 There is also an implicit theological defense of the spiritual sense's objectivity. “True saving grace is no other than the very love of God; that is, God in one of the persons of the Trinity, uniting himself to the soul of the creature as a vital principle, dwelling there and exerting himself by the faculties of the soul of man in his own proper nature after the manner of a principle of nature.” The saints are thus “not only partakers of a nature that may in some sense be called divine because ‘tis conformed to the nature of God; but the very Deity does in some sense dwell in them” (Treatise on Grace,; Edwards 1957–, vol. 21, 194). (There were Puritan precedents for these claims.)