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AUTHOR: 
 
 WILKINSON, JAMES 
 JOHN GARTH 
 
 TITLE: 
 
 ON HUMAN SCIENCE, 
 GOOD AND EVIL ... 
 
 PLACE: 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 DA TE : 
 
 1876 
 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 
 PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET 
 
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 Sw33S4 
 
 Wilkinson, Jrjnos John Garth, 1812-1899. 
 
 On human science, good and evil, and'its 
 works; and on divine revelation and its works 
 and sciences. Sy James John Garth Wilkinson 
 Philadelphia; J,' B. Lippincott & co.. 1876. 
 
 xxi, 590 p. 22-^, 
 
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it 
 
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 ON HUMAN SCIENCE 
 
 AND 
 
 DIVINE REVELATION, 
 
ON 
 
 HUMAN SCIENCE, 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL, 
 
 AND ITS WORKS; 
 
 AND ON 
 
 DIVINE REVELATION 
 
 AND ITS WORKS AND SCIENCES. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON 
 
 AUTHOR or "the HUMAN BODY, AND ITS CONNECTION WITH MAN,* 
 
 .». * 
 
 * ■» .> » t 
 
 
 * t 
 
 PHILApELPrilA 
 J. B-.L^PPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 1876 
 

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 Mrs. E toy 
 Apr. 6,, 
 
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 fe 
 
 I 
 
 PBEFACE. 
 
 rr^HE present treatise was commenced in order to 
 furnish to the public mind the Author s testi- 
 mony and convictions concerning what is called 
 Vivisection. The subject has engaged his attention 
 since his youth, and one firm opinion, of its useless- 
 ness, and its evils, has held him since his first 
 perceptions of physiological truth. The determina- 
 tion of his heart and intellect against it has grown 
 with his growth and strengthened with his strength. 
 He has written upon it from time to time. And 
 now, when a great public opinion is rising by his 
 side, he has been compelled to put forth all his 
 strength as one combatant in the cause of common 
 humanity, and of common science. 
 
 There are many w^orkers in the cause in all 
 civilized countries, and he desires to be in their 
 ranks so far as they allow. But he has perceived 
 that the policy of the cause, and its conduct, are not 
 always staked upon the safest issues, or led from 
 principles that can conquer. The saving of pain 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 to God s creatures, what is called '' the economy of 
 pain," is a good object, but not a sufficiently com- 
 plete policy to fight under ; the agony which cruel 
 practices cause to one's own sensibility, is a 
 powerful motive, but not a public plea : you cannot 
 declare war against a system because it makes you 
 uncomfortable, or even miserable. Therefore he has 
 felt that other issues and principles are needed. 
 The Duke of Wellington's advice. Do not make a 
 little war, is applicable to internal conflicts against 
 evil in society. For little wars have no back- 
 ground of resources, they do not know the strength 
 of the enemy, and the peace that follows them for 
 the most part leaves the evil in dispute nearly its 
 whole territory; perhaps is purchased by guaran- 
 teeing the evil by treaty ; and leaves the case of 
 offence more difficult of attack by reason of conces- 
 sion to wrong premises. On the question we are 
 considering, we want deep foundations of peace, and 
 must put forth high powers to attain them. Alios 
 ad prcelium ire videas, Chattos ad helium. 
 
 This issue has been attempted in the following 
 pages, and the whole array of reasons within the 
 writers ken has been brought into the struggle. 
 For the towering pretensions of science and service 
 embodied in old institutions and practices, and now 
 represented by extremely able men, are too massive 
 a phalanx to be opposed successfully on the battle- 
 
 FREFACE. 
 
 vu 
 
 field of an uneducated Parliament and people, by 
 humane sentiments and generous horrors : it is as 
 unequal a contest as that of the naked Britons with 
 Caesar and his legions when they came determined 
 to land upon our shores. More than Roman must 
 meet Roman, or mere human kindness will be 
 beaten, and bleed afresh upon the field. 
 
 More than Roman has come, and He is on our 
 side. 
 
 The writer has pleaded the ruin of physiological 
 science, and the corruption of medical art, as honest 
 reasons in the case ; and thus has assailed Viola- 
 TiONiSM from its own strategical centre. He has 
 named this realm of evil, Violationism, because 
 Vivisection is the fair name which the enemy gives 
 it, and this by no means characterizes its deeds. 
 He has demonstrated that human sciences are im- 
 possible on this ground, and that diabolical sciences 
 are not permissible here. He has appealed to the 
 people and to Parliament to recognize and settle 
 this fact. 
 
 Moreover he has found, on exploring the roots of 
 the evil, that you soon come to avowed materialism 
 as a creed of procedure, and to rights of materialism 
 disavowing all allegiance to conscience, to mercy, 
 and to God. Here is a new host which requires to 
 be encountered. 
 
 The chieftains of this host, in the British Asso- 
 
VUl 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 ciation, have summoned the Christian religion to 
 their tent, and ordered it to prepare itself for scien- 
 tific examination ; to submit its life to experimental 
 material science, and to add itself, so far as it passes 
 muster, to the atheistical forces. 
 
 This has given the writer room to bring forth 
 religion in a set of general statements. He has first 
 shown a new science which claims the throne of the 
 human mind in that department, and on which reli 
 gion can be based materially. This science is of the 
 divine provision, and the commencement of it has 
 been given to mankind by the illumination of 
 Swedenborg. It occupies and constitutes the very 
 ground under the feet of the violational army. 
 
 That science, in its harmonies, is filled with the 
 doctrines of a new religion, a new revelation, and 
 hereby a new personal chieftain appears upon the 
 field, even Jesus Christ, the Lord of human kind- 
 ness, but also the warrior, and the judge of the 
 earth. The doctrines alluded to, rationally and spiri- 
 tually occupy an inner realm above science, but 
 corresponding to science, a region into which viola- 
 tionism and materialism cannot come, and by the 
 pressure of their truths and principles, the higher 
 faculties of the mind are disciplined and embattled 
 against the perversions of the lower sphere. 
 
 The process assails the evils under consideration, 
 by solid organic reasons from above, and clears the 
 
 J 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 IX 
 
 upper human air. It is a process of general educa- 
 tion in the truths of the New Church ; and in the 
 knowledges and sciences flowing from these. Its 
 end is, the purification of the natural life, and there- 
 fore of the whole mind, by obedience to revealed 
 rational law. 
 
 The opportunity created by the British Associa- 
 tion, has been freely taken, to give from the writer s 
 point of view, as from a mind deeply interested in 
 physiology and medicine, and in Society in its re- 
 lations therewith, a passing statement of most of the 
 subjects contained in the writings of Swedenborg; 
 but always with the object of placing them opposite 
 to the scientific mind, for the repression of great and 
 cruel evils, and in order that the truths of love may 
 at last prevail. This ruling desire will conciliate 
 the reader to the constant recurrence to painful 
 topics of the hour, and to the bending round of the 
 discourse, wherever it begins, to practical aims, 
 which are the basis and justification of the whole 
 
 treatise. 
 
 The Author commends the theme, under its novel 
 mode of statement, especially to the attention of the 
 Church universal, and whilst inviting all religious 
 minds to a serious study of Swedenborg, he pleads 
 to the whole Church of Christ, that if they attain 
 the truths communicated in that Author, and apply 
 them to the regeneration of private and public life, 
 
! 
 
 I 
 
 X PREFACE, 
 
 the antagonism of science will cease, the evil and 
 false sciences will disappear, and a new knowledge 
 of nature, inconceivable now, will spring out of the 
 ground of the natural mind. 
 
 He commends the same truths to his own pro- 
 fession; for they are fountains of healing. And 
 though he has said hard things of that profession, 
 it is because he loves it well, and will love it to 
 the end. 
 
 He commends the light of Swedenborgs writ- 
 ings to honest statesmen. No more difficult or 
 delicate subjects can occupy the attention of states- 
 men, than the needful limitations of art and science 
 as they press into Temporal Power. Nothing can 
 injure the State more than allowing false admissions 
 to power in this direction. Nothing is more 
 difficult to cast out than the foreign virus of power 
 if once it penetrates into homes, consciences, and 
 affections, and is there confirmed by the intimate 
 pressure of house-to-house professional visitation. 
 This has been exemplified in the action of priest- 
 hoods; it is felt to-day in the influence of other 
 callings. Wise and extended statutes of mortmain, 
 thrown as shields over the weakness of human fear, 
 are needed to ensure and protect public liberty 
 threatened in many pleaded interests of life and 
 death. 
 
 The truths brought forward in this book are com- 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 XI 
 
 mended to legislators; for those truths are themselves 
 the highest laws, and the fountains of laws. They 
 nerve the mind with power to embrace in action the 
 several forces which combat on the side of public 
 good. Especially in regard to science they help 
 towards the conception of a needed Reform Bill of 
 the future. There are evils, such as the vaccination 
 laws, which consist of so great a number of small 
 wrongs, that it is difficult to seize them, and ter- 
 minate their reign : the sum of the evil is worldwide, 
 and the volume and cloud of it is immense, but the 
 germs and particles are nearly invisible, and always 
 fugacious, first to the professional, and then to the 
 public mind : like swarms of poisonous flies they are 
 more difficult to clear off than a '' plague of lions " 
 would be. The truths of the New Church, which 
 regard society as one, and its wrongs as one, group 
 these winged evils with their similars, and fixing 
 them to a common ground, proceed to exterminate 
 them in their principles, and to clear the social world 
 of their stings. This can be done by Bills consider- 
 ing several such subjects at once ; and by a general 
 legislative sweep upon all the cases in which false 
 science has attained to power; especial reference 
 being had to science itself, to see that it be perfectly 
 free, in being perfectly subordinate to the greater 
 freedom of mankind, and amenable to penal law to 
 keep it pure. For wherever an evil cannot be got at 
 
I 
 
 i 
 
 Xll 
 
 PREFACE, 
 
 by reason of its subtlety and voluble pretexts, the 
 policy is to put it in dock with other evils, to gain a 
 mass that can be grasped, and then to use upon it 
 the plain truths which dimension of enormity calls 
 forth. The ground of public life, first cleared and 
 then cultivated by the truths which the Church now 
 possesses, will thus be wholesome and good, and for 
 the farmers of future society, secure. 
 
 June 3, 1876. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I. 
 
 METHODS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 I. Good and evil rule in the Sciences, 
 Evil and false facts, 
 Evil and false Sciences, . 
 Evil and false physiological facts and Sciences, 
 II. The rights of Science, 
 The place of Science, 
 Wrong ambitions of Science, 
 
 III. Vivisection demonstrates physiological impotence 
 
 IV. The path of Analogy, 
 
 There is no real similarity between human and 
 animal organs. 
 
 How do living forces act? or. What is Life? 
 
 There is no real similarity between the organs 
 
 and parts of animals opened and dissected 
 
 alive, and the corresponding organs and parts 
 
 in animals in the enjoyment of their existence, 
 
 V. Kone but the basest analytical facts have a place in 
 
 the Physiology of the day, 
 VI. Egypt, ....'■ 
 
 The present range of violational facts fits into no 
 system of Truth, and cannot be appropriated by 
 the Vivisectors: it will be taken irom them," 
 
 PAGE 
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 3 
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 14 
 
 17 
 
XIV 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 
 and put to use by those who renounce their 
 ways as being evil, .... 
 
 There are similarities between this black art of the 
 violationists and the ancient mysteries of Egypt, 
 
 The evil heart toward Vivisection has being grow- 
 ing for ages, but with rapidity in the latter half 
 of this century, .... 
 
 Plea that animals are automatons, 
 VII. Interests of Science, .... 
 
 The interests of Science are pleaded, 
 VIII. Extension and decay of the old medicine, . 
 
 Vaccination, . . . • • 
 
 Lymph-poisoning, .... 
 
 Current disregard of serious physiological truth, . 
 IX. Decay of the old medicine — {continmd). 
 
 Symptoms, . . • . • 
 
 X. Extension and decay of the old surgery. 
 
 The influence of Vivisection upon surgery is and 
 has been for evil, .... 
 
 Surgery, on its bad side, paralyzes the patient's 
 
 rational faculty, .... 
 
 XL Evil and false medicine and surgery, and their rule 
 
 by fear, ...••• 
 
 An evil and false medicine and surgery give 
 wrong hopes and a base love of the bodily 
 natural life to mankind — they are a vassal of 
 the luxury of the people. 
 
 An evil and false medicine and surgery fix fear, . 
 XIL The circulation of evil, .... 
 
 The violations ruling in Scientism are closely re- 
 presented in the life of Professions, 
 Xni. Vivisection corrupts and destroys the principles of 
 
 medical and surgical education, and of medical 
 
 religion, ....»♦ 
 
 The violation of life by Scientism strikes medicine 
 more than the other arts on the religious side, 
 and injures its highest life, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 17 
 19 
 
 20 
 23 
 24 
 24 
 27 
 27 
 31 
 35 
 35 
 35 
 40 
 
 40 
 
 42 
 
 45 
 
 47 
 49 
 50 
 
 50 
 
 52 
 
 I 
 
 4 
 
 53 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 XIV. Vivisection corrupts and hardens the non-medical 
 
 public, . . . . . 
 
 Royal Commissions, . . . 
 
 Wickedness strangely coincides and correlates 
 
 with wickedness in the Physiology of Society, 
 Violation of life by Scientism, unless nationally 
 
 reprobated, despoils the efforts made by the 
 
 benevolent against common cruelty, 
 
 XV. Social Physiology by instances, 
 
 Biology of Vivisection, 
 The violation of animals in the rites of Scientism 
 threatens public order, 
 XVI. Violation of animals destroys organic knowledf^e, 
 Vivisection prevents any organic spiritual 
 views of the human and social bodies from 
 coming into existence: and correlation, not 
 of brute forces, but of hearts, consciences, 
 and deeds, from being thereby discerned, 
 The present so-called human physiologj'-, in 
 so far as it is founded upon Vivisection, 
 contains no direct knowledge, but is the 
 inference of an inference, 
 XVII. General violations ruling in Science, 
 XVIII. Evil and false Infinites, . 
 
 Unlimited ambitions and minds, 
 XIX. The Cities of the Plain, . 
 
 In violational Scientism, obscenity and visible 
 horror touch their last earthly gratifications, 
 XX. Separations in Science, 
 
 Science requires a careful study to separate its 
 better nature from its modern pretensions, 
 XXI. The single eye of the Sciences, 
 XXII. Justification by Science alone. 
 
 False Science complains of the arrogance of 
 false theology, and seeks to crush it, by a 
 corresponding arrogance of its own, . 
 XXIII. Scientifics, 
 
 XY 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 J 
 
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 81 
 
 r 
 
XVI 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 xvii 
 
 Vivisection, including human vivisection, which 
 exists "in posse" within the present prac- 
 tice, is the natural end of the evQ and false 
 analytical sciences, and of the evil and false 
 analytical philosophies, . . , 
 
 Analytics without uses close the Sciences, and 
 violent analytics close them violently and 
 seal them, .... 
 
 The vessels of Life, . 
 
 The rank of Analytics, 
 
 Certainty and exactitude, 
 XXrV. Consummatio Saeculi, 
 
 The consummation of the Age in Scicntifics, 
 
 Marks of Consummation, 
 
 Protoplasm and development "ex se," 
 XXV. Modern thought, 
 XXVI. The Spirit of the Age, . 
 XXVII. Good and evil rule in the imaginations of 
 Science, . . • . 
 
 The imagination, as a function in Science 
 is true, or false, for good, or for evil, 
 XXVIII. A New State, .... 
 
 The false faith that any absolute and final 
 truth can be discovered by Science from the 
 changeful phenomena of nature, is one image 
 and result of its' own self-deification. As 
 also is the faith of Science in its own 
 permanence. As also again is the postpone- 
 ments of religious exactitude called theology, 
 until Science has attained to its own exacti- 
 tude, complete, .... 
 XXIX. Love of dominion in Scientism, . 
 XXX. Science as Faculty is everlasting, 
 
 There is also a tender sense in which Science 
 is and will be permanent: it is immortal as 
 man is immortal, . 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 87 
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 101 
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 104 
 
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 107 
 
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 112 
 116 
 
 XXXL 
 XXXIL 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 XXXV. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 117 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 XXXIX. 
 
 XL. 
 
 XLL 
 XLII. 
 
 XLIIL 
 
 XLIV. 
 XLV. 
 
 XLVI. 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 L. 
 
 LL 
 
 LIL 
 
 LIIL 
 
 PART IL 
 
 SWEDENBORG AND A NEW SCIENCE. 
 
 Swedenborg, .... 
 The Law of good use confronts Scientism, 
 The Fire of Use in Science, . 
 Uses, .... 
 
 Correlation of Forces, including Love, Will 
 
 Mind, . . . • 
 
 Correspondences: Love, their point of de 
 
 parture, .... 
 Public limitations of Scientism, 
 
 Nota bene, 
 
 The selfhood. 
 Science is essentially dogmatic and doctrinal, 
 Doctrines [pressing upon Science: a new 
 
 religion claims it, 
 The Incarnation claims the Sciences on their 
 
 own grounds. 
 The Divine Humanity, 
 Positive Theology commences in Sweden 
 
 borg. The Incarnation, 
 The Divine Man the primary object of the 
 
 organic Sciences, 
 Swedenborg, 
 Swedenborg "founds human physiology — the 
 
 Doctrine of Uses, . 
 The Doctrine of Forms, 
 Posture and position of organic forms, 
 The Doctrine of Degrees, 
 Spiritual Influx, . . ' • 
 
 Spiritual sight opened, 
 Personal evidence supreme, 
 Illumination of Reason, 
 The prospects of Naturalism, . 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 183 
 186 
 192 
 197 
 
XVUl 
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 XIX 
 
 Prevailing contempt of human experiment, 
 and of the powers of natural substance, 
 LIT. The future of human Organology, 
 
 PAGE 
 201 
 
 203 
 
 LV. 
 
 LVT. 
 
 LVII. 
 LVIII. 
 
 LIX. 
 
 LX. 
 
 LXI. 
 
 LXIL 
 
 LXin. 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 LXV. 
 
 LXYI. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 LXVin. 
 
 LXIX. 
 LXX. 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 LXXin. 
 
 PAKT III. 
 
 A NEW CHURCH. 
 
 The Church Militant in Science, 
 
 Doctrines are necessary, 
 The ancient Churches enter Science and com 
 
 mand Anthropology, : 
 
 Three human natures, 
 Accord of Geology, 
 Social declension coincident in this world and 
 
 the other, . • • . 
 
 Individual and general judgment takes place in 
 
 the spiritual world. 
 The Word made flesh. 
 The Doctrine of Ultimates, 
 Swedenborg a rational teacher from the "Word, 
 Correlations of Theology, . . 
 
 Death confirms beliefs, good and evil, 
 Spiritual Science implies spiritual revelation 
 
 of its God and its world. 
 Conceits in Scientism, and social chaos therefrom 
 Spiritism, .... 
 
 Possession and superstition. 
 The first Christian Church, 
 The last judgment in 1757, 
 
 The English under judgment. 
 Contemporary History, . 
 Another sign, .... 
 The Word, .... 
 
 Theism, .... 
 
 208 
 210 
 
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 215 
 221 
 
 222 
 
 226 
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 240 
 248 
 
 250 
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 257 
 262 
 268 
 271 
 275 
 277 
 281 
 284 
 285 
 
 LXXIY. Abstractions put aside, 
 LXXV. The affections, 
 LXXVI. Divine entrances into Science, 
 LXXVII. Analogy, . 
 LXXVIII. Correspondency, 
 LXXIX. The Word conjoins Heaven and Earth, 
 LXXX. The Apocalypse Kevealed, 
 LXXXI. The authority of Swedenborg, 
 LXXXII. Human imperfection does not hinder, 
 LXXXIII. A new mind from Correspondences, 
 LXXXIV. Spiritual creation of correlates, 
 LXXXV. Judgment by Correspondences, 
 LXXXVI. Transformation and transfiguration, 
 LXXXVIL The laws of Nature and the Kingdom of 
 
 God, 
 LXXXVIII. Evil Forms and Events, 
 LXX XIX. 'J he march of Ends, 
 
 XC. The new imagination of illuminated reason, 
 XCI. Love is the life of man in Science also, 
 XCII. The ruling loves, . . 
 
 XCIII. Swedenborg and Fourier, 
 XCIV. Metaphysics, 
 XCY. Art, 
 
 XCVI. Genius and Insjiiration, 
 XCVII. Swedenborg founds a new Sanity, 
 XCVIII. Prayer and Miracle, 
 The new medicine, 
 XCIX. Sources against prayer, 
 C. Permissions, 
 CI. Prayer and Influx, 
 CII. Woman under the !N"ew Church, 
 cm. The new education, 
 CIV. jSTew centres of spiritual life, 
 CV. The gates of death opened, 
 CVI. The quickening of the Ages, 
 CVII. Freedom and Freewill, 
 CVIII. Ecclesiasticisms, . . 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 331 
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 361 
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 367 
 369 
 385 
 388 
 389 
 391 
 399 
 409 
 413 
 417 
 425 
 426 
 
XX 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CIX. Cruelties, 
 ex. The vastation of evU, 
 CXI. Physiology on good and evil, 
 CXII. Punishments and executioners, 
 CXIII. Slow reception of truth, 
 CXIV. Respect of man, 
 CXV. Man's place in nature, 
 
 Organic remorses, 
 CXVI. The hells, 
 CXVII. Re-incarnation, 
 CXVIII. The condemned sermon, 
 CXIX. Good and evil do not mix, 
 
 CXX. The annihilation-theory of evil, 
 CXXI. Divine influx, 
 CXXII. The human form as capacity of knowledge, 
 CXXIII. The great white throne, 
 CXXIV. The future of the Church and of Society, 
 
 PAGE 
 
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 437 
 
 442 
 
 446 
 
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 463 
 
 480 
 
 489 
 
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 496 
 
 498 
 
 499 
 
 505 
 
 513 
 
 523 
 
 / 
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 XXI 
 
 PART V. 
 
 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 CXXXIV. The late Royal Commission on Vivisection, 
 CXXXV. Destruction of reason, 
 CXXXVI. Unalterable by prayer, 
 CXXXVII. The catechism of the gallows, 
 CXXXVIII. The sacredness of forms of life, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 572 
 577 
 580 
 580 
 585 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 A NEW AGE. 
 
 CXXV. Charity, 
 CXXVI. Love and immortality, 
 CXXVII. The sexes, 
 CXXVIII. The British constitution, 
 CXXIX. Ducal Saharas, 
 CXXX. The New Church over politics, 
 CXXXI. The New Church over the passions, 
 CXXXII. The New Church over property, 
 CXXXIII. Summary, 
 
 529 
 538 
 541 
 546 
 551 
 553 
 560 
 566 
 569 
 
i| 
 
 I 
 
 PAET I. 
 SCIENTIFIC METHODS. 
 
 I. 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL RULE IN THE SCIENCES. 
 
 Evil and False Facts. — There are many facts which 
 a man is a rascal for knowing; such, for example, 
 as the contents of the private letters of other people; or 
 the revelations of spy-holes made into private rooms ; 
 that is to say, where reasons of police do not com- 
 mand these breaches of fellowship. There are other 
 facts which a man is a burglar for knowing; namely, 
 the contents of strong boxes which do not belong to 
 him ; the unpermitted knowing here is burglarious 
 as well as the handling. There are other facts which 
 a man is a seducer or violator for knowing ; facts 
 multipliable to any extent. There are other facts 
 again which a man is a murderer for knowing, such as 
 the behaviour of human beings under torture or 
 destruction inflicted by himself ; and the answerable 
 feelings and experiences called up by these proceed- 
 ings in his own breast. Many brigands have large 
 knowledge here. And then also there are abundant 
 facts which a man is a demon for knowing and pro- 
 
II! 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 : ) 
 
 |: 
 
 t 
 
 (! 
 
 2 GOOD AND EVIL RULE IN THE SCIENCES, 
 
 secuting; sucli as his own poisonings and pollutions 
 of the minds and hearts of others ; and the corruption 
 of life which is the consequence. The right to know 
 these things, and by implication the right to know 
 all things, not as police agents, but as truth -seekers, 
 is the magna clutrta of housebreaking and worse 
 violence applied to the world and all that is therein. 
 JEvil and False Sciences. — All such facts, by those 
 who commit the acts that make them, may be 
 arranged and digested into knowledge, and in the 
 greater adepts may be made, and are made, by the 
 working of the mind, into apparent sciences. A 
 peculiar feature of these sciences is, that they destroy 
 the quality which they think to register. The 
 burglar seizes property, but in his hands it is not 
 property, but pillage, and is not the means to ac- 
 quiring property, but to perpetuating plunder. The 
 violator seizes love, but it turns to death of love in 
 the seizure. The coveted thing, whatever it be, 
 loses its essence when the lawless lust has got it. 
 The knowledofe and science of it afterwards are but 
 the knowledge and science of its opposites, mistaken 
 for the undebauched facts. In short, there is nothing 
 acquired by unlawful means, that is not evil and false 
 in the knowing as well as in the keeping. There 
 is nothinor that does not belie the terms of truth. 
 
 At the same time, large ranges of fact and ex- 
 perience belong to these realms of evil ; and if any 
 person thinks he has a right to know everything 
 about human nature at first hand, he can know end- 
 less and unique things by criminal means. Nay, he 
 may scheme to circumvent criminality by wicked 
 knowledge in his own breast. He may plead, as an 
 honest ground of dishonesty, " Set a thief to catch a 
 thief," and may justify his thefts by this result. 
 There is much justice and judgment of this kind. 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL RULE IN THE SCIENCES 3 
 
 wicked justice. In taking its outcome, as we must 
 do, we deny its principles. The knowledge and 
 science here implied are wrong to have and to hold. 
 No matter what successes they lead to in disem- 
 bowelling villany and increasing policemanship, they 
 are bad from the foundation. 
 
 Evil and False Physiological Facts and Sciences, 
 — We have seen that there are wicked facts and 
 sciences, innumerable ones, in the moral and social 
 world. Cruelty to others, self-seeking at the cost 
 of others, — in a word, aggressive selfishness, is one 
 expression of them all. Exactly parallel with these 
 are the wicked facts and sciences elicited by cruelty 
 to the lower animals ; by cutting them up alive ; 
 by poisoning them and noting the symptoms of the 
 poisoning; by burning them with hot irons; by 
 injecting corruption into their veins, and filling them 
 with animalcules ; and by countless other ways 
 inherited from ancient, and aggravated by modern 
 science; e.g., wicked science. Whatever benefits 
 might accrue, whatever seeming property of know- 
 ledge might accrue, from such deeds, they are un- 
 natural, abominable, and, save for legal repression, not 
 to be named among Christians. They belong, indeed, 
 as the sequel will show, to ^^ that city which spiri- 
 tually is called Sodom and Egypt, wherein also our 
 Lord was crucified." Mankind has no right to them. 
 They are hellish facts ; and they belong not to life 
 and nature, but to imposture, death, and destruction ; 
 not to organization, but to ruin ; not to order, but to 
 the chaos of sin. 
 
