"There is nothing so intrinsically rational as Religion is."[33]
"The Truths of God are connatural to the soul of man, and the soul of man makes no more resistance to them than the air does to light."[34]
"Religion makes us live like men."[35]
"We worship God best when we resemble Him most."[36]
"Religion is intelligible, rational and accountable: It is not our burden but our privilege."[37]
Something is always wrong, he thinks, if Religion becomes a burden: "It is imperfection in Religion to drudge in it, and every man drudges in Religion if he takes it up as a task and carries it as a burden."[38] The moment we follow "the divine frame and temper" of our inmost nature we find our freedom, our health, our power, and our joy; as one of the Aphorisms puts it: {298} "When we make nearer approaches to God, we have more use of ourselves."[39]
This view is beautifully expressed in Whichcote's Prayer printed at the end of the Aphorisms: "Most Blessed God, the Creator and Governor of the World; the only true God, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We thy Creatures were made to seek and find, to know and reverence, to serve and obey, to honour and glorify, to imitate and enjoy Thee; who art the Original of our Beings, and the Centre of our Rest. Our Reasonable Nature hath a peculiar Reservation for Thee; and our Happiness consists in our Assimilation to, and Employment about, Thee. The nearer we approach unto Thee, the more free we are from Error, Sin, and Misery; and the farther off we are from Thee, the farther off we are from Truth, Holiness, and Felicity. Without Thee, we are sure of nothing; we are not sure of ourselves: but through Thee, there is Self-Enjoyment in the mind, when there is nothing but Confusion, and no Enjoyment of the World."
Religion is thus thought of as the normal way of life, as the true fulfilment of human nature and as complete inward health. "Holiness," he says, "is our right constitution and temper, our inward health and strength."[40] Sin and selfishness carry a man below the noble Creation which God made in him, and Religion is the return to the true nature and capacity of God's Creation in man: "The Gospel, inwardly received, dyes and colours the soul, settles the Temper and Constitution of it and is restorative of our Nature. . . . It is the restitution of us to the state of our Creation, to the use of our Principles, to our healthful Constitution and to Acts that are connatural to us."[41]
As soon as man returns to "his own healthful Constitution" and to "the state of his Creation," he finds that Religion has its evidence and assurance in itself. God made man for moral truths, "before He declared {299} them on Sinai," or "writ them in the Bible,"[42] and so soon as the soul comes into "conformity to its original,"[43] that is "into conformity to God according to its inward measure and capacity,"[44] and lives a kind of life that is "self-same with its own Reason,"[45] the Divine Life manifests itself in that man and kindles his spirit into a blazing candle of the Lord. Those who are spiritual "find and feel within themselves Divine Suggestions, Motions and Inspirations; . . . a light comes into the Mind, a still Voice."[46]
This direct and inward revelation is, however, for Whichcote never "a revelation of new matter," never a way to the discovery of truths of a private nature. The revelations which the guidance of the Divine Spirit breathes forth within our souls are always truths of universal significance, truths that are already implicitly revealed in the Bible, truths that carry their own self-evidence to any rational mind. But these revelations, these discoveries of what God means and what life may become, are possible only to those who prepare themselves for inward converse and who centre down to the deeper Roots of their being: "Unless a man takes himself sometimes out of the world, by retirement and self-reflection, he will be in danger of losing himself in the world."[47] Where God is not discovered, something is always at fault with man. "As soon as he is abstracted from the noise of the world, withdrawn from the call of the Body, having the doors of the senses shut, the Divine Life readily enters and reveals Itself to the inward Eye that is prepared for it."[48] "Things that are connatural in the way of Religion," he once said, "the Illapses and Breakings in of God upon us, require a mind that is not subject to Passion but is in a serene and quiet Posture, where there is no tumult of Imagination. . . . There is no genuine and proper effect of Religion where the Mind is not composed, sedate and calm."[49]