itself more and more, till it be filled with all the fulness of God.”  “It is not a melancholy kind of sitting still, and slothful waiting, that speaks men enlivened by the Spirit and power of God.  It is not religion to stifle and smother those active powers and principles which are within us....  Good men do not walk up and down the world merely like ghosts and shadows; but they are indeed living men, by a real participation from Him who is indeed a quickening Spirit.”

“Neither were it an happiness worth the having for a mind, like an hermit sequestered from all things else, to spend an eternity in self-converse and the enjoyment of such a diminutive superficial nothing as itself is....  We read in the Gospel of such a question of our Saviour’s, What went ye out into the wilderness to see?  We may invert it, What do you return within to see?  A soul confined within the private and narrow cell of its own particular being?  Such a soul deprives itself of all that almighty and essential glory and goodness which shines round about it, which spreads itself throughout the whole universe; I say, it deprives itself of all this, for the enjoying of such a poor, petty, and diminutive thing as itself is, which yet it can never enjoy truly in such retiredness.”

The English Platonists are equally sound on the subject of ecstasy.  Whichcote says:  “He doth not know God at all as He is, nor is he in a good state of religion, who doth not find in himself at times ravishings with sweet and lovely considerations of the Divine perfections.”  And Smith:  “Who can tell the delights of those mysterious converses with the Deity, when reason is turned into sense, and faith becomes vision?  The fruit of this knowledge is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb....  By the Platonists’ leave, this life and knowledge (that of the ‘contemplative man’) peculiarly belongs to the true and sober Christian.  This life is nothing else but an infant-Christ formed in his soul.  But we must not mistake:  this knowledge is here but in its infancy.”  While we are here, “our own imaginative powers, which are perpetually attending the best acts of our souls, will be breathing a gross dew upon the pure glass of our understandings.”

“Heaven is first a temper, then a place,” says Whichcote, and Smith says the same about hell.  “Heaven is not a thing without us, nor is happiness anything distinct from a true conjunction of the mind with God.”  “Though we could suppose ourselves to be at truce with heaven, and all Divine displeasure laid asleep; yet would our own sins, if they continue unmortified, make an AEtna or Vesuvius within us.[362]” This view of the indissoluble connexion between holiness and blessedness, as between sin and damnation, leads Smith to reject strenuously the doctrine of imputed, as opposed to imparted, righteousness.  “God does not bid us be warmed and filled,” he says, “and deny us those necessities which our starving and hungry souls call for....  I