ve 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 betwe