous conceptions of the divine. But the study of nature in itself is highly religious. It may modify and enlarge our thoughts, but it has no tendency to shut out from us the presence of the deity. On the contrary, all sober and wise minds feel the necessity of this nobler spiritual presence to illuminate nature and elevate human life. The idea of God not only answers to our rational instincts, but harmonizes better than anything else with all our experience, and fits in, so to speak, as the natural crown of all our meditations, perplexities, and hopes, quote. It is not possible for anything well to bear up the spirit of that man that shall calmly meditate with himself on the true state and condition of this world, should that mind and wisdom be taken away from it, which governs every part of it and overrules all those disorders that at any time begin to break forth in it. Were there not an omniscient skill to temper and fitly to rank in their due places all those quarrelsome and extravagant spirits that are in the world, it would soon prove an uninhabitable place, and sink under the heavy weight of its own confusion. Remove God and Providence out of the world, and then we have nothing to depend upon but chance and fortune, the humors and passions of men, and he that could then live in it had need to be as blind as these lords would be that he might not see his own misery always staring upon him. Close quote. Three. Having thus defined the mode of attaining the divine and marked off its true character, Smith proceeds to expound its main principles, immortality and God. There can be no religion without these two fundamentals, to which he added the communication of God to mankind through Christ, although he was only able to treat of the preliminary aspect of this subject under the name of prophecy. One. Immortality may be said to be the primary datum of religious belief. Without this, man sinks back into the mere order of nature and whatever higher elements his life may embrace, there is no permanent spring of elevation or religious interest in it. Indeed, without a soul, or substantive reality of divine life transcending the common life of nature which he shares with other beings, man cannot be said to have any true knowledge of God, for it is only by a contemplation of our own souls that we can climb up to the understanding of the deity. Three preliminary considerations must be kept in view in reference to the question of immortality. First, the natural belief which men commonly have that their souls are immortal. Secondly, the immediate relation of the truth to our spiritual experience. And thirdly, the principle that no substantive and indivisible thing ever perisheth. There may be said to be a consensus gintium in favor of the idea of immortality. And although this consensus in some things may be no proof of their truth, yet, quote, we cannot easily conceive how any prime notion that hath no dependency on any other antecedent to it, should be generally entertained, did not the common dictate of nature or reason, acting alike in all men, move them to conspire together in the embracing of it. Close, quote. Again, it is only possible for us to know what our souls really are by self-reflection. We can only steal from them their own secrets by direct converse with themselves, quote. All those discourses which have been written of the world's heraldry will not blazen it so well to us as itself will do. When we turn our own eyes in upon it, it will soon tell us its own royal pedigree and noble extraction by those sacred hieroglyphics which it bears upon itself, close, quote. Finally, the imperishableness of every true substance is a direct corollary from one of the first principles of the atheistic philosophy itself, quote. And indeed, if we collate all our own observations and experience with such as the history of former times hath delivered to us, we shall not find that ever any substance was quite lost, close, quote. According to, quote, the common distinction, all substantial being is either body, and so divisible, and of three dimensions, or else it is something which is not properly a body or matter, and so hath no such dimensions. And this is nothing else but what is commonly called spirit. Though yet we will not be too critical in depriving everything which is not grossly corporeal of all kind of extension, close, quote. Footnote. Discourse three, pages 72 and 73. This is a curious anticipation of Moore's favorite idea about the applicability of extension to spiritual being. End of footnote. In conducting his argument, Smith, after the manner of his time, fails to keep quite distinct his various lines of thought. But the following may be enumerated as the main grounds on which he rests the proof of the soul's immortality. A. Its incorporeality. B. Its spontaneity. C. Its power of forming abstract and necessary truths. And lastly, D. The indestructibility of its moral attributes. A. He views the question of the soul's incorporeality first ab absurdo. For let us make the supposition that the substance of the soul is nothing else but body in however subtle a form, then, of course, it is infinitely divisible as all bodies are. It is composed of the particles of other bodies, and, quote, must receive its augmentation from that food nourishment which is taken in as the body doth, so that the very grass we walk over in the fields, the dust and mire in the streets that we tread upon, may, according to the true meaning of this dull philosophy, after many refinings, macerations and maturations which nature performs by the help of motion, spring up into so many rational souls, and prove as wise as any Epicurean, and discourse as subtly of what it once was when it lay drooping in a senseless passiveness, close, quote. The conceit is so gross in his opinion as not to deserve any serious answer. A witty sarcasm of Plutarch is enough to confute it. He enters at the same time into a detailed exposure of the Lucretian doctrine of the genesis of the soul from the finest and most minute atoms. Atoms of such perfect spherical and small figures as may be capable of the swiftest movement. Admitting such atoms the question arises whence their movement, and admitting the power of motion to be originally inherent in them, he farther asks, quote, how shall we force up these particles of matter into any true and real perceptions and make them perceive their own or others' motions? Close sense of fairy, close, quote, as Lucretius himself calls them. The power of sensation can no more spring from any such combination of atoms, he says, than, quote, vision can rise out of a glass whereby it should be able to perceive