MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. 91-80425 MIC3lOFn:.MED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK (6 as part of the Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project yj Funded bv the NAHONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. A UTHOR : WILKINSON, JAMES JOHN GARTH TITLE: THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS PLACE: LONDON DA TE : 1895 COLUMBIA UNIVEl^ITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TAR^FT Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 938.94 W659 Wilkinson, Jamoe John Garth, 1812-1899. The combats and victories of Jesus Christ By James John Garth Wilkinson ••• London, James Speirs, 1895. viii. 104 p. 19^. • • • Restrictions on Use: 42Gf5ni TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE:__j|:5!2_ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA ^ IB IIB DATE FILMED: lZ/I/ll_ INITIALS_/Q. HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRlbGE. cf REDUCTION RATIO:___/iX. Association for Information and image IManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter iiii rrr 1 2 3 456 78 9 10 11 Inches TTT 1 I M I I rir 1.0 1.25 ■ 90 4.0 1.4 T 12 13 14 iiIiimIiiiiIiimIiiiiiiii 4.5 2.8 ^ ^ 1 = 6.3 7-1 III— 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 TTT TTT 15 mm ml T MPNUFnCTURED TO RUM STRNDRRDS BY APPLIED IMAGE, INC. ^^^i^^f^^i^M^mmmm \^'-K mnimm 1 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST : ♦ The Combats and Victories OF Jesus Christ " The books of the Word are all those which have an internal sense^ but those which have it not are not the Word. The books of the Word in the Old Testament are the five books of Moses^ Joshua^ Judges^ the two books of Samuel^ the two books of the Kings, the Psalms of David ; the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zepha- niah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: and in the New Testament, the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John ; and the Apocalypse^ — Arcana Ccelestia, n. 10325. See. The Lamb of God, the Lamb taking away the sin of the world (John i. 29). See. The Man (xix. 5). Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children (Luke xxiii. 27-31). BY JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON FELLOW OF THE ROVAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY » . < t JAMES SPEIRS I BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON 1395 y DEDICATION. Mrs. E by I t • • E » • 4 ' ' ■ J ! I £ My Dear Sister Harriet, ^ I ani thankful that you permit me ^ to dedicate to you the following pages as a testimony ^. of your steadfastness to the doctrines of Svvedenborg W the herald of the New Jerusalem. We owe our I knowledge of his Writings to our mother's brother George Blakiston Robinson, to whom they were living bread and wine, and who lost no opportunity of spreading their sacramental comfort. Our mother prayed that her children might be imbued with their heavenly truths. Our sister Mary died in the full reception of them; and in the performance of works of charity commanded by her faith. I make record of these things because they are exceptional. It is not common at present for families to maintain their ground in the New Religion. The world under many names, of which orthodoxy is a principal one in England, carries the young members away from divine things to secular, social, and traditional interests. You, Harriet, have stood your ground VI DEDICATION. during a long and difficult life. In the course of this you have learned in your own way that movement, save in justice and honesty, is not regeneration, and that outward change may be either for good or for evil ; and also that impatience need have no place beside our hopes. For the way, the truth, and the life, as now revealed to us, are only for those, whoever they be, that can endure to the end. I close with Swedenborg's words to Beyer : " May the Lord bless your thoughts." Your affectionate Brother, J, J, Garth Wilkinson, Miss Wilkinson. CONTENTS. DEDICATION, . I. THE LORD TAKING AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD, II. HOW WAS THE REDEEMER VICTORIOUS OVER THE SIN OF THE WORLD ? • > III. WHY THE LORD'S ADVENT BY BIRTH WAS NECESSARY, . * • • . IV. THE CONSUMMATION OF JUDAISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, V. THE LORD CAME TO CONFIRM THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS, VL WHAT WERE CHRIST's TEMPTATIONS ? . VII. THE TEMPTATIONS, VIII. SERIES IN TEMPTATION, IX. PERIODS IN TEMPTATION, X. SUMMARY, XI. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES, XII. VIA DOLOROSA, XIII. NOTES ON THE INTERNAL SENSE, XIV. THE MATERNAL HUMANITY, PACK V 9 lO II i6 21 26 29 36 39 Vlll CONTENTS. XV. THE MYSTERY OF THE MATERNAL HUMAN IN THE SEPULCHRE, XVL MYSTERIES OF ACCOMMODATION, XVII. THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE FIRST ADVENT, XVIII. REVEALED NATURAL RELIGION, XIX. ECCE HOMO, .... XX. RESULT OF THE LORD'S VICTORIES, . XXI. MILTON IN THEOLOGY, XXII. THE BABE OF BETHLEHEM, XXIIL THE SON OF GOD, XXIV. THE TWO HEREDITIES, XXV. MARY AND JOSEPH, . XXVI. CONJUGIUM, . XXVII. CONCERNING GOD THE SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, rAGE 44 49 54 57 6o 68 73 92 94 96 97 99 lOI THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST. I. The Lord taking away the Sin of the World, In the Authorized Version of the Bible, we read in John 1. 29,— "On the morrow he [John the Baptist] seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world." In the Revised Version the same reading occurs, but " beareth the sin " is given m the margin. The Greek is-'ISc. <3 ^yay^? rov Ocof a»pa,j^r7)v d/xa^r/av rou koV/xov.' See, The Lamb of God,' 1 he [One] enduring the sin of the world, alpu^v has many shades of meaning. It signifies taking away, taking (as a successfully beleaguered town is taken), conquering, over- powering, destroying, killing ; also enduring, bearing, carry- ing ; taking up in order to abolish. The text contains all these meanings. It is regarded as a scriptural statement of the dogma of the atonement, which imports that Jesus as our Saviour took to Himself the sins of mankind in order to avert the wrath of the Father and paid the penalty due to these sins by His death on the cross thereby releasing men from eternal damnation. To partake of this benefit, faith alone in Christ's work is neces- sary, and such faith has charity for its fruit. Much might be said on this head ; but the above is sufficient for the present purpose, which is limited to showing that the verse 2 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES in John does not countenance the atonement, but embraces for the New Church the true doctrine of the Lord's whole life on earth as stated in the letter of the Word from be- ginning to end. Like the Word, this particular text has in every syllable an internal or spiritual sense, and also, in this case, a plain literal sense corresponding. First, there is a command from John the Baptist, who like Elias represented the Word, and prepared the way of the Lord, to prepare us by new attention for new light. See. Open your mind's eyes ; both of them ; the greater eye of the will as well as the little eye of the present understanding ; to comprehend spiritual things here ; to see intelligently ; for the mysteries of faith can now, by permission, be seen. Lamb in the Word, to such open willing eyes, signifies innocence : Lamb of God, the divine innocence and sinless- ness in Jesus. God is the name for the divine truth which descended from the divine goodness, and was incarnate in the Saviour. The Lamb of God therefore is the Godhead now in operation, by means provided, taking upon Himself, and enduring and abolishing, the sin of the world. This is not only accumulated hereditary evil^ but it is new aggressive sin as it is borne by the Lamb of God. II. How was the Redeemer Victorious over the Sin of the World ? The belief in the Old Church is that He now takes it away in those sinners who have implicit faith in His mediation with a second divine person, the otherwise implacable Father. The translation in the two Versions, Authorized and Revised, is held to convey this creed. Natural reason, common-sense from universal experience, knows, sees that Christ did not take away the sin of the OF JESUS CHRIST. 3 world from the world. Its sin subsists in multitudes, mag- nitudes and portents which cause the phrase, "wicked world," to be in almost every mouth. Christ took away no sin there, small or great, individual or collective, past or present. All the sins that ever were committed are extant. Those that were repented of, and shunned afterwards, have been remitted, not abolished ; those not repented of, but repeated, are continually operant in perdition. What then did the Lamb of God effect ? We are com- manded to see Him taking away or abolishing the sin of the world ; a mighty and divine work, carried on from His birth to His death, sealed in His resurrection, and consummated in His ascension. It is plain that He has not performed this work in the lives of malefactors or in His own divinity. One only Person, intermediate between the two, remains, in whom it could be accomplished, who indeed was numbered with the transgressors, and was in the world beside them. He then who had no sin was effecting the abolition of the sin of the world in a human nature by which He was born as a natural man on earth. Be not afraid, gentle reader, to follow John the Baptist, who was sent to command you and me, as a first act, to see. Seeing is emptiness without remembering. Not holding steadily in mind Who in His birth Christ according to the whole Word was, you leave out of sight that He was born of a Jewish virgin as a mother, and of Jehovah as His Father. That mother made Him, to Satanic perception, a weak mortal, a Jew of the Jews ; while the Father, imperceptible to the hells, was full Godhead, almighty within Him. The apparent weakness coupled with innocency, tempted the devil as a wolf is tempted by a lamb. The babe veiling the omnipotence within, excited the hells, first to destroy, and failing that, to corrupt in boyhood and after life, the humanity in which Jesus was incarnate. With this humanity they co- habited in the Jewish character. The inherited frailty in Mary, herself espoused to Joseph, gave inclination to the sin THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES i of the world : sin in racial integrity. The devil and Satan, perditions of evil and falsity, had apparently the easiest prey within reach in the Son of Mary. And thus when the Lord by the divine truth, in whose hu?nan form He descended from heaven, rebuked the temptations and assaults of Pandemonium depth after depth, some specific frailty in His maternity was stricken, and some exact opposite quality of divine justice and judgment took its place. When He had trodden the winepress alone, and sin by sin the hells were under His feet, the Jewish maternity was extant only as a natural remainder, and after the death on the cross it was lost in the divine natural humanity which took its place bodily. Then, before the Angel of the Lord rolled back the