simplicity and spirituality of the Platonists, invented the word “Latitudinarian” to throw at them, “a long nickname which they have taught their tongues to pronounce as roundly as if it were shorter than it is by four or five syllables”; but they could not deny that their enemies were loyal sons of the Church of England.[359] What the Platonists meant by making reason the seat of authority may be seen by a few quotations from Whichcote and Smith, who for our purpose are, I think, the best representatives of the school.  Whichcote answers Tuckney, who had remonstrated with him for “a vein of doctrine, in which reason hath too much given to it in the mysteries of faith";—­“Too much” and “too often” on these points!  “The Scripture is full of such truths, and I discourse on them too much and too often!  Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most rational.”  Elsewhere he writes, “He that gives reason for what he has said, has done what is fit to be done, and the most that can be done.”  “Reason is the Divine Governor of man’s life; it is the very voice of God.”  “When the doctrine of the Gospel becomes the reason of our mind, it will be the principle of our life.”  “It ill becomes us to make our intellectual faculties Gibeonites.[360]” How far this teaching differs from the frigid “common-sense” morality prevalent in the eighteenth century, may be judged from the following, which stamps Whichcote as a genuine mystic.  “Though liberty of judgment be everyone’s right, yet how few there are that make use of this right!  For the use of this right doth depend upon self-improvement by meditation, consideration, examination, prayer, and the like.  These are things antecedent and prerequisite.”  John Smith, in a fine passage too long to quote in full, says:  “Reason in man being lumen de lumine, a light flowing from the Fountain and Father of lights ... was to enable man to work out of himself all those notions of God which are the true groundwork of love and obedience to God, and conformity to Him....  But since man’s fall from God, the inward virtue and vigour of reason is much abated, the soul having suffered a [Greek:  pterorryesis], as Plato speaks, a defluvium pennarum....  And therefore, besides the truth of natural inscription, God hath provided the truth of Divine revelation....  But besides this outward revelation, there is also an inward impression of it ... which is in a more special manner attributed to God....  God only can so shine upon our glassy understandings, as to beget in them a picture of Himself, and turn the soul like wax or clay to the seal of His own light and love.  He that made our souls in His own image and likeness can easily find a way into them.  The Word that God speaks, having found a way into the soul, imprints itself there as with the point of a diamond....  It is God alone that acquaints the soul with the truths of revelation, and also strengthens and raises the soul to better apprehensions even of natural truth, God being that in the intellectual world which the sun is in the sensible, as some of the ancient Fathers love to speak, and the ancient philosophers too, who meant God by their Intellectus Agens[361] whose proper work they supposed to be not so much to enlighten the object as the faculty.”