these idola that paint themselves upon it, though it were never so exactly polished, and they much finer than they are or can be, close, quote. A cause can never rise in its production above the height of its own nature and virtue, and the smallest corpuscula in the shape of atoms, which have no power of sense in themselves, can never produce it by any kind of concourse or motion. Lucretius virtually admits this by calling in the aid of a mobiles vise, something of the nature of an efflux of matter rather than matter itself, to account for the primary motions of sense. He may not allow this to be called anything else but matter, yet he cannot explain what kind of matter it is. Quote, by it he understands not merely an active power of motion, but a more subtle energy whereby the force and nature of any motion is perceived and insinuated by its own strength in the body's moved, as if these sorry bodies by their impetuous jostling together could awaken one another out of their drowsy lethargy and make each other hear their mutual impetuous knocks, which is as absurd as to think a musical instrument should hear its own sounds and to take pleasure in those harmonious airs that are played upon it. For that which we call sensation is not the motion or impression which one body makes upon another but a recognition of that motion, and therefore to attribute that to a body is to make a body privy to its own acts and passions, to act upon itself, and to have a true and proper self-feeling virtue. Close quote. Advancing in his attack on the Lucretian doctrine, Smith contends that even if it could explain the origin of sense, there is a higher principle of knowledge in man which it is wholly unable to explain. As it is true, does not allow any such higher principle. All our knowledge is based by him on the senses. But according to our author, he is refuted by his own arguments against the skeptics, in reply to whose assertion that nothing can be known, he maintains that in such a case we cannot know so much as that we know nothing or recognize any distinction betwixt knowledge and ignorance. The senses themselves cannot yield us this distinction. For they have no power of discrimination or judgment and report merely their own affections, which they always do faithfully, whether sound or unsound. In the senses themselves there is and can be no mistake. Quote. When the eye finds the sun's circle represented within itself of no greater bigness than a foot diameter, it is not at all herein mistaken, nor a distempered palate when it tastes a bitterness in the sweetest honey. Close quote. All is true qua the mere sense. But a higher principle of reflection or reason comes in to modify and correct our sensations. And without this principle we could not make a beginning of knowledge at all. We could never get beyond the confused and indeterminate mass of our own sensations, nor realize ourselves as rational unities capable of science. And this higher rational consciousness or cognitive power whereby we judge and discern things is so far from being a body that, according to our author, quote, it must retract and withdraw itself from all bodily operation whatsoever it will nakedly discern truth. For should our souls always mold their judgment of things, according to those impressions which seem to be framed thereof in the body, they must then do nothing else but chain up errors and delusions, one with another, instead of truth. As should the judgments of our understandings wholly depend upon the sight of our eyes, we should then conclude that our mere accesses from any visible object have such a magical power to change the magnitudes of visible objects and to transform them into all varieties of figures and fashions, and so attribute all that variety to them which we find in our corporeal perceptions. Or should we judge of gustables by our taste, we should attribute to one and the self same thing all that variety which we find in our own palates, which is an unquestionable argument that that power whereby we discern of things and make judgments of them different and sometimes contrary to those perceptions that are the necessary results of all organical functions is something distinct from the body. And therefore, though the soul, as Plato hath well observed, be various and divisible accidentally in these sensations and motions wherein it extends and spreads itself as it were upon the body, and so according to the nature and measure thereof perceives its impressions, yet it is indivisible, returning into itself. Whensoever it will speculate truth itself, it will not then listen to the several clamors and votes of these rude senses which always speak with divided tongues, but it consults some clearer oracle within itself, and therefore Plotinus hath well concluded concerning the body, should a man make use of his body and his speculations, it will entangle his mind with so many contradictions that it will be impossible to attain to any true knowledge of things. We shall conclude this, therefore, as Tully doth his contemplation of the soul's operations about the frame of nature, the fabric of the heavens, and motions of the stars. The mind which understands these things is like to that in the heavens which made them. Smith dwells particularly on the unifying power of the soul, its capacity of collecting all its perceptions and bringing them to a center, and again on its capacity of looking before and after, and holding alike the future and the past before it in a living thread of consciousness, as evidences of its immortality. I cannot think, he concludes, quote, Epicurus could in his cool thoughts be so unreasonable as to persuade himself that all the shuffling and cutting of atoms could produce such a divine piece of wisdom as this is. What matter can thus bind up past, present, and future time together, which, while the soul of man doth, it seems to imitate, as far as its own finite nature will permit it to strive after an imitation of, God's eternity. And grasping and gathering together along series of duration into itself makes an essay to free itself from the rigid laws of it, and to purchase to itself the freedom of a true eternity. Though it seems to be continually sliding from itself in those several vicissitudes and changes which it runs through in the constant variety of its own effluxes and emanations, yet it is always returning back again to its first original by a swift remembrance of all those motions and multiplicity of operations which have begot in it the first sense of this constant efflux, as if we should see a sunbeam perpetually flowing forth from the bright body of the sun and yet ever returning