stone from the door, that the women and the disciples might enter and see^ He had risen from the sepulchre, leaving nothing there but the folded linen clothes. No longer the Son of Mary : to the first Christian Church in the First Advent, the Son of God : to the second Church and the Second Advent, the one only God of heaven and earth. We now see by a plain revelation, which contains for our most exacting theoretical intellects a perfect doctrine of the Work of the Redeemer, that He jesisted and so vanquished the sin of the world just as He commands us to do, and that He did this in a human nature assumed for redemptive acts, and not in the registered characters and imperishable ** Book of Life "of sinners. He is therefore our divine example, commanding us to work out our own salvation as He worked out His Glorification, and also to know and ac- knowledge that it is entirely of His mercy when vve attain that blessed end. We also now see further that the Lamb did not lead Himself into temptation, did not summon and assault the hells, but endured, bore, and carried our iniquities, and meekly overcame them. And that now, in His own single divine Person, through the victory which He won, and the Godhead which He brought down, He keeps the Hells under Him in everlasting subjection. OF JESUS CHRIST. in. Why the Lord's Advent by Birth was necessary. It remains to be seen Why Jesus descended from heaven, and Why we must see Him abolishing the sin of the world, when yet the process had, in its divine dealing, no imme- diate reference to men on earth, but in the first instance to Himself alone, and to His Godhead. He could not put on a nature without being born in ( nature. Creation^ birth are its only gates. Had He ' been created like the first Adam, He would have been a finite man. To be the infinite man in nature, the infinite must be His Father, and, for nature's behoof, the womb of the espoused Virgin His mother. The fixity of nature is so accomplished ; and He becomes first a natural, and at last a divine natural man. What was the necessity commanding this ? There was divine necessity. The new divine nature in which ultimately He was in the world as the right arm of Jehovah, gave Him all power in heaven and on earth. He used this power to execute Judgment in the world of spirits, and re-establish order beneath the spiritual heaven, which in default of a divine nature under it lacked true foundation till then. " He came to save the spiritual.'*' This Judgment is spoken of in the Gospels. Preparation for it was perpetual from the preaching of John, and when Jesus sent forth His twelve disciples, and enjoined them to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, He said, Preach, saying, " The king- dom of heaven is at hand." The judgment signified by the nearness of heaven, or by heaven at hand, was a divine event springing immediately from the new nature which Jesus had put on. The nearing of the heavens causes judgment in the world of spirits. It is written in the Psalms, " Bow Thy 6 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES heavens, O Lord, and come down, touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Cast forth lightning and scatter them ; shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them." The mountains are aggravated self-love, loftiness of evil. The bowing down of the heavens by the Lord, His condescension, causes them to manifest their internal volcanoes of hatred against heaven, and to undergo judgment and perdition. Thus although Jesus abolished the sin of the world in His assumed human nature, and not in the evil nature of mankind. He descended from heaven solely in the interest of His creature, man, for his redemption and salvation. He took away the sin of the Avorld with no conditions as to any part of the sin ; thus again not in or for sinners, peni- tent, or otherwise; but for His own purpose of making human salvation by human efforts possible. IV. The Consummation of Judaism and its Consequences, When the Lord was born into the world, the hells were dominant in the world of spirits, the state first entered by all who die, being intermediate between heaven and hell : a realm of specific roads leading to each final abode according to men's specific characters. The natural world also was invaded and overpowered by the infernals. For the ways upward just mentioned were blocked and the ways downwards stood open. The destinies of the earth were conglutinated as it were in mid-air. The Jewish Dispensation, the last possible religious drama of mere mankind, was at its end. The form without the substance of a Church, it was in con- summation. The majority of men on earth, especially of ruling men, were sunk in evil, and for thousands of years had fed the hells with vast worsening populations of their OF JESUS CHRIST 7 children. So they overflowed into the purgatory or inter- mediate state, and there, unjudged and powerful, with nothing but an influx from heaven unseen and unheard to check them, and with no will to receive this influx, they built for themselves false Churches and States on exceeding high mountains, the images and likenesses of the decayed Judaism on earth. All continuance of events conspired to the pre- dominance of Atheism, and to the extinction of our race. The hells in their then high places, as dense darkness between heaven and earth, were an impenetrable firmament of re- spectable evil and falsity between God and man. They were closely related by sympathy of sin with the consum- mation on earth. No Man was remaining. Possession by devils was extant and imminent. See especially Mark, chapter i. Freewill, God's first constitutional gift in men, was in peril, and demoniac insanity crept over the dying .^on. A natural man, yea, a divine natural man, was needed in the breach. None but such a man could do the work. Deus interest^ dignus vindice nodus. So, to meet this necessity the Lord made Advent. By a divine life in a natural body such as we possess, formed in a natural mother, He made Himself Justice ; and by fulfilling and thus becoming the Word and making it flesh. He made Himself Judgment. In the Word He became Law. In and after these processes He effected a Last Judgment on the world of Spirits. Restoring order. He took up the patient good, the souls under the altar, forming new heavens of them where the evil had been enthroned ; and forming new prison- hells of the evil. The History coheres, its stupendous pieces hang together as salvation and divine necessity. Every thing and event in mere nature could have been otherwise. This could not have been otherwise. Such then is the reason why Jesus descended from heaven as the divine truth there, as Man, which the divine truth from goodness is ; and why, led by this same truth from His natural birth onwards, and continually obeying it, He made 8 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES His Humanity divine. In common language it was divine behaviour and divine conduct which did the deed. So He conquered the Hells, and Himself became Sole Humanity. This work written of in the Prophets and Psalms, and throughout the Word, was effected by the Son conceived of Jehovah and born as to the body of the Virgin Mary, while He lived the simplest of humble lives with His fishermen- disciples. Slender rays of the divine dawn on occasions awakened their kind understandings. Good and evil of which they knew not, from the highest heavens to the lowest abysses of the hells, were in conflict in His unprecedented natural parts. In His temptations He often seemed to Him- self to be among the damned. The Psalms assert this. And now first in a second Revelation through the prepared man, Emanuel Swedenborg, do we see the stupendous thing which was pleaded, and the Redemption of Mankind which was accomplished, in the Lord's Incarnation. The truth is now again and again obvious that Christ's victory over hell and death solely in man's interest, therefore of mere love and mercy, does none of man's proper duty for him. It capacitates him, however, if he chooses, to be a spiritual man, a moral man, a rational man, a social man, and a sound, healthy, natural man. This the Lord has effected by redeeming him from the overweight of the power of hell ; in other words, by making Freewill into a just balance, un- assailable. In persons not insane and irresponsible, man has his own liberty and rationality, and stands or falls by the use, or abuse, of these faculties. To reach the heaven for which he has been born, he must, as of himself shun evils as sins against God, and do the duties of his calling sincerely, justly, uprightly, and faithfully. These things fulfilled, he must attribute the good of the works solely to his Almighty Guide, and not to his own will and way. What the Lord has done for him, therefore, is, to leave him without the excuse of over-pressure from temptations. Hell can no longer 'possess him except by his own invitation of evil : sal- OF JESUS CHRIST 9 vation, God's final work, is for all of us ; His election, but f our selection. * V. The Lord came to confi^^m the Law and the Prophets, Swedenborg states this conclusion as follows : " Taking away sins amounts to the same thing as redeeming man and saving him. The Lord came into the world that man might be able to be saved. Apart from His advent no mortal could have been reformed and regenerated, that is, saved. This could be accomplished after the Lord had taken away all power from the devil, that is from hell, and had glorified His Human, that is, had united it to the Divine of His Father. Had these works not been done, no divine truth could by any possibility have been permanent with men, still less any divine good ; for the Devil, who had until then the greater power, would have plucked these things out of his heart. From these considerations it is evident that the Lord has not taken sins away by the passion of the cross ; but that He takes them away, that is, removes them, with those who believe on Him by living according to His pre- cepts. This also the Lord teaches in Matthew^ " Think ?tot thai I am come to destroy the law or the Prophets. . . . Whosoever shall have destroyed the least of these command- mentSy and taught men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of the heavens ; but whosoever shall do and teach the?n shall be called great in the kingdom of the heavens " (v. 1 7, 1 9). From reason alone, provided it have some enlightenment, everyone is able to see, that sins cannot be taken away from man except by actual penitence, consisting in this, that the man sees his sins, and implores the Lord's help, and ceases to commit them. Seeing, believing, and teaching anything else than this comes not from the Word, nor from lO THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES sound reason, but from blind desire and hieadstrong will, properties of man's selfhood, by which the mind's discerning faculty is infatuated " (The Doctrine of the New Jeru- salem CONCERNING THE LORD, n. 1 7). VI. What were Christ 's Temptations ? In the gospel-coherence they were temptations to " the sin of the world." Have we knowledge from the Word on this subject? The