To the love in the human soul there corresponds love in the divine nature, because love is of the essence of divinity. It precedes, in the mythology of the ancients, all the other gods. Hence there is a natural instinct or tendency of all things towards the beautiful and good. Love is that by virtue of which all things are produced, which is in all things, and is the vigour of all things; by its guidance souls rise to contemplation, by the power of flight it inspires, the difficulties of nature are overcome, and men become united with God.[526] To see God is to be seen by God; to be heard by divinity is to hear the voice of divinity; to be favoured by its grace is the same thing as offering oneself to it. The divine potency that is wholly in everything does not offer nor withdraw itself except through the conversion of the other, its object, to it, or aversion from it.[527] To love God is to be loved by God. It is only through love, again, that we can approach the inmost nature of God; we cannot reason or even think of the divine without detracting from it rather than adding to its glory.[528] To think of God is to limit Him, and, therefore, as we have seen, every conception of Him is inadequate: the deepest, the highest knowledge of divine things is by way of negation, never by affirmation. For the divine beauty and divine goodness can never fall within our understanding (our conceptual knowledge), but are ever beyond and beyond in absolute incomprehensibility. No finite intelligence ever perceives the substance of divinity, but always its similitude, its image; even the highest intelligences are, in the language of the schools, not _formally_, but only _denominatively_, gods, or divine,--divinity and the divine beauty remaining one and exalted above all things.[529] Being itself eternal, unchangeable, the divine truth reveals itself to the few to whom it is revealed--not as in the physical sciences, which are acquired by the natural light of sense and reason, proceeding from the known to the unknown, in successive stages, but--suddenly and at one stroke. There is no need of expense of time, laborious study, active inquiry, to secure it; but it enters into us as readily as the solar light is present, without lapse of time to him who turns to it, and lays himself open to receive it.[530] When the soul is thus wholly turned to God--to the Idea of Ideas--the mind is lifted up to the unity above essence, and becomes all love, all simplicity and unity. The soul is permeated at once with the desire or love of the divine beauty in itself, "without similitude, figure, image, or form"--a desire or love which is its own realisation. CHAPTER VIII POSITIVE RELIGIONS AND THE RELIGION OF PHILOSOPHY