*_Theophilus._ No; but I would have you judge of your state of love, by these angelical tempers, and not by any transient fervour. For just as far as you are freed from the folly of all earthly affections, from all disquiet, trouble and complaint about this or that, just so far is the spirit of love in you. For divine love is a new life, and new nature, and introduces you into a new world; it puts an end to all your former opinions and tempers, it opens new senses in you, and makes you see high to be low, and low to be high; wisdom to be foolishness, and foolishness wisdom; it makes prosperity and adversity, praise and dispraise, to be equally nothing. _When I was a child_, saith the apostle, _I thought as a child, I spake as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things_. Whilst man is under the power of nature, governed only by worldly wisdom, his life (however old he may be) is quite childish; every thing about him only awakens childish thoughts, and pursuits in him: all that he sees and hears, all that he desires or fears, likes or dislikes; that which he gets, and that which he loses; that which he hath, and that which he hath not, serve only to carry him from this fiction of evil, to that fiction of good, from one vanity of peace, to another vanity of trouble. But when divine love is in the soul, all childish images of good and evil are done away, and all the _sensibility_ of them is lost, as the stars lose their visibility, when the sun is risen. And now we are fairly brought to the one great practical point, on which our proficiency in the spirit of love depends. Namely, _that all we are, and all we have from Adam, as fallen_, must be given up absolutely, if divine love is to be brought forth in us. For as all that we are by nature, is in full contrariety to this divine love, so a death to ourselves is its only cure, and nothing else can make it subservient to good. _Theogenes._ I now sufficiently see, how man stands in the midst of heaven and hell, under an absolute necessity of belonging wholly to the one, or wholly to the other, as soon as this cover of materiality is taken off from him. For matter is his only wall of partition between them, he is equally nigh to both of them: and as light and love make all the difference there is between heaven and hell, so nothing but light and love wrought in his soul, can possibly keep hell out of it, or bring heaven into it.