ground which made such things possible was the possession from his virgin mother, Mary, of a Jewish Nature. Jewish inclinations were qualities in that human which could be tempted ; which could be subject to the trials to which the " chosen people " had succumbed : in short, to the sin of the world. Out of the chosen people the Virgin was the chosen Mother. The ages of the life and history of the children of Israel are the broad canvas depicting the character of the inheritance in the human nature assumed by the Lord. The Virgin, in whom that nature is not made apparent, completes and consummates it as a natural plane for divine use. One dominant lust stands out in the race itself : one love of dominion : gendering the Jewish demand for a Messiah who should govern the world, constitute the Jews supreme in it, and under them enslave the Gentiles. Holy Scripture does not leave us without express instruc- tion respecting the temptations of Jesus, which are universal likenesses, in the whole, of our particular temptations. As is the way in the creative Word, the lineaments are drawn in narrative form, and are an epitome of what the Lord underwent for us. They are divinely dramatic. We have then to sit in the stillness of faith, to listen to the letter as it was spoken and is written, and to pray to have our eyes OF JESUS CHRIST. II opened to have a beginning of understanding the Represen- tation. Unlike human dramas it is divinely serious. As we read in Matthew, " Jesus, when He was baptized by John, went up straightway from the water : and behold the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon Him ; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased" (iii. i6, 17). VII. The Temptations. The First Tejnpiation. — After the annunciation of the *' beloved Son " from the heavens, the divine Narrator pro- ceeds : "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit to the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And having fasted forty days and forty nights, at last he pined for food. And coming to Him, the tempter said. If Thou be the Son of the God, say that these stones become breads. But He answered and said, It has been written, Man shall not live by bread zXouq, but by all the Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God " (iv. 1-4). Who would expect this next scene in the divine drama } —Jesus led up of " the spirit," not here named of God, to the wilderness, to be tempted of the devil ? The humanity has been exposed to the opened heavens, and to the visible descent of the dove, which itself is a dynamic " representative of purification and regeneration by divine truth." As a conse- quence, straitness and barrenness afflict the Saviour. Con- sideration from the divine explores the human as to merit, and heaps coals of fire upon its head. This must be where truth from heaven is proclaimed to a human nature selected for such an end in God Man. Affliction in ordinary life is^ the parent of great issues. In religious life, as Bacon says, " prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, but 12 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES adversity is the blessing of the New." Trial comes when- ever in the regenerating man his life is confronted with the voice of conscience audible from the Word. It came to pass of supreme necessity in the process of the Lord's Glorification. He was not rebuked by light or conscience, but visited by divine love which He could not then appro- priate to His human. He was led up to this state in which He fasted forty days and forty nights. In the misery, when the humanity was the wilderness, non-reception there made void the nourishment of the Father's words, the bread and sacrament, nay, in the Lord's case the Divine right, of the soul. We know from experience that in anxieties and fears even natural, the mind can take in nothing for invigoration and support ; nothing interests it ; but it resorts perforce to the waste howling wilderness around. What must the case have been when the Spirit of God thus proclaimed as the Father, through the heavenly dove, explored the natural mind of the Son, the Redeemer. We see at least that the divine approval led up at once to the dire provings carried out in the Temptations. We see the furnace in which the gold was placed. On this subject the Rev. William Bruce observes as fol- lows : — " Though temptation does not come from the Spirit of God, it comes of receiving it. The Spirit does not tempt, but it leads into that state in which temptation is experienced. Temptation is an inward spiritual conflict between good and evil, truth and falsity. There can therefore be no mental conflict except in minds in which these opposites are present and active. The natural or unconverted man, who has no spiritual good and truth, and has no concern about eternal life, knows nothing of spiritual temptation ; there is nothing in him to tempt. He follows unresistingly the impulse of his natural affections, and pursues his temporal aims undisturbed by eternal considerations. It is when the Spirit of the Lord descends upon him, and enters into his heart, that his false peace is first disturbed" {Commentary OF JESUS CHRIST, ,3 on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, pp. 60, 61. London 1867). "The tempter came and said unto Him, If Thou be Son of the God, command that these stones become breads:' If Thou be ! The temptation was, to doubt ; to ignore the divine manifesto which had consecrated Him, and to super- sede faith born of divine filial love, by proving that He was Son of the God. The appeal was to the Son of Mary, and by the plain text, not to the Son of God, who was not recognized as such. Jesus answers from the Word ; and thus from His own Divinity. "It has been written,' Man shall not live by bread alone, but by all the Word that pro ceedeth out of the mouth of God." Bread alone is truth without use, and without fruit of good ; insincere truth not applied to good, knowledge for its own sake, disconnected from Life, and uncorrected. All the Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, is the Word itself, fulfilled and glorified in Jesus, Who made it into flesh ; and needful for the regeneration of the natural mind, and its salvation. The devil's plural, breads from stones, perverts them into falsities The belief in the voice of God testifying to His beloved Son, that is, again to say, faith in all the Word, as divine natural truth and good, proveable only by living according to it, is a part of our lesson to-day and forever as issuing from the Lord's victory over the devil's first attempt or tempta- tion. See, The Man ; He Who lives by all the Word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. It is evidently the Lord. We revert to this subject later on. The Secofid Temptation.—ThQn the devil taketh Him to the holy city ; and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple and saith unto Him, If Thou be Son of the God, cast thyself down, for it has been written. He shall give His angels charge concerning thee ; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Against this it has been written. Thou shalt not try the Lord, the God of thee " (iv. 5, 7). 14 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES Jesus taken by the devil to the holy city, is temptation to false doctrine of religious faith. The devil is now religiosum, a religiosity. The pinnacle or wing of the temple on which he sets Jesus is external dogma about salvation. It is to be effected by another than Himself, not by His own right hand and His holy arm. The highest of high places represents external holiness without internal: Jewish and all other sanctity apart from reformation and regeneration ; canonized ecclesiasticism and the sacrificial blood of the Saviour glorified. Doubt is again commended by the devil to the Son of Mary. He is to prove His son- ship to God by putting heaven through diabolic scientist ordeal. The foot of the Saviour is the divine natural humanity. The stone with which, haply, it would collide if the devil had his way, is the salvation of the maternal humanity, with Father Joseph of the genealogy also, as Himself. The angels of God, divine truths, are simply Deity from Whom heaven is heaven, and Who now speaks. Jesus saith unto Him, Against this it is written. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. The Son of God here naming Himself Lord and God, confounds the attempted possession of the Son of Mary. The Third Temptation.—'' Against this, that is, in opposi- tion to the Word ending the second Attempt, the devil taketh Him to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them : and says unto Him, All these things will I give Thee, if fall- ing down Thou wilt worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him. Get thee gone, Satan ; for it has been written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth Him, and See, angels came and ministered unto Him." The mountain exceeding high— nimis excehus — is the Jewish humanity as a summit, thus representing Roman and all other human nature on earth : the vast field of temptation still offered in the Son of Mary. It is the Messiahship OF JESUS CHRIST. 15 especially as interpreted by the Jews out of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms. " Evil, be thou my good" is now the policy. The view from this mountain of remorseless selfish- ness, from this universal captivity to Babylon, native to the infernals as an imagination of their own, is in manifestation to Jesus as King of the Jews, and shown by the tempter. Observe that Satan took Jesus to the mountain, but it is not written that He ascended it. It embraces in Satanic panorama the evil nations and false peoples of the world • the glory of their proud love of rule, and the gentle diplomacy of their enormities. Spiritually the mountain supereminent comprehends the hells, in which the devil invites the Son of Mary to be his subject, and to rule under his dictation ; promising that he will give Him all these things if He will fall down and worship him. This subjection also, invading the earth, would realize Jewish ambition, and carry to the end the nature deeply hidden in the Son of Mary. Then saith Jesus unto him. Get thee gone, Satan ; for it has been written, " Thou shalt worship the Lord the God of thee, and Him only shalt thou serve." After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in which Jesus fed "about five thousand men" on a mountain where He sat with His disciples, " those who had seen the miracle that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the world. When Jesus, therefore, perceived that they would come and take Him by force, to make Him a King, He departed again into a mountain Himself alone " (John vi. 14, 15), The whole chapter deals with the nourishment of man by the Lord as Himself living bread, flesh and blood, to be eaten and drank; "for My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed." Those who had seen and participated in the miracle of His bounty, manifested the Jewish nature in desiring, as He perceived, to make Him a King. He, the life of the world, was to wear an elective crown. Notice