back to it again. It never loses any part of its being because it never forgets what itself was. And though it may number out never so vast a length of its duration, yet it never comes nearer to its old age, but carry it a lively sense of its youth and infancy along with it, which it can at pleasure lay a fast hold on. Such a jewel as this is too precious to be found in a dung-hill. Mere matter could never thus stretch forth its feeble force and spread itself over all its own former pre-existences. We may as well suppose this dull and heavy earth we tread upon to know how long it hath dwelt in this part of the universe that now it doth, and what variety of creatures have in all past ages sprung forth from it, and all those occurrences and events which have during all this time happened upon it. Having thus vindicated the distinction of the soul from matter in those relations which bring it most in contact with matter, Smith dwells with comparative brevity on those special properties characteristic of its essence which appear to him still more plainly to attest its high descent and destiny. Is not the soul clearly distinguished from the body by its power of self-action? Many of our actions it is true are automatic and some even unconscious, but there are others which spring directly from the soul itself and are done solely at the dictate and by the commission of our own wills. It may be argued whether the first spring of such actions is in the understanding or the will, but in either case their spring is within the soul itself and not in anything extra. The soul has innate force to stir up such thoughts and motions within itself as it finds itself most free to. How entirely distinct is such a force or power from any property of matter? A fatal determination sits in all the wheels of corporeal motion. But here the movement is from within and as entirely free as reason can conceive. The soul finds itself non vi aliena sed sua mu veri. And surely a being thus conscious of a freedom which absolves it from the rigid laws of matter cannot be legitimately confounded with matter or supposed subject to its decay and dissolution. C. And this is still more evident in the view of the necessary and immutable truths, mathematical and moral, which the soul is capable of forming and holding clearly before it. Through such truths there is nothing exactly corresponding in the world of experience. They are more true, transcendently more certain than any sensible thing can be. The apodictical principles of geometry are altogether inimitable in the purest matter that fancy can imagine. They must, quote, needs therefore depend upon something infinitely more pure than matter which hath all that stability and certainty within itself which it gives to those infallible demonstrations. Close, quote. There are our higher moral axioms, less, quote, badges of an eternal nature. Such are the archetypal ideas of justice, wisdom, goodness, truth, eternity, omnipotency, and all those either moral, physical, or metaphysical notions which are either the first principles of science or the ultimate complement and final perfection of it. These we always find to be the same and know that no exorcism of material mutations have any power over them, though we ourselves are but of yesterday and mutable every moment, yet these are eternal and to depend not upon any mundane vicissitudes. Neither could we ever gather them from our observation of any material thing where they were never sown. Close, quote. Underived from external experience, these ideas are the categories or affirmations of the soul itself which must be held to share in their eternity and immutability. D. But the highest of all proofs of the soul's immortality is the indestructibility of true virtue. In this there is a divine force which unites us to God himself and makes us feel partakers of the divine nature. Our higher speculations may be get within us a sufficient conviction of our higher destiny, quote, but it is only true goodness and virtue in the souls of men that can make them both know and love, believe, and delight themselves in their own immortality. Though every good man is not so logically subtle as to be able by fit mediums to demonstrate his own immortality, yet he sees it in a higher light. His soul being purged and enlightened by true sanctity is more capable of those divine irradiations whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God. It knows it shall never be deserted of that free goodness that always embraces it. It knows that almighty love which it lives by to be stronger than death and more powerful than the grave. It will not suffer these holy ones that are partakers of it to live in hell or their souls to see corruption. And though worms may devour their flesh and putrefaction enter into those bones that fence it, yet it knows that its redeemer lives and that it shall at last see him with a pure intellectual eye which will then be clear and bright when all that earthly dust which converse with this mortal body filled it with shall be removed. It knows that God will never forsake his own life which he hath quickened in it. He will never deny those ardent desires of a blissful fruition of himself which the lively sense of his own goodness hath excited within it. Those breathings and gaspings after an eternal participation of him are but the energy of his own breath within us. 2. In passing to the other cardinal principle of all religion, Smith does not attempt any formal proof of the divine existence. He gives no hint of an acquaintance with Descartes' recent arguments on the subject, so familiar to both Cudworth and Moore. Moore does he bring into view the old argument from design which must have been so well known to him in the pages of Cicero whom he quotes frequently. He starts with the divine as already given in that spiritual side of humanity which he advocates so strongly, adopting the language of Plotinus that he who reflects upon himself reflects upon his own original and finds the clearest impression of some eternal nature and perfect being stamped upon his own soul. God, he says, quote, has so copied forth himself into the whole life and energy of man's soul, and that the lovely characters of divinity may be most easily seen and read of all men within themselves. As they say Phidias, the famous statuary, after he had made the statue of Minerva with the greatest exquisiteness of art, to be set up in the Acropolis at Athens, afterwards impressed his own image so deeply in her buckler that no one could delete or efface it without destroying the whole statue. And if we would know what the impress of souls is, it is nothing but God