The Platonists thus lay great stress on the inner light, and identify it with the purified reason.  The best exposition of their teaching on this head is in Smith’s beautiful sermon on “The True Way or Method of attaining to Divine Knowledge.”  “Divinity,” he says, “is a Divine life rather than a Divine science, to be understood rather by a spiritual sensation than by any verbal description.  A good life is the prolepsis of Divine science—­the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Divinity is a true efflux from the eternal light, which, like the sunbeams, does not only enlighten, but also heat and enliven; and therefore our Saviour hath in His beatitudes connext purity of heart to the beatific vision.”  “Systems and models furnish but a poor wan light,” compared with that which shines in purified souls.  “To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead”; in these, “truth is often not so much enshrined as entombed.”  “That which enables us to know and understand aright the things of God, must be a living principle of holiness within us.  The sun of truth never shines into any unpurged souls....  Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to be....  Some men have too bad hearts to have good heads....  He that will find truth must seek it with a free judgment and a sanctified mind.”

Smith was well read in mystical theology, and was aware how much his ideal differed from that of Dionysian Mysticism.  His criticism of the via negativa is so admirable that I must quote part of it.  “Good men ... are content and ready to deny themselves for God.  I mean not that they should deny their own reason, as some would have it, for that were to deny a beam of Divine light, and so to deny God, instead of denying ourselves for Him....  By self-denial, I mean the soul’s quitting all its own interest in itself, and an entire resignation of itself to Him as to all points of service and duty; and thus the soul loses itself in God, and lives in the possession not so much of its own being as of the Divinity, desiring only to be great in God, to glory in His light, and spread itself in His fulness; to be filled always by Him, and to empty itself again into Him; to receive all from Him, and to expend all for Him; and so to live, not as its own, but as God’s.”  Wicked men “maintain a meum and tuum between God and themselves,” but the good man is able to make a full surrender of himself, “triumphing in nothing more than in his own nothingness, and in the allness of the Divinity.  But, indeed, this his being nothing is the only way to be all things; this his having nothing the truest way of possessing all things....  The spirit of religion is always ascending upwards; and, spreading itself through the whole essence of the soul, loosens it from a self-confinement and narrowness, and so renders it more capacious of Divine enjoyment....  The spirit of a good man is always drinking in fountain-goodness, and fills