 With no intention to use strong terms here, they 
 arise in the subject ; because the science of cruelty, 
 and the cruelty of science, are not brutal or bestial ; 
 and in calm analytics brute beasts must not be 
 insulted by the application of their innocent adjec- 
 
 I 
 
 it 
 
1 1 
 
 !t 
 
 
 i( 
 
 4 GOOD AND EVIL RULE IN THE SCIENCES, 
 
 tive to cruel men. Devilish and hellish are the 
 scientific human terms. Cruelty is the hard sub- 
 stratum of the infernal pit, which common sense 
 tells us is full of false sciences, and of abandoned 
 means of possessing them. For whatever is depraved 
 in man, has cruel evil for its heart, and lying pre- 
 texts for the breath of its lungs ; and therefore is 
 hell in an imaore. But animal terms do not suit 
 these conditions. 
 
 No demonstration beyond assertion is necessary, 
 that mankind has no right to know how dogs be- 
 have with their spines sawn through, or how 
 their nerves affect their muscles and vitals when 
 their entrails are exposed, and their bodies skilfully 
 mangled. It is a plain fact in the sight of God and 
 man that the knowledge and the doing of such things 
 are abominable and unlawful, and that they are 
 beyond conception hateful to all simple honest 
 people. There is not an undebauched assembly in 
 the world that would not trample upon a man if he 
 persisted in such deeds before their eyes ; for they 
 insult and defy human society. There is, however, 
 no end to them in the dens of evil physiology. If a 
 sawn dog drags his hind legs in one way, what will 
 a sawn cat do under similar circumstances? what 
 will a sawn elephant do ? and so forth. The wealth 
 of facts here can only be co-extensive with the tor- 
 ments of the entire animal creation from age to age. 
 The lust of that wealth would grudge the shambles 
 their daily prey without protracted torture. 
 
 But why stop at animals, which are mere analogies 
 of that human organism which is the great problem 
 to be solved. The reason pushed further, of direct 
 knowledge to be acquired, needs the supreme ex- 
 periment of cutting up living men, women and 
 children. There might be pretexts. Take, as a 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF SCIENCE, 5 
 
 commencement, a poor idiot or a baby. They would 
 undoubtedly yield more direct results to evil human 
 physiology than animal analogy could furnish. ^' The 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number " versus 
 the shunning of wickedness by all, might plead 
 strongly for human vivisection. What sharp light 
 would come of it! What fruitful results to *'the 
 healinof art ! " What enthronement of science over 
 weak sentiment! What preparation for handling 
 unprofessional mankind with official fingers ! Only 
 one thing stands in the way of its logic ; the con- 
 science of vivisectors generally is not yet demonized 
 to that degree. They dare not yet say that they 
 have a right to these supreme facts. They are how- 
 ever on the way to declare it, so long as they assume 
 and act upon a right to any fact or knowledge gained 
 by the violation of living creatures. 
 
 11. 
 
 THE IIIGHTS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 The rights of science are the rights of man; he 
 has a right to do right in his calling. So science 
 has a right to do well and wisely, and honestly, and 
 a right not to do wickedly. There is a confusion 
 on this subject, arising principally from the hearts 
 of the men now in question — the vivisectors. By 
 many of these scientists science is conceived as an 
 almighty being irrespective of good and evil ; as 
 justified in doing what it pleases simply because it 
 is science. The old idea of divine right, popu- 
 larly given up elsewhere, has fallen into it, and 
 aims at a new jurisdiction of the world, setting 
 its position thus : ^' I, by my selfhood, science, do 
 decree," &c. On the other hand, it is here pleaded, 
 
I 
 
 I ' 
 
 
 I 
 
 6 TJI^ RIGHTS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 that if science goes beyond the plain lines of good, 
 and outrages religion and humanity, science may be 
 as common a rogue, felon, murderer, or poisoner, 
 as common a ruffian, as ever fed the gibbet. Nay 
 more, it may be ruffianism unbounded. For 
 science, to us men, is no abstract, ubiquitous thing, 
 but the conspiring hearts and minds and acts and 
 memories of the men who cultivate it. Like any 
 other league, science may be lawful or unlawful, and 
 be left free or laid liold of accordingly. It has no 
 rights, but the right to be good and honest in its 
 own fair field. If any revealment of the inner 
 and more hidden side of God's works is to come 
 to it, that right well obeyed is how it will come. 
 
 The Place of Science, — Science has a rank as 
 everything else has, from worm to philosopher, but 
 no special dignity as science. When good, it is 
 large, enlarging, and useful, but as a faculty it is 
 neither good nor bad in itself Per se, its aim 
 is to know from principles. This abstract knowing, 
 unless entered by other powers, is an exercise of subor- 
 dinate faculties, and the honest domain of external 
 nature is its present field. In other ages now not 
 comprehended, but coming up again before the 
 mind, deeper realms of science have been culti- 
 vated ; the physical and sensual skin of things is 
 the object, the providential object, of the science of 
 the present day. In this democracy and platitude 
 of knowledges, what Swedenborg calls scientifics, 
 there is nothing that outlies right and conscience, 
 nothing that can set up for itself, and do what it 
 likes irrespective of good and evil. The scientific 
 man's dog, and the costermonger's donkey, will be 
 protected by an equal England, and an equal 
 heaven, and science must not harm them. God, 
 not science, makes rights. 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF SCIENCE, 7 
 
 Wrong Ambitions of Science. — It has happened 
 from the foolishness of the dignity of science, and 
 the falsity of the rights of science, that the am- 
 bitions of science are preposterous. This is a root 
 of evil. Numerous minds have been inflated by the 
 dignity aforesaid, and inflamed by the rights, which 
 are not meant in nature to sound the deep problems 
 they have attempted. They lack genius for the 
 investigation. They have no spiritual perceptions ; 
 no analogical power ; no ear for the harmony which 
 principles play as they move over the varied and very 
 difficult chords of nature. They are like astronomers 
 without telescopes, and indeed without eyes, and 
 above all, without adequate minds, who require to 
 have the sun, moon, and stars in their observatories 
 before they can study them. They must vivisect 
 the system of nature in order to get at it. So it 
 has come, owing to vanity, dignity, rights, and 
 shocking privileges unbanned by law, that many 
 who can handle a scalpel, or a red-hot iron, are after 
 the most insoluble problems with no inward fitness 
 for their comprehension ; or rather, torture in hand, 
 they do not know or care what else they are after. 
 Their delirium over their own works is one root of 
 vivisection. ''Fools rush in where angels dare 
 not tread." This subject will occur again presently. 
 In the meantime it may be noted that the useless, 
 because incompetent people referred to, being with- 
 out a calling in knowledge, yet desirous to possess 
 its wealth for the sake of its honours, constitute the 
 dangerous classes in science, and the criminal class 
 in physiological scientism ; and if they have free 
 play, and get loose, they will ruin their respective 
 institutions and associations. This by the way. 
 
 It 
 II 
 
a 
 
 PHYSIOLOGICAL IMPOTENCE, 
 
 \\\ 
 
 III. 
 
 VIVISECTION DEMOKSTRATES PHYSIOLOGICAL IMPOTENCE. 
 
 The scalpel and the pincers are the evil inverse of 
 the physiological mind. Like fatal disease, they abuse 
 and slowly kill the living. On the other hand, the 
 bright mind, armed with its genius, makes the dead 
 anatomical forms alive ; its faculties recombine them, 
 inspire them, and play in them. To the violator, 
 the animal body is a house of unnatural agonies, his 
 own creation ; to the physiologist with a genius, it 
 is a self-delighting and rhythmic life. If you are by 
 nature incompetent to divine this life from your own 
 body and mind, and from the dead subject in your dis- 
 secting-room, give the matter up ; put your misplaced 
 ambition on the shelf, and seek some occupation to 
 which you are adequate ; break stones on the 
 geological highroad, or do anything else ; but be 
 sure that you can never maltreat yourself into the 
 genius required, by breaking the vase of life, and 
 recording the spilt phenomena. If you have any 
 genius, you will kill it so ; for the constant love and 
 delight of genius lie in handling without corporeal 
 touching, and in seeing with the eyes of the mind. 
 Astronomy is again in point. An ambition to 
 elicit astronomy, with no genius for doing so, if 
 foolishly persevered in, must force the mind to cry 
 out for the moon and stars to manipulate ; whereas 
 genius manipulates them where they are, in their 
 order ; the spectrum analysis handles them ; the 
 mathematical mind handles them, the optical mind 
 too ; the telescope touches them ; and their distance 
 and its exactitude is the condition of true mental work 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY, 9 
 
 about them. It would crush genius and science, 
 not to say the savant himself, if they came too 
 close. They are not far off from the God-given 
 intelligence of man ; they are mercifully far away 
 from bis sensuality. Just so the problems of life 
 may be unfolded from the contemplation of organic 
 forms ; if you complain that these are dead, it is 
 because you are a corpse with regard to them. 
 You ought to seek some other department in which 
 haply you are alive. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY. 
 
 There is only the most trifling analogy between 
 animals and men, reasoning from below upwards. 
 For animals are limited sensitive existences, and if 
 you will, minds, whose small works and ways on 
 earth demonstrate their boundaries. They have 
 bodies and faculties, and so have men. But all that 
 is distinctively human outlies the animal, and in man 
 overlaps it, or should overlap it, so that it is lost to 
 view. Thus it is that comparative anatomy and 
 physiology, looked at from the bottom upwards, are 
 organism without an interpretation, and gorilla- 
 logical science is the blotting out and the shame 
 of human life. 
 
 On the other hand there is complete and illumina- 
 ting analogy between men and animals when the mind 
 moves rationally from above downwards. They are 
 images and likenesses of human nature and society 
 projected on living tables. That means practically 
 that you can learn about animals, and unlock their 
 secrets, from human life, if you have the genius to 
 
lO 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY. 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY. 
 
 II 
 
 do it ; but you cannot learn anything of the life of 
 man from animals. By the insurgent upward way 
 you can deny the distinctive life of man, but that 
 is all ; gorillalogical induction does deny it. These 
 statements will be amplified further on. 
 
 There is no real similarity between human and 
 animal oiya7is. The lungs of a beaver are as unlike 
 the lungs of a man, as the mud and tree construction 
 which a beaver makes is unlike Buckingham Palace 
 or the Great Western Eailway. They are as unlike 
 as the voices of all beavers since the beginning are 
 unlike the gathered word of mankind whose body 
 is literature. True, the two lungs, in bits, look the 
 same ; nay, the two " plucks " look the same. But 
 it is not what they look like in pieces, out of the 
 body, but w^hat they are in their places in the 
 two bodies ; it is what there comes into them, and 
 throuofh them, that makes them different. Into 
 the beavers lungs, besides its physical blood and 
 juice for construction and repair, come nervous 
 life and governance making function ; and into 
 this come the beaver s affection and the beavers 
 instinctive instructed mind, inspiring the animal 
 lungs, and then its whole frame, with its pecu- 
 liar life : breathing all that that life is into perpe- 
 tual expression fit for perpetual varied action. The 
 beaver's lungs are hung for that life with divine 
 delicacy of adaptation. Into the man s lungs comes 
 his life ; a portion of the life that is mankind in all 
 its development ; in all human deeds and achieve- 
 ments. There is no ratio between the inspiration in an 
 animal's lungs and this stupendous descending influx 
 into human lungs poised by the All- Wise to receive 
 it. The invisible but most real forces pressing 
 into the man, are in a measure infinite in power and 
 purpose compared to the forces, also invisible, press- 
 
 ing down into the beaver. The influx of the human 
 pressure upon the organ, constant from end to end 
 of life, makes the very form all it is at last. 
 
 How do living forces act ? or, What is Life f — Life 
 in the body is the fitness of the body to be laid hold 
 of by the soul and the mind, following the influx which 
 first forms and then uses the fitness. It is the cor- 
 respondence of the body to the wants and uses of 
 the man within it and above it. The form of each 
 organism is what constitutes that fitness, and is that 
 correspondency. Thus the organism seen in its place 
 by the anatomically instructed eye of a fitting genius, 
 is an incarnate exhibition of the mental and spiritual 
 working of the inhabitant of the organism. The 
 nerves that carry human thought and feeling through 
 the body proceed from embodied faculties non- 
 existent in the animal, and require adaptations in 
 form and in function, in blood and fluid, for which 
 the animal has no use. The poise of Newton's lungs 
 for a problem, the hush to hear the supreme word of 
 it ;— the held breath of a Swedenborg, as truth after 
 truth, revelation after revelation, astonishment after 
 astonishment, translated themselves into spiritual, 
 solid fact on the prepared tables of his understand- 
 ing, — into full-armed fact on its massive balks and 
 strands ; — no animal is competent to these positions, 
 and none therefore requires them. Physical they still 
 are, yet not animal, but spiritual and intellectual phy- 
 sics. The telegraphs proceed from different forces, 
 and require at the other end, in the organs, attitudes 
 for signifying their commands, alphabets to be trans- 
 lated into bodily messages, and powers that are 
 beyond the scope of animal life. 
 
 This is difficult to see, yet it is true. The way not 
 to see it is, to prosecute human anatomy with no 
 
13 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY. 
 
 spiritual genius to animate its dead side. And one 
 way to deny and abhor these truths is to cut up ani- 
 mals alive, and to reason and infer from their irrele- 
 vant life ; the violation of which is the only thing you 
 know about it, for now it is your own selfhood in its 
 artifices. Here knowledge is not the double of 
 existence ; the truths of violation, except as heavy 
 judgments on man, are not the truths of the Creator. 
 They are the lies of the devil. 
 
 There is no real similarity between the organs and 
 parts of animals opened and dissected alive, and the 
 corresponding organs and parts in animals in the 
 enjoyment of their existence. — Animal life and the 
 functions of that life in organism, are here the quest 
 of the physiologist. Again, from another point of 
 view, what is life ? Life is the operant affection or 
 love which every animal has for following out its pecu- 
 liar nature through its organization. The creature 
 has a practical mind answering to this love or supreme 
 want, which is its being. It has a body, which its 
 nature and its mind fill from inmost to outmost, and 
 which carries them both into its actions. Every fibre 
 and function of fibre is instinct with these lives, one 
 within the other. The product of this animal love 
 of itself, and of what it is and does, is an offensive 
 and defensive unity of the creature. For this end 
 all the parts are related to each other, and cannot 
 livingly be contemplated apart. There is sympathy, 
 co-operation, affection of part for part, and affection 
 of the whole creature to itself, for maintenance, pro- 
 pagation, and power. Dissect the animal when dead, 
 and in exact proportion to your own understanding 
 of love, and the current of faculty which flows from 
 that, to your physiological genius, to your affectionate 
 sympathy with the animal life and habit under view, 
 
 THE PATH OF ANALOGY. 
 
 13 
 
 and to your divination of character as a soul of form, — 
 in proportion to your human respect of the creature 
 when alive, — you will reanimate the prostrate organi- 
 zation, and gradually help your science to divine how 
 the structures before you correspond to the parts of 
 the nature which is carried out in the existence of the 
 animal. You will see how its organism hands down 
 its character into the world of sense in the actions of 
 its life. That organic set of perceptions is the phy- 
 siology of any one animal. You will see, for example, 
 how a horse's lungs hang upon its thoughts and 
 desires ; how a tiger s lungs hang upon its love ; and 
 so forth. You will see that the integrality of every 
 position in the animal is a necessity for your percep- 
 tions. You will see the existing case by a horse 
 genius, and a tiger genius, given through correspon- 
 dences into your own faculties. 
 
 Cut the animal up alive, and the tightness of life 
 is gone ; the draw of respiration is gone ; inspiration, 
 which fills all creatures, and expiration, which puri- 
 fies for another filling— these are cancelled. Equable 
 tension, which is life's ever- varying plane, is gone, and 
 life has no playground left. Separate spasms repre- 
 sent violation by the man, and aberration of the 
 victim. Distinctive function disappears, for function 
 comes of wholeness. Like the lobster casting away 
 its claws, the animal would break itself to pieces if 
 it could. It does break up its autonomy of function. 
 Its intimate contortions evidence this. Its life and 
 offices now are horrible fragments, so crushed that 
 no understanding can repiece them. The bloody con- 
 sciousness of the false physiologist never even tries 
 to do so. He shows the tatters and rags of a nature, 
 ignorant that before he began they lay as delights in 
 the harmonious clothing of an organized animal soul. 
 
r-i 
 
 14 BASE PHYSIOLOGY, 
 
 V. 
 
 BASE PHYSIOLOGY 
 
 15 
 
 NONE BUT THE BASEST ANALYTICAL FACTS HAVE A 
 PLACE IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE DAY. 
 
 They are not low facts, for sucli are indispensable as 
 a basis in every science ; but they are essentially 
 base and inhuman facts, the impostures of their 
 subjects. Put forth with great pride, they are 
 disgraceful to knowledge. The physiologists glory 
 in their shame. Such physiology, and it now repre- 
 sents nearly the whole science, errs in several ways. 
 It takes for granted the actual identity of animal 
 and human nerves, muscles, and viscera, and uncon- 
 sciously substitutes the animal for the human. Per- 
 force it leaves out all which is not identical, and 
 therefore omits the human. It is animality sen- 
 sualized by physiology. It is made up of bits of 
 animal agonies ; a carved obscene idol of the 
 laboratory. Under it lies an automaton got from tor- 
 tured insects. The pangs of dogs and cats, and rabbits, 
 and all animals cheap enough to be its food, or to take 
 its poison and receive its pollution, are its entrails ; 
 a woof and web like that of the fatal sisters, of 
 which such physiology is one. Its brains are muti- 
 lations. A poorer monster, or a more gory, never 
 was laid out in the deadhouse of scientific inquest. 
 It is impossible to identify remains which are the 
 mincemeat of zoology. They belong every day to 
 more and more victims. There are skinned rats in 
 it, and all maltreated vermin in it ; and every one of 
 them is sweet and innocent compared to the cruelty 
 that sits at the trough where these poor creatures are 
 muzzled and martyred. 
 
 After such an analysis, synthesis is plainly impos- 
 sible, excepting such synthesis as a now historical 
 surgeon made, who taliacotianized a living rat to a 
 living crow. Conglutination is evidently possible, 
 and that is what physiology has attained to. It is a 
 menagerie of direful creatures and symptoms packed 
 until they grow together, and then accepted as the 
 adequate analogue of the human body, and as the 
 minister and interpreter of human life. 
 
 All reasoning from these sanguinary pieces, from 
 this physiological " Thames Mystery," is of course 
 analogical ; but analogy will not work here. Its 
 bridges do not reach from animals to man, still less 
 from violated animals to the truths of science. 
 Subverted animal organs, functions, and professors, 
 are all that is present. Incapacity, greedily calling 
 for more victims to make it capable, is witness to the 
 futility of violational research. In short, vivisection 
 is the lean famine and gory jaws of a false and evil 
 science. 
 
 Human physiology is not extant ; at present there 
 is no such thing ; but the substantial facts of that 
 anatomico-physiological geography which is common 
 to all organized beings, and therefore in no sense 
 proper to man, may be better elicited by anatomy 
 and other sources of human observation than by 
 any cruel methods. Had vivisection been impos- 
 sible, the circulation of the blood mio^ht have been 
 elicited by Harvey, by injection and common obser- 
 vation. All the ^' vaso motor " thoughts can, and 
 have, come into the gifted mind, without dissecting 
 and irritating the arteries or capillaries of living 
 animals. The formulas about reflex action, the 
 telegraphy of nerves, can be suggested by the 
 simplest means when the mind wants them. A 
 
i6 
 
 BASE PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 pinch of snuff followed by a sneeze presents the full 
 doctrine to a physiological Newton, as a falling apple 
 presented gravitation. The decease of sanguinary 
 sensuality would of itself remove a film of sin from 
 the eye of physiology ; and genius, with humane 
 and penetrating thoughts, honouring the lives of 
 all creatures, could then come behind the field of 
 vision. The function of imagination in science, 
 spoken of lately by one experimentalist, would have 
 room criven to it, when sensual violence, which 
 stands as a red spectre between man and discovery, 
 was pushed aside as a diabolical means. Repentance 
 of the evils treated of, in setting aside hard hearts, 
 would leave new men impressible to new revelations 
 of knowledge. 
 
 There will be mistakes then, guesses that are 
 wrono- : are there none now ? Vivisector contradicts 
 vivisector ; and the record of one set of experiments 
 challenores and obliterates the record of another. The 
 scientists are in a hurry to be scientific, but God 
 opens no gates to hurry. If the genius is not there, 
 put up with the absence of it, and attend to the 
 works of the day. You will never take the kingdom 
 of physiology by violence directed to other sentient 
 creatures, though you may take the kingdom of 
 heaven by force — force put upon yourself to repress 
 the lusts of cruelty in your own heart. And that 
 repression, violent if need be, is the main factor which 
 it lies with ourselves to employ, to call down genius 
 and its marvellous sight from the place where it 
 abides. 
 
 This matter of absence of hurry is of great import 
 in these sciences. It is not as if there were a petty 
 plan to be known, and it could be got to the bottom 
 of speedily by human probes, but the field is such 
 
 EGYPT. 
 
 17 
 
 that only a little of it can ever be acquired by man- 
 kind — probably only the parts that are needful, 
 because edifying for each particular age; all the rest 
 being vanity strutting in nature. New conscience 
 first, and then, new mind, coming to the investiga- 
 tion, in a manner born for it, will elicit fresh dis- 
 coveries as they are required. These will be partial 
 views also, but useful. In a few years, judging from 
 the nature of such facts, and from the history of 
 science, and the wants of the minds of successive 
 generations, they will be put aside for other formulas 
 germane to each new time. No greed of getting the 
 final thing, of cashing nature into scientific gold, 
 and enriching the little selfhood of a day with its 
 wealth, can have any result but that of putting the 
 asses' ears of Midas upon poor science. It is cruel 
 and deluding to hold out prospects of such wealth to 
 a host of small speculators in the truth mines of 
 nature. The most of them, by debasing and soiling 
 their age, spoil the greater enterprise of genius, and 
 practise deliberate if not cruel idleness themselves. 
 Protestant countries are overrun with monkish 
 orders of science, and many a strong arm born for 
 service is thus abstracted from the beneficent 
 work of the world, which wants all hands at present 
 to do it. 
 
 VI. 
 
 EGYPT. 
 
 The present range of violational facts fits into no 
 system of truth, and cannot he appropriated by the 
 vivisector s: it will he taken from them, and put to use 
 by those who renounce their ways as heing evil. — Any 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 EG YPT. 
 
 processes, however monstrous, if persevered in, will 
 elicit a system of facts under a system-maker— a 
 complex and enormous system, simulating a creation, 
 if time and room for growth be given. All evil is 
 such a system, and is indeed a vast nature ; but it 
 founds a stupidity which makes lasting possession of 
 facts impossible. So of vivisection. It leaves stand- 
 ing a ghastly, and if you please universal science, 
 answering properly to nothing within or without — 
 a science of human selfhood, with large delusive 
 dreams of possession. This exists, and cannot yet 
 be forgotten; it must be administered; and it will 
 be handed over to humane genius seeking other 
 ends. To that genius it can be useful, because it is 
 now property where property can be held ; and in 
 its hands it may confirm some results. It is, indeed, 
 a bog of fallacies, but bogs must be burnt, or planted, 
 and then cultivated. Now, nothing is admitted here, 
 excepting that ill-gotten gains of former times will 
 pass to good men, and without farther crime be em- 
 ployed for honest ends. We shall have no more 
 pounding of animal life ; there is bad blood enough 
 in that way already, and science will feel the angry 
 effects of it for long ; but we have the stuff on hand, 
 and it is ours, chiefly for avoiding ; and in grains, for 
 insight, and for humanity. It will not defile the 
 fingers of those who abhor the method of its acqui- 
 sition, but cannot give it back to the dead. It is the 
 old story; the gold and silver vessels of the 
 Egyptians may be borrowed by the Israehtes, and 
 will belong to them on their march. The Holy 
 Scripture has many. instances of the transference of 
 the possessions of evil to the hands of good ; and here 
 also we shall have to be faithful in the unrighteous 
 mammon. 
 
 EGYPT. 
 
 19 
 
 There are similarities between this black art of the 
 violationists and the ancient mysteries of Egypt. — 
 Both of them mingle beasts and men in a common 
 rite and a common creed. Both of them accept the 
 theory of transformations, and reckon all life to be 
 continuous and identical, and the passage from 
 monkeys to men of actual occurrence. Both of them 
 regard beasts as sacred, i.e., consecrated to destruc- 
 tive rites. With both of them life is limited to 
 nature, and its gods or theories are artificial pro- 
 ducts. With both, secrecy is the final result; 
 secrecy of plans and perpetrations ; and then secrecy 
 of writing forth ; hieroglyphics, and uncommon ter- 
 minology. The good of neither can be told ; there 
 is no common population, no Eoyal Commission even, 
 that can learn it; for it is a mystery, and belongs to 
 priests and to professionals. Both are systems of 
 subjugation of the human mind. Both leave out the 
 common people, except as tools, and slaves to rites 
 and operations. Both believe in the eternity of 
 men*s bodies — an eternity of mummy, and the con- 
 sequences of mummy ; and an eternity of the scien- 
 tific body of a man's fame — his mental mummy. 
 Both of them are jealous with that cruel jealousy 
 that belongs to privileges which are sacred, secret, 
 and evil. Both are anti-human, final states of per- 
 version which have come down from a long and 
 degenerating past ; whereof the one has long since 
 had its doom, and is only known in Scripture and in 
 monument; and the other is now summoned and 
 invaded by the angel of humanity that will destroy 
 it. The existence of both marks the decline of a 
 great religion, and exhibits a statue of its consumma- 
 tion and its woe. Both of them summon the deso- 
 lating plagues of the last times. Human agency. 
 
20 
 
 EGYPT. 
 
 under divine, is in both cases the means by which 
 the evil Egypt will be brought to a close. Both die 
 of a new religion. 
 
 The evil heart toward vivisection has heen growing 
 for ages, hut tvith rapidity in the latter half of 
 this century. — In former times it was confined to 
 renowned professors, now it extends to the students 
 of medical colleges, and the practice is only limited 
 by their consciences, which are in good part formed 
 by the bad examples of their teachers. Careful 
 books are published for the classes to instruct them 
 how to do the violations. When the present writer 
 was in medical school, to the best of his knowledge 
 no student ever dreamed of doing such things ; an 
 animal was occasionally poisoned with woorali by a 
 lecturer, but this led to no repetition of experi- 
 ment ; and if students had been known to violate 
 doo-s and cats, the general conscience of the school 
 would have rebuked it. All this has quickly 
 changed for the worse. Now, however, when these 
 practices are coming up for judgment, we learn that 
 only a few frogs, and such like insignificant and 
 smally sentient creatures, are the victims of the pro- 
 cess. Unfortunately, the hand-books do not say so ; 
 and the apologists never said so till now. We know, 
 on the contrary, that dogs and cats, rabbits, guinea 
 pigs, rats, innumerable, have been violated to 
 scientific slow death of late years ; we know that 
 if elephants were cheap, and if secrecy was cheap, 
 elephants would have figured to as large an extent 
 as rats in the troughs of vivisection, and to audiences 
 tending to grow from rat-dimension to elephant- 
 dimension. No man not interested personally, but 
 humanely, can doubt what the vivisectors are doing, 
 or what they would have done. In one laboratory. 
 