himself who could not write his own name so as that it might be read but only in rational natures. Neither could he make such, without imparting such an imitation of his own eternal understanding to them, as might be a perpetual memorial of himself within them. And whenever we look upon our own soul in a right manner we shall find an urim and thumim there by which we may ask counsel of God himself who will have this always borne upon its breastplate. For though God hath copied forth his own perfections in this conspicable and sensible world, according as it is capable of entertaining them, yet the most clear and distinct copy of himself could be imparted to none else but to intelligible and inconspicable natures. And though the whole fabric of this visible universe be whispering out the notions of a deity, and always inculcates this lesson, of its divine origin, to the contemplators of it, yet we cannot understand it without some interpreter within. The heavens indeed declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork, and that which may be known of God, even his eternal power and Godhead, as St. Paul tells us, is to be seen in these external appearances. Yet it must be something within that must instruct us in all these mysteries, and we shall then best understand them when we compare that copy which we find of them within ourselves with that which we see without us. The schoolmen have well compared sensible and intelligent beings in reference to the deity when they tell us that the one do only represent Vistigia day, the other Facium day." According to this view, the divine existence is regarded as a postulate of our spiritual reason. Intuition at once reveals and guarantees it. The soul and God are correlative facts. The latter, plainly involved in the former, and attested thereby. Given the one, we have the other. Blot out the spiritual reason, or soul, as a distinctive element in humanity, and the divine existence, or at least any valid authentication of it, disappears. If we have no souls, we can never find God. If we have, it is unnecessary to search for his shadow in nature when his presence is clearly revealed within ourselves. The soul, according to our author, not only witnesses to the fact of the divine existence, but moreover to the divine character and attributes. Its affirmation of the divine is no mere blank assertion of a first principle, but a revelation of a living God, one in being and infinite in power, freedom, and love. When we reflect upon our own idea of pure and perfect reason, we know that our own souls are not it, but only partake of it. Neither we nor any finite thing contain the source of reason within ourselves. And this very contingency and imperfection of our own rational consciousness forces us to recognize an absolute and perfect reason. The idea within us, in its very successiveness and growth, will not suffer us to rest in any reality short of the infinite, an original and uncreated unity, the fountain of all special and partial being. As time lies in the basis of all finite life, whereby it is enabled by degrees to display all the virtue of its own essence, which it cannot do at once, so eternity lies at the foundation of divinity, whereby it becomes one without any shadow of turning, as St. James speaks, without any variety or multiplicity within itself, of which all created beings that are carried down in the current of time partake. In a similar manner, as we find within ourselves a will, the executive of our own reason and judgment, so we infer along with the divine reason an almighty will. The purist mind must also needs be the most almighty life and spirit, and as it comprehends all things and sums them up together in its infinite knowledge, so it must also comprehend them all in its own life and power. Such a will, being without limitations, is absolutely free. There are no bounds to it. Yet, we must not conceive God to be the freest agent because he can do and prescribe what he pleaseth, and so set up an absolute will which shall make both law and reason, as some imagine. For as God cannot know himself to be any other than what indeed he is, so neither can he will himself to be anything else than what he is, or that anything else should swerve from those laws which his own eternal nature and understanding prescribes to it. There is nothing therefore arbitrary or without reason in the divine will. Moving with the most perfect freedom, yet it is never bereft of eternal light and truth to act by, and although we may not be able to see a reason for all the divine actions, we may be sure they were neither done against it nor without it. From the same principles we may conclude the perfection of the divine love, which in its very nature rises superior to all the passions and disturbances whereby our love is wanted to explicate and unfold its affection towards its object. As it is, quote, infinitely ardent and potent, so it is always calm and serene, unchangeable, having no such ebbings and flowings, no such diversity of stations and retrogradations as love hath in us which arises from the weakness of our understandings that do not present things to us always in the same orient lustre and beauty. The divine nature is thus, according to our author, the reflex perfection of all the higher faculties of the human soul. It is their ideal realized, and the very dimness of the ideal in us only suggests the more strongly the necessity of its realization in the divine. There it is, a power within us, a presence haunting us. How should we have it at all unless there is some divine reality corresponding to it? He emphasizes in this respect our restless longing after supreme good. This unsatisfied ideal is of itself enough to lead us to the knowledge of God unless our life be an illusion. For what is its meaning? Does it not point us beyond ourselves to another in whom alone we can find satisfaction? The very earnestness with which men pursue an unattainable happiness, search for it through all the vast wilderness of this world and find it not, does this not indicate a source of happiness above them? And thus the heart as well as the reason of man witnesses to a living God. He is the supreme reality in which all our aspirations orb and complete themselves. Not only the eternal reason and almighty mind which our understandings converse with, but also that unstained beauty and supreme good after which our wills are perpetually aspiring. Having thus explained and vindicated the idea of God, Smith draws various deductions or inferences with which we need not occupy ourselves. Their main effect is to show, on the one hand, that communication is, so to speak, the