John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”). In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. Above all, the concern here is for the relationship between the theoretical and the practical.