 EGYPT. 
 
 21 
 
 teste Dr. Hoggan, from one to three dogs a day was 
 the number of victims. As vivisection is now at 
 the bar, its plea of " only frogs " is pleaded against 
 out of its own records. 
 
 But then chloroform and anaesthetics have made it 
 all right ; the animals sacred to writhing for hours 
 on the altars of science, and to supplying the food 
 of new systems to the self-created intellect of man, — 
 they, by mercy of science, feel no pain, but are read 
 through like books, and then put underground. 
 Are the vivisectors, who are now at the bar of God 
 and man, and w^ho have a heavy verdict to fear, 
 impartial witnesses ? They have borne the suflferings 
 of the flesh of other beings so calmly, that they are 
 poor judges of what hurts. It is known that in 
 many cases chloroform does not annul the force 
 of dreadful nervous shock. It is known that after- 
 consciousness often reports agony suflfered during sur- 
 gical operations under '' ansesthesia." One sees that 
 the preliminary process of muzzling, and tying, and 
 holding for the despotism of the coming knife, is 
 outrageously cruel ; that the smell of the last vic- 
 tim's violation, to creatures of instinct, is horrible 
 beyond our nerves ; and that no one who loved a 
 dog or a cat could go on with the process, and that 
 nobody but a Royal Commission could doubt the 
 fact. True, somewhat similar things are done for 
 surgical operations ; but there is voluntary submis- 
 sion there, and purpose of use and service, which 
 may fill the knife with a sacred tenderness where 
 the vivisecting scalpel is all human cruelty harder 
 than the steel. No one not partially demonized can 
 do the one thing to a dog ; the tenderest of men 
 might, under necessity, do the other to his own 
 daughter or his own wife. A man has a right to be 
 
22 
 
 EGYPT, 
 
 abstracted from the pangs he causes, let them be 
 ever so mortal, if he feels and knows that he is 
 doing pure good in pure justice to his fellows, or to 
 the animal tribes : he has full right to be surgeon, 
 butcher, executioner ; to administer the cat ; to 
 direct the battle, point the cannon, and wield the 
 cutlass ; honourable and honest right ; but to build 
 up his own selfhood in science out of the woes and 
 pains of other beings, is simply devilish, and abhor- 
 rent to all human conscience, as to all human culture. 
 The utter selfishness of the end, the ''do as you 
 like" of it, first the private selfishness, then the 
 corporate selfishness, a worse form than the private, 
 consigns these deeds, one and all, to the deepest 
 abysses of crime — not the less criminal that tiiey 
 are not yet legal crime. 
 
 If it were possible to take the word of the defen- 
 dants, which no judge on any bench would dare to 
 do, and if chloroform really fell on the victims as a 
 sweet sleep from which they were never to awaken, 
 as in a bed where the operator was like a cradle- 
 rocking nurse ; and if the strokes which open brain 
 and spine, and chest and abdomen, were unfelt, still 
 the question would come. What right have you to 
 do this horrid thing to one of God's sentient crea- 
 tures ? We deny the rights of your artificial science : 
 you gain no truth or good ; nothing but evil curiosity 
 and ambition gi'atified by your doings. We also 
 assert that you are acting against the best interests 
 of real science when you are spoiling your own 
 faculties, which are the science perceivers. Pain, or 
 no pain, the sights and sounds and contortions, the 
 violation of organic insides, are simply abominable ; 
 and nothing but a dreadful education could enable 
 you to witness them. Chloroform has given you a 
 
 EGYPT, 
 
 n 
 
 seeming right to quarry all animal life as if it was 
 marble of your estate, meant to be cut up into your 
 statues, and to hand down your well-inscribed monu- 
 ments to after ages ; to build Egyptian pyramids for 
 perishable you. Chloroform has blunted your feelings 
 to the destruction inwrought upon yourselves. It has 
 extended indefinitely into science the already great 
 empire of the savage man who murders charity as 
 he goes. It has made the demon of materialism 
 into the organon and mouthpiece of the truths of hv- 
 ing natures. It is the conscience-quieting opiate of a 
 science dying of its own abominations : the '^ soul 
 take thine ease" of all ruinous doctors and professors. 
 Plea that animals are automatons, — Will you here 
 plead, as a subtle doctrine of justification, that 
 animals are automatons, and have no feelings ? If 
 you do, that hypothesis comes from no impartial con- 
 sideration, but is the fruit of past misdeeds, and 
 contains the seed of endless evils to come. Were it 
 true, violation would be as abhorrent to every sense 
 as it is now. The torture of what seems to live 
 and agonize would be shocking to the mind. 
 And again, were it true, the hypothesis extended 
 whither the good Berkeley never carried his idealism, 
 would plead that all men, women, and children, but 
 excepting only self, are but phantasms and auto- 
 mata, and can as such be handled without remorse. 
 Now all crime, in exact proportion to its enormity, 
 does so deal with them ; and the hopelessness of 
 crime lies in the fact that it has no sense of the 
 sufferings of other people. Their merely automatic 
 character is its intellect, and universal perceptive 
 state. And reversing the process, it may be 
 assumed as certain that violational scientism can- 
 not reign long before the stupefaction of humane 
 
24 
 
 INTERESTS OF SCIENCE, 
 
 mind which it causes, reveals itself in a formal doc- 
 trine before the world that animals are mere automa- 
 tons, and may be scientifically, conscientiously, and 
 religiously sawn like boards. We hail here the 
 truth that every practised evil has its own falsity 
 to confirm it and make it comfortable (see Sweden- 
 borg). 
 
 VIL 
 
 INTERESTS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 The interests of Science are pleaded. — The rights 
 of science have already been somewhat considered ; 
 the interests mean much the same thing as the 
 rights. But they mean also vested interests, such 
 as a corporation enjoys by royal charter. Science 
 represented by the medical profession has long been 
 established by law ; it is supposed to know its own 
 business, and that nobody else knows it ; therefore 
 it resents public opinion as irrelevant, and laughs at 
 the policeman. He cannot get into the torture- 
 room called the laboratory, because vested interests 
 stand at the door. The conscience of the age, filled 
 in many other channels with the pressure of a new 
 Christianity, insists upon examining all vested 
 interests to ascertain if they be indeed the real 
 interests in the case ; this conscience, as in Plimsoll, 
 insists upon being admitted by law into dark corners 
 hitherto unexplored. It will press into the dens of 
 science, and clear them of their money-changers, 
 even though these cry out : '* The temple, the temple ; 
 you are violating the established temple of our 
 truth ! " 
 
 So much for these vested interests, allowed to 
 
 INTERESTS OF SCIENCE, 
 
 25 
 
 grow to direful proportions in the deadness of the 
 professorial and the sleep of the public conscience. 
 
 Other interests of physiological science are founded 
 upon pleas of service and good character. Such science 
 must be free to do as it likes, because it is a good 
 friend to practical medicine and human healing. 
 Medicine has made great strides of late, and this is 
 owing noticeably to violation al science. Now, on 
 the contrary, the side of medicine which is turned 
 to such physiology, has made no assignable progress 
 from this source. It has been corrupted by it, nay 
 torn and mangled by it, and instead of diseases being 
 healed, tissues and nerves and muscles have been 
 treated, and chemicals without have been fired into 
 presumed chemicals within, often with violent aim. 
 Anaesthesia, or the momentary obliteration of the 
 sense of painful symptoms, has drugged the patient 
 and the art. The tendency is to squander the 
 doctor in scientific vagaries when he ought to be 
 gathered up in a common-sense head before the 
 case ; to make him walk like a probe, see like a 
 knife, and think like a microscope. Nevertheless, 
 in spite of evil physiology whispering at its ear, 
 medicine has made advances. From plain causes. 
 The public, subject to a new spirit from God, will 
 not abide the former physic, and the public forces 
 the profession to do something else ; and the com- 
 pulsory abandonment of much poisonous drugging 
 is an advance in the fate of the physician. The pres- 
 sure on the age is here ; the descending pressure, 
 impossible to be gainsaid, of a new Christian Church; 
 and the doctors have, like other callings, the bene- 
 fit of it. 'Tis real estate to be still permitted to be 
 active and not to be able to do evil. 
 
 Concurrently, many benign things have come in 
 
26 
 
 INTERESTS OF SCIENCE, 
 
 DEC A V OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 27 
 
 along with this irresistible pressure of the higher 
 world upon the lower. Homoeopathy has come down 
 one little rational ray, and saves the divine uses of 
 druo-s, where their abuses would otherwise have cast 
 them out of healing altogether. It has lifted 
 poisons into helps, as the brazen serpent was lifted 
 up to save those who were dying of venomous 
 serpents. It has fought its way, and will fight so 
 lonof as it is needed. No one denies that it has 
 stricken the blood bowl and the poison bowl out of 
 the hands of old physic. It has also knocked the 
 brains out of common physiology, which cannot 
 understand it. The public has seen this ; has 
 watched the combat; and a stride towards small 
 doses is made by medicine, because the patients feel 
 their good, and also will no longer take large doses. 
 But this has nothing to do with cutting up dogs and 
 cats alive ; advance in physic has not been owing to 
 their hells. The cause is clear ; new thought and 
 life given from above, and new arts and sciences 
 worthy of the name, born of the open reception of 
 good by the people at large, and then stolen by the 
 old profession. 
 
 The discouragement, however, by which evil phy- 
 siology has operated against these benign results, is 
 immense ; no man can calculate it. It has put 
 back the cause of physical health, nay more, of honest 
 and honourable care for the body and the man, for 
 generations, for it has stupefied the medical pro- 
 fession and enslaved under its spiritual dulness 
 nearly the whole population. 
 
 We now proceed to read some of the signs of this 
 state of things. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 EXTENSION AND DECAY OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 Vaccination, — The introduction of vaccination, the 
 persistence in it, and its elevation into a compulsory 
 law, may be cited as a cardinal instance of blindness 
 to the most general considerations of health on the 
 part of the medical profession. Stupid as vaccination 
 is in the present, it is more perniciously stupid for 
 the future. None but a chartered calling in interior 
 private ruin could entertain or maintain it. See 
 how the case stands. 
 
 The causes of death may be divided into natural, 
 accidental, and hereditary. Few people die natural 
 deaths, of mere fulness of years without intervention 
 of disease. Many die of acute diseases ; and of these 
 a large proportion have weakness of constitution 
 lying in them, which betokens hereditary taint, with- 
 out which the accidental disease would not have 
 arrested their lives. The third class comprises the 
 hereditary diseases which fatally affect the com- 
 munity. Scrofula, consumption, insanity, gout, can- 
 cer, syphilis, and the vice diseases, such as drunken- 
 ness and the like, are genera of disease which belong 
 here. They figure largely in the causes of death. 
 Temporary maladies are influenced by them towards 
 fatal issues. Thus many cases of whooping-cough 
 and measles, and of teething, die because of their 
 consumptive parentage. For this reason the number 
 of deaths from hereditary causes might be multiplied 
 in the returns. 
 
), 
 
 28 
 
 DEC A Y OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 DEC A V OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 29 
 
 If we could survey the infants of the United King- 
 dom, and make inquisition of their parentage, and 
 then take note of the infant rate of mortality, and of 
 subsequent mortalities by decenniums, we might 
 nearly allocate the numbers that would die out of 
 the multitude of cases thus brought before us. So 
 many of them of syphilis in the first year, with so 
 many of syphilis left alive for future ill health, or as 
 easy grounds for other diseases. So many of cancer, 
 late perhaps in life ; the mother s history pointing 
 the way. So many of consumption at various stages 
 of life. So many of madness. So many of heart 
 disease. If we could see far enough, we could pre- 
 dict from the known taint the ground of death. Not 
 seeing at all, we yet know that the cause is there 
 from the equable death-rate. Some taint of the 
 kind exists in nearly every family, and explains its 
 vices, its deaths, and often its extinction. 
 
 God has made families separate, and the taints 
 with which they are afflicted, and of which they die, 
 are separate also. The more separate they are kept, 
 as by well-assorted marriages, such assorting being 
 honest enlightened separation, the better it evidently 
 is for human nature. 
 
 The blood which is the life also has in it the blood 
 which is the death. This death is a seed working in 
 the system until its destruction is prematurely 
 effected. The great diseases are the organs and 
 manufactories of human decay. They exist in their 
 beo^innino^s in nearly all our infants : one mortal 
 disease in one class of constitutions, another in 
 another class ; and more or less misery and overt 
 malady of body and mind accompanies the taint in 
 its progress from the cradle to the coffin. 
 
 There is no medical dogma so much insisted upon 
 
 as vaccination. Though of recent family, it is the 
 acknowledged royal seed of medicine which already 
 sits upon its throne. 
 
 What does vaccination do? The infants are,indeed, 
 appointed to die in time of the reigning disease of their 
 lives ; but this disease is inscrutable for the most 
 part until its period for manifestation arrives. They 
 look tolerably healthy; and if medical inquiry went 
 strictly back into the history of parents and ancestors, 
 the pick and choice of infants left to vaccinate from 
 among the poor would be very small. If some of 
 our kings when infants had been straitly canvassed, 
 no far-seeing decent beggar would have been vacci- 
 nated from their veins. But vaccination shuts its 
 eyes, and takes its way. 
 
 The consequence is, that breaking down the 
 divine law of keeping evils separate, of imprisonino* 
 them in families, vaccination mingles in a communism 
 of blood the taints of the community. Every 
 hereditary sewer opens up into every nursery; nay, 
 into each infant's very heart. All ferments of 
 disease are poured by the healing art through the 
 physical nature of the people at the tenderest ao-e. 
 An antichrist is reached here when medicine says, 
 through the penal State, '^Suflfer little children to 
 come unto me." 
 
 Now the statistic to be worked out by the 
 Statistical and Epidemiological Societies, is the fol- 
 lowing : If seven infants die every week of syphilis 
 in London, how many are left alive impregnated with 
 the same disease ; how many of these are ignorantly 
 vaccinated from ; what is the natural increase of 
 syphilis thus ; and so on, and so on ; what is the 
 formula of progression, and how long will it take to 
 extend the poison of syphilis to the entire population ? 
 
30 
 
 DEC A Y OF THE OLD MEDICINE, 
 
 DECA V OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 31 
 
 f 
 
 And the like with every other disease : standing on 
 its own first figures, how long a time will it take to 
 universalize consumption, scrofula, cancer, arthritic 
 poison, insanity, etc., etc., etc., until no vaccinated 
 person is left who is not infested by all the con- 
 tagious of the time ? It is impossible to elude this 
 result. The consequences to the population may 
 appear at a distance from their causes, and look 
 quite novel, as effects develop themselves slowly; 
 but they are as sure as fate. Only note, that the 
 conditions being comparatively new, of a popula- 
 tion subtly poisoned with venom put into the blood, 
 careful study is necessary to trace and allocate the 
 results, which are not similar to anything that the 
 past has furnished. 
 
 In passing we note the plain fact, that as inherited 
 constitutional diseases render acute temporary mala- 
 dies more intractable and fatal, so the injection and 
 ingeneration of a plane of constitutional diseases 
 artificially communicated by vaccination, imparts to 
 the diseases of childhood a terrible depth of mortality, 
 and thus gives dentition, measles, whooping-cough, 
 scarlatina, a power of destruction which they would 
 never have in unvaccinated infants. Note also that 
 vaccination is done just at the period when disease 
 may be expected ; childhood and old age standing 
 Ulone as periods in this respect. 
 
 The medical profession puts in only one plea in 
 abatement of the plain inference, of universal com- 
 munication of hereditary taints, — that if no ^' blood " 
 is drawn in the act of vaccination, the vaccine disease 
 alone is communicated, and the constitution of the 
 vaccinifer is left out. Passing by the fact of numer- 
 ous cases of syphilitic and other infection occurring 
 from vaccination, and which are attempted to be 
 
 accounted for on the ground that blood has been 
 drawn, or rather, which are for the most part denied 
 point blank by the vaccinators, — what probability is 
 there in common sense that a vesicle on a syphilitic 
 arm should not carry the syphilis into the second 
 infant's system, and infect its blood ? No profession 
 but a crowned fool would dare the risk. For every 
 drop of lymph in the body is in rapport with the 
 entire blood, and by its contents commands and 
 modifies the state of the blood. The medical hypo- 
 thesis would make it appear to be unimportant to 
 select infants for vaccinating from, carefully ; the 
 only necessary point being to take care that the 
 puncture is bloodless. May we not here chronicle 
 corporate blindness as well as hardness of heart? Is 
 it possible that the English people can allow, that 
 Avith a mind such as this reigning in the healing art, 
 the body which practises it is making strides in 
 practical medicine ? But a word here on the lymph. 
 Lymph-poisoning. — Coherent views of the human 
 body have so far vanished out of modern percep- 
 tion, that the place of the lymph in the economy is 
 overlooked. Now the cellular tissues, from which 
 the lymphatics arise, are a kind of terminal sea to 
 the whole of the fluids, that is to say, to the visceral 
 lakes and rivers of the body. They are the area of 
 a universal communication. In them especially the 
 body is materially continuous. They reign through- 
 out the conglobate glands, are present in all the 
 glands, and are connected with their diseases. And 
 yielding their lymph to the blood by the absorbents 
 or lymphatics, they communicate to it their states 
 and properties. They are the grand expanse of 
 absorption. And the lymph, and its congener, the 
 chyle, is the milk and impressible infant state of the 
 
32 
 
 DEC A Y OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 rest of the fluids. Swedenborg has shown these 
 truths in his Animal Kingdom. Thus he says : 
 '' The lymph is the true purer blood " (vol. i. p. 219). 
 '' The cellular tissue is the emporium of the lym- 
 phatics" (p. 289). ''The cellular tissues, lympha- 
 tics, thoracic duct, mesenteric glands, and receptacle 
 of the chyle, are all continuous, and identical in use, 
 structure, and nature" (p. 222). " The cellular coat 
 is a lymphatic projected into a plane" (pp. 222, 319). 
 Thus the cellular tissue, and the lymph which arises 
 in it, pervade the constitution, and whatever modi- 
 fies them produces universal visceral effects. Poison- 
 ous injection therefore of any kind communicated to 
 the lymph, goes always either, first, to its own elective 
 centres and peculiar seats, as in syphilis or con- 
 sumption ; or secondly, to the patient's weakest part, 
 evoking his tendencies to disease, and aggravating his 
 existing diseases. Hence vaccination, by putting 
 animal and human virus into '' the true purer blood," 
 and into the universal arena of it, namely, the cellular 
 tissue, " the emporium of the lymphatics," tends to 
 distribute the diseases of which it may be the vehicle, 
 to their own susceptible seats in the body, and also 
 to evoke by its incitation the latent diseases of the 
 constitution. So lymph-poisoning is worse than 
 blood-poisoning ; because the sphere invaded is 
 higher and wider and deeper ; the effects chronic ; 
 the means of elimination incomparably more diffi- 
 cult, and often impossible. True, many infants do 
 not suffer appreciably ; but we know that taints 
 may be years in showing themselves. Moreover, we 
 guard against causes of unhealth even although they 
 affect visibly but a small number of the people. 
 Organic molecules in Thames water are under a 
 scientific police, and rightly so, when yet few cases of 
 
 DECA V OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 33 
 
 mischief are traced to its effects. The common 
 sense is, that all are injured by unwholesome influ- 
 ences from without, especially by habitual lymph- 
 poisoning, whether we can trace the vitiation of 
 health to vaccination or not. 
 
 Materialism, we may here coin an ugly word and 
 say '' matterism," reigns in it, else it would be seen 
 that evil infections, violating the skin by the lancet, 
 must have consequences of decay acting upon the 
 race, although these consequences may deceive 
 coarse observation by appearing at a distance from 
 their causes, just as the influence of sewers and 
 their connection with fevers was scarcely appreci- 
 ated by our hard-nosed ancestors. Diseases, we 
 know, maybe dynamic as well as material; they 
 may be suppressed from outward manifestation, and 
 fall in long times, or even at once, upon remote 
 faculties and organs. The vaccinated syphilis of 
 one organism, passing into another, may not mani- 
 fest itself by eruption, or chancre, or visible syphilitic 
 taint at all, but may fall upon the nervous life, and 
 be a raging and unappeasable lust in after life. A 
 keener philosophy, tracking the sins of the blood 
 through their career, may see with fatal certainty 
 that one set of patients from this cause have 
 syphilis in their brains and mental faculties ; that 
 another have it in their emotions ; and indeed in 
 any faculty that belongs to man ; because the physi- 
 cal organism, in its health, and in its corruptions, is 
 the form that determines the presence of every 
 higher faculty in the body ; the higher beino- ac- 
 cordmg to the lower. What is said of syphilis is 
 also true of other similarly-communicated diseases. 
 V accination extends them all to the very doors of the 
 mind and the soul, and injects them into the human 
 
 c 
 
 %\ 
 
. 
 
 34 DEC A y OF THE OLD MEDICINE, 
 
 race through the whole compass and complex of its 
 nature. This is medical advance into us indeed, but 
 
 if great, it is wicked. 
 
 If vaccination could give no taints but its own 
 animal disease, it must debase all blood, or mixture 
 has no meaning. It is a law, that in any associa- 
 tion, the worst and meanest elements, if first ad- 
 mitted, and then not resisted, gradually corrupt the 
 rest to their own standard, and then carry the 
 organism as a new quantity by its own gravitation 
 to a lower level still. This also vaccination does : 
 for it mixes up in time the whole blood of the nation, 
 and subtracts excellence as a quality overmuch 
 wherever it goes. Now it is not wonderful that a 
 profession which aims to advance by violation of 
 animal lives, should be blind to the organic fact, 
 that evil communications corrupt good blood, and 
 that base communications embase and debase it. 
 At present it is a profession pointed outwards into 
 grossness of thought, and its eyes are in the ends of 
 the earth : it is keen after sewage gas, and typhoid 
 germs ; whilst by vaccination and its compulsion, it 
 pours every disease and ventilates every commonness 
 through all the little children of the land. 
 
 Thfs is not the place to discuss the question of 
 vaccination, because the object here is to show by a 
 great example how the medical intellect is vitiated 
 and deluded, as a symptom of deep causes injuriously 
 affecting the mind of the profession. But the more 
 the subject is probed, the more abyssal the insanity 
 is seen to be. Two things may be noted. 1. The 
 poison inserted into the blood of infants is fivefold : 
 First poison y the matter of the vaccine disease itself 
 Second poisons, the occasional and constitutional 
 diseases of the cow from which the matter is derived. 
 
 BECA V OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 35 
 
 These are animal poisons, and tend to assimilate 
 the blood to themselves on the animal level. Third 
 poison, the vaccine disease of the human being. 
 Fourth poisons, the occasional and constitutional 
 diseases of the child and family from which the mat- 
 ter was taken. And, Fifth poison, the gathered taints 
 of all the children through whose systems the 
 matter has passed since it left the cow. This is 
 what the healers of the people inject by law into the 
 blood, or into the lymph, which is a higher blood, of 
 every little baby in the British Islands. A five- 
 fold coil of poison within poison ; a fivefold fang in 
 the nation s future life. 
 
 Note the disregard of serious physiological truth.— 
 In the human body, whatever enters the blood, be 
 it even the most bland food, the juice of the grape 
 or the pomegranate, or the fine flour of wheat, be 
 It oil, wine, or fig, is broken up first, and then' led 
 mwards through long avenues of introduction. The 
 most innocent food goes in most easily and first. The 
 police and surveillance for the rest are exceeding 
 great and many. The senses electively appetize the 
 fine food ; it has to pass through their peremp- 
 tory doors of liking and disliking ; instructed doors 
 of memory, association, imagination, reason, wis- 
 dom, religion, in adults. It is then attacked by 
 digestive salivas, tests, examinations, and severe 
 juices, and questioned to the uttermost in that 
 degree, which corresponds to the former. It is 
 strained through organ after organ ; each a tribunal 
 of more than social exactitude. It is absorbed by 
 the finest systems of choice in pore and vessel, 
 organic judgment sitting in every corner, and pre- 
 siding over each inner doorway. It is submitted to 
 glandular and lung purifications, and their fur- 
 
36 
 
 DEC A Y OF THE OLD MEDICINE, 
 
 naces of trials and eliminations. At last it is 
 weighed in the balances, and minted, by supreme 
 nerve wisdoms ; and only after all these processes is 
 it admitted into the orolden blood. This of the best 
 food, such as good and wise men eat. The worst 
 food is made the best of by a constant passage 
 through bodily mercies and mitigations ; a no less 
 sedulous though a penal process. This is physio- 
 logy, and divine human decency, and like a man s 
 life. Vaccination traverses and tramples upon all 
 these safeguards and wisdoms ; it goes direct to the 
 blood, or, still worse, to the lymph, and not with 
 food ; it puts poison, introduced by puncture, and 
 that has no test applicable to it, and can have no 
 character given to it but that it is fivefold animal 
 and human poison, at a. blow into the very centre, 
 thus otherwise guarded by nature in the providence 
 of God. This is blood assassination, and like a 
 murderer s life. The point however here is that 
 this amazing act is the homicidal insanity of a whole 
 profession ; and the reader is requested to study 
 the correlation of this sin with the horrible methods 
 of acquiring physiology now in vogue, and which 
 surely prepare the minds of men for similar dark- 
 ness and its deeds in medical practice. 
 
 IX. 
 
 DECAY OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 Symptoms, — Other instances might be given to 
 prove that some powerful unperceived cause is at 
 work in medical life, and blunts the faculties of a 
 very humane class of persons to the true and full 
 
 DECA V OF THE OLD MEDICINE, 
 
 37 
 
 exercise of their calling. Observe the jealousy of 
 old medicine to homoeopathy, which they despise 
 instead of studying, and while they crouch before it 
 in practice, they will not appropriate the dynamic 
 virtues and the blessings of gentleness which lie in 
 it. Their own corporate anger is what they feel and 
 know of homoeopathy. Look at the medical grasping 
 at power and place, that the dogmas of the most 
 fluctuating and uncertain of arts and sciences may be 
 secured and attested, not by nature but by Parlia- 
 ment. See the empire of violent drugs, of quinine 
 and calomel and chemicals, still holding much of its 
 old sway. Mark the new extension of opiate de- 
 lusions, the chloroforms and chlorals, which are 
 committed as a habit, and a destroying habit it is, to 
 the sick. Look at the vast hospitals, which are 
 medical and surgical thrones, whereunder patients 
 die at a rate unknown to private practice. Observe 
 corporate medical secrecy and its technical pharma- 
 copoeias, which warn the public from learning the 
 mastery of its own diseases. It were easy to extend 
 the list of these grave symptoms of the decay of old 
 medicine ; symptoms doubtless of long standing, but 
 which show for so much death in the light of a new 
 age. Clearly some cause is at work to keep these 
 symptoms active at a time when public opinion 
 descries the mischief, and when the pressure of better 
 things and systems from without abashes it and 
 tends to abate it. Is it not fair to suppose that a 
 great clique with vivisection in its midst, which holds 
 up this thing as a way to truth, and a means to good, 
 should feel it has something to conceal, should draw 
 darkness round it as a mantle, should resist question- 
 ing with nervous arrogance, and play more and more 
 for condonation, and for governmental power over 
 
38 
 
 DECA V OF THE OLD MEDICINE, 
 
 DECA y OF THE OLD MEDICINE. 
 