natural expression of the fullness of the divine benignity and, on the other hand, that assimilation to the divine is the true intention and destiny of man. He thus prepares the way for the further idea or main principle of religion, revelation, which emerges as the complementary truth to God and immortality. CHAPTER III He proposed to consider the chief contents of revelation, or those pieces of revealed truth which tend most of all to foment and cherish true and real piety. He was only able to enter upon the preliminary aspect of the subject, the idea or mode of revelation, how and in what manner this kind of truth is manifested unto mankind. The discourse upon prophecy is all that survives to us of his more extended plan. It is full, however, of valuable thoughts which go near to the heart of the whole subject. The following is a rapid summary of them. Smith penetrates directly to the true idea of revelation as a free influx of the divine mind upon our minds and understandings. All our primary and higher knowledge may in a sense be called revelation. It is a manifestation of truth to us through appropriate organs or faculties, of the truth of material things through our senses and of the truth of higher spiritual things through our reason and conscience. The truth communicated in either way may very well be called truth of revelation, and insofar as we reach divine knowledge at any time through a direct and steady illumination of our spiritual faculties, we are all more or less prophets. The spiritual attitude always partakes more or less of prophetic enthusiasm. But revelation in a special sense implies the selection of a special race of prophets, of a class of minds peculiarly trained and qualified not only to be the recipients of divine knowledge but to be the organs of its communication to others. And this is exactly the aspect under which it is presented in Scripture. God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. The Scripture revelation is nothing else than the divine thought communicated to the succession of the Hebrew prophets from Abraham to Christ and through them imparted to the world. Prophecy and revelation are essentially correlative. The former is the only way whereby this kind of truth can be dispensed to us. More author traces with interest but also with too many involvements of rabbinical learning, the character and development of Hebrew prophecy. He points out how rational and imaginative elements united to form the prophetic spirit and how diverse prophetic ranks are to be reckoned according to the degree in which these elements respectively combined. The imagination was the sphere in which the prophetic imagery arranged and pictured itself while the reason is conceived as looking forth upon the scene and interpreting its spiritual meaning or intelligible mysteries. The degree of prophetic illumination was in proportion to the predominance of the rational over the imaginative element. But only in one case was the former deemed to be exclusive and the truth presented nakedly to the prophetic mind without the interposition of any schemes or pictures. This was supposed to be the special privilege of Moses, founded on the statements that the Lord knew him face to face and spoke with him mouth to mouth and accordingly Moses was placed by the Jewish doctors in a rank by himself, spoken of as the gradus mosaicus. From this highest grade of the prophetic spirit, three descending grades were reckoned, one in which the rational power, although no longer exclusive, yet prevails, penetrating directly through the imaginative or material form to the naked essence of the truth, another less perfect in which the imaginative and rational powers equally balance each and a third lowest of all in which the imaginative power predominates, quote, so that the impressions made upon it are too busy and the scene becomes too turbulent for the rational faculty to discern the true mystical and anagogical sense of them clearly. In this case, the enthousiasms spend themselves extremely imperibles, similitudes and allegories in a dark and obscure manner, as is very manifest in Zechariahs and many of Ezekiel's prophecies as also those of Daniel, close quote. There are two ways in which the prophetic spirit was ordinarily conveyed, either in a dream or a vision. The difference betwixt the two was in circumstances rather than in anything essential, as indeed there is no dream properly without a vision. A voice was more usually heard in the former, yet the Jews, our author says, were want to make a vision superior to a dream as representing things more to the life and more suddenly surprising and seizing the senses of the prophets. All dreams spoken of in scripture as sent by God are by no means to be taken for prophetical. Many of them were merely nothetical or monetary and these were much weaker in their energy upon the imagination. They had nothing of the ecstatical rapture whereby the prophets in the moments of the divine afflatus were snatched from themselves and made to realize the divine presence. A careful distinction is also to be made betwixt the real enthousiasm characteristic of the prophetic spirit and mistaken enthousiasm. The latter is a mere play of imagination or a vulgar assumption. It is never able to rise above the low and dark region of sense and the more obtrusive it is, the further it wanders from the truth. But the genuine prophetical enthousiasm, however intense, quote, never alienates the mind, seeing it seats itself as well in the rational as in the sensitive powers, but always maintains a consistency and clearness of reason, strength, and solidity of judgment where it comes. It doth not ravish the mind, but inform and enlighten it. Our author discusses at length many other aspects of the subject, such as the ministration or agency of angels in the conduct of prophecy, the symbolic actions attributed to the prophets, the schools of the prophets, and finally their style as recorded in scripture. On all these points his views are characterized by largeness and depth of comprehension, but he runs into too many details and borrows too much from the Jewish doctors for us to quote or even to summarize. He is at particular pains to explain how entirely cynical and imaginary many of the prophetic actions must be regarded as narrated in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. What the prophets are represented as saying and doing in such cases is only to be supposed as said and done in a vision. Their acts especially are not really or sensibly performed but only represented to the fancy. For we must remember, quote, that the prophetical scene or stage upon