Like all of his kind, Smith begins with what to him is an axiomatic fact, that the human soul has a "royal pedigree and noble extraction," that, "as the best philosophers have alwaies taught, we must enquire for God within ourselves," that "Principles of Divine Truth have been engraven on man's Heart by the finger of God," that we can find "a clear impression of some Eternal Nature and Perfect Being stamped upon our own souls," that there are "Radical Principles of Divine Knowledge" {311} and "Seeds of Divine Nature" hidden within us and that a Divine Spirit blows and breathes upon men's hearts, assisting the soul to participate in the Life of God.[23] In one of his bold sayings this position is summed up as follows: "Religion is a Heaven-born thing, the Seed of God in the spirits of men, whereby they are formed to a similitude and likeness of Himself. A true Christian is every way of a most noble extraction, of an heavenly and divine pedigree."[24] He finds the mark of man's excelling dignity in the inexhaustible depth of his nature and in his noble discontent with every finite and mutable thing. The soul of man is "too big for earthly designs and interests." There is forever a restless appetite within man for some infinite Good without which he can never be satisfied. Everything which he attains or achieves still leaves him in "pinching penury," unsatiated with "the thin and spare diet which he finds in his finite home." His soul, "like the daughters of the Horseleach is always crying: 'Give, give.'" No happiness worth having ever arises, nor through a whole eternity could arise, for any soul sequestered like a hermit in the narrow confines of its own private cell, sundered from "the Fountain-Goodness," for which it was created. The immortal Principle within forever drives it to seek its Original, and it lives only when it "lives above itself," and follows "its own proper motion upward."[25]