that the miracle took place on a mountain. This i6 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST 17 , I height signified His Divine Goodness and Love for the human race. And after His perception of the aim of those who would make Him a King, " He again departed into a mountain, Himself, alone." A more elevated state was assumed in which no one was present with Him. Im- mediately after this He walked on the sea in tempest These two mountains are states opposite to the exceeding high mountain to which the devil led Him ; and they mean the kingdom of the heavens, in contrast to the mountain of Satanic vision, and to the preferred dominion of the hells. It is not the purpose of my brief Notes to dwell in detail on the internal sense of these Revelations; but rather to point attention to some doctrines of the New Church which are drawn directly from the Divine system shining through the literal sense. For the spiritual sense we refer the reader to the Writings of Swedenborg, the Lord's Commissioner; and let those who as yet cannot read him, consult the works of the Rev. John Clowes, and the Rev. William Bruce, who have prepared the way for a large and connected view of the Four Gospels. The narratives of James Spilling are also Primers of the Evangels ; and introduce us into paradises of thought that lead gently up towards the heights of the Word. VIIL Series in Temptation, The Word in the letter is a series, just as created nature and the stellar universe are in series; and as humanity itself is. The attempts of evil and falsity are in a series. Nothing escapes the inexorable domain of consequences. The Lord's temptations are evidently under this divine order which holds in connexion all things in the heavens and the hells. In this series the faculties of the infirm humanity were assaulted from the inmost to the outmost, through the ruling loves which they contained. The wiles were directed with infernal skill to the frail nature inherited from the Virgin, blessed among women. She, by the beauty of the Lord, her Father, seems to stand without recorded sin as the Eve of pro- phecy : as the second Eve, fulfilling the Word, that the seed of the first should bruise the serpent's head. Never- theless she contained in very nature the latent summum malum of all the surviving children of the first Adam. In attempted pursuance of the series inevitable in all Divine works, permissions and contingencies, we observe that when the Lord recovers from the contrast between the loving assurance of God, His Father, and the wilderness of naturalism to which He was led up by the Spirit, His pin- ing for food testifies to a new longing for instruction in the way in which He should go. His faculties for expected truth are hungry. The tempter now came, and would be His schoolmaster, if Jesus will be his pupil. Accordingly he proffers doubt as to the relationship of Jesus to God, and suggests experiment, as a scientific confirmation, or fair dis- proof, of His presumed position. So natural truth will be assured, and the devil's " higher criticism " will be satisfied. The voice from above had said, "This is my beloved Son." Let this be tested by the tempter's scriptural novum orgation. Let these stones become breads: the devil commanding Jesus to command that it be so. Thus the order of things need not be shocked, and the natural mind will be self-contained, and be inviolate. The miracle, if it occurs, will become the pro- perty of the devil, who indeed worked miracles in Egypt ; and if the miracle does not occur, the presumptuous Sonship will be disposed of. And then other similar voices from heaven, nay, all such, will be discredited. It is a plausible process invading all sects and churches to-day, and the existence of God, and the Divinity of the Word, are denied B i8 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES and dissipated in it. The first temptation then is that natural truth, in itself in good hands a good bread, deprived of its unity, shall collide with spiritual truth, judge, condemn, and execute it. The habit of making worship of our own hereditary limits into a tribunal sentencing the Word to auto defe, is epidemic among the learned. It has its series. It is sensualism in science preparing for sensualism in life ; evolving the stones of the heart of your wishes into the loaves of your practices. It has nothing above it ; no divinity, no law, no pressure. To the wilful and the thoughtless it appears a small thing, harmless to them, and it allows the narcotic prayer, peace in our time, O Lord, to be uttered. It is the beginning of an atheism and anarchy in which no master and no god are in- fernal order and liberty. The first beginning is protoplasm, and the first end is respectability. The end afterwards is confusion, chaos and limbo. Beware then of conceding to yourself that habitual negative principles are " negligeable quantities." Know on the contrary that nothing higher than the ghost of temporary self-interest, can exist under these presumptions. Cannibalism can be the end of godless respectability when modern thought has fasted forty days and forty nights. Do not plead your ancestral heredity, as Mr. Bradlaugh did, for infidel states of mind. T he soil in wVnrh ynn grew can be rejected as your pauperisnk You can have a spiritual Father, and be His Son, and inherit the riches of His love and mercy. But first accept His whole Word, live from it, and see what comes of it. This experi- mental method is the fair way of proving all things. Under the category of "revelation limited" there are many who take shares in the gospels ; who indeed sub- scribe to them, but are responsible only for what they like. We have first the Gospel of Paul of Tarsus as the Gospel of Christ, written before the New Testament itself, and of which he declares,— " Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that OF JESUS CHRIST. j^ which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed " (Galatians i. 8). This is not a gospel of the Incarnation, but mere tidings of Paul's conversion ; and although he had opportunity to gather up the story of the external life of Jesus Christ, he avoided the disciples now become Apostles, and is the first justification of non-conformity m the unlettered days of the earliest Christian congrega- tions. On this subject see Saul of Tarsus, or Paul AND SWEDENBORG, BY A LaYMAN, 8vO, 1877. The author is Ralph Nicholson Wornum, well known for his contributions to the History of Painting ; and who will be known as the bearer of a message of conscience to the late posterity of the New Church. The book is an earnest survey of Paul's pretensions, and a keen dissection of his influence on Christianity. After the controversies of this stormy age, the voice of Swedenborg from the spiritual world will in time be heard and considered, as It is reported in full in this fearless documentary volume which every New Church student should hasten to possess. Paul had the excuse of not having the Gospels before him when he wrote his Epistles. He could not pick and choose from their contexts. But now that these are extant, we have preferential versions of them. We have the gospel according to Emeritus Professor Newman ; according to the Rev. Stopford Brooke ; according to Renan ; according to Tolstoi ; and very many others. In the Christian Church now consummated, every branch of it contracts out of many literal liabilities of faith or truth. The union of such Chris- tendom is impossible, because there is nothing left to gather and unite. Religious truth and good are gone from the Chief Priests and the Rulers. The New Church however has five loaves and two fishes. And those who will obey the Lord's Commandment, and sit down on the grass with His blessing, will receive the food of a New Dispensation, and a real Christendom can come. 20 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES The Gospels which we here consult throughout are those of Matthew, Mark. Luke, and John. Inasmuch as these pourtray the temptations of Chr.st. they are «""«" b^ Christ Himself, for none but God-man could know to write them He used the memories of His disciples, the " anec- dotal" memories, if you like, for he uses everybody and everything, as His divine purpose moves. The Four Evange- lists however, without knowing it, were H.s scnbes. The conUuence is, that the Gospels, as the New Word are accommodate to man everywhere ; that .s, in all the stages of his being ; that every iota is divinely natural for men on earth, and divinely spiritual for their angels^ That heaven has the soul of the Word, and the true Church, whether few or many, has the body of it And thus the two realms of God in the faithful are united as one soul to one body. A common ground between heaven and earth is now given, by the revelation of the spiritual sense to the natural Utterly accepting this, it comes home more and more every day by wonders of thought and love, making all tilings new wherever we discard the limits of our own invention and conceit. On the main subject of these pages I have confined tny basis to Matthew's narrative of the Temptations, Attempts, Trials Each Gospel sunds by itself in its own specific series The Four Gospels themselves are also in series ; separate Revelations for separate ends. The diversities and divergences in them, beginning with the different genealogies of Jesus Christ, want no harmonizing but the acceptance of their spiritual sense. The use and good of them is their soul- "The divine truth is various; the divme goodness is one " In this use they are one, as the three heavens, and the Church, which is their representative here, are one. OF JESUS CHRIST, 21 IX. Periods in Temptation. * The first temptation embraces the early life of Jesus, in which His Sonship was gradually revealed to Him, and which, after His baptism, was consummated in the opening of the heavens, the descent of the Spirit of God as the dove, and the voice of His adoption. His childhood, as Sweden- borg was instructed to show, was an epoch of direful tempta- tions, through which His divine and human-divine inno- cence rebuked the deepest hells, and overthrew their power in His humanity. Ordinary childhood to my own knowledge has grievous and horrible trials of the same kind, which have survivals of stored uses in later life. The general child-life in the world has also some magisterial power or influence over its mature and senile sinners. The child- hood of Christ had divine power over earth and hell, and over the heavens. Isaiah writes, — " Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, . . . and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Father of Eter- nity, the Prince of Peace " (ix. 6). If, however, the early life of Jesus was signalized by the First Temptation and the First Victory, the result was continu- ous from the Father, and was a way, truth, and life, a wis- dom of divine innocence to the end on the Cross. One victory flowed into another, as the Glorification was accom- plished. The Prince of Peace at the end of the divine titles, signifies this unity at last ; it applies to the child and the Son as well as to the Father of