which all apparitions were made to the prophet was his imagination, and that there all those things which God would have revealed unto him were acted over symbolically, as in a mask in which diverse persons are brought in, amongst which the prophet himself bears a part, and therefore he, according to the exigency of this dramatical apparatus, must as the other actors perform his part, close quote. The same enlightenment and breadth of criticism characterize his remarks on the prophetic style in which he everywhere sees the peculiar expression of the prophetic mind and not any fixed or direct form of divine language. The idea of verbal inspiration appears to him wholly unnecessary to guarantee the accuracy of the prophetic representations. This was secured in the mere fact that they were men of knowledge who, quote, could speak sense as wise men and tell their own thoughts and experiences truly, and indeed it seems most agreeable to the nature of all prophetical visions and dreams, wherein the nature of the enthusiasm consisted in a symbolical and hieroglyphical shaping forth of intelligible things in their imaginations and enlightening the understanding of the prophets to discern the scope and meaning of these visa or fantasmata, that those words and phrases in which they were audibly expressed to the hearers afterwards, or penned down, should be the prophet's own. For the matter was not, as seems evident from what has been said, represented always by words but by things. Close, quote. Three. Smith's remaining discourses are occupied with various aspects of Christian truth, and in so far as they have a common aim, may be said to unfold the distinctive character of Christianity as a living power of righteousness and sanctification in human life. The picture which he draws, both of the gospel and its effects, is in the main correspondent to that drawn by Wichcote, with here and there a yet fuller insight and comprehension, greater wealth of spiritual illusion and a deeper grasp, so to speak, of evangelical principles. Where Wichcote sketches rather the ethical and outwardly harmonious relations of the divine life, Smith gets more to the root and vitalizing center. His mind was both more creative in conception and more largely philosophic in survey. In speaking, for example, of legal and evangelical righteousness, he discriminates the latter on all sides thoroughly. It is not only spiritual instead of formal, according to the Jewish point of view, but it is a principle of life brought to the soul and not any mere spontaneous growth out of it, or new mold and shape in a pedagogical kind of way in which the soul trains itself. It is, in short, a divine gift and not any mere moral process. On the theological side, Smith brings out more decisively than his teacher the distinctive divinity of Christianity. While on the other, or practical side, he emphasizes with equal force the vital union of religion and morality. Divinely given, evangelical righteousness yet never merely lies alongside the soul, formerly imputed to it as an addendum securing its acceptance with God, but it spreads itself over all the powers of the soul, quickening it into a divine life. It is not a, quote, doctrine wrapped up in ink and paper, but a vitalis cientia, a living impression made upon soul and spirit. The gospel does not so much consist in verbis as in virtute. Neither doth evangelical dispensation therefore please God so much more than the legal did, because as a finer contrivance of his infinite understanding it more clearly discovers the way of salvation to the minds of men. But chiefly, because it is a more powerful efflux of his divine goodness upon them as being the true seed of a happy immortality, continually thriving and growing on to perfection. It does not hold forth such a transcendent privilege and advantage above what the law did, only because it acquaints us that Christ, our true high priest, is ascended up into the holy of holies, and there instead of the blood of bulls and goats hath sprinkled the ark and mercy seat above with his own blood, but also because it conveys that blood of sprinkling into our defiled consciences to purge them from dead works. Far be it from me to disparage in the least the merit of Christ's blood, his becoming obedient unto death whereby we are justified, but I doubt sometimes some of our dogmatta and notions about justification may puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of ourselves than God hath of us, and that we profanely make the unspotted righteousness of Christ to serve only as a covering wherein to wrap up our foul deformities and filthy vices, and when we have done think ourselves in as good credit and repute with God as we are with ourselves, and that we are become heaven's darlings as much as we are our own." Again, by so much the more acceptable any one is to God by how much the more he comes to resemble God, it was a common notion in the old Pythagorean and Platonic theology that the divinity transformed into love and enamored with its own unlimited perfections and spotless beauty delighted to copy forth and shadow out itself as it were in created beings which are perpetually embraced in the warm bosom of the same love from which they can never swerve nor apostatize till they also prove apostate to the estate of their creation. And certainly it is true in our Christian divinity that that divine light and goodness which flows forth from God, the original of all, upon the souls of men, never goes solitary and destitute of love, complacency, and acceptation, which is always lodged together with it in the divine essence. And as the divine complacency thus dearly and tenderly entertains all those which bear a similitude of true goodness upon them, so it always abandons from its embraces all evil which never doth nor can mix itself with it. The Holy Spirit can never suffer any unhallowed or defiled thing to enter into it or to unite itself with it. Therefore, in a sober sense, I hope I may truly say, there is no perfect reconciliation rot between God and the souls of men while any defiled and impure thing dwells within the soul which cannot truly close with God nor God with that. Unpolymical as Smith is in a polemical age, dwelling for the most part in a region of religious meditation far above the strife of tongues, it is yet evident here and there in the larger movement of his thoughts that he is striking at prevalent bigotries and dogmatic pretensions unwelcome to his school, as in the passage already quoted about justification and in other passages such as the following, quote, it is not because our brains swim with a strong conceit of God's eternal