e Love of God towards him [and the
{314} Assurance of his Salvation]; yet methinks it were more desirable
to find a Revelation of all _from within_, arising up from the Bottome
and centre of a man's own soul, in the Reall and Internal impressions
of a Godlike nature upon his own spirit; and thus to find the
Foundation and Beginning of Heaven and Happiness within himself; it
were more desirable to see the crucifying of our own Will, the
mortifying of the meer Animal life and to see a Divine life rising up
in the room of it, as a sure Pledge and Inchoation of Immortality and
Happiness, the very Essence of which consists in a perfect conformity
and cheerful compliance of all the Powers of our Souls with the Will of
God."[33]

The consciousness of Immortality rises or falls with the moral and
spiritual height of the soul. Nothing makes men doubt or question the
Immortality of their souls so much as their own "base and earthly
loves," and so, too, inward goodness "breeds a sense of the Soul's
Immortality": "Goodness and vertue make men know and love, believe and
delight in their Immortality. When the soul is purged and enlightened
by true sanctity it is more capable of those Divine irradiations
whereby it feels it self in conjunction with God. It knows that
Almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death. It knows
that God will never forsake His own life which He has quickened in the
soul. Those breathings and gaspings after an Eternal participation of
Him are but the energy of His own breath within us."[34]

Smith finds the world in which he lives a fair world, everywhere full
of "the Prints and Footsteps of God," the finite creatures of which are
"Glasses wherein God reflects His glory." There are many "golden links
that unite the world to God," and good men, "conversing with this lower
world and viewing the invisible things of God in the things that are
made in the outward Creation, may many times find God secretly flowing
into their souls and leading them silently out of the Court of the
Temple into the Holy Place."[35]

{315}

The outward world is thus not something stubbornly foreign to the
spirit; it is not the enemy's country, but every finite good and
everything of beauty is "a Blossom of the First Goodness, a Beam from
the Father of Lights." The spiritual person discovers that the whole
creation is spiritual. He learns to "love all things in God and God in
all things, and he sees that God is A