 39 
 
 all who resist its sway. The dog in office is a poor 
 symbol of it; the torturers' instruments in office are 
 a jealous and harmful person indeed. 
 
 It will be said that few medical men have any- 
 thing to do with vivisection: thousands of them 
 would refuse personally to violate any living animal. 
 The complicity, however, of those who know of the 
 thing, and yet do not work to oppose it, is not the 
 less a fact. Violation of animal life, more or less, 
 reiorns in our centre, and many eminent men adopt 
 and endorse it. The lust of it is spread through our 
 body politic. Its suggestions are in us, its doctrines 
 are in us, the fruit of its practices is in us ; its dire 
 cruelty while unresisted by us is in us : and its con- 
 sequences will come upon us. Our plebiscite is in 
 its favour ; and innocent-looking though thousands 
 of us be, we must partake of its doom. That is the 
 way in which bodies of men suffer ; if they are not 
 rising to higher forms of virtue, they descend to the 
 level of their own lowest members, who give them 
 the word that rules the day. And then a judgment 
 
 comes. 
 
 The stupefaction of medicine from this among other 
 causes, has stupefied the public and the other pro- 
 fessions. The chloral of medical secrecy, the false 
 honour of esprit de corps, has shut their brains, and 
 kidnapped their voices, which are whispers where 
 they should be indignant thunders. The clergyman 
 and the lawyer, professional themselves, become 
 accomplices, and refuse to make up their minds 
 whether violation of animals is good or bad, because 
 it is a medical question ; they refuse to meddle with 
 compulsory vaccination for the same reason ; they 
 must take instructions from the lords of medicine 
 on all such topics. In this state of things, the heart 
 
 and the conscience as guides are dispensed with, and 
 Royal Commissions, in which the offenders who are 
 on trial sit enthroned, give doubtful utterance, in 
 which good is cheated, and evil goes greatly free. 
 
 There are no medical or surgical questions in the 
 sense which medical despotism desires. Every day 
 of treatment of a case is submitted to by the public 
 from grounds of reason proper to the public itself; if 
 a doctor proposes to take a leg off, the patient and 
 his friends are the last judges whether it shall be 
 done, or not ; they are often correct in their refusals. 
 They call in the doctor, they dismiss the doctor ; 
 they are still sovereign (save in parliamentary 
 vaccination) in their homes. If they too would not 
 be accomplices in atrocities, they must judge for 
 themselves whether the things we are considering be 
 good or bad, right or wrong. Continually before the 
 bar of their own judgment, which reflects a judgment 
 to come, they must, by what beats in their own 
 bosoms, refuse the abominable, though all the Phari- 
 sees of all the professions declare that they speak 
 blasphemy, and are unknown to science. Decent 
 common humanity, which is sure to have common 
 sense close to it, is supreme judge of all these things. 
 If the common sense is not yet apparent, let the 
 common humanity, like a naked new-born babe, 
 come forth alone, and God will help it to light and 
 to victory. One infant, it is said by Swedenborg, 
 from his experience, can put to tortured flight a 
 whole infernal society. The public innocence has 
 only to look at the violators, and they will vanish 
 from the land. 
 
40 
 
 EXTENSION AND DECA Y 
 
 OF THE OLD SURGER V. 
 
 41 
 
 I 
 
 X. 
 
 EXTENSION AND DECAY OF THS OLD SURGERY. 
 
 Tlie Influence of Vivisection upon Surgery is and has 
 been for Evil — The first duty and counsel of surgery 
 is to decide from pure humanity and its wisdom, 
 whether operations shall be done or not ; and, in the 
 sight of God and man, to refuse to perform them 
 whenever they are unnecessary. When they must be 
 done, the second duty is to do them well. The first 
 and principal point depends upon the character of the 
 suro-eon ; upon his intolerance from the heart of all 
 cruelty ; upon his asking himself whether, under the 
 circumstances, he would have the operation done to 
 himself, or to his wife or daughter ; or whether he 
 would wait, and try something else a little more out 
 of the common than cutting. This depends again 
 at last upon his constant prayer to the Lord to help 
 him against corporal cruelty, which is a danger in 
 his profession. Now this surgeon character, of 
 humanity reigning over and in the knife, of human 
 love most tender in his steel, cannot coexist in the 
 same heart with the admission of violation as a 
 proper practice. No man can serve the two 
 masters, unbounded deliberate cruelty, and de- 
 liberate humanity. The cruelty will be in the in- 
 side, and the humanity outside, in the reputation. 
 The consequence must be, and is, that numerous 
 operations are performed in direct contravention of 
 the law, " Do unto others as ye would that others 
 should do unto you ; " which law is the bill of rights 
 
 of patients, and should be absolute over the con- 
 sciences of surgeons. 
 
 Passing from individual cases, the contraction of 
 operative surgery within the smallest possible Hmits, 
 the regulated contraction, the restricted permission 
 of the art, should be the normal aim of surgeons ; 
 but its extension in new directions is alarming. 
 Chloroform, humane on one face, is inhuman on the 
 other. Patients in hospital, once insensible, may be 
 vivisected indeed; they have no control over what 
 is done to them ; and the knife which is presumed, 
 often erroneously, to give no pain, has on this 
 account the less conscience. The cut nerves and 
 flesh are however there for life, with the horror in 
 them afterwards, if the patient awakens. It is im- 
 possible to disconnect the strides of surgery from 
 those of animal violation. Two such things cannot 
 meet together in the surgical mind, without the one 
 influencing the other towards the permitted dissec- 
 tion of the livinof. 
 
 In private practice, men of great mechanical skill 
 operate enormously, the delusion of chloroform, that 
 nothing is being done, assisting the public to submit. 
 The excision of eyes, useless operations upon cancer, 
 operations disastrous for female complaints, prevail 
 to a new extent, where many of them might be dis- 
 pensed with. They are lucrative. Moreover, there 
 is a growing practice of semi-surgical operation upon 
 every open avenue of the body. Internal medical 
 cure is discouraged ; and the nervous diseased con- 
 sciousness of the sick is added to numerous maladies 
 by the internal application of local chemicals and 
 surgicals to all the available passages daily. It is 
 well that the human body has only a certain num- 
 ber of gates, and that instruments cannot get far into 
 
42 
 
 EXTENSION AND DEC A Y 
 
 OF THE OLD SURGERY, 
 
 43 
 
 if 
 
 I 
 
 these; if the heart could be got at from without 
 plasters would be laid upon it : the throbbing surface 
 would taste every drug, and surgery would assay to 
 mend its valves, or to cut it for the stone in its 
 ossifications. There would not be an organ unvisited 
 by subtle ministers of violence if only the organ 
 could be reached without immediate manslaughter. 
 Judging by present appearances, internal treatment 
 would not long hold its own where treatment from 
 without could be administered. External treatment 
 is adjudged to be comparatively real, and satisfies 
 the senses of both parties, that something has been 
 done. But in the meantime the surgeon has not 
 answered to himself the true surgical question, Am I 
 doing to others as I would that others should do 
 
 unto me ? 
 
 Surgei^, on its had side, paralyses the patient's 
 rational facidty.—Few persons bring a formidable 
 complaint to the surgeon for his decision without 
 fear and shrinking ; and if he says that such an 
 operation must be performed, they accredit him with 
 disinterested humanity, and they either have the 
 operation done, or they are left in the presence of 
 panic. It is a terrible alternative, and the present 
 writer has witnessed the struggle, and seen the panic 
 end in an unjustifiable operation. This is a con- 
 sequence not remote of unscrupulous surgery, as 
 such surgery is itself a direct communicant with 
 cruelty in whatever forms it exists in the education 
 of the profession. 
 
 It has been said that vivisection improves skill of 
 cutting, and that it is humane to patients, because 
 those who have frequently operated on live flesh not 
 human, but canine, or feline, can acquire a dexterity 
 in the process. So they can ; a cruel dexterity — a 
 
 great proclivity to be dexterous. But sooner than 
 acquire a lust of operating, and do things against the 
 Lord's law, it were better that they remain bunglers. 
 They would be thrown upon more spiritual ways, 
 upon hopeful patience, upon gentle means, and 
 cure would sometimes meet them there. The objec- 
 tion to surgical operations performed by learners 
 upon living animals, is, that they are diabolically 
 cruel, and destroy the heart and hand that does 
 them. They destroy the hand, because they cut off 
 its communication with the conscience, which is the 
 proper limit of all work and skill whatever, and, in 
 then multiplying operations, plucking glory and 
 pocketing fees, that hand does much evil for little 
 good, more evil than a bungler could eftect. 
 
 But history does not show that the rearing of 
 great surgeons depends upon previous vivisections 
 of animals. For every strictly necessary operation 
 is itself a fine vivisection ; a beautiful and humane 
 vivisection ; a thing pleasant to a good surgeon to 
 see. The genius of good and use comes into it, and 
 the experience. By cultivating this genius and this 
 experience, under the Lord's surgical law, ''Do ^ 
 unto others," etc., all the skill that is required 
 will come into the fingers of the operator, and in- ' 
 vention will flourish in his mind. Moreover, the 
 dead body supplies a perfect field for material opera- 
 tions. The surgical gift, availing itself of that 
 experience, is equipped for whatever ought to be done 
 in this way to human beings. In using the words, 
 the surgical gift, it is proper to recollect that many 
 practising surgeons have it not. In conscience, they 
 ought not to attempt such terrible proofs of them- 
 selves as operations upon their fellows ; if they 
 require to operate on the eyes of living animals 
 
44 
 
 EXTENSION AND DEC A Y. 
 
 before they can do the like to men and women, they 
 should resign the field. In the new surgery of con- 
 science, few operations will be performed com- 
 paratively ; and the great hands, greatest first in not 
 doing, will be able to manage them all. 
 
 A point is made of Sir Astley Cooper experi- 
 mentally tying tlie descending aorta of a living dog, 
 that he might ascertain if circulation would be carried 
 on by the arterial branches above and below ; for he 
 wished to isolate an aortic aneurism in a patient. 
 There was a risk that circulation would stop if he 
 tied the aorta. This risk he wished to eliminate. If 
 he had a right to do the thing, he had a right to 
 face the risk, as he had often done before in surgical 
 experiments. Fine injection in the dead subject 
 would have settled the right so far as it lay in the 
 possibility of a re-established circulation; and the 
 experiment on the dog could do no more ; nay, it 
 could not do so much ; because the anastomasis of 
 vessels in the dog is not the same as in the man ; 
 and the inference of the patient's risk here is there- 
 fore mere conjecture. In the modern operations for 
 the removal of great ovarian tumours, probably fifty 
 per cent, of the patients die. The surgeons contend 
 that they are absolved in the matter of the risk, and 
 this, though they have cut no ovarian tumours from 
 animals. Sir Astley Cooper would have been in the 
 same category as they, without the operation per- 
 formed on the dog ; nay, he was this continually in 
 his large daily practice. He would have taken what 
 he had to take, the risk of the case, and accepted 
 the patient's death which followed. As it was, his 
 vivisection founded no practice of surgery. 
 
 EVIL AND FALSE MEDICINE AND SURGERY, 45 
 
 XI. 
 
 EVIL AND FALSE MEDICINE AND SURGERY, AND THEIR 
 
 RULE BY FEAR. 
 
 Vivisection has 710 relations with trite medicine and 
 surgery, — Before penal laws reduce vivisection to a 
 crime, this point may be discussed and settled by 
 tabular statements. The tables will answer the ques- 
 tion. What are the specific individual points of good 
 that vivisection has contributed to the healino- arts ? 
 It is a revolutionary subject to broach, because it 
 will bring in question, not the share which vivisec- 
 tion may have had in suggesting new practices, but 
 whether those practices are good or baneful. The 
 medical profession on its most delicate affairs is at 
 the bar on such an inquiry ; which constitutes the 
 people long operated on the plaintiff*, and the profes- 
 sion the defendant, and humanity and conscience, not 
 science, the judge. This will affect the equilibrium 
 of all the professions, and will especially shake the 
 autocracy of medicine, submit it to a vigilant popular 
 tribunal, and shift and subordinate the medical mind 
 and conscience as a centre in the country. 
 
 The writer is convinced that no good has come of 
 vivisection that could not come by other ways. Such 
 knowledge may, indeed, come by two ways. You 
 may ascertain that an animal has heart and luno-s 
 either by opening it after it is dead, or by cutting it 
 open alive ; but there is no prerogative, but delusive 
 knowledge, in the latter operation. So also you may 
 acquire skill in surgery either by cutting and maim- 
 ing the living, or by operating upon the dead sub- 
 ject; or by ascending from small operations to 
 
 >^ 
 
«l 
 
 I 
 
 46 EVIL AND FALSE MEDICINE AND SURGERY, 
 
 greater ones, which is the way in every other depart- 
 ment of life. This way, the opposite of routine, is 
 the via trita of the gifted surgeon. Surgery, there- 
 fore, in its purity, protests against the horrors of the 
 French veterinary schools, where living horses are 
 cut up to teach youth the art of operating, to teach 
 them a direful routine. This gives pupils the lust of 
 operating, wiiich is the demon of surgery. And true 
 medical practice borrows no light from vivisection, 
 or from the poisoning and pollution of animals. Medi- 
 cine gathers from the latter, materialism of thought, 
 and chemical violence of practice; impatience of 
 natural processes of cure; interference with cure; 
 the lust of drugging and doing, which is one demon 
 of medicine. These positions will stand, until by 
 tabulated results the good things which medicine and 
 suro-ery have derived from vivisection, and which 
 could not come without it, are demonstrated in detail 
 to the public, which is virtually called in where daring 
 evil is arrested, or practical good is pleaded. 
 
 But the tables demonstrating to the judicial public, 
 which may call any schools of medicine as witnesses, 
 the practical good derived from vivisection, will be 
 incomplete unless they are opposed by tables setting 
 forth in detail the charges of evil. These will con- 
 sist principally of influences, of effects upon profes- 
 sional character, and of the multiplication of practices 
 on human beings like those which vivisection does 
 upon animals. They will charge the worst routine 
 engendered as a habit of practice. They will record 
 the opening through the human heart and mind, of 
 the vivisectional sodoms into the operating theatre. 
 They will set up a distinct charge of the existence of 
 an evil and false surgery and medicine, and trace 
 these corrupt institutes to one of their sources in the 
 
 AND THEIR RULE BY FEAR, 47 
 
 cruel ways of an evil and false science. Of course it 
 is open to the defendants to produce tables of the 
 beneficial and humanising influences of cutting up ani- 
 mals alive, and to exhibit the vein of mercy that runs 
 from their bleeding entrails into human medicine and 
 surgery. The balance can then be struck, and it can 
 be seen whether vivisection, abominable on the very 
 face of it, presents an exception to the rule, that a 
 good tree cannot bring forth bad fruit, nor a corrupt 
 tree good fruit. 
 
 An evil and false medicine and sui^gery gives ivrong 
 hopes and a base love of the bodily natural life to 
 
 mankind ; it is a vassal of the luxury of the people, 
 
 One plea, and the main practical plea for the tor- 
 ments inflicted upon animals is, that they tend to 
 mitigate human suffering and to lengthen life. This 
 is here denied in toto. But were it valid, it would 
 furnish no excuse for committing evils. Life and 
 health may be purchased too dearly. A man who 
 runs away from his place in battle, or from his post 
 of duty anywhere, may purchase life and health, and 
 retire into comfortable quarters for '' a good old ao-e," 
 but at the expense of his manhood, and to the ruin 
 of his soul. He is slain, a dead man, in his better 
 part, and his health and home are his disgrace. He 
 had better be in the other world, or hobbhng about 
 on one leg, or gathered anywhere into the noble 
 wreckage of fortune, but still upright and entire in 
 his spiritual honour. Medicine and surgery have no 
 comprehension of this plain truth, and' would save 
 their patients by means that are alien to common 
 honour and honesty ; they would bleed the poor into 
 the veins of the rich, and leave the rich poor indeed. 
 For they teach the axiom, Life at any price, and give 
 a value to the natural life over the spiritual life, 
 
48 EVIL AND FALSE MEDICINE AND SURGERY, 
 Which makes the fear of death predominant and con- 
 tinual, and life a wasting and a weakness, ihey 
 may be said to inculcate the fear of death, and to 
 live by panic, and thus to increase sorrows and 
 shame Jimmealurably. And this leads to the intro- 
 duction of any arts that will promise rejuvenescence, 
 and that will paint roses on the old rakes of soc ety 
 and it ultimates in the hope that a secret may at last 
 be discovered that will make the body aiid cadaver 
 Self immortal, and independent of the god-f chance 
 and change ; that one lucky bubble f „tl^« P^^^ 
 protoplasm, and man is " lord of death Material 
 ^.eans after material means is tried m this agony fo 
 life, and the true immortahty is omitted ; although 
 thi^ is the spring and source of whatever life is 
 ^vorth having, and to shatter its hopes and fears is to 
 destroy the future of any i^ce which stands upright 
 by honesty alone. Purity is gone out of he world 
 thus Vaccination is a case here. The whole race 
 is fouled with diseases to allay its panic about one 
 disease. If you can only get rid of that, which is 
 the present spectre of Fear ! The --e panic line o 
 thinking makes men, under medicme attempt to eat 
 themsefves into immortality, and to drmk themselve 
 into immortality : it makes flesh and brandy the 
 sacraments of the death-bed ; keeps wretched bodies 
 here which are bound to depart ; and counterworks 
 and keeps waiting the angels of mercy and life on 
 the other side. It is because evil and false medicine 
 encourages men to believe that they have a righ 
 to take all means to live in their carcases all 
 cruel means, rather than accept the divine risk of 
 livinc to their souls. Such medicine is the direc 
 antagonist to the Lord's words, " He ttiat would 
 save his life shall lose it, and he that would 
 
 AND THEIR RULE Bl FEAR. 
 
 49 
 
 lose his life for My sake, shall save it unto life 
 eternal." 
 
 It also follows from this that a healing art, impreg- 
 nated with violence of materialism, loses faith in 
 spiritual means of cure, derides them as nothings 
 and hates them as opposing its own gross ways ; is 
 closed to human love, which loves the whole man s 
 health, not the health of his body alone ; and has no 
 inspirations from above, no happy moments of gifts 
 for others ; no sympathy with that Lord who made 
 us in His image and likeness, and who alone can make 
 our arts conservative of that image and likeness by 
 our obedience to His will. It follows, in short, that 
 such a healing art is a bad healer, tortures and 
 shortens, not blesses and lengthens life, and leaves 
 out the marrow of cure. 
 
 An evil and false Medicme and Surgery fix Fear. — 
 Besides every disease which requires treatment, fear, 
 adding itself to the disease, and locaHzed about it, 
 is antagonistic to the skill of the physician and the 
 process of cure. Now in many cases the disease is 
 a limited material thing ; but the venomous cloud 
 of fear settUng upon it, extends it about through the 
 body and the mind, and gives it a portentous circum- 
 ference. Faith and trust in the Lord tend to banish 
 this fear with its miserable anxieties, where the mind 
 is willing and strong enough to entertain the heavenly 
 guests. Where this is the case, disease is held at 
 bay, and confined to its real dimensions ; and it often 
 leaves the organism where it has no encouragement, 
 attacked and routed by the interior health. Mere 
 cheerfulness from a high source can sometimes smile 
 away monsters from the body. But all this spring of 
 well-being is attacked by materialism, which finds in 
 every symptom only fresh food for violent appliances; 
 
 D 
 
so 
 
 THE CIRCULATION OF EVIL, 
 
 THE CIRCULATION OF EVIL. 
 
 51 
 
 by its paraphernalia of examination imports new 
 panics into the suffering frame, and fixes as morbid 
 substances the shadows of weakness. If materiahsm 
 does this, vivisection, which is the breaking open of 
 life to prove with fingers and eyes what life is, and 
 which is therefore malignant materialism, with a main 
 end to violate organization, stands at the fountain- 
 head of the causes which make evil and false medi- 
 cine into the destroyer not only of the body, but of 
 the mind in the body, of the sick. It is the last 
 pungency and injecting cobra tooth of all such art. 
 
 And such materialism, with such an inspiration 
 behind it, breaks down altogether any final hope of 
 the cure of the great foundations of disease. For 
 it is a rule, borne out by sacred history and expe- 
 rience, that the more powerful the healing Word is, 
 the more merely symptomatic and circumferential 
 the whole disease becomes, and retreats to a greater 
 depth before the virtue, until at length physical ill 
 is shown, by such regulated defeat, to have none 
 but a spiritual substance ; whereas this materialism 
 aggravates disease, being at one with all corruption, 
 and vice goes out of it, and fills the measures of 
 death. 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE CIRCULATION OF EVIL. 
 
 The violations ruling in Scientism are closely repre- 
 sented by their own branches in the life of Profes- 
 sions.— Th'as, violational medicine and surgery are 
 extant in the grossness of drugging, in the physical 
 invasion of the body on every pretext, in the multi- 
 plication of instrumental means by which this is 
 
 ii 
 
 
 accomplished, and in the spread of surgery uncon- 
 trolled by conscience ; also, in the obstinate rejection 
 of mild and efficient means of cure and treatment ; 
 such, for example, as the gentle medicaments em- 
 ployed in homoeopathy; and in the casting of those 
 who adopt them out of the clique of the profession. 
 The latter is a social violation of good. Pollutive 
 medicine arid surgery exist in the now universal 
 practice of vaccination, which poisons the whole com- 
 munity at least once in their lives, and aims to do so 
 many times in revaccination. Also in the congrega- 
 tion of diseases in great hospitals, where they are 
 focussed, and whence they are extended on the wings 
 of the air, and on the greater wings of panic. One 
 mental domain of this evil branch lies in the terrors 
 which medicine inspires about diseases to come, and 
 in the operation of these terrors upon the public as 
 motives for building new hospitals by private begging 
 and State or county aid. These are artificial infesta- 
 tions and pollutions of the peace of the general health. 
 Adulterine medicine and surgery exist in the aid 
 which medicine affords to the impure State to pro- 
 vide license for the soldier class, and for whomsoever 
 else it may concern in garrison towns, or as they are 
 called, '' subjected districts," so that brothels may be 
 clean and prostitution safe. This, with numerous 
 consequences, comes of the illicit connexion of medi- 
 cine with the State, the proclivity to which con- 
 nexion is engendered by evils in medicine itself, 
 many of which are fed by the scientism which under- 
 lies it. These subjects furnish studies of social 
 physiology, and future statesmen will see their con- 
 nexions, and consider them well. They have already 
 occupied attention in these pages, but are here 
 brought forward again to show the currents of 
 
I 
 
 !l 
 
 r 
 
 li . 
 
 52 VIVISECTION CORRUPTS AND DESTROYS 
 
 influence to and fro in which our evils live, and espe- 
 cially, for recognition's sake, to track them to their 
 hearts of cruelty, and to show the social circulations 
 
 thence. 
 
 And although the matter does not yet belong to 
 the present series, it occurs to remark how great the 
 need is for the British nation and people to abjure 
 the responsibility of fostering germs of evil which 
 have such vast profligacies connected with them by 
 ascertained relationship. This the State at present 
 will not do ; the people under God are the hope. 
 The first step is to insist on the withdrawal of State 
 aid of every kind from science, and leave it to itself 
 The second step is to discharter medicine, to abolish 
 its connexion with Government, leaving it to be 
 called in, as the private physician is called in, when 
 its services are required. A new public mind, and 
 a new power of health, will follow these emancipa- 
 tions, and medicine itself will rise, like Lazarus, from 
 its grave. Laws of public safety, — where necessary, 
 penal laws forbidding the evils spoken of above, — 
 must consolidate the order which enlightened liberty 
 has begun. 
 
 XIIL 
 
 VIVISECTION CORRUPTS AND DESTROYS THE PRINCIPLES 
 OF MEDICAL AND SURGICAL EDUCATION, AND OF MEDI- 
 CAL RELIGION. 
 
 This proposition is a truism hard to talk of 
 because it is so certain. Classes of young men can- 
 not see living creatures violated through prolonged 
 operations by those who are the educators, without 
 having their minds inured to cruelty. It comes to them 
 
 MEDICAL AND SURGICAL EDUCATION 53 
 
 with every sanction. They think less of these deeds 
 every time they are witnessed, and if tenderness of 
 heart and conscience has anything to do with the 
 healing art, — and it has everything to do, — they are 
 killing the root of their own calling in " receiving 
 bloody instruction." The tree of cruelty does not 
 bear the fruit of medical and surreal service. Full 
 of an insane ambition to know at the cost of the 
 worst way, vivisection imparts into its scholars, 
 recklessness against all flesh, and in time, money- 
 making out of the careful recklessness. It isolates 
 medicine from the Lord, and builds up the student 
 apart from, and in defiance of, the first law of medi- 
 cine and surgery, and of all work w^hatever : ^^ Do 
 unto others as ye would that others should do unto 
 you." It explodes medical education. 
 
 Self-evident as this is, it can now be perceived 
 only by the public ; a proof that the whole bitter- 
 ness of the case is true, is, that the medical and 
 surgical profession can no longer see it. The body, 
 as a body, is so depraved by it, that common vision 
 of right and wrong on this point is lost. 
 
 The violation of life by scientism strikes medicine 
 more than the other arts on the religious side, and 
 injures its highest life. — Because, from lack of strong 
 faith in the unity of creation, and the order of the crea- 
 tures, medicine is the only art which seems to have any 
 great concern with organic physiology, the professors 
 of this art appropriate to themselves especially the 
 good and the evil of physiological methods. Hence 
 it is that violations of animals, seeming to be medical 
 methods, flow with destructive force into the medi- 
 cal conscience, and hurt its religion. They propose 
 Moloch over the spiritual springs of the profes- 
 sion. 
 
54 
 
 VIVISECTION CORRUPTS 
 
 THE NON-MEDICAL PUBLIC 
 
 55 
 
 M 
 
 t> 
 
 It is common to say that human nature repeats 
 itself; but few persons recognize the repetitions if 
 they are correspondences, and not literal copies. 
 Scientism, in the violations here spoken of, that is 
 to say, scientism averse from God, is a heathen cultus, 
 with abominable rites ; as much so as the Aztec 
 religion, in which youths were bred and kept in 
 ecclesiastical menageries for sacrifice by the priests. 
 None of the materials of such a cultus are absent. 
 There is the goddess science, man-made, with privi- 
 leges over life and death. The artificial temple 
 constructed for cruel rites : cruelty organized, and 
 rising against the sky. The laboratory of violation 
 at the top of knowledge. The honoured priesthood of 
 scientism, whom to question is laical impiety. The 
 result is accepted agonies, spilt blood, and propitiated 
 yet ever hungry goddess. Great popular assem- 
 blies, British Associations, hushed, or plaudant, 
 around the ministers of the violational church. In 
 short, the selfhood goldenly accoutred as high priest 
 of nature, and sacrificing humanity, love, and kind- 
 ness, to evil, false and foolish ambitions which are 
 the inevitable gods when the Lord God Almighty 
 is displaced. 
 
