John Smith possessed a mind in which the mystical element mingled itself with an intense energy of reflection, a habit of calm thought, and an imagination which employed itself, not in painting individual objects, but in dyeing, with rich tints of colour, abstract and immutable ideas. His mental training had been in the Greek Academy. He had long sat as a loving disciple at the feet of Plato, and had conversed with the earlier and later Platonists. The reader of Smith’s works will, in every page, discover traces of his peculiar culture, as well as of his peculiar endowments. His _Select Discourses_, published in 1660, take a wide range, embracing the true method of attaining Divine knowledge; the errors that grow up beside it--superstition on the one hand, atheism on the other; the immortality of the soul, which is the subject, and the existence and nature of God, who is the Author and object of religion; and prophecy, which Smith treats as the way whereby revealed truth is dispensed and conveyed, rather than as a proof whereby it is established. The discourses upon the difference between an evangelical and legal righteousness, upon the excellency and nobleness of true religion, and upon a Christian’s conflict with and conquest over Satan, exhibit the author’s characteristic views of doctrinal, ethical, and experimental Divinity. The first only requires particular notice here. “The law was the ministry of death, and in itself an external and lifeless thing; neither could it procure or beget that Divine life and spiritual form of godliness, in the souls of men, which God expects from all the heirs of glory, nor that glory which is only consequent upon a true Divine life.” Whereas, on the other side, the Gospel is set forth “as a mighty efflux and emanation of life and spirit, freely issuing forth from an omnipotent source of grace and love, as that true, God-like, vital influence whereby the Divinity derives itself into the souls of men, enlivening and transforming them into its own likeness, and strongly imprinting upon them a copy of its own beauty and goodness; like the spermatical virtue of the heavens, which spreads itself freely upon this lower world, and, subtily insinuating itself into this benumbed, feeble, earthly matter, begets life and motion in it. Briefly, it is that whereby God comes to dwell in us, and we in Him.”[458]