Eternity. In the second attempt the devil accepts Judaism, admits or grants Jehovah, quotes His Word, and counsels the fulfilment of prophecy while himself perverting the pro- phecy. Defeated as to divine natural science, confirma- tion in which the Lord has now received, the devil com- 22 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES mends faith in the letter of the Word, but again for experi- ment and trial about the truth of the Sonship of Jesus from the God. The pinnacle of the Temple is the " Laboratory " where he would break the humanity from the Divinity. Salvation by faith alone, which leaves the devil as owner of works, is the vivisection contemplated. It patronizes every perilous leap of suicidal evil suggested by demons. By profanation it enacts safety in sin, not salvation from it. In the first trial the attempt was, to overthrow the whole natural mind of Jesus as a vehicle for His Glorification, by making Him incapable of receiving immediate instruction, revelation, light, from the voice of God. And by making the Opening of the heavens incredible to Him. In the second attempt, in which the devil would recover himself against the defeat of the first, the spiritual mind in the Church is assaulted, and in this again God is not to be trusted, but tried. So the spirit will be killed, and the letter, capable of turning every way, will survive. If the first trial belongs to the Lord's childhood and youth, when He was subject to Joseph and Mary, and when He said to them, Wot ye not that I was about My Father^s business, the second trial relates more especially to His Ministry, when He went inside the temple and taught in the synagogue ; and also when " He went into the house of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the Temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves. . . . And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them." In this attempt the devil has fallen from the high ground of the first engagement, from the heaven which lay about the Lord in His infancy, to the sphere of doubt and dispu- tation and tradition represented in the Jewish Church by the Scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and to their literal demand for miracles, and disbelief in them without constant repetition. It recalls the bearing of the Jews after OF JESUS CHRIST «3 the miracles which accompanied them from the Red Sea, by Sinai, through the wilderness, to Canaan. Selling doves coming after the money-changers signifies making spiritual purification into ecclesiastical merchandize. Indulgences. —Overthrowing the seats of the traders signifies the eradica- tion of this Jewish tendency in the early Christian Church. As a commentary for to-day, this second attempt, foiled in Jesus, affects both the Church and the world. In the Church it breeds truth without good, faith without life, formalism without understanding, dogma averse to doctrine. Out of the Church, with the learned and the scientific, it founds disbelief on the ground of the falsities of orthodoxy : embraces atheism as an escape from tripersonal polytheism; and from the mythology of the atonement, and the general abuse of reason which it leaves behind it. Scientific light is invoked in the field of darkness, on the ground of the total want of doctrinal illumination issuing from the Churches. Lack of religious interest, though not of critical and controversial learning, becomes universal. Moreover, the mind of the Churches invites attack. They are, unless politically, helpless and unresisting ; and admit the vagaries of resolute materialism as not incompatible with " holy scripture." This latter state in both Catholicism and Pro- testantism is a policy of ecclesiastical defeat. Noncon- formity crowns it in the popular Book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World : where evolution and its consequences are freely accepted, and obeisance is made to the blind gropings of naturalism. This to-day is not a small thing. It marks for the whole ecclesiastical mind the consummation of the age, and the end of the Church. A further descent is made in the third Attempt. The three events are strong chains round the devil himself, and this is signified in the letter by the Greek word ttoXiv, signifying here not again^ but against. It means the tug of diabolic War. So after the fulmen^ Thou shalt not try the 4: 24 TffE COMBATS AND VICTORIES Lord thy God, Satan acts as stricken. Against this he flies disconcerted, and leaves Revelation and Religion alone, confessing to his o^r. froprium or amour profrc To hs he confidentially introduces Jesus. The humanity can st.U be tried in the Jewish /r^/n«»^ which breathes towards a kingdom. The Messiahship of worldly amb.t.on is the rock on which the vessel of Judaism threatens to founder The Lord is now coming into His kingdom, and the dev^l proffers Him as a last resource the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them ; and shows them to Him. It is materia tL/tation : question of life and death^ What ^ Tiberius say ? What do the High Priests and the Rulers sav to the King of the Jews? Would they not accept Christ if He overthrew Pontius Pilate and thenTU^enus? It seems as if in the last historical act the Priests and Rulers trembled in a balance, and seeing in their rooted materia isn, what Jesus as a wonder-worker had ""deniably done, they superstitiously considered whether terms could be made with some divinity-whether Moloch or Jehovah-which dwelt within this unknowable Man who confronted them. They repeated even when Jesus was on the Cross the doubting Ifs of the devil's first attempts, which, to their minds, could truly be called Temptations. "If Thou be the Son of God, save Thyself." They felt that if they were in His agony, and had the power which He had shown and still professed to have, they would exert it to " save them- selves" But the kingdom of Jesus was not of this world, and saving Himself was not of the world. This third is the lowest and most external of the attempts. It is Satan dis- puting about the body of Christ, and mistaking his own body for it. , i- • c«f^,> Note that the devil, when Jesus dismisses him, is Satan. The devil is the impersonated evil of the hells ; Satan is the falsity. Both titles cohere in the devil. Satan is also besides a more superficial Hell, a father of lies for himself His promise of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of OF JESUS CHRIST, as them to Jesus on diabolic terms is a lie ; and therefore Satan is named. The Lord in His good time here on earth will have the kingdom, the power, and the glory. In the Lord all temptations were overcome, and His maternal heredity or infirm humanity, in which He talked with the Father as a separate person, was at length put off and dissipated. In man the process is now twofold. Those to-day who receive the new Religion in His Second Advent, are living in the dawn and promise of a New Church with blessing and permanence assured to it. The descent of the New Jerusalem commences. The Second Coming of Christ in His sole Divinity, by removing the shroud of darkness wound round us by the hells, has given new faculties of will and intellect to all the earth. This newness of freedom, which is nothing other than a worldful of fresh free-will, has before it a realm of unlimited good for the good, and of evil for the evil. There never has been such common liberty. The New Jerusalem in man is now in the third temptation. Naked self-love bestrides its narrow world like a Colossus. All nations are struggling for rule. Our fair sister France, by very phrase, for glory : Britain, for com- placency and business : and all, for gain : each leading power craves universal dominion for its own quality. This too high mountain of avowed selfishness, built into a warring dynasty of evil giants as a new heathenism, is ascended by imperial, regal, and republican lusts to different altitudes; and more and more as the Word of God is denied, falls down and worships that special devil and Satan who promises to give all these things proportionally to his lowest devotees. Instead of the ten commandments of the Old Jerusalem, and the two summary ones of the New, on which hang all the law and the prophets, mankind is a thousand million voting machine enacting its wills by chosen chiefs from the moun- tains of its egotism. Hatred is the common spirit of the nations ; cunning, the wisdom ; cowardice, the friendship ; and progress in these things the life and onlook. ^ s6 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES The tiny force which confronts this movement towards doom is the New Jerusalem. It is itself as a little child born in the manger where the knightly horses of instruction feed. It has Sinai and Zion with it ; and the Mountain of the Transfiguration ; that high mountain apart into which Jesus brought the chosen disciples up. And now again as at first. " See, A bright cloud overshadowed them, and see, A Voice out of the cloud, which said. This is My beloved Son, Hear ye Him " (Matthew xxiii. 2-5). And it has, in its keeping, doctrine from the Word, which alone will be suffi- cient, in unbroken procession, from our reception of the divine natural humanity of the Lord, to restore the balance of order, and to seat love with wisdom upon their final thrones in His new and everlasting ^Eon. X. Summary, These three temptations exemplary in the Lord, com- prehend all life for us men. Want of trust in the Word of God is the first weak spot which the devil finds, and he summons his learned critics to see to it. Faith in truth is to be suspended until external crucial science confirms k. This involves endless repetitions. Let fellows of Royal Societies do all that Christ did, and themselves rise from the sealed tomb in due laboratory, millions of times if there are millions of doubters. Nothing shall be authoritatively good or bad until after such ordeal, which shall itself have no end. So the divinity of the Word is mocked out of time and space. This was attempted in the Saviour, and the tempter was foiled. In the second state, the devil appropriates the Word, and invites Jesus to profane it, and again to prove His Sonship by miracle. Instead of this the Lord proclaims His Godhead. Priesthood on the evil side was represented OF JESUS CHRIST 27 by the devil ; but kingship, the dominion of evil through falsity, by Satan, now seen as the tempter. The devil is imprisoned ; the resources of hell become internal and limited to itself. God and heaven have disappeared, and lust and atheism are counselled ; kingdom and glory ; and worship of the god of Satanic reason is proposed as the end of the drama. The Saviour disperses these infernal principalities and powers for Himself. Thus the series stands out more distinctly. The Saviour gains in the trials— i. Natural Revealed Religion, the celestial state, the innate Word. 2. Spiritual Revealed Religion, the Spiritual State, the written Word. 3. The divine natural humanity ; all power in heaven and on earth. The third is the only attempt properly to be translated as temptation. The first and second are combats against hell from the natural power of the Word ; the