* * * * *
There is nothing that so embases and enthralls the Souls of men, as the
dismall and dreadfull thoughts of their own Mortality, which will not
suffer them to look beyond this short span of Time, to see an houres
length before them, or to look higher than these material Heavens; which
though they could be stretch'd forth to infinity, yet would the space be
too narrow for an enlightened mind, that will not be confined within the
compass of corporeal dimensions. These black Opinions of Death and the
Non-entity of Souls (darker than Hell it self) shrink up the free-born
Spirit which is within us, which would otherwise be dilating and
spreading it self boundlessly beyond all Finite Being: and when these
sorry pinching mists are once blown away, it finds this narrow sphear of
Being to give way before it; and having once seen beyond Time and
Matter, it finds then no more ends nor bounds to stop its swift and
restless motion. It may then fly upwards from one heaven to another,
till it be beyond all orbe of Finite Being, swallowed up in the
boundless Abyss of Divinity, [Greek: hyperano tes ousias], beyond all
that which darker thoughts are wont to represent under the Idea of
Essence. This is that [Greek: theion skotos] which the Areopagite speaks
of, which the higher our Minds soare into, the more incomprehensible
they find it. Those dismall apprehensions which pinion the Souls of men
to mortality, churlishly check and starve that noble life thereof, which
would alwaies be rising upwards, and spread it self in a free heaven:
and when once the Soul hath shaken off these, when it is once able to
look through a grave, and see beyond death, it finds a vast Immensity of
Being opening it self more and more before it, and the ineffable light
and beauty thereof shining more and more into it.
_Select Discourses of John Smith, the
Cambridge Platonist, 1660._