love to us or because we grow big and swell into a mighty bulk with airy fancies and presumptions of our acceptance with God that makes us the more acceptable to him. It is not all our strong dreams of being in favor with heaven that fills our hungry souls the more with it. It is not a pertinacious imagination of our names being enrolled in the book of life or of the debt books of heaven being crossed or of Christ being ours while we find him not living within us or of the washing away of our sins in his blood while the foul and filthy stains thereof are deeply sunk in our own souls. No, it must be a true compliance with the divine will which must render us such as the divinity may take pleasure in. In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avail of anything nor any fancy built upon any other external privilege but the keeping of the commandments of God. We have learned to distinguish too subtly, I doubt, in our lives and conversations intersacrum et profanum, our religious approaches to God and our worldly affairs. We must not think that religion serves to paint our faces, to reform our looks, or only to inform our heads or instruct and to tune our tongues. No, not only to tie our hands and make our outward man more demure and bring our bodies and bodily actions into a better decorum, but its main business is to purge and reform our hearts and all the illicit actions and motions thereof. There are such who persuade themselves they are well affected to God, yet they can sometimes beat down the price of other men's religion to enhance the value of their own, or it may be by a burning and fiery zeal against the opinions and deportments of others that are not of their own sect they lose the sense of all their own guiltiness. A religion that runs out only in particularities is but a dead carcass and not indeed that true living religion which comes down from heaven. Close quote. We have now presented nearly all that is characteristic in the substance and mode of Smith's religious thought, yet many passages remain in these concluding discourses, eloquent with such a high and pregnant meaning that we have difficulty in omitting them. The following, however, must sum up our quotations. Quote. It is a fond imagination that religion should extinguish reason, whereas religion makes it more illustrious and vigorous, and they that live most in the exercise of religion shall find their reason most enlarged. True religion is no piece of artifice, it is no boiling up of our imaginative powers nor the glowing heats of passion, though these are too often mistaken for it when in our jugglings in religion we cast a mist before our own eyes, but it is a new nature informing the souls of men. It is a godlike frame of spirit discovering itself most of all in serene and clear minds in deep humility, meekness, self-denial, universal love of God, and all true goodness without partiality and without hypocrisy, whereby we are taught to know God and knowing Him to love Him, and conform ourselves as much as may be to all that perfection which shines forth in Him. True religion never finds itself out of the infinite sphere of the divinity, and wherever it finds beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuity, wisdom, holiness, justice, and the like it is ready to say here and there is God, wheresoever any such perfection shine out a holy mind climbs up by these sunbeams and raises itself up to God. Religion is no such a steer, sour, and rigid thing as to a fright men away from it. No, but those that are acquainted with the power of it find it to be altogether sweet and amiable. It is no sullen stoicism, no sour phariseism. It does not consist in a few melancholy passions in some dejected looks or depressions of mind, but it consists in freedom, love, peace, life, and power. The more it comes to be digested into our lives, the more sweet and lovely we shall find it to be. Close quote. Enough has been presented to show how solid, fine, and rich a thinker Smith is. Of all the products of the Cambridge School, the select discourses are perhaps the highest as they are the most accessible and the most widely appreciated. Many for whom the other members of the platonic group possess comparatively little interest and who have barely heard of Smith's teacher, which quote, have read with admiration these discourses. And indeed no spiritually thoughtful mind can read them unmoved. They carry us so directly into an atmosphere of divine philosophy, luminous with the richest lights of meditative genius. Philosophic elevation is their pervading characteristic. We see a mind religious to the core, tremulous in its inmost cords with pious aspiration, not only free from all pietistic weakness and dogmatic narrowness, but poising itself naturally at an altitude out of sight of them. Smith is not only no controversialist, but the dust of controversy has never touched him. His mind bears no scores of party conflict, but is fresh as a newborn life, with open eyes of poetic wonder and divine speculation. He has not painfully reached the serene heights on which his thoughts dwell, but these heights are the natural level of his lofty and abounding spiritual nature. This elevation marks, in our author, both a certain intellectual and spiritual advance. The breadth and freedom of mind which we traced in which coat still lies, in some degree, on a polemical and scholastic background. He has worked himself out of technical subtleties and obtained a firm rational footing. But many of the trappings of the scholastic spirit still clung to him, as his correspondence with Tuckney plainly shows. He made a clear advance upon the theological spirit of his age, having pushed the lines of his religious thought manfully forward, till they touched all the diverse aspects of speculative and moral culture. He thus redeemed religion from the dogmatism and faction which were alike preying upon it, and taught men to see in it something higher than any mere profession of opinions or attachment to a side. He well conceived and drew its ideal as the spiritual education of all our faculties. But this which may be said to form the summit of which coat's thought, attained through meditative struggle and prolonged converse with platonic speculation, was the starting point of Smith. He began easily on this level and never needed to work out for himself the rational conception of religion. Religion was inconceivable to him under any other form than the idealization and crown of our spiritual nature. The divine represented to him from the first, the compliment of the human. The perfect orb which rounds and completes all its aspirations and activities. The