 This cultus, this evil religion, subsists in the heart 
 of medicine, until by private and public repentance 
 it is cast out as abominable sin. The practices can 
 first be disallowed and cast out ; and the medical 
 societies of the kingdom have this battle to fight. 
 They will then see more clearly the infernal root ; 
 and afterwards scientism, as self-love, will come 
 before the bar of consciences and societies, and be 
 striven with for many a long year before its pride is 
 subdued, for this belongs to the deeper evils of the 
 heart. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 VIVISECTION CORRUPTS AND HARDENS THE NON-MEDICAL 
 
 PUBLIC. 
 
 Are these subtleties ? Or are they broad but 
 stoutly-denied and well-derided facts ? Has the cut- 
 ting up of animals alive any such long cords of com- 
 munication with the profession, society at large, 
 and Parliament, as is here asserted ? The thinof 
 being diabolical in its inception, execution, organiza- 
 tion, and angers of defence, for vivisection is white 
 with many furies, look how the case stands with its 
 associations. It sits in the halls of science ; presides 
 over her assemblies ; lives about royal courts, and 
 frequents the tables of the great ; and scientific 
 ladies improving grace softly regret its necessity, 
 while agreeing that science must be served first, and 
 humanity be thought of afterwards. This amounts to 
 an influence which extends to all classes of the people. 
 Take any other great and unnatural wickedness ; 
 and suppose that the well-known doer and repeater 
 of it is always in the foremost rank of the best 
 society ; that the good and distinguished women of 
 the country are about him as an equal ; and that he 
 is the confidential adviser of a large circle in public 
 and private affairs. Suppose further that there are 
 many such men, polished in the wickedness, and 
 great in the society ; and where then is the society 
 going to ? Clearly it will do things on the same level 
 of evil as that to which it has descended in these 
 voluntary associations which the men described. So 
 in vivisection. There is no subtlety in tracing its 
 
 *t 
 
S6 
 
 VIVISECTION CORRUPTS 
 
 THE NON-MEDICAL PUBLIC. 
 
 57 
 
 II' 
 
 111 
 
 influence through every profession which has not as 
 a body denounced it. At this moment it is the sin 
 of England herself. With few exceptions, the great 
 organs of the press, markedly the chief London 
 newspapers, are apathetic to its influence ; it has 
 made them cold and cruel, and they turn the sub- 
 ject over languidly, as if it were no concern of theirs, 
 and the perpetrators must settle it among them- 
 selves. The head centres of vivisection, the Red 
 Indians of science, they hope will not scalp and tor- 
 ture beyond what is necessary and proper. If they 
 do anything too much, it is a medical subject, diffi- 
 cult for the common mind, and the Lancet must look 
 to it. 
 
 Royal Commissions, — Among the public signs of 
 increasing hardness of heart in such things, none is 
 so striking as the abuse of Royal Commissions. 
 Some great evil, such as the maltreatment of women 
 to ordain them for safe abuse by the soldiers of the 
 State, or this very matter of the violation of living 
 creatures, comes before Parliament ; the horror beats 
 in the public heart ; but successive ministers of the 
 day cannot or dare not say whether the thing is good 
 or bad, but refer it to a Royal Commission. The 
 very entertainment of the question is a disgrace to 
 political nature. The criminality becomes to the 
 perpetrators less criminal, to the conscience less 
 hideous, from the fact that a Prime Minister has to 
 refer the matter to an elaborate tribunal, sitting for 
 weeks or months, to decide whether it is right or 
 wrong. Such a commission marks a public advance 
 in the confusion of good and evil. It betokens 
 paralysis of the perception of good, and preparation 
 for the legalized preponderance and fresh State 
 sanction of wickedness. Accordingly, these Royal 
 
 Commissions ordinarily result in compromises with 
 public sin, and in condoning, and generally compli- 
 menting the sinners as valuable public servants, to 
 whom the virtue of prudence is commended ; and the 
 evil issues from them in official guise ; red then with 
 the love of dominion as well as with the first hand of 
 violence. Recent experience in two cases shews that 
 they are the quiet decorous nests in which the eggs 
 of corporate cruelty are hatched ; and the brood is 
 transferred from individuals and professionals into 
 the mind of the nation. 
 
 Wickedness strangely coincides and correlates tuith 
 wickedness in the Physiology of Society. — Strangely, 
 only because the case is not comprehended. Human 
 society in any country is one man. Its thoughts 
 and feelings as a society are organic. Tolerated 
 villanies debase the whole body, and, in the present 
 swift movement of the world, at a rapid rate. Con- 
 science falls like a plummet down the sea of evil. 
 Practices that were rebuked twenty years ago are 
 now in the market and the forum, and have passed 
 from manners into morals. The general atmosphere 
 of the State blunts each mind to its own peculiar 
 evils. Wrong is not so wrong as it was. The wife- 
 beater, the garotter, the authors of crimes of violence 
 and unnatural crimes at the coarse end of the one 
 man, English society, receive in ^^ reflex action " 
 and ''unconscious cerebration" the fine permitted 
 cruelties and abominations of scientist schools. It 
 cannot be otherwise where there is a general mind ; 
 the great spine of moral habit in the people is con- 
 stantly transmitting to and fro impressions, for good 
 or for evil ; and the perverted intelligence of organic 
 centres causes spasms of murder and violence in the 
 poor ignorant wicked circumferences far and wide. 
 
58 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOGY BY INSTANCES. 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOG Y BY INSTANCES. 
 
 59 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 Violation of life hy scientism, unless nationally 
 reprobated, despoils the efforts made by the benevolent 
 against common cruelty, — This is self-evident. The 
 plea of societies for the protection of animals from 
 mankind, is the wickedness and cruelty of infringing 
 their bodies by ill-treatment; such societies are 
 founded upon the perception and declaration of this 
 truth without permission of logic. Scientism denies 
 this perception, and creates a factory and arsenal of 
 cruelty out of the denial. Once admit its foot, and 
 the other position, that violation is heinous, falls to 
 the ground. And as scientism works by plan, 
 like the man of Bremerhaven, and the animals of 
 the world are in its design, and arts and sciences are 
 used for carrying it forth, the scope of torture is so 
 vast that whatever common bad men do to their 
 beasts in kicks and with cudgels, or in games, is 
 ridiculous in consideration. The greater evil in- 
 cludes the lesser, and demonstrates it into rio-ht. 
 Obviously the humanity of the country represented 
 in benevolent institutions is confused and paralyzed 
 until the head of this crime is crushed. 
 
 XV. 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOGY BY INSTANCES. 
 
 Events of every day supply instances and instruc- 
 tion of the transmission of evil to and fro in the human 
 body of society, what is called in medicine meta- 
 stasis of disease ; and also of the growth of evils from 
 their first wicked thoughts or germs, from their true 
 protomorphs, tiny and unperceived, to monstrous 
 destructions. E. g., the explosion of dynamite at 
 
 Bremerhaven was, it seems, the failure of a de- 
 liberate and carefully mechanized plan to blow up 
 the great ocean steamers full of passengers, in order 
 to realize insurances upon the loss of the vessels. It 
 was destruction by a law, and involved no dislikes 
 or passions : simply Self gnawing wealth as its bone. 
 To it there were no persons, but only gold, on wliich 
 a certain amount of flesh was the wart and the 
 accident. Now here was a demoniacal possession, 
 a hell with lightning for its fingers, and it compassed 
 the planet in its gripe. But it is the same disease as 
 sending ships to sea bulkladen, or rotten ships, or 
 ships too heavy, or ships with destructive cargoes of 
 iron on board ; or sending them into Baltic winters, 
 and realizing insurances upon their going, with or 
 w^ithout all hands, to the bottom. The one wickedness 
 flows into the other. The principle, the first vaccina- 
 tion by the tempter, self, is but one ; the last 
 development of it at Bremerhaven looks more 
 shocking, though had it taken place at sea unwit- 
 nessed, Lloyd's page would have been clean enough. 
 If biologists studied these things instead of the 
 frivolities which now occupy them, they would trace 
 the connexion between the first dream of wicked 
 insurance, and the ultimate aim of general explosion, 
 as clearly as between one tubercle in the body and 
 lines of consumptive families. 
 
 Furthermore, when the protomorph, self against 
 God and man, is struck upon, we connect this 
 wickedness with other developments of the same 
 selfhood. For instance, the prosecution of the 
 pleasures and rights of unruled Self existing in a 
 man of an imperial family, and persuading him that 
 a certain nation is his to be under him, first as a tiny 
 desire attended by pleasing thoughts awakens him 
 
6o 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOGY BY INSTANCES. 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIO LOG Y BY INSTANCES 
 
 6i 
 
 II 
 
 I 
 
 to its life, brings him on in culture, and dandles him 
 in the good he will do. This ends in great massacres, 
 in a nation emptied of its own mind, and filled with 
 his selfhood, in wars and countless murders to 
 aggrandize and protect that self; and at last in his 
 self-deification as the saviour of society, when his 
 godhood makes a heaven out of his sin. This self, 
 this calm, crowned, passionless self, which has its ill 
 work done by instruments, while its own hands show 
 white and clean, is a far lower deeper degree of the 
 same quality which reigns among ship-owning 
 wreckers, and in the man of Bremerhaven ; a 
 supreme variety, the most destructive of all save 
 religious dominion, of the protomorph of evil, atheist 
 Self. 
 
 Now if these great patent facts were studied as a 
 part of the organic physiology of society, — and 
 Swedenborg has given abundant lines for the study 
 of them, and the world every day supplies the facts, 
 — communications would be suspected, and evils 
 would be traced, and might be treated by states- 
 men ; and then if these evils were looked at from 
 the point of view of correspondences and correlations, 
 the diseases and taints of the physical body, even 
 the deepest, would fall under clear causation, and 
 into series and order, and their extensions from 
 germs to deaths, and from one set of organisms to 
 another, would no longer be overlooked. 
 
 Biology of Vivisection. — This is a wide theme, 
 and the beginning of it belongs to the perceptive 
 physiology of ,a New Church, and a not distant 
 future. It will occupy us presently in these pages. 
 SuflBce it to say here that there is complete paral- 
 lelism between the human form as we know it in our 
 own bodies, and the form of that maximus homo, 
 
 humanity. Now, in the body, if a malignant 
 germinal spot commences, it perverts to itself the 
 uses of blood and tissue, and grows in size and 
 visible malice at the expense of the organization. 
 No matter how small the spot at first, how fair the 
 cheek, how fine the limbs, how good the organs ; 
 the destroyer is there, because the body in which it 
 works is one and indivisible. The spot represents a 
 love of dominion which means to have the whole 
 body for its own. Therefore you cannot point to 
 hand or eye as intact, for you know that destruction 
 is in them. Least of all do the clothes alter the 
 facts. Just so, the germ of wickedness, planted 
 voluntarily in the life's love of a single man, occupies 
 him first, and converts him into a malice ; and then 
 stands as a dominion and a destruction in his pro- 
 fession and his society. You can see this best in 
 the human body, because it is there a sensual fact ; 
 you can know and perceive it best in society, be- 
 cause there it is a principle and an intelligible fact. 
 You can understand the malignant disease of a mind 
 better than that of a body, because the materials 
 of the first disease are intellectual and conscious 
 elements. Putting the two together, the sensual 
 diseases, and the diseases of the will, you find a 
 correspondence by which each illustrates the other. 
 So you can see in both cases how malignity of 
 disease is born ; and that in each case it is coincident 
 in extent with its respective man ; in the body with 
 the body ; in society with humanity. For example, 
 in the latter organism you have at this day many 
 minds in all civilized countries which are voluntarily 
 and practically familiar with horrible deeds against 
 animal life, and fashioned externally with pretexts 
 justifying them. Those minds, social cancers and 
 
62 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOG Y BY INSTANCES. 
 
 SOCIAL PHYSIOLOGY BY INSTANCES. 
 
 63 
 
 fungi hsematodes, are cells filled with dreadful 
 imagery, the experiences of their laboratories ; not 
 one horror is forgotten, or forgetable ; the life's love, 
 grave with habit, takes care of that ; the experiences 
 will exist in those minds here and hereafter; and 
 unless repentance come, the determination to con- 
 tinue the deeds will be aggressively perpetual. 
 Every dog of the fifteen thousand will live in the 
 Florentine violator's aorta. This swelling of mortal 
 sin is set in the very tissues and near the heart of 
 society ; for the worse any such thing is, the nearer 
 it is to the heart ; and whether visible or not 
 elsewhere at a given time, it pervades the world. 
 All social diseases, otherwise superficial, are worse 
 for it, being founded perforce upon its circumstance 
 and terrible base. It is therefore mere physiology 
 to connect the wickedness in question, and especially 
 the intellectual confirmation of it which makes it 
 presently incurable, and the professional pride, with 
 all murder and violence done by coarser and more 
 ignorant men in the same social body ; and to see in 
 this immeasurable sin an infernal stratum on which 
 rest those more casual crimes which are laid hold of 
 by the law. Crime indeed existed before vivisec- 
 tion ; but we signal it alone here as a responsible 
 inheritor of the ancient cruelty which is written in 
 the history of our race. 
 
 T}ie violation of animals in the rites of scientism 
 threatens public order. — The British people has 
 been prominent for humanity to animals, and there 
 is scarcely a great poet or novelist who has not left 
 our society a legacy of sound regard for them, and 
 put the brand of denunciation upon wanton cruelty. 
 Therefore as a people we are tender to them, and 
 prompt to indignant action when inhumanity is done. 
 
 f 
 
 II 
 
 I' 
 
 •a 
 
 The very word humanity, used in this sense, marks 
 the high kinship of this tenderness with what is best 
 in our national character. The law hitherto with 
 faithful step follows this kindness of the people, and 
 the magistracy administers it, often with regret that 
 its provisions are too merciful to evildoers. But 
 here comes in a thing, not new in its existence, but 
 quite new in its pretensions and extent, introduced 
 by a sect of scientism, a thing beyond common 
 atrocity, such in its horrors as the wildest poet, or 
 the most fanciful novelist, even a Poe, has never 
 dreamed of depicting or denouncing ; and this 
 scientism, cool, red-handed, and dressed for fashion- 
 able society, meets the genial heart of the English 
 people. It is little to say that order is imperilled. 
 Undoubtedly we love to abide under the laws, but 
 then the laws must have a place to take our hearts 
 into, or we cannot long so abide. If lynching began, 
 and borrowed from Shakespeare, 
 
 " I'll put in every honest hand a whip 
 To lash the rascals naked through the world ; " 
 
 that were an evil end to the law itself; a consum- 
 mation for it in England — a consummation to be 
 deprecated, and by all means avoided. But the law 
 must be prompt, or such things may happen. The 
 sure thing is that conviction for such offences a<rainst 
 the violators would carry laurels to the convict from 
 the hearts and souls of all good men and women, 
 from the Queen downwards, and prison Avould 
 be triumph. The one point which Parliament 
 needs consider is, what amount of promptitude will 
 meet the case in the interest of public order. A 
 Royal Commission which can debate the matter, is 
 beside the question, and out of the responsibility ; 
 
64 
 
 VIOLATION OF ANIMALS 
 
 but Parliament, representing the British people, 
 for the protection of its own supreme interests, 
 cannot be dilettante over horrors which may evoke 
 the nation's steel. Indifference to drowninsr men 
 w^as tried with PlimsolFs case, but dizzied hypocrisy 
 reeled before him, and Parliament was eclipsed and 
 consummated for the time. 
 
 The plain fact is that there are men among us who 
 cannot be trusted to have any cheap animal near 
 them without a horrible suspicion attaching to the 
 case ; who can make no purchase of monkeys or 
 other creatures without shocking the public ; whose 
 visit to a " doofs' home " ous^ht not to be known to 
 the neighbourhood for the sake of its peace of mind ; 
 men for whom Nero's ne quidem miisca is a solitude 
 and isolation which alone can make society content ; 
 men to whom animal life should be cancelled, as 
 " sleep no more " was in the series, — " Macbeth has 
 murdered sleep." We may then surround these 
 considerations wdth the certainty that such viola- 
 tions, whatever law may do short of suppression, 
 tend from the side of honesty itself to the violation 
 of social order ; and must be dealt with from that 
 point of view by Parliament, and dealt with at 
 
 once. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 VIOLATION OF ANIMALS DESTROYS ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Vivisection j^revenfs any organic spiritual vieivs 
 of the human and social bodies from coming into 
 existence ; and correlation, not of brute forces^ but 
 of hearts, consciences, and deeds, from being thereby 
 discerned. — For vivisection lives by destructions, 
 
 DESTROYS ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 65 
 
 and is the record of isolated agonies and spasms, 
 whereas the correspondence indicated, between 
 social and organic truths, is the result of a high 
 philosophy, directed by adequate genius, and regards 
 living organs in their places in the economy of the 
 human form. That form is the literal expression of 
 society; and society may be formulated in its 
 physiology ; and its interiors, dark in themselves to 
 the senses, may be made translucent and shining by 
 the lamp of the greater man, society, suspended in 
 their midst. This is progressive physiology ; all else 
 is inept ; and this it is one of the main businesses 
 of materialistic violation to crush and to ignore. 
 True human physiology is the way of reasoning from 
 the spiritual to the natural man, from light to dark- 
 ness, from self-evident things and great facts, to 
 organs which are their expressions, as it were the 
 words of the Author of all these substances in which 
 man is conveyed into bodily action and existence in 
 this world. He is spoken forth through the order 
 of his body, and to read the book of that order, with 
 all its meanings of interior faculties, is human 
 physiology. Similarly, to read the book of a dog s 
 nature, and see in it all the dog, is canine physiology. 
 And so on of every animal. What is common to all 
 is not distinctive of any. The fact that the liver 
 secretes bile is no part of the human physiology of 
 the liver. All livers, of men and snails alike, secrete 
 bile. The hard, but inevitable condition of the human 
 physiology of the liver, is, to show that the liver 
 and all its functions in a man are the man, that they 
 reflect and represent him, that they are as human as 
 his face, or as his wife and children ; and more 
 closely human than his cities. It is the soul, and 
 practical belief in the soul as beinof itself the real 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 VIOLATION OF ANIMALS 
 
 man, and fuller of organism and order than the 
 material body built of the bricks of nature can be, 
 that affirms the possibility of this grand knowledge, 
 which makes all organizations distinct, and shows 
 their correspondence w ith their inhabitants ; and 
 which will ultimately make them self-evident; so 
 that given an instinct, or a passion, or a faculty, you 
 shall see why the organic machinery that carries it 
 must be suspended in the corporeal system where it 
 is and how it is. For the attraction of soul to organ, 
 and the association of organ with organ by that 
 attraction, compacts the system, and closes in the 
 whole. The man is the result, and the new point of 
 departure of the gathered manhood of all his organs. 
 
 The dead body, human anatomy, offers the matter 
 to this physiology ; the living body, of and in which 
 we are conscious, and in w^hich we abide, gives such 
 physiology senses ; and the internal rational mind, 
 believing in God and spirit, and human society of 
 their creating and maintaining, by potent roads of 
 analogy, in minds gifted by influx for the work, fills 
 the physiology with the corresponding higher life in 
 every department. The human heart is the form of 
 the human loves ; the human lungs are the form of 
 the human understanding ; and each can be studied 
 in and from each. There is no inference here, but 
 capacity of direct knowledge. The master of the 
 house gradually learns about the house w^iich has 
 been given to him by the Almighty, and about the 
 furnitures of the house, and their uses to him, which 
 are the reasons of their be'nof. This aofain is human 
 physiology. 
 
 The 'present so-called liuman physiology, in so far 
 as it is founded upon vivisection, contains no direct 
 knowledge, hut is the inference of an inference. — It 
 
 DESTROYS ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 67 
 
 infers from animals cut open to animals soul-tight, 
 from bleeding fragments to happy and peaceful 
 animals, from tortures to functions of happy order ; 
 and the inference will not run, because the cases are 
 hateful to each other. There is no analogy. Then 
 it has to infer from the patched physiological dog to 
 the dead human body, where again there is no human 
 analogy; for everything truly human in bare 
 mechanism is left out in the dog, however perfect. 
 Then again it must infer from the dead body of the 
 man to the life of the man, which dead body, 
 so used, imports insurgent death, and not life. 
 Analogy fails here also. The cutting-up of living 
 people is hopeless at present, or it would logically 
 be attempted. Were it done, the vivisected man 
 would offer less analogy to the living man than the 
 vivisected dog to the living dog, because there is so 
 much more to be violated and spilt in the former 
 than in the latter case. Thus truly the gates of 
 science are valvular, and open from above down- 
 wards, but cannot be opened from below upwards. 
 The carriages which would run from the tormented 
 body to the living soul, in any case are no train, 
 because they have no couplings ; the engine makes 
 no way, though it is loud with the puffs of the 
 vivisectors. The process is the mysticism of 
 materialism, — methods of reason perverted into tools 
 of darkness. The violationists have either no results, 
 or are jugglers and sorcerers. 
 
 In the boasted clarity of evil science, in its passion 
 for exactitude, you see as in a glass how mystery is 
 born. There is the lust of knowing at any price. 
 There is the vivisection. There is the large limbo 
 of facts of life and animal happiness which must for 
 ever escape the vivisecting mind. That limbo put 
 
68 
 
 THE TRUE MOTHER OF MYSTERY, 
 
 on one side and ignored, is mystery number one 
 haunting the beginning of this physiology. It re- 
 quires continual denial, or the physiology and its 
 method are at an end. But there it stands. Next 
 the record gained is applied to man, and to this 
 record, human truth, none of which it covers, is a 
 set of manifold limbos, immense, which are a second 
 mystery. This also haunts materialism, which is 
 occupied with it, and so alarmed about it, that its 
 present life seems taken up in combating these 
 ghosts of its own murders. The works of leading 
 physiologists confirm this. They are versed in up- 
 rooting superstitions and supernaturalisms. Whose 
 superstitions ? Their own. The superstition that 
 there is any life of order to be got at by the scalpel 
 used on the living. There is no such life. The 
 superstition that there is any distinctive human soul 
 and spirit to be inferred from animal vivisection. 
 There is no such spirit or soul. The superstition 
 that God has ways and laws to be revealed by 
 vivisection. He has no such ways. The supersti- 
 tion that there is a God knowable from nature. 
 There is no such God. No one else believes in the 
 things they are denying ; and they deny them 
 because they have created them, and must by 
 "unconscious cerebration" create them. They are 
 indeed terrible spectres, and shake their gory locks 
 at such physiology. In vain the wearied physio- 
 logist says, — I have nothing to do with you. They 
 will never leave him. He is a practitioner not of 
 necromancy, but of a biomancy which is the sum- 
 moning of the living by the dead for the purpose of 
 killing, — 
 
 "And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
 Pursue like raging hounds their father and their prey." 
 
 GENERAL VIOLATIONS RULING IN SCIENCE, 69 
 
 XVII. 
 
 GENERAL VIOLATIONS RULING IN SCIENCE. 
 
 Vivisection, hy reflex action, is concurrent with a 
 spirit of violence and outrage in the sciences gene- 
 rally. — If there were no Christian religion to be 
 assaulted, and no spiritual conscience to be slain, 
 several sciences would languish for lack of motive in 
 their prosecutors. If the Almighty were once given 
 up, protoplasm would lose his amusement. Its 
 armies of inferences would grow lazy if they were 
 not marshalled for war against a personal God. 
 Mere nature would be its own Capua, and enervation 
 of its votaries ensue. This is a great subject, but 
 can only have a few words bestowed upon it here. 
 
 As the sciences are at present studied, from with- 
 out inwards, nothing but phenomena can be regis- 
 tered ; and while the field grows wider and wider, 
 and classifications are made out, the student survey- 
 ing his discoveries would fain forget that their scope 
 is still only of phenomena, and that living causes are 
 not indicated in his process. In some moment of his 
 triumph, sooner or later with different minds, he puts 
 the life of his own imagination into his systema 
 mundiy his system of the world; and there it meets in 
 his mind his mother's legacy, the Christian religion. 
 This is now involved in his science, and makes it 
 aggressively alive. Two lives — his own life and 
 God's — are striving within it. If he can push his own 
 life, his own selfhood, through, he kills the other life 
 in himself and in his science. The world is his 
 animal, filled with his passions, and he is about to 
 
70 GENERAL VIOLATIONS RULING IN SCIENCE, 
 
 make its laws. He postulates that it is God, or 
 instead of God, as the vivisectors postulate that 
 tortured animal physiology is peaceful and happy 
 human physiology. These violences of the mind 
 reign very especially in physiology, in biology, in the 
 newest natural history, in geology, and are coming 
 with a large sway upon astronomy. No science 
 wrought by human minds can long escape them. 
 The greatest absurdities of thought, its very para- 
 lyses, such as the infinity of space, the eternity of 
 time, the impregnability of atoms, the constant 
 unalterable quantity of force in the universe, are the 
 table of the laboratory in which they operate ; and 
 violently taking theology into the meshes of their 
 system, and binding it there, they cut it up with the 
 knives of their own imaginations. They wound the 
 human intellect in all its faculties in the process. 
 All but the very simplest, who know nothing of 
 science, are liable to be injured in their life of life. 
 It is the poor natural man, so dependent upon the 
 spiritual man for everything, that is here vivisected, 
 and the sacred boundaries of the soul are set at 
 nought. Such scientists are only happy when there 
 is a faith to torment, a doctrine to deny, or a con- 
 science to harrow, or the education of little children 
 to ruin. 
 
 This state of things is wide spread, and the justi- 
 fication of it is the pursuit of truth, and the interest 
 again of science, and of the human mind ; just such 
 claims to our regard as the violators of animal life 
 put forth. 
 
 There is, however, no need why it should be so, for 
 every science can be worked for God better than for 
 His adversaries. You believe in Him, in His Word 
 from the beginning, in His spaceless infinity, or 
 
 GENERAL VIOLATIONS RULING IN SCIENCE, 71 
 
 divine love ; in His timeless eternity, or divine 
 wisdom ; in His incarnation, and in our redemption 
 thereby. These are the creative fire and light of all 
 human faculties and forms. After and under this, 
 every science can flourish with vigour and fearless- 
 ness. The use of the imagination in science, filled 
 as the faculty thus is, becomes stupendous. The 
 study of all facts which do not involve wickedness in 
 their procuring, is lawful. Evolution, as the record 
 of observed phenomena, is perfectly lawful. Geo- 
 logy with millions of years is as laudable as if it 
 were geology of seven days. The one point is, that 
 the evil heart of unbelief be kept under ; that what 
 is holy be not invaded ; that science be a note-book 
 of classified phenomena always acknowledged to be 
 phenomena, and not causes, the whole sum of them 
 no more causal than the first instance was ; and in 
 fact that no inferences upwards be allowed. Science 
 in this way expands the true theology when that 
 theology is in indisputed power. For example, with 
 the modern knowledge of the universe, and the exact 
 sciences which are in it, if we grant and already 
 adore the Lord the Creator, we can acknowledge 
 Him as a mightier Lord, a more vast spiritual Person 
 and Father, than He was conceived in older times ; 
 in so far, that is to say, as the revelation of Him to 
 natural knowledge is concerned. But in order that 
 science may be privileged to this result. He must be 
 first acknowledged, and science in its daily work 
 must drink the cup of humility, and eat the bread of 
 practical good. If she allows herself to question 
 Him, and dispute His existence because He is not 
 in her phenomena, she becomes insane and cruel, 
 and in the end magical, because she will then pro- 
 
 / 
 
72 
 
 EVIL AND FALSE INFINITES. 
 
