he World."

Religion is thus thought of as the normal way of life, as the true
fulfilment of human nature and as complete inward health. "Holiness," he
says, "is our right constitution and temper, our inward health and
strength."[40] Sin and selfishness carry a man below the noble Creation
which God made in him, and Religion is the return to the true nature and
capacity of God's Creation in man: "The Gospel, inwardly received, dyes
and colours the soul, settles the Temper and Constitution of it and is
restorative of our Nature. . . . It is the restitution of us to the
state of our Creation, to the use of our Principles, to our healthful
Constitution and to Acts that are connatural to us."[41]

As soon as man returns to "his own healthful Constitution" and to "the
state of his Creation," he finds that Religion has its evidence and
assurance in itself. God made man for moral truths, "before He declared
{299} them on Sinai," or "writ them in the Bible,"[42] and so soon as the
soul comes into "conformity to its original,"[43] that is "into
conformity to God according to its inward measure and capacity,"[44] and
lives a kind of life that is "self-same with its own Reason,"[45] the
Divine Life manifests itself in that man and kindles his spirit into a
blazing candle of the Lord. Those who are spiritual "find and feel
within themselves Divine Suggestions, Motions and Inspirations; . . . a
light comes into the Mind, a still Voice."[46]

This direct and inward revelation is, however, for Whichcote never "a
revelation of new matter," never a way to the discovery of truths of a
private nature. The revelations which the guidance of the Divine Spirit
breathes forth within our souls are always truths of universal
significance, truths that are already implicitly revealed in the Bible,
truths that carry their own self-evidence to any rational mind. But
these revelations, these discoveries of what God means and what life may
become, are possible only to those who prepare themselves for inward
converse and who centre down to the deeper Roots of their being: "Unless
a man takes himself sometimes out of the world, by retirement and
self-reflection, he will be in danger of losing _himself_ in the
world."[47] Where God is not discovered, something is always at fault
with man. "As soon as he is abstracted from the noise of the world,
withdrawn from the call of the Body, having the doors of the senses shut,
the Divine Life readily e