first from the Adamic Word, the second from the Mosaic. In the third the devil has something of his own to offer ; he deploys the vision of universal rule ; and promises the gift of all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. This is a bribe to the infirm humanity ; and the corrupter believes that every man has his price. He also knows that the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them are presently his ; as they must be in the consummation of the age when the Church has come to an end. He would make a present of them to Jesus. In the attempt, the signification of the event is reversed. Satan has gone ; and the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them signify not so much the first Christian Church as the New Jerusalem, of which it is written, " The nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it, and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory and honour into it " (Apoc. xxi. 24). Looking onwards to the Apocalypse^ expressly named by John as "the Revelation of Jesus Christ," it is written that one of the seven angels carried John away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed him that great city the Holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven 28 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST. 29 from God. This is a manifestation of the Bride, the wife of the Lamb, the New Religion now in advent. What an object lesson on mountains^ in their two modes of divine and infernal, are these various passages in which they are mentioned, to the new human intelligence ! The reader will do well to remember that what, in the letter of the Word, seem merely questions and answers, are examinations of the Logos on which life depends. He who triumphs slays the adversary. The tef?ipter, the devil, and Satan, three names with three meanings, were each of them dead after the three sentences against them. How were they dead? They were dead spiritually, in the second death. They were cast into hell. Were they not then always in hell ? No, good reader. Hitherto, at the end of every Church, owing to the strong invitation of mankind to the tempter, the devil, and Satan, they have come forth, and filled the world of spirits, and there built the " former heavens and former earths which passed away." See the Apocalypse, and the Apocalypse Revealed by commissioned Emanuel Sweden- borg. When the Lord came in His own Person, and subdued the hells. His immediate presence in His Glorifica- tion inflicted the second death on all those evil spirits who had not undergone it before, and re-affirmed it for those old denizens of the abyss who had come out, tempted by the nations and peoples. The latter, who seemed to be on mountains of false heavens before His advent, were recom- mitted to the ancient doom. And now the Lord in His plenary power in the natural sphere which includes the hells, allows no exit from them excepting to individual men and women who lead hellish lives here. Such are permitted to run their course, which they could not do unless their days were fed by false and evil spirits. Bear in mind that seclu- sion in hell is life to confirmed sinners : if anything of heaven comes near them, their dead freedom cannot breathe, and they cast themselves into the pit in order to escape suffoca- tion, and to be " themselves again'' Before the Incarnation and Christ's natural divinity infer- nal legions were the tempters and aggressors ; after it, evil men and women in the world drew single devils and Satans towards them by culture of specific evil and falsity : but no combined assault against human nature was possible any longer. The mortal combat of the devil and Satan with the Saviour has penetrated into the Mythologies; and -also in them illustrates the Dynamics of the Word. In the Norse Pantheon, question and answer respecting the divinities is carried on between Odin and the Giant Vafthrudner, and the Giant, after catechizing the God, is unable to answer Odin's own personal question about his Word, and therefore yields up his life. In the corresponding lore of the Greeks the riddle of the Sphinx has a similar result. When CEdipus freed Thebes by solving the riddle, the Sphinx threw herself down from her rock, and was killed. Spiritual and not natural life and death, heaven, and hell, are here signified by these wars of lower against higher powers. Logos makes and unmakes. XL Supplementary Notes. The evils and falsities exterminated for Himself by the Saviour are in rule to-day, and, if adequately examined in the light of the Word of both Testaments, are at the bottom of the world's religious, moral, social, political, national and international life ; they preside in its dogmas and rituals, and so-called charities ; in its scientism, art and learning ; in its poetry and literature ; and self-love as a devouring lion roars in its parliaments. So little, we again repeat, have the Lord's victories abolished or taken away the sin of the world anywhere else than in His own maternal humanity, which itself at last was bound to disappear. There, however, "fmr- 30 THE COMBATS AND VIC TO J^ IE S through agonies or combats, Be gradually made Himself Justice^ and then, of divine right, through His Word made flesh in Him, He became the Judge of the world. Consider this latter proposition for a moment. Why have we so little right or might to judge others ? Because we are so far from being right ourselves. Why does no ruler or parliament feel able to preach with authority more than journalistic, to the governments of other nations, in condem- nation of the wrongs inflicted upon their subjects or depend- encies? Why is world-arbitration on a severe model impossible? It is because each nationality is itself bent and bowed with injustice, and, Hke Nero, cannot enter these sacred Eleusinian mysteries of ideal Justice, haunted as it is by its own matricides. Contrast this with Christ, on the mother's side a timely Jew, making Himself Justice, and then exercising its judicial rights. Common-sense is a furnace for trying gold, all through these Gospel Revelations, which criticize our virtues and hospitallings from their Great White Throne. When were the Lord's Victories achieved 1 On this subject Swedenborg writes :— By the [three] temptations all those which He afterwards underwent are signified. He has not revealed more concerning the latter to His disciples. For it is said in Isaiah,—" He was oppressed, yet He humbled Himself and opened not His mouth ; as a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb ; yea, He opened not His mouth " (liii. 7 ; Doctrine of the Lord^ n. 13). If the treatise of Swedenborg here quoted be carefully studied, the evidence from the Old Testament to the New, and the lawful exactitude of prophecies to realized events, will be seen by the candid reader to be overwhelming. " Moses," the Lord says, " wrote of me." The Lord's whole life is delineated in this His Doctrine for the New Jerusalem, the Jewish veil of the contrary Messiahship being dissolved in its glory. OF JESUS CHRIST 31 The phrase, " It has been written," often occurs in the Gospels. It means, for faith, acceptance, and an eternal settlement. Also, that in the sense of divine power or Word, nothing else " has been written " in the created world. " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass away." On the Cross the echoes of the devil and Satan, in their own words from the temptations, are still heard around Him, and the Jewish Church is now their mouthpiece. For the Lord is the Word made flesh, and His sufferings represent the violence done to the Word by that Church, in which the Word, the Logos, the divine truth, was crucified, died, and was buried. Thus when Jesus was on the Cross, " they that passed by reviled Him, wagging their heads and saying, Thou that destroyest the Temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross. Likewise also the chief priests . . . said, If He be the King of the Jews, let Him now come down from the Cross, and we will believe Him." They spoke from the pinnacle of their temple, and the devil was with their fallen Church. One more trial still remained : the Jewish Word fulfilled by Jesus " cried with a loud voice. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? " (Psalm xx. i). " Jesus then, wher^ He had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the spirit."^ This was the apotheosis of the Son of man, who could be tried in His Jewish maternity through the appearances of the letter which killeth. God is nighest in our direst need ; in Jesus nigh to identity. Of this death the Lord declared : " Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me ; but I lay it down of myself : I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. That command- ment have I received of my Father" (John x. 17, 18). \ 32 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES XII. Via Dolorosa, The sufferings of Jesus Christ are a prominent theme in all the Churches. In the Romish Church they are dramatized, and pictured and sculptured, as the leading events of His divine life. The Crucifixion in evident im- portance furnishes the crowning dogma of the old Christian Religion. Its physical horrors are dwelt upon with an appetite which makes them apparently into the main articles of faith for salvation. The Cross has become our symbol and life of Christ. As the mortal End, it has with it the human-divine career of the Saviour ; but it cannot properly usurp the place of the whole redemptive life and action which was consummated and finished in Him. What is most important in a divine series of powers and virtues, it is impossible to say : rather, all are infinitely necessary ; and therefore the selection of the cross for single regard is not doctrinal but dogmatic. Moreover, the Cross and Passion were not the End, as the death was not ; the Resurrection, Glorification, and Ascension were in superseding series the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, the God of the Natural man, the Divine Humanity. It is written in Luke : "Then there followed Him a great company of people; and of women, which also bewailed and lamented Him. But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, see, Days are coming, in the which they shall say. Blessed, the barren ; and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry ? " (xxiii. 