en sin and damnation, leads Smith to reject
strenuously the doctrine of imputed, as opposed to imparted,
righteousness. "God does not bid us be warmed and filled," he says,
"and deny us those necessities which our starving and hungry souls
call for.... I doubt sometimes, some of our dogmata and notions about
justification may puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of
ourselves than God hath of us, and that we profanely make the
unspotted righteousness of Christ to serve only as a covering wherein
to wrap our foul deformities and filthy vices, and when we have done,
think ourselves in as good credit and repute with God as we are with
ourselves, and that we are become Heaven's darlings as much as we are
our own.[363]"

These extracts will show that the English Platonists breathe a larger
air than the later Romish mystics, and teach a religion more
definitely Christian than Erigena and Eckhart. I shall now show how
this happy result was connected with a more truly spiritual view of
the external world than we have met with in the earlier part of our
survey. That the laws of nature are the laws of God, that "man, as
man, is averse to what is evil and wicked," that "evil is unnatural,"
and a "contradiction of the law of our being," which is only found in
"wicked men and devils," is one of Whichcote's "gallant themes." And
Smith sets forth the true principles of Nature-Mysticism in a splendid
passage, with which I will conclude this Lecture:--

"God made the universe and all the creatures contained therein as so
many glasses wherein He might reflect His own glory. He hath copied
forth Himself in the creation; and in this outward world we may read
the lovely characters of the Divine goodness, power, and wisdom....
But how to find God here, and feelingly to converse with Him, and
being affected with the sense of the Divine glory shining out upon the
creation, how to pass out of the sensible world into the intellectual,
is not so effectually taught by that philosophy which professed it
most, as by true religion. That which knits and unites God and the
soul together can best teach it how to ascend and descend upon those
golden links that unite, as it were, the world to God. That Divine
Wisdom, that contrived and beautified this glorious structure, can
best explain her own art, and carry up the soul back again in these
reflected beams to Him who is the Fountain of them.... Good men may
easily find every creature pointing