 EVIL AND FALSE INFINITES. 
 
 73 
 
 ceed to make impossibilities out of herself, and call 
 them things, which is magic. 
 
 In short, true science by hard work may know 
 progressively more and more about the creation, and 
 this exactly in proportion as she gives up the attempt 
 to domineer over thouorht about the act of creatino-. 
 She is not creative as God the Lord is, but studious. 
 Nay, more, she may in her way apprehend somewhat 
 of the process itself of creating, if, after bending her 
 knees in humble prayer, she watches in the sky of 
 her then large mind, the brightness first, and then 
 the revealing personal form, and then the message 
 in her faculties, creating order in the chaos of obser- 
 vations, and suggesting the lineaments of a divine 
 theory coincident with the Word which spoke and 
 speaks forth the world. True, in all this she must 
 be passive and prayerful ; recipient, not originant ; 
 yet in feeling and acknowledging herself thus created 
 from on high, her consciousness will be a living and 
 loving mirror of the act of her own creation, and of 
 nature's beorinninof also. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 EVIL AND FALSE INFINITES. 
 
 Unlimited ambitions and minds, — These are re- 
 ciprocally the causes and products, the seeds and fruits 
 of violational scientism. They are mortal injuries 
 to the present faculties employed in the study of 
 nature, for the spirit that impels them voids par- 
 ticular pursuits, and hurries on deliriously every- 
 where to the unknown. They amount to absence of 
 spiritual and intellectual restraint in studies, and 
 
 consequently to loss of internal self-control, in which 
 case the mind is played upon by its own inherent 
 moods, however insane. The disease is twofold : the 
 first root is that falsity of eV\\falsum mali, that you 
 have a right to take any means to attain know- 
 ledge ; this hands over everything, sacred or tender, 
 to the inquisition of an unbounded lust of knowing. 
 The second root is the falsity beckoning onwards, 
 that everything, and the whole scheme of things, 
 can be known ; and that man's power therein is 
 infinite. In both cases, true limits, which are in 
 one sense the all of things, are denied. After this 
 the mind has no standpoint, no fulcrum, nothing to 
 exert itself upon, nothing to resist it, no skin, and 
 no bones. In short, here is the ingenious genesis 
 and human type of protoplasm ; and of that king of 
 nonsense, "the void and formless infinite." But 
 now, on the other hand, definiteness of study, 
 finiteness of objects, dutifulness of research as of 
 every calling, is the way and the life that leads to 
 the comprehension of nature. And infinitude or 
 infinities in any sense, placed before the mind, are 
 the delirium of absurdity. This state probably 
 corresponds to scrofula in the body, in which boun- 
 daries and therewith powers and states begin to dis- 
 appear ; for the taint shows itself in softening of the 
 bones, in the running of organism into tubercle, in 
 the breaking down of the blood, in softening of the 
 brain, in escape of the mind into idiocy or insani- 
 ties ; and in innumerable other ways which are 
 recognized as decay and dissolution in the body, 
 while the mental states that correspond to them are 
 regarded as powers and liberties and realm, though 
 indeed they are but interior rottenness. The corre- 
 spondence reminds us of facts that are forgotten on 
 
74 
 
 THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN, 
 
 THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN, 
 
 75 
 
 lit 
 
 the present plane of consciousness. It also begins 
 to give the clue to scrofula itself, by enabling us to 
 tally its softenings and dissolutions in the body 
 with the wasting effects of unscrupulous and un- 
 limited scientism upon the mind and its pursuits. 
 Science also, as a handmaid to intelliofence, corre- 
 spends to the lower functions of the lungs, and 
 unlimited scientism, its disease, may well correspond, 
 in one of its main attacks on the mind s integrity, to 
 tuberculous consumption, in which the function 
 immediately beneath respiration is subverted by 
 decay. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN. 
 
 In violational scientism, obscenity arid visible hor- 
 ror touch their last earthly gratijications, — Touch, not 
 reach, for the same things done to men, women, and 
 children, are ahead in the career, and from those who 
 have no God, scientism wants the deeds, and clearly 
 nothing but expediency bars them. Here occurs 
 opportunity for saying that the direful details of 
 these things are purposely omitted from our pages ; 
 no reader should be made to imagine them too 
 vividly ; and they may be abundantly read in the 
 brazen literature of the subject, especially in French 
 and Florentine annals ; and also in papers by Dr. 
 Hoggan and others, who are labouring to abate the 
 practices. Suffice it to assert that the facts are 
 horrible beyond imagination. Dr. Hoggan, who has 
 been through three campaigns, avers from his own 
 too long experience, that the preliminaries to the 
 tortures exceed in sadness all he has witnessed after 
 
 days of battle. But the mental filthiness is not 
 often noticed. The word violation carries it ; and 
 to that word we are driven, for vivisection does not 
 embrace half the subject. The field of this scientism 
 belongs to " the Cities of the Plain." The i^lain 
 here is atheism and materialism, proclaiming the con- 
 tinuity of visible nature from one end to the other ; 
 so that there is no supreme order, no building by 
 God, but only things on one level, and life is an 
 arranofement of atoms and cells flowing into con- 
 struction, and into decay, in an endless wash of 
 change. Upon the plain there are two cities. The 
 one city is the doctrine that scientism may do what 
 it likes with any part of the plain — the doctrine 
 that scientism is omnipotent over its effects. The 
 other city is the doctrine that the plain, that is, 
 nature, being all of one sort, without ends, purposes, 
 or degrees, can and shall be all known by dint 
 of scientism racking it ; and here scientism counts 
 upon omniscience. But let Scripture be read that 
 records the olden doom ; it is applicable to-day as in 
 the time of Lot. It is enough here to have indi- 
 cated what the plain is, and tliat the two cities 
 which are built upon it are exhibitions of a filthiness 
 which is under judgment now, and whose end is at 
 hand. That end is fire from heaven, love as a 
 destroyer, and the later stage is the dead sea of 
 knowledo-es, around which nature dies, and where 
 science is a death and a disgrace. 
 
 The reader can trace these correspondences in 
 the writings of Swedenborg, and he will begin to 
 perceive what a terrible militant revelation Biblical 
 correspondence is of the states of men and things. 
 '' The grand old Book," as one gentleman calls it, 
 will prove to be an awful new book for the coming 
 
76 
 
 SEPARATIONS IN SCIENCE, 
 
 SEPARATIONS IN SCIENCE. 
 
 77 
 
 /^ 
 
 w 
 
 \ 
 
 centuries. The present devastated churches, however, 
 cannot combat from these truths of the Word, but 
 live like incurious aborigines hutted in the outward 
 shadow of its arsenals. 
 
 Let it be borne in mind that these are not mere 
 similitudes or analogies, but that they are corre- 
 spondences, on which subject more will be said in the 
 following pages. Now correspondences, according 
 to which the Word of God is written, are equations 
 between the spiritual and the natural worlds, and the 
 spiritual w^orld quickly, and the natural world and all 
 the circumstances of its societies, slowly, change 
 according to them. By them the internals of men 
 and things open into the externals. Hence the two 
 cities of the plain of scientism, its dead sea, and its 
 scrofula, are creative diseases, and as they come out- 
 wards, betoken national and individual woe ; — such 
 dooms as are spoken of in Isaiah for Assyria, Egypt, 
 Tyre, and the like correspondential places. In fine, 
 all the evils of men, of societies and nations, are 
 fundamentally and organically treated of, and traced 
 into destructions in the sacred pages. 
 
 XX. 
 
 SEPARATIONS IN SCIENCE. 
 
 Science requires a careful study to sej)arate its 
 better nature from its modern pretensions. — It has 
 been indicated wherein that better nature lies; 
 fundamentally in humility, or limiting itself to its 
 own necessarily superficial observations, and to the 
 hypotheses and theories, which sum up these, and 
 bind them together in comprehensive rules and laws. 
 
 Thus, for instance, a true geology will limit itself to 
 the phenomena and order of the changes in the crust 
 of the planet, and estop as any part of its own 
 labours the realm of creative acts, and especially the 
 impertinence of denying a creation. It will deal 
 with natural processes, the actions of fire and water 
 and air, without mental prejudice to divine pro- 
 ceedings, or the love and wisdom of the Lord as the 
 world-maker. In this regard, nothing that can be 
 alleged against science applies. Such science in its 
 origin is divine when it is acknowledged to descend 
 from the divinity. It is a lowly work of the logos 
 done in and through human nature. 
 
 But the other science, the perverted science, steals 
 the attributes of the logos, and would fain appro- 
 priate them. It claims divine powers, and uses its 
 own power badly. So far from being a pure and 
 ideal goddess, — a pure organon for the discovery of ^ 
 things as they are, impartial as the balances, a Lord- -^ 
 Chief-Justice of the respective claims of natural 
 phenomena, — such science is filled with temporal 
 passions. The passions of personal dominion rage 
 in it ; my discovery, and your discovery, are as near 
 to blows as learned societies permit. The passion of 
 cruelty, the love of cruelty, a considerable passion in 
 human nature, is allowed free play in it. Atheism 
 and materialism, which are not abstractions, but 
 fiery passions, inhabit its chambers from the heart 
 outwards. In short, there is not an actual vice in 
 man that does not get into this science to find a 
 home and a justification at its hands ; to formulate a 
 culminating doctrine of justification by science alone. 
 So it is necessary to be careful in any abstract plea 
 for science, its rights and interests, to know what 
 science you mean, whether the science that receives 
 
IM 
 
 78 THE FUNCTION OF THE SINGLE E YE, 
 
 its commission from the brooding spirit of God, and 
 works as His servant, or the science whose motives 
 are ex se, from the selfhood, and which lays hold of 
 truth to animate it with the lusts of fallen man. 
 
 We are livingr at this time before another flood, a 
 spiritual flood, and that strange word is again appli- 
 cable, that the sons of God saw the daughters of 
 men tliat they were fair, and took them to wives. 
 The sons of God are divine truths, in the present 
 case the divine truths of the sciences as allowed for 
 use sake to human minds ; the daughters of men are 
 the lusts of the selfhood. The union of the two, the 
 lusts receiving and embracing the sciences, produces 
 giants, Anakim, — mighty scientific appropriators of 
 tlie universe to themselves, with at length complete 
 denial of the proprietorship of the Lord. Anakim 
 are already born of this infernal marriage. 
 
 XXT. 
 
 THE SINGLE EYE OF THE SCIENCES. 
 
 It is plain from the foregoing pages that there are 
 old sciences with wrong methods and minds producing 
 them, and that the new sciences must come from a 
 contrary source. The first requisite for a new science in 
 this sense is the innocence of the inquirer s mind. This 
 innocence is a pellucid eye through which the works 
 of the Lord, " Who is Essential Innocence " (Swe- 
 denborg), can be seen from within. The way to this 
 recovered eye is by many self-abnegations. Evil 
 kno\Yledge must be put aside, and by repression be 
 held as forwtten. The unfallen mind must not 
 touch it, for it is not knowledge but seduction ; the 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE SINGLE EYE. 79 
 
 fallen mind, praying and working for regeneration, 
 must extirpate bad experiences with all its might. 
 The new science is of maiden purity, and that purity 
 is a rebuke and a destruction to the aggressions of 
 evil knowledge, and also of premature knowledge. 
 Prematurity is itself an evil, and destroys the order 
 of the coming state. To see and to know by effort 
 of the selfhood what does not belong to your epoch, 
 is violent decay of the present good of life. Intel- 
 lectual and metaphysical falsities, which overspread 
 the present mind, the brood of " intelligence from 
 self" must also be put aside, for they are arrogant 
 masters, and not ministers of natural knowledge. 
 And more than all, the lust to rule by science, and 
 the persuasion that nature and immunity can be your 
 propei'ty thus, is cataract or glaucoma in the per- 
 ceptive eye ; and nothing but interior blindness and 
 its diseased lights can come in such an organ of 
 vision. These points have been dwelt upon already. 
 The cure of the evils is mentioned now as the way 
 to a human sight that alone can be ^^ a minister and 
 interpreter of nature." The formula of it all is, an 
 innocent scientific mind. 
 
 Here we note aofain that largfe tracts of knowled^re 
 will be abandoned because of the evil passions and 
 actions that have transacted themselves therein. 
 The poisonous ground of those passions is still left 
 in such tracts; the pestilence, the owl, the bittern, 
 and the wild beast, represent the activity of the lusts 
 in their final state. The ruins of the infernal tem- 
 ples and palaces must be quitted, for there is no 
 health nor safety there. Innocence cannot dwell be- 
 side their suggestions. This fact is represented his- 
 torically by the doom of Babylon and other cities 
 which stand in the Word of the ancient world for 
 
8o JUSTIFICA TIOJ^ B V SCIENCE AL ONE. 
 
 similar evil states. The plough which belongs to the 
 whole earth cannot go there until great cycles of 
 God s providence have wrought their purifying way. 
 What that way is no man can foresee. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 JUSTIFICATION BY SCIENCB ALONE. 
 
 False Science complains of the arrogance of false 
 theology, and seeks to crush it by a corresponding aiTO- 
 gance of its own, — In regard to the rights of cruelty, 
 for instance, it seeks to outlie the State. In the 
 violation of animals it makes war upon civil decency 
 and honesty, and while subscribing to punish common 
 men who overdrive their horses, it claims to mangle 
 horses in unmentionable ways. Its Vatican derides 
 the honest State. It traverses the hearts and heads 
 and order of religious nations as with an assassin s 
 knife. It is of miraculous conception and birth ; a 
 fruit of things evolving themselves from what is be- 
 low them and does not contain them, until '^infinite" 
 successions of incompetent factors in the fulness of 
 time produce science ex se, and the scientific Anak. 
 It is infallible, because nothing outside of it may 
 dispute it ; and the deaths of its chiefs do not alter 
 the validity of the succession from its founder. Saint 
 Self. It has its quod semper, quod uhique, quod ah 
 omnibus, like Rome. The dominion of its tenets and 
 orthodoxies is the practical point of its infallibility 
 and ubiquity. That never changes, however its dog- 
 matic formulas may be altered from hour to hour. 
 It claims, however, to be flexible and truth-loving, 
 because it wears so many dresses of temporary 
 truths. But it always wears three hats. It has in 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 8i 
 
 it the arrogance of Protestantism and Popery com- 
 bined. Again the Anakim — the lust of dominion 
 reigning and governing in and over the love of 
 truth. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 f y 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 Vivisection, including human vivisection, ivhich 
 exists in posse ivithin the present practice, is the 
 natural end of the evil and false analytical sciences, 
 and of the evil and false analytical j^hilosojMes, — 
 We purpose, under this head, to interpolate a 
 chapter on scientifcs generally, and on some con- 
 siderations which grow out of the subject. 
 
 Now, final causes reign in the core of all sciences ; 
 because man, the author of sciences^ has plans and 
 purposes in all that he does; and purposes are final 
 causes as related to action. These ends of science 
 may be fourfold. 1. Science may be prosecuted for 
 its own sake, from the love of knowing the facts and 
 relations of thing^s. Manv men seem born with this 
 love as a mainspring in their faculties. It is in 
 itself a pure eye for the intelligence of nature. Per- 
 haps Linnaeus and Kepler and Charles Bell might 
 stand as typical instances of its possession. 2. 
 Science may be prosecuted because such knowledge 
 is practical power of many kinds ; for instance, 
 power to enrich and subserve the arts of life. 3. 
 Or it may be prosecuted in order to see the Creator 
 in His works ; because the Author, if revealed, can 
 be increasingly seen as the works are better under- 
 stood. Or, on the other hand, science may be pur- 
 sued in order that visible matter may crowd out the 
 
 F 
 
Ill 
 
 82 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 SCIENTIFICS, 
 
 83 
 
 invisible spirit, that the senses may be enthroned as 
 the only faculties, and that God being nowhere for 
 this process, He may be denied by the conclave of the 
 atheized atoms and substances of His own worlds, 
 presided over by the selfhood of the scientific man. 
 
 Here we deal only with analysis, or the taking of 
 things to pieces to see how they are made ; and with 
 evil and false analysis, or the breaking up of forms, 
 even living forms, to find that they are all self-made, 
 not God-made. There may, however, be evil and 
 false synthesis; nay, there must be; for the last 
 stage of such processes of science is to put the self- 
 hood of the man into them, as a will and a theory, 
 as the final account of the matter. But this by the 
 way. Intuition from evil, and a very powerful 
 intuition it is, always culminates in this synthesis. 
 Ego et mundus mens. 
 
 This voids the love of use, for it is uselessness 
 incarnated. That love once gone, and nature handed 
 without remorse to the dominion of the Selfhood, the 
 love of scientific conquest and possession has no 
 bounds. It takes false analysis, the method of 
 pulling down the building, not to find the architect, 
 but to affix meum and tuum, and especially meum, to 
 the carefully gathered heaps of ruin, as its starting 
 point. The ruins are its possession, because they are 
 indeed its creation ; and it studies them as its own 
 children, and claims their education and evolution, 
 in which ruin organizes ruin. 
 
 Now, since the beginning, science has been studied 
 by a class with these ends, in this way, and with 
 these results. Especially so the most difficult 
 sciences, those pertaining to man's body, which has 
 contact at all points with his mind. Evil and false 
 analysis, originating in heathenism, has come down 
 
 as a stream, always with violent intent against 
 internal truths, and has broken up all the parts of 
 nature to which it has applied itself on its passage. 
 It is powerful by reason of its deep descent, for it 
 comes from the mountains of self-love, and foams 
 through the magnificent scenery of self-conceit. 
 True analysis stands indeed on another track; but 
 in the organic sciences it is hard to find its face at 
 present. It results from the course and antecedents 
 of the worse analysis, that a time should come when 
 it brincrs itself face to face with all life, Divine and 
 human, attempts to bind it hand and foot, to muzzle 
 it, to cast it into the scientific trough, and to violate 
 it by every instrument that the fruitful dreaming 
 selfhood can invent and excogitate. We live in that 
 age now, in the consummation of this analysis. 
 There is no love of truth in it, there is no love of 
 good in it, there is no love of use in it, but only the 
 rights of science, and the glory of the individual, 
 which taken together form the last pretexts of the 
 infernal man. 
 
 Since such analysis, animated by this spirit, means 
 progressive dissolution of all substances which are 
 submitted to its process, the last lower thing left 
 being the hammer to beat out the brains of the order 
 of the thing next above it, Swedenborg, who knew 
 this kind of analysis as well as if he had seen its 
 developments at the present day, predicted in his 
 time the impending decay and destruction of those 
 sciences in which it held sway. He predicted the 
 decline of human physiology wherever this course 
 was persevered in. His words are memorable, as 
 follow: '^I have now, therefore, ventured to attempt 
 this method" (i.e. analysis from the point of view of 
 the uses and ends of forms) ''of discovering truths, 
 
84 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 at present deeply hidden under a veil of hypotheses. 
 And the proper time has arrived, for a rich store of 
 experience is at hand ; an accumulated heap sufficient 
 to enable us to build a palace ; a luxuriant field 
 where our sickles may reap an abundant harvest ; 
 a table where we may enjoy the most sumptuous 
 banquets. Nor do I think we ought to wait any 
 longer, lest haply experimental knowledge shall be 
 overtaken by age, night, and oblivion ; and the arts 
 and sciences be carried to the tomb ; for unless I 
 mistake the signs of the times, the world's destinies 
 are tending thitherwards." {Animal Kingdom, vol. 
 i. p. 9.) 
 
 What is happening now abundantly confirms 
 Swedenborgs anticipations. In spite of the multi- 
 tude of small discoverers of small facts, and of laro-e 
 books holding them for a few years, and then giving 
 place to other granaries of the same dust, less is 
 known of life, and more of corruption, than when the 
 analysis was kept in straiter bounds. There is less 
 commerce of these maggots of fact, with practical 
 healing ; indeed, they overswarm the mind of the 
 physician, and do not fit him for the sick-room ; for 
 they are the active bits of an analysis which belongs 
 to the grave. It is superfluous to say that less is 
 known of God in such analytic sciences, for God is 
 known in His works, and these are none of His 
 works ; but wicked works of men's own hands. 
 Atheism is the proper and final truth of them so for 
 as regards the Lord ; the merciful truth of them, 
 for profanation is saved. 
 
 In fine, the moderns of this school have created 
 a domain all their own; and Homines naturce viola- 
 tores et evolutoresy with evil end from the beo-innino- 
 of the metaphysical and physical sciences, have 
 
 SCIENTIFICS, 
 
 85 
 
 destroyed God in and around them in order to 
 aggrandize themselves ; and now in the last resort, 
 not daring to consummate their plan on the bodies 
 of their fellows, they have yet brought analysis 
 through all its disguises into the dock of cruelty, 
 where it fronts the judgment of God, and is coming 
 under the secular police. 
 
 What a light does this receive from tliat Genesis 
 despised by scientists, which tells of the consequences 
 of eating of the tree of knowledge of good and 
 evil, with " Thou shalt surely die " implanted in the 
 day or state of it. 
 
 On the contrary, what a lesson for the true 
 analysis, and the good science, to persevere. In the 
 first lines of his first chapter on The Tongue, in the 
 Animal Kingdom, Swedenborg strikes the key-note 
 of the true analysis thus : — 
 
 '' The use or eflfect which produces the end must 
 be the first object of analytical enquiry. The nature 
 of a member or organ is known from the use. The 
 use determines what the organ is in itself, or in its 
 own form ; what it is in series with otl/er organs 
 which are contiguous to it, or surround it, and which 
 continuously precede and continuously follow it ; and 
 what it is in order with the organs which are above 
 and below, or prior and posterior to it. All these, 
 and their uses, indicate the nature of the organ under 
 investigation. The use and end are the first things 
 that manifest themselves ; for the end is in a manner 
 all in all in every stage of the progress, from first to 
 last— the very soul of the thing. Thus all things 
 that belong to the body, and that act as parts of the 
 body, vividly represent and manifest the soul." 
 {Animal Kingdom, vol. i. pp. 33, 34.) 
 
 You must know the end or use, and work from 
 
86 SCIENTIFICS, 
 
 that ; or else metaphysically work in the dark, and 
 pile up facts which may, with a good purpose, be a 
 good thing for a future time. The ends or uses of 
 the tongue are manifold ; as these are revealed to 
 you, and as the structure is known, you have the 
 soul and body of the organ. So your Ufe as a 
 physiologist is strictly limited by your discernment 
 of the ends carried out in the structure. And analy- 
 sis is but the path which shows in clear detail the 
 synthetic ends in the tongue. These ends are 
 what make it, as architects make houses; and 
 analvsis is the pupil mason who must be commanded 
 by them, or be a foolish artisan. The higher the 
 ends, the better the analysis. In other words, God 
 and the soul are the masters of physiology, and 
 analytic science working honestly for knowledge of 
 God's purposes, is their everlasting subordinate, 
 blessed in his proper place. But an analytic science 
 which does not look for plain ends when they can be 
 had, or which despises them, is a busy and danger- 
 ous fool. Now the plain end of all is, that the 
 whole body is the organ of its immortal soul, and 
 that the soul, mind, and spirit in the body, are in 
 their end and use when they stand in the order of 
 the Lord for His service. Fence it about as we may, 
 the discernment of this end, and the religious appli- 
 cation of it, and the gift to see how it is carried 
 forth in potency in the life of every organ and of the 
 whole, is the only recovery from death and ruin 
 possible in the analytical physiological sciences. 
 
 If you think this cannot be done, you are referred 
 to Swedenborgs Animal Kingdom, where it is done 
 for the organs of the human body: it is there 
 accomplished '' anatomically, physically, and philo- 
 sophically," by demonstrating the correspondence of 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 87 
 
 the organs with the soul, that is, with the man ; and 
 with society, that is, with the greater man ; and the 
 proximate animation of the body by that' correspon- 
 dence. The latter problem, inscrutable for other 
 pliysiology, receives a complete and ever-completing 
 solution, as the human mind perceptive of ends, and 
 observation studying their instruments, bring the 
 two together in the use of life. 
 
 There are tests by which a scientist, examining 
 himself in the sight of God, may ascertain what his 
 end and object are in pursuing his self-imposed 
 vocation. And a plain one suggests itself here. If 
 his means are atrociously cruel, if he is in the '^ Sodom 
 and Egypt " of animal violation, he may be scientifi- 
 cally sure that his end is self and its gratification, 
 and that it is earthly, sensual, and devilish. 
 
 Analytics witlioid uses close the sciences, ctnd violent 
 analytics close them violently, and seal them, — By 
 closing them is here meant, that they are closed 
 against ends and all the higher reasons, closed 
 against all imagination of good and truth as reigning 
 at the top and in tlie centre of things, closed against 
 the secret way and the open way that leads to God, 
 from whom all things come. Thus they are closed 
 against His influx, which organically is genius, and 
 by a better gift, inspiration. After this a right 
 understanding has no hold on scientifics, and they 
 never reach the portals of the rational mind : they 
 are surds making surds to the end of the chapter. 
 