57-31). This passage instructs us how to love the crucified OF JESUS CHRIST 33 Lord " with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength " (Mark xii. 30). The way is, by exploring the evils which crucify Him in ourselves, and which kill love, and charity and good affections, and make us sentimental, unfeeling, and external. After this self-examination we can truly weep for ourselves as He en- joins, and practise repentance. Spiritually He wept for what the daughters of Jerusalem have to weep ; for what He bore and endured, — for the Sin of the World. The cumulative degeneration of hereditary mankind, and the consequences of it, are what He foretold in this exhortation. The affections for evil now signified by the Daughters of Jerusalem, should be explored and corrected ; for His agonies are not personal to us, but are veiled in the words, " Ought not Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into His glory" (Luke xxiv. 26). In this exhortation, the Lord removed from us an impos- sible task, and commended to us an actual duty. No honest human being can weep over the sufferings of Jesus, which extended from the manger to the cross. They are straitly beyond us. We cannot indeed but be affected by the glorious pathos of the New Testament, tragic, unwailing, unemotional. But the sufferings of devotees in all ages, undergone for the set purpose of weeping for the Saviour, concentrated the attention of the self-righteous on their own sufferings, and made them meritorious and personal. The sufferings of martyrs had a better purpose, if they were not self-inflicted. Christianity, however, from the first was not an asceticism, but a blessed way to the conservation of all good things. He who was falsely called gluttonous and a winebibber, came to assume and redeem the sensual, not to destroy it. " He put on the Divine Sensual." It w^as in- dispensable to the flesh and bones which we saw Him have : it was the last omniscience of the Divine Natural Man. Some theologians, thinking not sympathetically but philo- sophically of the redemptive sufferings of the Son of Man, 34 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES lean to the conclusion that His whole presence on earth was a phenomenon representative of what the Jews did to the Word : that His personal life was a figure to the drama of violence, and that the low estate and suffering and death of Jesus were but apparent. This the written Word does not countenance ; reality, not seeming, is its postulate for faith. The divinity indeed did not suffer, but the Son of Mary suffered, and also the Son of Man. There is, however, doctrine to be seen before such sentiments, which came forth early in the Christian Church, can be dismissed. The Lord discourages the physical or natural investigation of His endurances by mentioning them so little in His own Works, the Gospels and the Apocalypse. They are written of throughout in His other Work, the Old Testament, but as figures ; for instance, in the Prophets and the Psalms of David ; and this mode concentrates attention entirely on the spiritual and divine side. The devout reader can peruse those portions which most explicitly signify the Lord's suffering, and can believe in his heart that they refer to Him, and yet never descend to dwell on the thorny crown or the nailed feet, or on the gall and vinegar. If he does imagine down to these things, he raises them into spiritual meanings in a solid of present doctrine which abolishes the shadowy past. These things, and the Word is full of them, — as when Satan's temptings are evidently dramatic in Divine art for heaven and earth, both in audience, — tend to show that we must look into the reason why we are to weep not for the Saviour but for ourselves ; for as well-pleased sentimentalists, enjoying the romantic pathos of interesting sufferers, we are all daughters of Jerusalem, who in tenderness to ourselves and our sins, for which we do not weep, shall begin to call upon the mountains to fall upon us, and upon the mounts to cover us. Judging by what the mind and the body are in great crises, reason may humbly see that the Lord's sufferings on OF JESUS CHRIST 35 the Cross, from the Divine Sonship now closing relations with the maternal natural, were more and more sufferings for the Sin of the World, and for the Judgment and destruc- tion then impending. This was foreshadowed by the Lord's lamentation for the chosen people to whom He was divinely patriotic. «0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the pro- phets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under wings, and ye would not 1 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say. Blessed He that cometh in the name of the Lord " (Matthew xxu'i. 37-39). Jesus yearns over His unrepentant race, and, as their Lord, will be unrevealed to them to save them from greater damnation. And when He says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," it is impos- sible but that vast multitudes should be comprehended and gathered in this last prayer of the Son of Man from the Cross. Thus the Passion was less and less of physical agonies, and transcendently of agonized love in the closin*^ hours of the frail humanity. Martyrs may illustrate this, but with an infinite difference. Many such, as History re- cords, were not only lifted above bodily feelings, but were introduced by God's angels into rapturous states, and vision of heaven was opened to them, as if they had passed from death to life, and had left sin and sorrow, the pyre and the tortures, behind them. The death of Jesus was not thus. On the Mount of Olives, before the Crucifixion, being in an agony. He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. And on the cross He gave up the ghost after crying with a loud voice m agony. Was it not agony for the sin of the world? Was it not the agony of the human as still of the world ? For the Lord is divine Love itself, and, in contradiction to all first appearances, wrath and indignation have no part in the supreme Judge of mankind. These speculations, how- 36 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES ever, if allowable, belong more to the historical sense than to doctrinals. XIII. Notes on the Internal Sense, That the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world by rejecting it from His own Humanity, and iti His own maternal body, and did not cancel it in sinners, is declared by Himself in the words quoted from His Gospel of Luke. Let us endeavour again to see this text in the light of the New Church. " And as they led Him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, to carry behind Jesus. But there followed Him much multitude of the people ; and of women ; and these bewailed (ckotttovto - beat their breasts) and lamented (e^pj vow = made dirges about) Him. But turning to them Jesus said, Daughters of Jerusalem, Do not lament over me ; rather over yourselves lament, and over your children. For, See. Days are coming. In these they shall say. Blessed the barren, and the wombs that have not born, and the breasts that have not suckled. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains. Fall upon us, and to the mounts, Cover us. For if in the moist wood {kv rw i^yptf ^vXo)) they have done these things, what comes to pass in the dry" {kv tw ^7//oa; = dead, sapless) (Luke xxiii. 26-31). Christ's followers here, much multitude of the people, re- present at first the simple, capable of receiving truths from the power of the Lord's goodness, and the authority of His miraculous dealings. The women represent the affections of that multitude, and their sympathetic horror at the cruel death about to be inflicted on the Son of Mary. He sympathizes, turning to them, to warn and instruct them. Daughters of Jerusalem, signifies the strong external sensi- OF JESUS CHRIST. 37 bility of the Jewish race, but not now of the Jewish Church. Do not lament over me, signifies that present external appearances and feelings must be put aside when the Word is to be received. Rather lament over yourselves. Enter more deeply into yourselves in My name, and at My com- mand here, and discern your sins with sorrow, and your life in them : your actions are their children. For, see. An injunction to greater attention. Your external sensibility, if uncorrected, will externalize the mind, and make faith sensual. Days are coming. States of greater evil will ensue to those who disregard ; who sentimentalize over the Saviour's cross without keeping His commandments. The first com- mand here is, Lament not for Me. This must be obeyed by the Church. The second is. Lament for yourselves. In those days they shall say. Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not born, and the breasts that have not suckled. It is better to dry up the fountains of spurious grief, inasmuch as generations of evil and falsity spring from attributing merit to our pity for the Lord's sufferings. The marriage of the Lord with the Church, and of good with truth in us, is a blessed consummation when we refuse the temptation to make false innocence out of our temporary emotions. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains. Fall upon us = otherwise Communion with self-love which counsels barricades of naturalism against divine influx ; and to the mounts. Cover us = and eternal death, namely hell, in preference to this visitation. The moist wood is the de- vastated Church in its earliest consummation, its sentimental, moist religiosity : the dry wood, the fuel of inflammation against the Lord at the end. This applies to the Christian Church as not shunning evils as sins first; but making merit of love, pity, and external devotion without previous repentance in act from habitual evils. The Cross signifies the rejection and condemnation of the Jewish y^on. They laid it on a man whom they had com- pelled to carry it ; a man from the country, from the field. 38 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES The evil nature corrupts the simple good to inaugurate a doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, and of spurious pity for the burden about to be laid on the Lord. It is carried at the back of Jesus ; that is, it is rejected by Him from the first. He has to bear His own Cross. The field signifies man as to doctrinal good. The Cyrenian, one Simon, was an African, and may signify Remains, that is survivals, of the most Ancient Men. This transference of the Cross from Jesus to human nature, leads up in series to all that followed next. To the great following of Multus, the Laity, the com- monalty, adding themselves to Simon the Cyrenian coming from the field ; which signifies the propagation of the dogma of transference of the Lord's merits to man ; and of man's sins to the Lord. It is when the women appear that the case declares itself. They beat their bosom, and rend the air with their dirges. Banded natural feelings are here averted from the true centre. Jesus turned to them, to con- vert them to Himself. He spoke, " Lament not over Me ; rather over yourselves lament, and over your children." The coming ages of the Christian Church are in revelation here. He counselled the women in parable-words about the blessing of being childless, of being loveless, and of being motherless. To those who are in the opposite sense fruitful, amorous, and motherly, apply the suicidal calls for hell and death in the Terror,— Days are coming. The develop- ment of continuous states of mental and affectional devasta- tion, is shown from this first beginning of theatric sympathy with the Man of Sorrows ; against which Jesus instructs them to weep for themselves, and for their children. He alone can endure His Cross: they could not bear it for Him. When its passion came, then all the disciples forsook Him and fled (Matthew xxvi. 56). Every man and woman has his or her own cross to bear for taking away his or her own sin of the individual. Failing to do this encourages and increases dersonal