 Edwards is making two claims. First, the new spiritual disposition and tastes which God bestows on the soul are divine. The differences between God's love and joy and the love and joy that he bestows on his saints is a difference of degree, not of nature or kind. Second, God does not act on the soul from without, but dwells within it “as a principle of a [new] nature,” living, acting, and exerting himself in the exercise of the soul's faculties. The “mechanism” underlying the new spiritual sense thus ultimately turns out to be God himself. Hence, since God in some sense is reality or being itself, it follows that the spiritual sense is necessarily aligned with reality.