 Now this closure, and the contrary openness, are 
 worth attending to. The closed analysis is all flesh, 
 with no channels, or tubes, or permeabilities in it 
 but those of the lowest order. '' Goods trains," of 
 flesh and other food, of air, and the like, run through 
 the carnal subject from the world, to the world, and 
 
as 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 SCIENTIFICS, 
 
 89 
 
 create its faculties, and are its causes. Bowels are 
 its be all and end all, as in some low animal forms. 
 The circulation of its blood is self-contained, a river 
 of self ; the body itself is the carnal microcosm in 
 which it expatiates. In short, the man is conglu- 
 tinated aggressive flesh, corresponding to violational 
 physiology. Protoplasm and cells differently ap- 
 posed, and developed into impervious lines, are the 
 account of the solid creature. This has no founda- 
 tion in fact, but is the imagination of the carnal 
 mind, itself equally solid with its conception ; it is 
 mere imaorination, because the ultimate structure of 
 nerve and vessel is beyond microscopes, and the 
 solidity is not a fact but an inference from liking. 
 It, however, concedes the right to other imagination 
 — to an imasrination based on the fact of Influx. 
 Now thought, feeling, love, all states of consciousness, 
 have their channels; they are not permanent, but flow 
 on occasion ; in other words, they inflow, or come 
 by influx. They come by influx from the source of 
 life, which is God. This theory with its imaginations 
 is justified, like any scientific theory, by fitting the 
 facts. The steps of its appreciation, like the solid 
 cell-germ view, are hypotheses, imaginations if you 
 please. Good science is full of these, and the fuller 
 the better w-hen the rational mind controls them ; 
 they give it active life, and work for it as its artisans. 
 Swedenborgs first hypothesis of these things, and 
 we are obliged to cite him, for he is the only human 
 physiologist extant, lay in the doctrine of the nerves 
 as channels of the animal spirits : the animal spirits 
 being cosmic human forms which, with their proper 
 brain substances, are accommodated hy their forms 2it 
 once to the beginning of motion and to the reception 
 of life. He regarded the nerves as in some sense 
 their tubes, carrying their capacity for life, wisdom, 
 
 and work throughout the frame. Thus regarding 
 them, he kept the human frame open at the top for 
 the influx of creative life ; and in doing this, whether 
 his formula was final or not, he let a pure river of 
 life water physiology. No matter whether the influx 
 and its tubing are like blood and arteries, or like air 
 and ether and their rills and rivers of light and 
 electricity, he here struck upon Correspondence ; 
 and the formula, with no dogmatism, is, — as the 
 blood is to the heart and arteries, so is the animal 
 spirit to the brain and the nerve channels. So long 
 as this is steadily kept in view, above all study and mi- 
 croscopy, so long the body is open to life ; the moment 
 the reverse of it is fixed, that moment the higher 
 reasons of the body die, and its physiology is a carcase. 
 The vessels of Life, — Against this ancient per- 
 ceptive doctrine of the ^^ animal spirit," that is to 
 say, of an orderly influx into, and transflux through, 
 the human body, from the highest organs, or the 
 cortices and marrows of the brain, downwards, the 
 sensual mind pleads microscopic reasons, such as the 
 cellular and concamerated, not tubular structure of 
 the nerves, as revealed by observation. This how- 
 ever makes the senses the last court of appeal about 
 the mind's instrumentation ; which is absurd. It 
 may be stated broadly, that to any higher set of 
 powers, all the lower forms are tubular ; that is to 
 say, the higher can penetrate and pervade them in 
 orderly paths, and in the organic body, in paths pre- 
 appointed. And also this further, that the way of 
 the hiorher throuofh the lower can never be found out 
 from the lower ; though when it is once admitted, it 
 may be discerned mentally, not sensually, from the 
 point of view of the higher. The lower always 
 seems blocked by its very structure, by its resistent 
 
 
90 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 inferiority, when looked at from beneath, and the 
 clearest evidence can be given that it is impermeable ; 
 besides that " impossibility " and its endless gabble 
 enter the sensual field. Yet it is clear that the 
 nervous fibres, seemingly solid, or compacted of 
 walled cells and cellules, and exhibiting no pathways, 
 may, and if there be real influx and transflux of life 
 must, be channels and conduits of a human stream 
 represented in nature by a receptive vibratile spirit ; 
 a human etlier if you please. Where the senses show 
 no doors, but only walls, this can '' come in," and 
 traverse its own vessels, visible as certainties to only 
 the instructed rational mind ; and indispensable as 
 objects for that mind in its relation to physiology. 
 
 And further it is clear, that if you are to reason 
 from anatomy and physiology at all, which no one 
 need do unless he pleases, the thought that connects 
 the visible brain with the whole mind, is a rational 
 servant of the upper thought that the animal spirit 
 has the mental attributes in a superior and supreme 
 degree, and exercises, not a '' cerebration," which is 
 a general or communal function, but an intuition 
 from God, which is a universal or statesman function, 
 of which we are not conscious ; and which exists in 
 degrees ; and is only revealed to us in part as our 
 minds become voluntarily opened parallel to the 
 high tiers of this exalted spiritual and cosmical in- 
 telligence above us and within us. This animal 
 spirit, or, to borrow an old English word, this 
 '' soulish " spirit, for there is nothing animal about it 
 in the ordinary sense, gives us the right to think 
 analogically of every function of the body, and to re- 
 present it as of human quality and proportion ; to 
 know that the functions are quasi mental works, 
 or struggles, parallel with our own consciousness; 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 91 
 
 and especially with conscience, as determining the 
 ultimate character of our lives ; which lives through- 
 out are organic forms. 
 
 The rank of Analytics,— QoT\i\x^\on reigns with 
 regard to the importance to be attributed to the 
 abstract or unapplied sciences, and to their proper 
 order in the services of the mind. For in large part 
 at the present day they are frivolous, and the off- 
 sprincr of the love of novelty, amusement, and dis- 
 tinction. This is perceived by the public ; and the 
 scientists in question, beggars in regard to solid 
 property of use, claim kindred, nay, main sharehold- 
 ing, with the applied sciences, more properly speak- 
 ino", with the Arts which minister winged sandals to 
 the feet of human life. The title is not valid ; and 
 so far as evil and false analytics blur the great light 
 of true knowledge, their influence on human power is 
 to discouragement and paralysis. For knowledge is 
 not power, but weakness, nay, ruin, when the thing 
 known had better be unknown. The place of bad 
 analytics of this kind, such as vivisection gathers, is 
 the place of rejection ; socially at last, the cell of the 
 prison. But, on the other hand, there is a large 
 assemblage of analytical knowledges which is at 
 least neutral ; botanical, zoological, and other facts, 
 which, if observers are justified by their daily duties 
 in attending to, they may fairly plead, may be 
 useful, and in the meantime are harmless, and as 
 objects, curious and beautiful. The question then is, 
 what is the place and rank of the pursuit and attain- 
 ment of such things ? Their scientists claim for it, 
 and the systems in which it is enshrined, a very high 
 place. What is the limit and precedence of the great 
 collectors and dilettanti of the day? 
 
 It is obvious that mere facts, and the digest of 
 
92 
 
 SCIENTIFICS, 
 
 SCIENTIFICS. 
 
 93 
 
 'I 
 
 mere facts, belong in themselves only to the senses 
 and the memory, and that their importance consists in 
 the rational mind laying hold of them, and convert- 
 inor them from dead scientifics into truths. Failing 
 this, they still have a value, because, so far as they 
 are correct, they are convertible when an adequate 
 mind receives them. But excepting where they 
 touch use, and suggest work and practice, they are 
 the lowest stratum of human acquirements. Bare 
 knowing without doings remains in the senses, but 
 does not enter the mind. It is justified in the 
 sciences, because many good men are born with an 
 honest love of acquiring such knowledges. But 
 next to the objects of the five senses, its place is at 
 the bottom of faculties. We speak not now of 
 acquired knowledges animated by ulterior designs ; 
 such as the serving of God intellectually, or the 
 denial of Him ; but of the place of mere science ; 
 Avhat Bacon calls its ''dry light." And this is 
 adjudged to be not a foundation, which applied Art 
 and its science are, but a limbus of an inferior order. 
 The more of such knowledge there is, the more 
 the memory is cultivated at the expense of the mind. 
 And as the possession of it is huge materially, the 
 acreage, yea, the wiseacreage immense, it gives the 
 sense of lordly proprietorship, and puffs up the 
 impleted scientist beyond his fellows. Knowledge is 
 property at any rate ; there is no denying that. 
 But conceit of privilege, and lordism, is its present 
 bane ; so that the typical conceited men among men 
 are these scientists ; and they walk among the rest 
 in big cloaks of terminology, stopping the streets of 
 nature with persons. Such scientists, so mainly 
 icrnorant of man, are at best in the stratum next 
 above the senses. The place of the atheistic 
 ientists is far beneath this, and is a region of 
 
 arrogance more fiery than conceit, and deeper down 
 than ignorance. 
 
 In fine, the place of the natural sciences, and in- 
 deed of all scientifics, is in the external mind ; and 
 does not belong to the opening of man s internal life. 
 And hence, in spite of the exactitude of this great 
 field of memory, intellect and rationality cannot be 
 predicated of it ; for it stands beneath the problems 
 of good and evil ; and though it may enter into 
 wisdom, there is no wisdom in its own walk. The 
 truths of the conduct of life, the knowledoes which 
 accompany the heart and mind and conscience, in 
 short, the way of a good man's life, most exacting, 
 but with none of the exactitude of definition or foot- 
 rule, are of kingly certainty compared to scientific 
 facts, and theories however universal of matter, 
 space, and time. The man, in his existence, is made 
 up of awful certainties for himself, compared to 
 Avhich scientifics, even those of the widest range, 
 and commanded by theories however perfect, are 
 but chauQfeful shadows. 
 
 Certainty and exactitude. — We may here con- 
 clude that exactitude, the aim of science, is one 
 thing, and certainty another ; for exactitude may 
 attach to any falsities if their artifice is but carefully 
 worked out and defined. You may make exactly what 
 you want, and call that exactitude. But certainty 
 comes from above, and is the constantly increasin^^ 
 appanage and fortune of the truths and goods of life. 
 Hence again the living church and the living state, 
 in their daily experiences and knowledges, that is to 
 say, divinely instructed common sense, and the tiers 
 of wisdom and intelligence natural and spiritual 
 which correspond to it, and are built upon its 
 exercise, are immeasurably above the field, and beyond 
 the permanence, of science, its plane, and its laws. 
 
94 
 
 CONSUMMATIO S^CULL 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 CONSUMMATIO S^CULI. 
 
 / 
 
 The consummation of the Age in Scientijics. — The 
 reader may wonder that we have spoken at such 
 great length of the violation of life by scientists as a 
 norm of procedure ; but besides that the facts are 
 appaUing, they belong to a series of crimes which 
 are '' intev Christianos non nominanda,'' and which 
 are already statutable offences in part. Being such, 
 any instance of these deeds proclaimed as a rule of 
 action, leads to all the rest, and calls upon the 
 country for judgment, and condemnation by law. 
 We do not argue that because a murder is of some 
 poor outcast person, it escapes from value in the 
 eyes of justice; on the contrary, the nation is 
 stricken by it, and justice mounts its throne to 
 assign it to doom. The whole people is hushed to 
 listen to the sentence. This is because the crime is 
 of universal import, and if it could be disregarded, 
 it would breed murders as the shambles breed flies ; 
 it would actively infest mankind ; as perhaps we 
 may have opportunity of showing in speaking of the 
 doctrine of infestations. The nature of society, 
 which is one body, assures this result. Science too, 
 being in society, is one body, and whatever crime is 
 practised and then condoned by it, is made into 
 one of its laws and measurements, infests it, and 
 accomplishes its consummation, and its doom. 
 
 Now the violation of life to get at the knowledges 
 of life, is the last debauchery of science, and its final 
 crime in one direction. The mind of man can con- 
 
 CONSUMMATIO S^CULL 
 
 95 
 
 ceive nothing more final. The pruriency of the most 
 cruel lusts uses all its fingers here. The delights of 
 hell are bodily in it. We are entitled to say that 
 this belongs to the consummation of the age in the 
 scientific sphere. 
 
 We must here somewhat anticipate the argument 
 of this book. Now we know from the writings of 
 Swedenborg, and afterwards read in the signs of the 
 times, that such a consummation has come upon the 
 first Christian Church. It has died, and been re- 
 moved out of the Divine way, '^ because it had no 
 lono"er any faith, because it had no charity ; " and 
 therefore could no longer guide mankind. What 
 then does this imply ? 
 
 It impUes that the whole sphere of modern life is 
 under this consummation ; on the evil side it is 
 judged, and displaced from the institutes of the 
 Divine Providence. We must look out for this 
 consummation everywhere ; not in theologies and 
 churches alone ; but in law, in medicine, in govern- 
 ment ; in money, facts, and figures ; in public and 
 private affairs, and their combinations. We must 
 also look everywhere for the beginnings of the new 
 order ; for the way of Him who says, '^ Behold I 
 make all thinofs new." We have found the clear 
 brand of consummation on the forehead of science ; 
 it may be found universally in other fields if we seek 
 for it in this lio^ht. 
 
 The advent of the new order, the new aeon, 
 specifically, the second coming of the Lord, is 
 effected already in the spiritual world with plenary 
 power ; the day of judgment, and its acts, are there : 
 men on earth receive its influence, but without the 
 disturbance of their voluntary societies, or the in- 
 frin^orement of their free choice and following* of srood 
 
h 
 
 06 CONSUMMATIO S^CULI. 
 
 and evil. The colossal events which that influence 
 has quickened seem to follow in natural course in 
 the days of men and nations. But good and evil are 
 both animated by new principles, and pmctical 
 good will have continual successes, and evil will 
 " still have judgment here." The new freedom from 
 heaven, and the new intelligence which is its outbirth, 
 give tiie opportunity for evil consummations, and 
 brin^ one quickened wickedness after another to its 
 boundary, its final discovery by divine light, and its 
 iud<^ment. And thus we have the spectacle at this 
 day" in all departments where a clear judgment for 
 ri.rhteousness and faithfulness has not been volun- 
 tarily pronounced by the people, of more towering 
 forms of evil. This is because the great criminals, 
 the ancient evils of the race, must show themselves 
 until they arrive by their own waywardness and 
 blindness before the very bench of the assize of 
 the Divine Man. Tliere are numbers of them, m- 
 dividuals, professions, combinations, policies, ship- 
 ownincrs and landownings, arts, sciences, philosophies, 
 churches, advancing through evil after evil to ima- 
 ginary estates, or thrones, and all on the road to 
 their own specific judgment in the consummation o 
 the acre. But for any of them this may be averted 
 by individual and national repentance, and true 
 reformation ; and in that case they quit the lines ot 
 divine judgment, and enter upon voluntary regenera- 
 tion, which is the path commanded by the Lord lor 
 
 the new age. . 
 
 Marls of Consunmation.— Science itselt, m us 
 
 general aspects, shows on its forehead the clear 
 
 mark of the consummation of the age in two 
 
 directions. The ambition towards universal know- 
 
 led<re, and the dominion of the same ; and contempt 
 
 CONSUMMATIO SyECULI. 
 
 97 
 
 of use ; for the Lord's own kingdom of science is a 
 kingdom of uses. And 2. The desertion of the 
 proper ends of knowing, to introduce covertly the 
 end of mortifying religion ; this object being deeply 
 planted in, and often openly avowed by, the scientific 
 mind. By the first of these destructions the old 
 science ceases to be human in a good sense ; and by 
 the second it becomes diabolical in its aim. By the 
 first it loses its body and mind, and by the second 
 its soul. In other words, it impinges by both of its 
 great faculties against that fence beyond which 
 there is no passage, but wliere arrest and consumma- 
 tion come, Tliis may happen while scientific pursuit 
 is in full cry, and its prey great ; it may be un- 
 suspected by reason of the multitude of followers, 
 the width of the field, and the multiplication of 
 wealth ; and yet the whole dominion as a centre 
 may be already displaced, and its candlestick re- 
 moved ; and the open desolation of it be preparing 
 by the doom of God and the instrumental indigna- 
 tion of mankind. The removal of influx from the 
 condemned sciences, their lowering to the lowest 
 grounds, their loss of modesty and decency, their 
 resort to cruelty, the defect of genius for prosecuting 
 them on their own merits, and the presence of evil 
 genius for atheizing them ; these are signs written 
 up for those who can read them, and they mark 
 consummation. A new science in and from a new 
 church will then take a new place in regions of the 
 mind far distant from these desolations. 
 
 Protoplasm and developyiieiit ex se. — Among the 
 signs of scientific consummation we note the dogma 
 of developments in nature postulated and worked 
 apart from a Divine Author of being ; the be- 
 gmning of such developments in protoplasm ; and 
 
 G 
 
 I 
 
98 CONSUMMATIO S^CULI. 
 
 their end everywhere for the mind in 'Hhe un- 
 known." Now the protoplasm of modern thought 
 is the doctrine of a primordial matter or stuff from 
 which all organizations take their origin, and which 
 reaches in its upward course from organific cells by 
 developments of shapes through animals to man- 
 kind, being therefore a prse-seminal continent of the 
 forces of life. In fact, it is Nature itself regarded as 
 a lake of seed. We do not speak here of any sub- 
 stance that is not doctrinated, but occurs in the 
 field of microscopic or other observation, and carries 
 with it no insurgent mental consequences. Such 
 substance, if visible, is of course valid, and has its 
 own scientific worth. But protoplasm so called, and 
 entered by the doctrines which now inspire it, is of 
 a different import. Out of otherwise harmless serum 
 it makes an imaginary cauldron of life working 
 towards organism, and producing nature after nature 
 in its own way ; the clay mind moving and moulding 
 the clay, and sceptic of the potter as a matter of 
 ease to itself, ex professo, but in reality actively 
 shunting the potter, and bidding him wait for ever. 
 This is'' the fancy of a most bachelor Self. No 
 childhood but dribbling senility of science, it leaves 
 out, as unworthy of notice, the fact that men 
 and women make men and women, and that the 
 lake of primordials inside any conceivable organism is 
 made in an analogous way ; that every drop of plant 
 juice presupposes the plant, and every atom of mans 
 serum contains the man. Protoplasm has indeed no 
 real seed in its loins, but only pruritus atheizandu 
 It is impotence in a mirror, a doctrine antagonist to 
 generation. And the scepticism inside it is perfect 
 fear casting out love and foreclosing its acts. It is 
 needless to say how pedantic it is, and how ridicu- 
 
 CONSUMMATIO S^ECULL 
 
 99 
 
 lous in a world of uses. Its importance however 
 lies in the fact that it is part of a deliberate method 
 of leaving out all the truly human faculties in the 
 study of living nature, and supplanting their place 
 by sensual thought alone. This makes this, and this 
 makes this, is the word of its biological laboratory, 
 and as it begins at the extreme opposite to person, 
 the end is that nature makes nature. But man, 
 who is, if he will, a recipient of love and wisdom 
 and intelligence from the Almighty, may leave out 
 nature thus, but cannot so make nature. Whatever 
 he does with his powers and parts, among which his 
 exploring senses are the lowest conscious ones, he 
 does from plans, purposes, ideas ; and whatever pri- 
 mordial stuff he handles becomes the vehicle, and 
 ultimately the form of these. It is then impossible 
 to him, without violating his own mind, and using 
 only a small fraction of the remnant, to investigate 
 nature otherwise than as the carrier of the ends of 
 the Creator ; otherwise than in the whole forms of 
 things working out their predetermined uses. And 
 not primordial stuff traced from below upwards, but 
 men and women, and all their correspondences in 
 forms and uses from above downwards, are the 
 theatre in which ends and purposes live, and from 
 which they issue. Moreover, without a Word of 
 Ood, God's ends and purposes cannot be known. 
 And hence to the descending series of thought inter- 
 preting nature, that Word pressant above is a 
 '' rational necessity." In other words, science, in all 
 its perceptions and defences, cannot ascend from 
 protoplasm, but must descend from the Word of the 
 Lord. 
 
 In concluding these hints on protoplasmism, or 
 the dogma of ponds of life from which organisms 
 
T 
 
 lOO 
 
 CONSUMMATIO S^CULL 
 
 MODERN THO UGHT, 
 
 lOI 
 
 S 
 
 issue, emptied of the belief in a Creator having pur- 
 poses, it may be noted that the method of thought 
 involved is the professor's path of stupidity and 
 obscurantism. It aims to know nothing of the 
 protoplasm but its struggles and successes ; its lines 
 ultimating now in a race of men, now in a race of 
 frogs ; and as creative purpose is voided from the 
 struggling abyss, it is essentially unknown and un- 
 knowable save as a transit; and what will the 
 thing do next is the only question. But where 
 there are no ends nothing is attainable, and what- 
 ever the fall of chances, nothing effectual is realized 
 or done. And this beginning from the unknown 
 and unknowable, from active cells that exist for 
 nothing, implying an ardent love of ignorance of God 
 and ends, pursues the subject to its goal, where all 
 life, in death, closes again in a strongly voluntary 
 unknown. Proceeding from such a beginning as a 
 primum falsum, men and manners and societies, and 
 moral life and affairs, are still but the rolling pro- 
 toplasm, over turning by self-evolution into some- 
 thing else fundamentally unknown ; no foothold 
 gained, and death at every step triumphant over 
 science as well as over mankind. Scientific proto- 
 plasm thus disembogues and loses itself into philoso- 
 phical protoplasm, and the cataract of nature and mind 
 is dissipated into the frivolous unknown. A word 
 the opposite of education is required to signify the 
 public effect ; obfuscation is not enough, for it is a 
 honeyed voluntary diabetes which drains spiritual 
 manhood away. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 Modern thought is a sly justification often pleaded 
 for opinions and practices that otherwise want a char- 
 acter. It generally clinches some attack upon ancient 
 thought, so far as the latter embraces religious faith, 
 or acceptance of the ends of a Divine Providence 
 ruling in nature or society. In this sense, it is 
 *' modern thought" that science shall study nature 
 apart from belief in a Divinity. Also that all Scrip- 
 ture is externally made up of words whose final sense 
 is to be unlocked by criticism. Also that knowledge 
 is the power of powers, and that all means to it are 
 justifiable. Also that society is a human invention 
 continually perfecting — not growing better, for good 
 and evil have no standard with which to measure 
 themselves in this thought. Also that circumstances 
 evolve everything, and are the only objects of study. 
 And that society can be held together by science and 
 talent, and dispense with the old guides, religion and 
 its wisdom, and under them, love and its wisdom, 
 when the selfhood becomes sufficiently enlightened 
 to be unselfish for the sake of supreme selfishness. 
 Also that observant expediency is the easiest wheel 
 of movement, and that long sharpsighted expediency 
 grows to be wisdom. These are some factors of 
 '^ modern thought." And as they require a brazen 
 statement, modern thought wears a long face, a calm 
 manner, a flippant logic, and an appearance of unin- 
 terested apathy, and of languid power of holding 
 its own and waiting for more modern thought. It 
 seems to care for nothing, in order that it may not 
 
 "n 
 
I 
 
 I02 
 
 t< 
 
 MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 open the Eastern question," and rouse the antago- 
 nism of powers that have deep cares and aims which 
 modern thought ignores. 
 
 But this claim, modern thought, as often used, is 
 a forgery, and therein a small but active band of 
 doubters and deniers usurp the great seal and signa- 
 ture of the age for the purpose of their ways. The 
 spirit of the age, in its good, in its breadth, in its prac- 
 tical arts and sciences and their punctuality to use ; in 
 its devotion to the end of raising the people into de- 
 cency first, and into thrift, duty, love, and religion, and 
 so into education and useful knowledge, — that spirit is 
 earnest, emphatic, inevitably biblical, and has nothing 
 to do with knowledge as an end for manliness, but 
 as a means to godliness. This spirit is the ruling, 
 the unappreciated principle of modern thought. It 
 never existed as a rational religious principle until 
 these times, when a doctrine of use derived from 
 heaven has made clear to man that the only justifi- 
 cation of any system or pressure of thought, of any 
 popular mode of wishing and thinking, is its justifi- 
 cation on the altar of service of God and service to 
 man. Will the thought call down fire when it is 
 placed there ? The other '' modern thought" is the 
 sphere of decay from philosophies and scientisms 
 since the beginning, the rags and ruins of Greek spe- 
 culation and analytics, to which the Gospel is fool- 
 ishness ; modern in nothing but its usurpation of the 
 new cloth of the age, and in the extent of its publi- 
 cation. Wherever its term occurs it is suspect ; and 
 it should be straightway tried by the test of faith in 
 the Lord as the highest good, and its forgery of 
 newness, or its newness, may be judged accord- 
 ingly. 
 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 103 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 
 
 The spirit of the age has been mentioned, and it is 
 important to understand wherein it lies, and what it 
 is. The spirit of a man in the pervasive sense is the 
 general efflux from his life and character, and his 
 peculiar influence upon men and things around him. 
 It is his qualitative place and share in the sphere of 
 his operations, be that sphere large or small. And 
 so the spirit of an age is not its mind or conscious 
 development, but the sphere which proceeds from it, 
 and is its general circumambient life. This spirit no 
 man makes, though every man is an influence in it. 
 It depends in its turn on the internal world in which 
 all men are constituted. The spirit of the age 
 traced higher up is the general pressure of the 
 spiritual world upon the human race on earth ; in the 
 present case the incalculable pressure of a new 
 righteousness of life, in a new church above, on con- 
 sciences, public and private. No single generation 
 could appreciate this, because it comes from the 
 plenitude of purpose in all human races since the 
 beginning, and is continually poured through them 
 as His organ by the Lord. This spirit can never more 
 be extinguished, because the Word which is its 
 fountain is unsealed, and its wellsprings open into 
 the rational mind. And hence, an illuminated reason 
 is become the inward spirit of this age, fortunate 
 with a divine fortune. Reason, human rationality, 
 is therefore profoundly justified in its true workings; 
 and there is pure certainty, as it is God's organ now, 
 that it will be helped to discover and comprehend 
 
I04 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL RULE 
 
 
 everything that is for the glory of God and the good 
 of man's estate ; and also that it will, by internal 
 dictate and outward experience, be warned away 
 from all fruitless fields, and from every breach of 
 use of life. Openness therefore to the Spirit of God, 
 and to tlie spiritual world, always for use' sake, is 
 also the inner spirit of the age; and nothing can 
 enter into it that questions for a moment the higher 
 life, and its pulse in, and correspondence and con- 
 tiguity with, the daily life of man on earth. Hence 
 also it is the spirit of the age to purify the outward 
 life, in order that it may be hard enough in the 
 granite of the good and the true to sustain the piers 
 of the bridges of spiritual communication which are 
 being thrown across from the other side, to engineer 
 death and mortality until they can carry the Second 
 Cominor of Him Who is the resurrection and the 
 life. Truly, when we look around, there seems to 
 be another spirit than this; and yet there is no 
 other. The breath of men contrary is not a spirit ; 
 and their freedom is not a freedom. They have no 
 goal and no aim ; and a spirit is all goal and aim ; 
 knows what it wants, and ''bloweth where it listeth." 
 They are the unburied past ; the spirit of the age 
 is the honest present and the Holy City of the 
 sure future. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL RULE IN THE IMAGINATIONS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 The imagination, as a function in science, is true, 
 or false, for good, or for evil. — This topic has been 
 alluded to already. It shall be illustrated by the 
 present imaginations about astronomy. A " modern 
 
 IN THE IMAGINATIONS OF SCIENCE. 105 
 
 thought " and intention here is that suns and systems 
 are evolved by natural law out of the concourse, or 
 streaming to centres, of atoms and bodies, and that 
 heat, a permanent inhabitant of body, is evolved by 
 its own laws and forces; produces incandescence 
 in the suns, and indeed at certain stages in all the 
 members of the solar system ; which heat dies out 
 gradually in times, leaving planets a tempered period 
 in which, '' by laws," mineral, vegetable, and animal 
 kingdoms come out of them upon them; after which 
 period the planets cool, and universal death covers 
 their surfaces. This is the " be-all and end-all " for 
 the sun also, which at present is a fiery, ever-bursting 
 bubble in the centre of the system. Here is a dis- 
 tinct set of imaginations. It is formed from the 
 lowest plane of thought, from physical heat as a 
 commander; and though it notices the fact that life 
 appears on our earth at a certain stage, and may 
 therefore come up on other planets, yet it '' runs " 
 bare heat as an imagination of all that happens, 
 without putting life in cause, or remembering that it 
 is a living brain in which the imagination works. It 
 is an imagination from self, and at no point touches 
 upon a work of God. Now this fact is elicited, that 
 any man who believes in God as the creator of the 
 universe, and the end of ends, can entertain no such 
 imagination as that which we have sketched. He 
 can accept all the facts which it marshals; but having 
 other faculties than the lowest opened, and an 
 imagination to each of them, those faculties will 
 breathe through the subject-matter, and give it a 
 totally different form. By the highest of those 
 faculties, which apprehends the revealed Lord, and 
 by the revelation itself, he knows that nature is 
 dead, and of itself can do nothing, but is actuated 
 
f 
 
 io6 
 
 THE IMAGINATIONS OF SCIENCE, 
 
 A NEW STATE, 
 
 107 
 
 f 
 
 from within by Him to all that occurs in her. 
 His imagination as a factor works from these points. 
 And quitting the level of matter he too imagines, 
 but as a whole man he imagines, that the suns are 
 themselves the primal natural fires lighted by the 
 Maker as the foundries of His other works : that as 
 He is love itself, fire can exist from Him by itself as 
 a substance and a subject. That if all things stream 
 from it, this is because it is the natural principle of 
 all things, and contains them from the Lord in 
 potency. That therefore spectrum analysis does not 
 import that there are either metal, metal gas, or 
 other planetary substances in the sun, but only their 
 fire correspondents ; as it were the spirits, brains and 
 nerves, to which the atmospheres and substances of 
 earths are flesh and clothing on the earth. Here is 
 a new set of imaginations adequate to all the facts, 
 and more infilling, higher and better than the former. 
 They proceed from all the faculties of the man, from 
 his religion, his love, his intellect ; and they press 
 against the insurgent sensual and superficial imagina- 
 tions breast to breast. For any given time they are 
 true however poorly stated, and lead to good ; the 
 others, because brainless and heartless, carnally- 
 minded, and designedly negligent of the Lord, are 
 false however clearly put, and lead to evil. 
 
