And although these interior speakings are used to come after such extraordinary manner that it is only known to Him that hears them, yet after another ordinary manner they pass through all, and are called inspirations; for (as the glorious Doctor St Augustine says) " The interior speaking of God our Lord is a secret inspiration, by the which invisibly He discovers to the soul His will or His truth" [1] With this He speaks to just and to sinners; but oftenest to those that are very spiritual, whom He teaches, corrects, reprehends or exhorts, comforts and moves to works of virtue and perfection. And therefore David, as one well experienced in feeling these inspirations and divine impulses, said, " I will hear what the Lord God will speak in me;" [2] desiring that He would speak to him, and showing himself prepared to comply with whatsoever He should say.
These two manners of prayer or contemplation by spiritual seeing and hearing holy Job touched when he said to God, " With the hearing of the ear I have heard Thee, but now my eye seeth Thee;" [3] in which he gives to understand, (as St Gregory 20 notes,) that it is a more noble manner of knowing God by an interior beholding than by the hearing; for the hearing has more obscurity in the darkness of faith, and the sight more perspicuity, beholding God more near, and as it were more present; at other times in the Scripture supreme contemplation is declared by means of hearing, as we shall hereafter see in the introduction of the third part
iii. The third manner of God's communicating Himself interiorly is by spiritual smelling, infusing into the soul an odour and fragrance of spiritual things so sweet that it comforts the heart and revives it to aim at and seek them, running (as it is said in the Book of Canticles) "after" Him "to