assimilation of man to God was consequently the one comprehensive function of Christianity, and whatever contributes to this spiritual transformation is more or less of the nature of religion. Wherever there is, as he says, quote, beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuity, wisdom, holiness, justice, and the like, there is God. Close quote. But Smith did more than merely develop this comprehensive ideal of religion. He not only moralized and broadened the conception of the divine, but he entered directly into its whole meaning and inquired what it was as a phase of human knowledge as well as of human attainment. That religion cannot be separated from reason nor morals from piety was of the nature of an axiomatic truth to him. His special thought was, how does reason authenticate religion and the divine idea in its totality rise into a valid element of human knowledge? He was in short from the beginning and by right of mental birth a Christian philosopher. Divinity presented itself to him in the shape of a science. Even if the answers given by him to the questions which he thus raised had been less satisfactory than they are, it was yet a definite advance in the thought of the seventeenth century to ask such questions, to conceive the idea of a philosophy of the divine. Theology had been hitherto viewed as a product of the schools, or at the best, as a series of deductions drawn from a supposed infallible oracle. It was tradition, or dogma, resting on a verbal basis. And Smith, no doubt, had been taught it as a system of inherited formulae ready to hand for the solution of all questions. But whatever traditionary impressions had thus been made upon him had sunk into the large depths of his spiritual nature and become merely food for its richer nurture rather than left any formal trace behind. The great ideas of theology were taken up by him from the first as vital elements within the sphere of the soul itself. Whatever they are he felt that they must have a real conformity to man's higher reason and life, and that the only valid science of them is to be sought in the ascertainment of this conformity. A science of the divine may embrace many things, elements of communicated and derived as well as of primary knowledge, but its basis must lie on the primary affirmations of the soul, and all its structure be traced back to the great question of man's essential character in the scale of being. What then is this? Is man essentially a spiritual being? And if so, what are the true contents of his spiritual reason or consciousness? These, the eternal problems of religious philosophy, were the problems to which Smith directly addressed himself with clear sighted and admirable perspicacity. And his answers upon the whole go as nearly to the heart of their solution as any that have been given. He vindicated the distinctive reality of the human soul with clear effect if not with any special resources of argument. All arguments on such a subject, from those of the Phaedo downwards, are indeed more or less of the same nature. And it may be safely said that no man not already convinced is likely to be convinced by them. Smith's argumentative details are not more conclusive than others. But he unfolds all the spiritual qualities of humanity with such a rich depth of insight that we feel, as it were, the fact of the soul to realize itself before us. The sense of the divine grows quick within us at the touch of his living analysis, and it witnesses itself not as the result of any elaborate inference, but as the primary being which we are, the original ground of all our life. And this is really the most that any thinker can accomplish on the subject. For the question of spirit versus matter, of immortality versus epicureanism, comes in the end to a rational assumption on the one side or the other. We must start spiritualist or materialist, from within or from without. Or we may start from the meeting point of both, the eternal doubleness which seems to lie at the basis of being. The one cannot be logically deduced from the other, but the one may be found in the other, and an essential antithesis, subject-object, with the subjective or spiritual side in front. And the thinker who brings out most vividly and helps us to understand most fully this spiritual side of human thought and life does most, after all, to attest its reality. The manner in which Smith attaches the belief in God to the belief in immortality was also a special service rendered to the cause of religious philosophy. He saw clearly what has since his time been so often declared authoritatively by the highest thinkers that the only basis for the recognition of the divine in the world was the recognition of the spiritual in man. Both the fact and the character of deity must be primarily read in the human soul, and without this interpreter within, all life and nature would be really void to us of divine meaning. If we do not find God within ourselves, the whole fabric of the visible universe may whisper to us of him, but the whisper will be unintelligible, for we receive but what we give, and in our life alone does nature live. All questions concerning God and religion thus really cluster around one root, the root of an original divine principle in man. Revelation itself is nothing else than the historical illumination of this fontal source of the divine, while practical religion is its growth or development on the volitional and moral side. Smith saw all this plainly and expounded it luminously. He saw also what perhaps witchcoat has not made so apparent that the divine, while thus linked to human reason and finding its first and essential utterance in it, is yet as a living power something which human nature itself could never elaborate. No mere philosophy or moralism can ever transmute itself into evangelical righteousness. This has its rise within the heart, no doubt, but not as a spontaneous product. It can only come from the original fount of divinity, a new divine force within us springing up into eternal life. While Smith therefore broadened, and in a sense humanized, the conception of religion, he at the same time with admirable balance of mind vindicated it as a distinctive divine power revealed in man. A righteousness not self-evolved, but divinely given through the faith of Christ, the righteousness witches of God by faith. He was one of those rare thinkers in whom largeness of view and depth and wealth of poetic and speculative insight only served to evoke more fully the religious spirit. And while he drew the mold of his thought from Plotinus, he vivified the substance of it from St. Paul. End of chapter 3, part 4.