Dr. Smith observes, in his select discourses, "besides the outward Revelation of God's will to men, there is also an inward impression of it in their minds and spirits, which is in a more especial manner attributed to God. We cannot see divine things but in a divine light. God only, who is the true light, and in whom there is no darkness at all, can so shine out of himself upon our glossy understandings, as to beget in them a picture of himself, his own will and pleasure, and turn the soul (as the phrase is in Job) like wax or clay to the seal of his own light and love. He that made our souls in his own image and likeness, can easily find a way into them. The word that God speaks, having found a way into the soul, imprints itself there, as with the point of a diamond, and becomes (to borrow Plato's expression) 'a word written in the Soul of the learner.' Men may teach the grammar and rhetoric; but God teaches the divinity. Thus it is God alone that acquaints the soul with the truths of revelation." The learned Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down and Connor, speaks in a similar manner in his sermon de Via Intelligentiae. "Now in this inquiry, says he, I must take one thing for granted, which is, that every good man is taught of God. And indeed, unless he teach us, we shall make but ill scholars ourselves, and worse guides to others. No man can know God, says Irenaeus, except he be taught of God. If God teaches us, then all is well; but if we do not learn wisdom at his feet, from whence should we have it? It can come from no other spring." Again--"those who perfect holiness in the fear of God, have a degree of divine knowledge more than we can discourse of, and more certain than the demonstration of Geometry; brighter than the sun, and indeficient as the light of heaven--A good man is united to God--As flame touches flame, and combines into splendour and into glory, so is the spirit of a man united to Christ by the spirit of God. Our light, on the other hand, is like a candle; every word of doctrine blows it out, or spends the wax, and makes the light tremulous. But the lights of heaven are fixed and bright and shine for ever."