sin, the sin of the world in the world, engendering OF JESUS CHRIST, 39 the fiction of an Atonement by Christ's passion. This has led the first Christian Church into the second death, where it subsists, under the falling mountains which shut it away from the divine life, and under the covering mounts which in mercy make hell endurable. XIV. The Maternal HMmanity, The thought may come to others as it has to myself, that the human nature which the Lord took upon Him from His Jewish Mother, Mary, conceals the mystery that He died to its frailty daily, and yet put it off as matter, space, time and person, only by His death on the cross and His burial in the sepulchre. Whereas it might seem that in His redemptive Victories He dissipated and extinguished every day, that in in the nature which had been tempted, or attempted, and then and there supplied its place with its glorified or divine counterpart. That this was not the case, the continuity of the Saviour's natural life seems to demonstrate. But we learn furthermore that He retained the infirm maternity while He was in the world, because in no other way could He be tempted, and least of all on the cross : after which the rejection of the maternal humanity, and the resurrection of the Lord, were both accomplished. Our own case, as we also learn from Swedenborg, is an image and likeness of the Lord's in this, that human regeneration corresponds to the Lord's Glorification. If by obedience to the Word, and by shunning evils as sins against God, we become sons of the Father of us, The in-the- heavens, that is, of the Lord, the change is an internal one, and a spiritual birth or new degree of man is formed within us, the radical change not being visible in the bodily person. Death, or harvest time, is awaited, to announce the yield of 40 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES the life. We are " all there " up to the end. So, in analogy, the maternal humanity or body of our Saviour was not exterminated in the course of His natural lifetime. It had been the ground of all temptation by all evil, of all seduc- tion to all sin. One temptation must have been to expect the Father to intervene with His omnipotence in the crises, and to vitiate the fairness of the combat between the Lord and the hells. The frail humanity, however, never yielded, or consented to sin. Could it, the frail mind and body of it, fail to become more obeisant to the very end ? Could it fail to exalt for coming mankind the historical memory of the Son of Mary ? This deep Remainder has to come down from age to age as of a Natural God of prayer and worship for the natural man. Our planet is its beginning. It has to be communicated as image and likeness of the Human Divine in every soul from star to star, from one solar system to another, by those who die, and become communicants of tidings of God Man, incarnate in our flesh, and born with us, to the streams of men and women who are making for the heavens which the Lord has prepared for those who love Him. Does not that maternity enter still for our traditive minds into the Lord's accommodating manhood ? After His Resurrection, after He had left the sealed tomb (Matthew xxvii. 66) before any angel had rolled away the great stone which closed it (Matthew xxviii. 2-6), after He came in to the disciples when the doors were shut, it is written that He showed them His hands and His side, " And that then were they glad when they saw the Lord " (John xx. 19, 20). After eight days again He showed the print of the nails to Thomas, to whom He also said, " Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side, and be not faithless but believing " (xx. 26, 27). These prints and this wound belonged to the Human Divine, but they had been common to the body of Jesus now risen from the dead, and to the body of the Son of Mary. Likeness, and for us, identity was preserved. In OF JESUS CHRIST 41 that case the Saviour will be known for ever as having been born of Mary ? So the young child, and the poorest little mind on earth, even the African Pigmy, will at length learn his first lisp of salvation ; that his God is a born man ; and at length through some appointed translated Swedenborg, he may be instructed upwards to know that God is the only Man, and that He and we are men only after we become His sons and daughters ? Swedenborg again informs us that the Jews treated Jesus as they treated the Word ; that the violence done to the one was done to the other ; for He was the Word made flesh. The signatures of the Cross on the body of Jesus belong, when they were inflicted, to the retained human maternity on the one side, but after the resurrection, when the maternity was gone, to the son of man, who was the human divine, in distinction from the Divine humanity, and who also could show the marks of temptation in the appearances of the Letter which killeth. These murders of the truth are represented in the Apocalypse by the Lamb slain from the foundation of the World, which signifies His human not acknowledged in the Church as divine. They are per- petuated in the first Christian Church from which the Word as divine truth has disappeared. Thus again it is that the process of the Lord's glorification of His Humanity was carried on in Himself; that He is the Lord of His New Church, and yet that its members must be gathered individually by their repentance, and His remis- sion of their sins. Swedenborg recounts that he has seen the Lord when those were present who had been with Him on earth. They recognised him as the same. And in the spiritual worlds above other planets, this was repeated, that it might be confirmed to the spirits that came from those earths that He had been born here. In this manner, after death, the Lord's works, also His Autobiographies, are circulated through all spiritual societies ; so that the whole Spiritual world leading 42 THE COMBATS AND VICTORIES / heavenwards is one Society for the propagation of the Gospel. Proof from Divinely selected experience is here, that all worlds that are possibly habitable are nurseries, residences, schools and disciplines for men and women intended for heaven. And that the Written Word is the way, the truth, and the life common to both Worlds ; natural first for the natural, and spiritual for the spiritual. Might the frail natural humanity derived from Mary, while it subsisted, and yielded its inclinations, tendencies, and heredities to the Son of God, the Humanity over- ruling it, and which it obeyed, — might this humanity undergo a regeneration contemporaneous with the glorification which was proceeding as the Divine Natural Humanity in the Saviour? It was not put away until the Man Jesus died and was buried. It could not be converted into the Divine humanity : finite could not commingle or be identified with infinite. Could it take part in the process of the descent of Deity into a New Degree of Omnipotence, without a new life penetrating it, and making it more alive in its most actual senses to the divine work of the Father descending to the Son, and through the Son to the disciples, and especially to John the beloved disciple ; who was to become the Son of Mary ? Mary's life in further conjecture — Mary being the Church and John the Love and Charity from which the life of the Church proceeds, — seems to bean object-lesson of advancing regeneration in the humanity of the representative woman who carried and bore the Lord. That she was a Jewess, and what Judah as race implies, are facts we have often dwelt upon. That her life in the Gospels was of a motherhood of unknown depth, awe-stricken, brave, faithful and obedient, is plainly written. That it was these good things in increase is her history. Thus when she was apparently reproved at the marriage-feast of Cana in Galilee by the address, Woman, what have I to do with thee ? she uttered no plea. And when she and her other children waited without. OF JESUS CHRIST, 43 and as His mother and brethren would see Jesus, He owned them as not more related to him than all are who are hearers and doers of the Word of God. And on the Cross He again addressed Mary as Woman, when yet His written Gospel here calls her His Mother \ and no reply or wailing is written of her, but she accepts the divinely-given sonship of John. Is it possible not to conjecture that her trials were more and more compensated within by the most wisely affec- tionate Man that ever trod this rough earth, namely the now Natural God of it, and that He upheld her with more than Weep not for me, by an entire suitable revelation. Observe also that she disappears entirely from the Word of God after the crucifixion ; and it has not been written that she was among those to Whom He showed Himself as the risen Lord. She did not witness the ascension of her Redeemer. These things have a divine depth of meaning confronting human ideas and relationships. But apart from Mary's life, which disconnects itself more and more from Him who was born as her Son, the life, education and training of Jesus is advancement in the growth of the natural human which Christ assumed in order to be a responsible man among men. Of this Sweden- borg writes : " The Lord's human became united to Jehovah after, by the combats of temptations. He had purified the maternal, namely, that which He derived from the mother " {Arcana, 1293). He obeyed every commandment and law of God enjoined by the divine truth which was in Him ; He fulfilled the whole Word and made it into flesh, to become Himself the living Word. So from the first " He increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man " nade Rirnsdf the.J^ast thing. Man is not able to be conjomiid* With God unless by a Human medium," vi-sibie and'ac«;'e!»sibie. . Every male ^ born from a spir^tpaj origin — from a Truth as a seed. \ ;/...*'.• .',•.,.' ' The reason why ' hitherto' ji^eh 'jjave not perceived this, and why so many opinions have come about respecting the I04 COMBATS AND VICTORIES OF JESUS. Human nature of Christ, has been, that they have not understood the difference between Goodness and Truth, nor the marriage of these, nor between the will and the intellect, nor between the soul and the body. The Virgin also of whom He was born signifies the Church in regard to affection for truth. It was necessary and proper that He be born of a virgin in legitimate marriage with Joseph. Christ Alone is Man from eternity, and Man natural in time. All the Divine is in Him from the Divine in Himself. He alone is to be approached to realize salvation. He is to be approached immediately, and if approached mediately, communication is intercepted. Cite here what is said concerning the great affliction, and its sequels (Matt. xxiv.). To worship three gods is to worship no god. No one comes to God, or is conjoined to Him, unless the Human be approached : otherwise He is not accessible. Because God the Father is the Redeemer as to the Human. For conjunction to be realized, God must be visible, and thuswise accessible and fixed. To Christians this does not appear to be so ; but it is evident to all others. The Divine Truth has suffered." — Eman. 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