compared with that which shines in purified souls. "To
seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living
among the dead"; in these, "truth is often not so much enshrined as
entombed." "That which enables us to know and understand aright the
things of God, must be a living principle of holiness within us. The
sun of truth never shines into any unpurged souls.... Such as men
themselves are, such will God Himself seem to be.... Some men have too
bad hearts to have good heads.... He that will find truth must seek it
with a free judgment and a sanctified mind."

Smith was well read in mystical theology, and was aware how much his
ideal differed from that of Dionysian Mysticism. His criticism of the
_via negativa_ is so admirable that I must quote part of it. "Good men
... are content and ready to deny themselves for God. I mean not that
they should deny their own reason, as some would have it, for that
were to deny a beam of Divine light, and so to deny God, instead of
denying ourselves for Him.... By self-denial, I mean the soul's
quitting all its own interest in itself, and an entire resignation of
itself to Him as to all points of service and duty; and thus the soul
loses itself in God, and lives in the possession not so much of its
own being as of the Divinity, desiring only to be great in God, to
glory in His light, and spread itself in His fulness; to be filled
always by Him, and to empty itself again into Him; to receive all from
Him, and to expend all for Him; and so to live, not as its own, but as
God's." Wicked men "maintain a _meum_ and _tuum_ between God and
themselves," but the good man is able to make a full surrender of
himself, "triumphing in nothing more than in his own nothingness, and
in the allness of the Divinity. But, indeed, this his being nothing is
the only way to be all things; this his having nothing the truest way
of possessing all things.... The spirit of religion is always
ascending upwards; and, spreading itself through the whole essence of
the soul, loosens it from a self-confinement and narrowness, and so
renders it more capacious of Divine enjoyment.... The spirit of a good
man is always drinking in fountain-goodness, and fills itself more and
more, till it be filled with all the fulness of God." "It is not a
melancholy kind of sitting still, and slothful waiting, that speaks
men enlivened by the Spirit and power of God. It is not religion to
stifle and smother those acti