In order to demonstrate how essential is the co-operation of the will to that living intercommunion with God, which is something more than a mere understanding, we advance the following assumptions. Supposing that in the incredible condescension of His love, God has made Himself known to a man, just as in the first books of our Holy Scripture He is described as conversing with Moses, and as familiarly as one friend talks to another; supposing also that He revealed to him all the secret things of heaven and earth without reserve; that He at the same time laid open to him His will and hidden counsels, and that not summarily and in a general way, but definitely and in detail--expressly making known to him His gracious purposes, both in what He at present requires of him and designs for him hereafter; that He has also pointed out to man the means which will enable him to accomplish His will, and, moreover, has added the highest possible promises for his encouragement; supposing all this, is it not evident that it nevertheless could not help or profit man unless he consented to receive it? The whole divine communication would be in vain if man obstinately continued in his old Egoism, mixed and compounded of evil habits, fears, and sensual desires, and, unable to tear himself away, still clung close to the narrow limits of self and his own Me. Now it is nothing but this intrinsic consent and concurrence in the will of God, this calm affirmation of it, that can help man, who is now left to his own free determination even as regards the Deity, and that can lead him to God. On this account I called the will, rather than the understanding, man’s sense for the divine. But all that is here required is the internal assent, and not the power of actual performance; for that varies even according to the standard of nature, or rather of that which is imparted to him from above, since of himself man has no capacity for that which is higher and more excellent, nothing being man’s own but his will. Now this internal assent and submission of man’s own will to the divine is clearly inconceivable where it has not, to a certain degree, withdrawn from the sensible world which surrounds him with so many ties and allurements, and where it has not loosened and set itself free from the narrow domain of self to which his Ego so closely clings.