o have the inner experience] but being
full of darkness and obscurity to those that rebel against it."[42]
"The dead letter," he says, "is a sandy foundation" for religion,
because it is never in books and writings but rather in the human soul
that men must seek for God.[43] Action and not words; life and not
motions; heart and not brain, hold the key to Truth: "They cannot be
good at Theorie that are bad at Practice."[44] "Our Saviour," he says,
"would not draw Truth up into any System, nor would He lay it out into
Canons or Articles of Faith, because He was not so careful to stock the
world with Opinions and Notions as to make it thrive with true piety,
Godlike purity and spiritual understanding"; and in a very happy
passage, he reminds us that there are other ways of propagating
religion besides writing books: "They are not alwaies the best Men who
blot the most paper; Truth is not so {318} voluminous nor swells into
such a mighty bulk as our Bookes doe. Those minds are not alwaies the
most chaste that are the most parturient with learned Discourses."[45]

I have, I believe, now given a true account of Smith's type of
Christianity, It was no new message. It was a re-expression of ideas
and ideals that had already been often proclaimed to the dull ears of
the world. He, however, is never a repeater of other men's ideas.
What he offers is always as much his own as was the life-blood which
coursed through his heart. He fed upon the literature which was
kindred to his growing spirit, and his books helped him find the road
which he was seeking; but he was nobly true to his own theory that the
way of Life is discovered by spiritual experience rather than by
"verbal description," and this quiet, sincere scholar and prophet of
the soul found it thus. He once said that "Truth is content, when it
comes into the world, to wear our mantles, to learn our language and to
conform itself as it were to our dress and fashions";[46] that is to
say, prophets speak in their own dialect and use the modes of their own
culture, but they are prophets through their own temporal experience of
that one eternal Reality which shines into their souls in its own
Light.[47]

What impressed his contemporary friends most was the beauty of his
spirit, and that is what still most impresses the reader of his
Discourses. He has succeeded in preserving some of the strong elixir
of his life in the words which survive him, and we know him as a
valia