and no number of
letters could convince him that the new message presented a safe way of
faith and life. And no amount of criticism or advice could change the
other man who found it necessary for him to have {296} reasonable cause
for what he was to believe and live by. Whichcote closes the friendly
debate with some very positive announcements that for him religion must
be, and must remain, something which guarantees its reality in the soul
itself: "Christ must be inwardlie felt as a principle of divine life
within us."[21] "What is there in man," again he says, "more
considerable than that which declares God's law to him, pleads for the
observation of it, accuseth for the breach and excuseth upon the
performance of it?"[22] And finally he informs his friend that each of
them must be left free to follow his own light: "If we differ there is no
help for it: Wee must forbear one another. . . . If you conceeve
otherwise of me than as a lover and pursuer after truth, you think
amisse. . . . Wherein I fall short of your expectation, I fail for
truth's sake."[23]

The central idea in Whichcote's teaching, which runs like a gulf-stream
through all his writings, is his absolute certainty that there is
something in the "very make of man"[24] which links the human spirit to
the Divine Spirit and which thus makes it as natural for man to be
religious as it is for him to seek food for his body. There is a
"seminal principle," "a seed of God," "something that comes immediately
from God," in the very structure of man's inner nature,[25] and this
structural possession makes it as natural and proper for man's mind to
tend toward God, "the centre of immortal souls," as it is for heavy
things to tend toward their centre.[26] "God," he elsewhere says, "is
more inward to us than our own souls," and we are more closely "related
to God than to anything in the world."[27] The soul is to God as the
flower is to the sun, which opens when the sun is there and shuts when
the sun is absent,[28] though this figure breaks down, because, in
Whichcote's view, God never withdraws and is never absent. This idea
that the spiritual life is absolutely rational--a normal function {297}
of man's truest nature--receives manifold expression in Whichcote's
_Aphorisms_, which constitute a sort of seventeenth-century Book of
Proverbs, or collection of Wisdom-sayings. He had absorbed one great
saying from the original Book of Proverbs, which he uses aga