 Between these rival genera of imaginations ami- 
 cable discussion is not possible ; each battles for the 
 possession of the mind. Both are mental super- 
 additions to matter; the one pleading God as a 
 supreme quantity, the other ignoring God and plead- 
 ing its own probabihties without Him. Each 
 imagination grasps the case according to the faculty 
 put in force ; and there is no prospect of consent be- 
 tween the opposing volitions and intellectual facul- 
 
 ties from which the imaginations live. Clear state- 
 ment marched into the enemy's field, war, not 
 counsel or debate, is the manifest issue. The war 
 is a holy and must not be a timid work, for on the 
 spiritual side it is a war for the very existence of the 
 human mind in the domain of the sciences. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 A NEW STATE. 
 
 The false faith that any absolute and final truth 
 ca7i be discovered by science from the changeful pheno- 
 mena of nature, is one image and result of its own 
 self-deification. As also is the faith of science in its 
 own permanence. As also again is the postponement 
 of religious exactitude called theology, until scieiice 
 has attai7ied to its own exactitude complete. — The 
 end and aim of science is exact knowledge of the 
 data of any subject submitted to it ; of anything 
 natural, moral, social, or spiritual, that the faculties 
 of mankind can touch ; also of the rules and laws of 
 things, which by their application increase the 
 faculties of perceiving and knowing. Tlie love of 
 the investigation for its own sake is the corporeal 
 spirit of science. Approximate and if possible entire 
 exactitude introduced into the subject in hand is the 
 attainment. Geology, for example, advances con- 
 tinually to this attainment by the study of the crust 
 of the earth. It has reason to conclude that geo- 
 logical time is immeasurably greater than historical 
 time, and that present agencies account for a great 
 part of the superficial phenomena of the earth. One 
 exactitude is attained. But here is the point. The 
 
If' 
 
 1 08 
 
 A NEW STATE, 
 
 A NEW STATE. 
 
 109 
 
 V 
 
 triumphant geologist, not content with this, must 
 needs pass from geological time and astronomical 
 space to two quantities of his own postulation, not 
 of his own creation or imagination, for he can neither 
 create nor imagine them, — namely, to infinite space, 
 and infinite time, and endeavour to introduce exacti- 
 tude to cover his quantities there. Instantaneously 
 the love of science and its lawful possessions is in- 
 verted, and converted, with its feet upwards and its 
 head downwards, into the lust of science, sighing 
 and burning for the possession of things that are not 
 its own. Present history is full of this. You shall 
 see the accomplished crystallographer and experi- 
 mentalist, most versed in delicate operations which 
 show the exquisite orders of matter, a very Linnaeus 
 of what is lovely in particles, who can handle heat 
 and light with the fine heat and light of his own 
 scientific genius, and give them to the mind of an 
 audience almost like firm statues, — you shall see him 
 leave his little palace of truth, and rushing out 
 before the people on a great occasion, go a-hectoring 
 against personal Godhead, and proclaim himself an 
 archbishop in a new church of matter. In short, 
 the lust of knowing everything, and on his own terms, 
 has supplanted his science, and mockingly gives 
 oracles out of its abandoned shrine. So have we seen 
 an aggressive young cuckoo overfilling a small bird's 
 nest, and the true brood lying about dead on the 
 ground. If such a man goes on in this career he 
 will in time care nothing about science, and every- 
 thing about himself. He will soon be more dexter- 
 ous in getting rid of God out of his own mind than 
 in studying creation. And the end of him will be 
 '^ Ego, et natura mea" 
 
 That such an end is possible, not only for indivi- 
 
 dual scientific men, but for large and fruitful realms 
 of science, may be gathered from many signs. If 
 we look back into the past, science has depended 
 greatly upon the peace and virtue of men. The 
 angels who announced the birth of Christ therein 
 also announced the birth of immortal science. 
 Christianity, through all its terrible vicissitudes of 
 war and crime, has contained the power and presence 
 of a loving and rebuking truth, which on the one 
 hand has led to a constant renovation of social order, 
 and on the other to an appeal to justice and righteous- 
 ness as the true rulers of aflTairs. It has contained 
 in it, always working, though often invisible, the 
 enemy to all common superstition, in the recognition 
 of the divine claims of natural truth. To be exact 
 where possible flows out of a theology which exactly 
 apprehends the Godhead in the Lord the Christ. 
 Accordingly, the aim of exactitude in physical 
 science has been gradually increasing from century 
 to century since the Christian era commenced. At 
 the beginning of it stands in nature and in her 
 laws an exact and divine supernaturalism, out of 
 which, as a river of clear water out of the throne, 
 can proceed an exact and correspondent naturalism, 
 the gift and effluent genius of God, and so far itself 
 divine. No superstition, and no unreasonableness, 
 mars the reverent faith in the greatest of physio- 
 logical facts, the incarnation of Jehovah in the Lord. 
 Its essence is that it is a natural fact ; and though 
 dimly comprehensible at present, it can be seen 
 more and more by every faculty of head and heart 
 from age to age. Since Swedenborg wrote, it has 
 entered the domain of the sciences, of which it is 
 the future king, laid in that good man's rational 
 mind as in a manger. 
 
no 
 
 A NEW STATE. 
 
 Tn the field of this sight there are no bubbles of 
 air, but a sound personality at the centre. So also 
 in the field of any true science all is real and prac- 
 tical for the knowing. The geological hammer 
 and the astronomical telescope singly aim at star 
 and rock, without any duplex thought of infinite 
 space and time, which would make the blow of the 
 one and the pointing of the other wavering and 
 ridiculous. But in the false sciences, which have 
 the gas of vanity instead of the blood of natural 
 truth in their veins— that is to say, in the lusts of 
 science, which burn to aggrandize the human self- 
 hood—these two mutually destructive aims coincide, 
 and suns and planets are studied with one eye, while 
 ^' a sharp look-out " against theologies is kept by the 
 other eye. The body of such sciences cannot be full 
 of light. And although a great churchman in his 
 cathedral may ask one eye to tolerate the other eye, 
 yet a horrible squinting attention is the result, and 
 God and nature are both missed in the process. 
 
 For this reason it is probable that large tracts of 
 so-called science will be given up as mankind makes 
 advances in what is true and good. Lusts are not 
 easily got out of eyes when once they have been 
 enthroned above vision within them. Scientific 
 amaurosis in eyes so possessed may well give rise 
 to dreaming, and scientific superstition desolate the 
 land. But not for long ; because the land itself has 
 true value ; and humble cultivators, receptive of 
 Christ and His theology, will recolonize it, and 
 make it fruitful of truths for His sake, for nature's 
 sake, and for their own sakes. 
 
 Already we note that one eminent man, in view 
 of late manifestoes of materialism, propounds that if 
 this is the way of science, it is a fair question whether 
 
 A A^EW STATE, 
 
 III 
 
 it shall be allowed a place of power in national educa- 
 tion. Now here legislation may play a serious part in 
 regard to the future sway of the lusts of science. It 
 may discourage their growth, and kill these vanities 
 somewhat. Another and more pregnant concern is, 
 that there is a new righteousness, a New Church, 
 with new revelations opening the Word, and the 
 spiritual world, in the world. That will make a 
 difference to pursuits. Many things that seemed im- 
 portant to the natural boj^, science, may be quite 
 unimportant to science when he is a spiritual-natural 
 man. He will come to value tilings for ends, for 
 final causes pertinent to himself here and hereafter. 
 He will love truth for its own sake, because it is 
 true, and pursue it into the final office of its exacti- 
 tude. But the exactitude will be for an end ; not 
 to be pushed irreverently on into other pretended 
 exactitudes, but to stand as an organized backbone 
 in the mind, as a support and a fulcrum for other 
 and greater truths practical to the regeneration of the 
 man and his fellows. If the opposite tack were 
 possible to be sailed, the mind, claiming exactitude 
 beyond all measure of truth, would become bony 
 throughout, and science itself would become an 
 immeasurable skeleton, frightening out its own sun 
 and stars. 
 
 In truth, the vehement antitheological bent of 
 science at present is a sign that matters cannot rest 
 as they are, but that a war in the internal reo-ions of 
 the mind, where theology abides with those who have 
 not closed themselves against it, is imminent. For 
 if science claims to be antitheos there, and to sweep 
 the region clear because there are no sensual facts in 
 it, a new religion confronts the invader, and marshals 
 its own divine experiences^ which are both natural 
 
112 
 
 LOVE OF DOMINION IN SCIENTISM. 
 
 I> 
 
 and sensible, for the encounter. This threatens the 
 peace and permanence of everything which is 
 called science at the present day. The British 
 Association for several years, abandoning purely 
 scientific themes in its annual orations, has virtu- 
 ally entered the lists against all theology as a serious 
 study ; and thus has given the first example of the 
 dese^n of scientific pursuits in favour of levyi^^^ 
 war aaainst the realities of the religion of Christ. 
 Just In passing, it is well to remember that its 
 atheism is coincident with its horrible cruelty at 
 Norwich, which has brought science into a court ot 
 law • for the two things are, as we shall see presently 
 closely connected. Science therefore is warned not 
 to imagine that theology will submit its faith m 
 God, and creation by His act, to the measuremen of 
 scientific rules, or will postpone belief m revealed 
 truths until the British Association has confirmed 
 them. On the contrary,-war. War m a held 
 where a true theology is at home, and where 
 science is over its own boundaries War which 
 will annex science, city by city, and provmce after 
 province, to that theology, or leave it desolatecL 
 A war of conquest, divinely foreseen, but provoked 
 by science for its own false glory and evil purposes. 
 Perhaps the first general mental conflict for right- 
 eousness ; the first war of the New Jerusalem. 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 LOVE OF DOMINION IN SCIENTISM. 
 
 Science has inherited the lusts of attack which 
 are destroying it, from the love of dominion in the 
 
 LOVE OF DOMINION IN SCIENTISM. 113 
 
 past, especially as it is embodied in the Catholic 
 and Protestant churches. Such scientism is simply 
 Catholic and Protestant atheism and materialism, 
 the church of self represented in the desire to 
 possess the whole natural world in knowledge for 
 power. Laws which will formulate and handle and 
 govern all things are its cathedrals. As the above 
 ecclesiastical churches are visibly falling into ruins, 
 the spirit of dominion which animated them must go 
 somewhere, — by the conservation of forces, must, — 
 and like the dragon cast down from heaven, it falls 
 upon sciences and their professions, and animates 
 them with the old woeful love of rule. This is 
 again why there will and must be war, and why 
 scientism, in its present ideas, conceptions, and 
 theories, has no permanent foothold in the future 
 of the human race. 
 
 It is surprising how soon things pass away when 
 peoples sink out of their rank and comprehension, 
 and having pressing daily objects, cease to care 
 about them. The excavators find the limekilns in 
 which the marbles of Praxiteles were burnt for 
 mortar to be used in building common houses ; 
 statues which not long before w^ere in the 
 palaces of kings, and the temples of gods. But 
 the wheel of time turning, nobody was rich enough 
 in care to do them any longer reverence. So it will 
 be with every object, however costly now, that is 
 not cared about for ends of practical good. So it 
 will assuredly be with all the statues of personal 
 renown that have been hewn out of the fair quarries 
 of nature by the mind of atheism wielding the 
 chisel of analysis, and its devilish edge, vivisection. 
 
 Another instance from geology. It has been 
 worked of late on the hypothesis that the present 
 
 H 
 
114 LOVE OF DOMINION IN SCIENTISM. 
 
 wear and tear of nature, the action of air, fire and 
 water on a great scale, and the rules or laws of that 
 action are the only field that the geologist need 
 enter and this is perhaps true so far as the ^^,^ 
 of the earth's crust is concerned. The detritus of 
 animal and vegetable life is of course included in the 
 causes of physfcal change; as also IS the action of hgh 
 
 and heat and of ^vhat are called the imponderable 
 fluids. This is a ^vide but humble realm of scientific 
 research : and here science becomes especially sub- 
 
 of the engmeers. but mart . uut 
 useful grasp of nature there comes forth a httle 
 doctrine, that these same surface causes which age 
 by age give the earth a new stone coat, are the only 
 causes that have played from the begmning ; that 
 there is change of materials but no creation ; m shor 
 that there i^ no beginning, but geological time 
 infinite. Between the geology and this hypothesis 
 there is a great gulf fixed. The geology is for the 
 Hiost part true'and good, and follows recognised 
 sions and changes on the earth : the hypothesis is 
 baseless. It i^ indeed quite allowable to work the 
 thought that the changes of to-day are the same in 
 character with those which have been proceedmg for 
 any needful number of years ; and thus to discovei 
 how much that looks immense and violent may be 
 accounted for by long times and persistent agencies^ 
 For example, a sea bottom may be rising a foot in 
 a hundred years, until in a calculable time it be. 
 comes high dry land. But when the leap has to be 
 made that all planetary contingencies have been 
 ^us created the word creation startles and rouses 
 luo her tnd higher mind. Is it likely that wear 
 Ind tear and internal uneasiness are the creatoi ? 
 
 LOVE OF n MINI ON IN SCIENTISM. 1 1 5 
 
 Is there not another order in the nature of things ; 
 an order in its beginning out of time, and which is a 
 creative act, a living, mental, spiritual, divine per- 
 sonal order ? If there is, geology does not reach it, 
 or touch the hem of its garments. It need not do 
 so ; but if its hypothesis attacks that other order, it 
 quits its own domain, is no longer geology but Anti- 
 theos, and in losing its singleness of aim, to under- 
 stand fairly its own surfaces, it endangers the per- 
 manence of its own lines of investigation. Peace is 
 its necessity as a science, but here it enters war. 
 If to its utterly free labours were added faith in the 
 Lord the Creator, analogies could come down from 
 other fields to animate its vast carcase. If in origin 
 the planets are a personal work, have our minds no 
 leading-strings to help them to admit ways altogether 
 different from old wear and tear as the factors of 
 earths ? Place a man before you, and reason back- 
 wards on the current geological hypothesis from his 
 present to his past. To-day he is clad with his 
 clothes and nourislied by his meals, and made up of 
 elements from without. Are the chancres that now 
 occur in him day by day a sufficient account of his 
 birth, parentage, and education ? Is he created by 
 meals, and was he born in a tailor s suit ? Did his 
 tradesmen plan him ? His beginning was very 
 different ; there was a precedent personal love of 
 his father and mother, and a creative act ; he was 
 conceived in the womb, and carried, and in a moment 
 at last born as a baby ; and grew from one great 
 change to another, by a process always from within, 
 to his adult state. Wear and tear is not his theory, 
 but his dross ; and the matter he takes in is not his 
 architect, but the most exterior scaffolding of his 
 true temple. Now this, and many other analogies, 
 
ii6 SCIENCE AS FACULTY IS EVERLASTING. 
 
 inhere in the faith in a creative Lord, and cannot be 
 rooted out of it. Not to use them is to cease to 
 have mental operations in the realms beyond science, 
 and to be content with denials ; for the mind lives 
 also in these realms as well as in the lower exacti- 
 tudes ; and by analogy its higher operations are 
 founded upon the lower, and keep them in their 
 places. Analogy, that great help, here rids the 
 mind of insufficient causes, and will be the medium 
 that unites external observation with religious belief 
 in the widest field of common sense. But again it 
 is easy to see that in discarding it, the facts of 
 geological science, except for commerce and business, 
 are already enough, that care for more will not be 
 permanent, and that one of the great buildings of 
 present knowledge will be neglected and decay. 
 
 "We lay it down as certainty that only where the 
 theological mind is full of its own sufficient informa- 
 tions, and where the scientific mind stands freely 
 under it, active to possess itself of its own honest 
 department, can there be any peace in which science 
 can advance. In the other case, which is the present 
 case, where the scientific mind is full, and its theo- 
 logical faculties empty, it must, as was said before, 
 break its borders, and desert its own native country 
 of phenomena in which alone its true spirit can 
 subsist. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 SCIENCE AS FACULTY IS EVERLASTING. 
 
 Science, however, will be permanent, and will not 
 decay, for it comes down from the Lord, in whom all 
 knowledo-e, natural knowledge included, is infinite 
 
 SCIENCE AS FACULTY IS E VERLASTING. 1 1 7 
 
 and perfect ; though its present forms, desecrated too 
 much, will cease to be remembered. Oblivion has 
 two ends. When a race of men declines and decays 
 from a higher life to a lower, its arts and industries, 
 and in time its traditions, perish out of its power, 
 and it may wander as a nomadic tribe about the 
 ruins of the cities of its ancestors, and not know who 
 built them. That is one deep forgetfulness. On 
 the other hand, if a human race is lifted up by its own 
 free permission from a lower to a higher state, from 
 darkness towards light, from sensuality to virtue, 
 from insurgent materialism to religious humility, 
 from self to the Lord, such a race will unavoidably, 
 of His mercy, forget the past, void the objects of its 
 former cares, and for the most part, except Avhen 
 remembering its discipline, not know the evil 
 days from which it has voluntarily by God's will 
 departed. This is a deep and a blessed oblivion. 
 These two causes will at length combine to effect the 
 transition from the present sciences. The godless 
 cultivators will fall out of them, as no longer germane 
 to the selfhood of their lives. The New Church in 
 entering upon them will change and regenerate them, 
 so that they are no longer recognisable for what 
 they were ; for they will now exist solely, as Lord 
 Bacon said, '' for the glory of God, and for the good 
 of man s estate." 
 
 There is also a tender sense in which science is and 
 ivdl be 2Jerma7ient : it is immortal as man is im- 
 mortal. — When the great Swedish chemist Berzelius 
 was dying, he underwent a sorrow which would have 
 been assuaged had he known this merciful certainty. 
 The anecdote is contained in a memoir of Berzelius 
 by Rektor P. A. Siljestrom, and is as follows : He 
 felt that his last hour had come, and that he must 
 
ii8 SCIENCE AS FACULTY IS EVERLASTING, 
 
 take leave of the science which he had loved so well. 
 He therefore summoned one of his most devoted 
 friends, who came to his bedside with tears in his 
 eyes. Berzelius also broke forth into weeping, and 
 when the first emotion was over, he exclaimed : '' Do 
 not wonder that I weep. You know I am not weak 
 {^IWuj), and I do not fear what the doctor has to 
 announce to me ; for I am prepared for it all. But 
 in this hour I have to bid farewell to science, and 
 you must not wonder that it is hard for me. What 
 my lot shall be only the Almighty knows."^ He 
 did not then know that beyond nature, beyond 
 space and time, superior to space and time because 
 living and spiritual, living because correspondmg to 
 the Lord who is its sun, and to the immortal people, 
 changing as they change from good to good, there is 
 a spmtual world, into which every man of woman 
 born carries his affections and his acquired character 
 immediately after death. When space and time are 
 taken off the mind as old clothes, the garments of 
 new perception are given, and that spiritual world is 
 sensibly entered upon. Every form of this lower 
 creation is there extant, sun, moon, and stars, earths 
 with their kingdoms, and all inhabited by human 
 characters that correspond to them exactly, and are 
 in their final causes. It is the correspondence, as 
 was said above, the correspondence or justice of that 
 world and all its parts, that makes it alive ; for it is 
 the prolongation of good and evil, and their pro- 
 cession outwards on the scale of worlds ; what the 
 Word of the Lord calls heaven and hell. In that 
 heaven no Berzelius misses his heaven in his darling 
 pursuits. His chemist heart was not given here to 
 
 1 Minnesfest bfver J. J. Berzelius firad af Litteratur-SdllsJcapet i Stock- 
 holm den 20 Januari 1849. 
 
 SCIENCE AS FA C UL TV IS E VERLASTING. 1 1 9 
 
 meet with the accident of threescore years and ten, 
 and perish of it, but to have a spiritual chemist life 
 disclosed in him, a life not subject to tears ; a life 
 founded upon his life in nature, and for w^hich that 
 Hfe was bestowed. There the Linnes and the 
 Hunters and the Lyells can and will pursue their 
 sciences, so far as they please, subservient to all that 
 is above science, in innocence, peace, and permanence. 
 The sciences of the earth are preparations for the 
 modest immeasurable sciences which are to be o-iven 
 when we die. 
 
 I 
 
SWEDENBORG. 
 
 121 
 
 PAET II. 
 SWEDENBORG AND A NEW SCIENCE. 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 SWEDENBORG. 
 
 If any one is willing to know how spiritual things 
 are real, how space and time, and their order of suns 
 and systems, are not incompatible with suns and 
 systems and measureless extenses in which space 
 and time have no part, and in which minutes and 
 inches are impossible; how the natural world is 
 small and the supernatural world great, he is recom- 
 mended to read the writings of Swedenborg, where 
 alone that knowledge can be obtained ; and wdiere it 
 is imparted with a definite power which needs no 
 present supplements for man. 
 
 If this seems out of place in continuation of our 
 remarks on the relation of science to good and evil, 
 it is submitted that it is not really so for the fol- 
 lowing reason. The enemies of religion and its 
 attendant sciences have thrown up their earthworks 
 in the ground of natural science. They have opened 
 a game at which two can play. Every man is bound 
 to enter the field with his religion, and take up the 
 challenge if he can. It was very well when religion 
 was excluded ; good manners might fairly keep back 
 
 the theme, although at the expense of much of the 
 intercourse in which man's heart warms man's. But 
 when the main business preached as the be-all and 
 the end-all of scientific processes and formulas is 
 atheism and materialism, manners are withdrawn 
 as a bolt, and the floodgates of plain speaking are 
 opened. Even if the scientific policy retreats upon 
 sneers, the same thing is done ; and materialism 
 will constantly be confronted by revelation, illumina- 
 tion, and rational religion warring from its own 
 sphere. It will meet the incarnation of God in the 
 Lord at every turn. This is British fair play. After 
 the polemical rings of late British Associations, it is 
 but following their suit to put the spiritual other 
 side before their meeting whenever an opportunity 
 occurs, and to leave their poor science out in the 
 cold as they have done. Unfortunately bishops and 
 clergy know little of these things, and are at the 
 mercy of their foes. But the knowledge is in the 
 world, and can be had by those who are willino- to 
 receive it. 
 
 There is a propliecy in the Word which shows 
 what is coming upon the earth as it has always come 
 in heaven. " In that day there shall be a highway 
 out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall 
 come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and 
 the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In 
 that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and 
 with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the land, 
 whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed 
 be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My 
 hands, and Israel Mine inheritance." The w^ords 
 have a soul in their body ; a spiritual sense in the 
 letter. Egypt signifies science ; Assyria signifies 
 reasoning ; the highway out of Egypt into Assyria 
 
122 
 
 SWEDENBORG. 
 
 THE LA IV OF USE CONFRONTS SCIENTISM. 123 
 
 is the opened communication of sciences with the 
 rational mind as the lower platform of the spiritual. 
 In the next act Egypt and Assyria are subservient, 
 and Israel, or the spiritual mind, the creation ot the 
 Word and the life proceeding from it, enters upon 
 the scene, and is the tliird, the all-in-all-for three 
 and all the threes in three signify all-in science 
 and in reasonings ; yet not in domination but in 
 freedom of man's own yielding ; for it is said, Israel 
 shall be the third xmih Egypt and with Assyria, as 
 if the companions were equals ; for whenever the 
 Lord comes to our freedom He will not seem 
 greater than ourselves. It is added that this all-in- 
 all this third, is even a blessing in the midst of the 
 land ; which signifies the Divine mercy, and its in- 
 fluence, descending through Israel, the spiritual 
 mind, by the serving of the rational and scientific 
 minds, into the New Church, which is the midst ot 
 the land Herein at last all these faculties live 
 consciously from their Creator and Eedeemer, who 
 stands at the door and knocks, and when it is opened 
 by us, opens into them ; and the knowledges of all 
 thino-s, the sciences, the reasons, are by suboixlina 
 tion°filled with the love and the wisdom which are 
 the heat and the light which created them bo 
 alone, as Bacon says, can knowledge be the double ot 
 existence. This is the prophecy, dimly set torth 
 here, of those words of Isaiah (chap. xix. ver. 23-2d). 
 It is commended with earnest good-will to the 
 students of the British Association. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 THE LAW OF GOOD USE CONFRONTS SCIENTISM. 
 
 The above considerations tend to prune the ex- 
 cesses of the scientific mind. Mere curiosity and 
 ambition, constituting in their union a false love of 
 knowledge, cannot but be rebuked by them. The 
 conclusion is inevitable, that science exists for pur- 
 poses — for ^' ends of use," and that the incessant 
 prosecution of it in many directions is vain and 
 frivolous. The science which is attempted from the 
 mere love of knowing must be limited at last by the 
 account of the truths which accrue from it, and these 
 must be tested by the good which proceeds from 
 them. That good is mainly educative, to enlarge 
 men s minds, that they may be better and clearer 
 organs for duty. Accumulations of facts much 
 beyond this are the prey of avarice, and corrupt the 
 science, as the miser corrupts and is corrupted by 
 his gold. It is not that any despotic doctrine of 
 utility, a term far inferior to use, shall have right to 
 board the 'Challenger,' and under the plea oicui hono^ 
 terminate the voyage of the boat of science ; or 
 arrest the botanist in his excursions, and ask him 
 for a certificate of the use of his facts. No man is 
 bound at any particular time to point out the use of 
 his discoveries ; it may be centuries before some 
 other man is born who can show that. The change 
 does not strike the accumulation of facts by fair 
 means (abominable means are of course unlawful), 
 but imports that a new spirit presides over discovery 
 and its possessions. The attempt to be as gods, 
 
■■I 
 
 124 THE LA W OF USE CONFRONTS SCIENTISM. 
 
 and comprehend all things, is given up ; the 
 idea that the universe, or any single thing in it 
 can be put into a formula, when it is only in God 
 that it has its being, is carefully repressed in the 
 mind The aim to make surfaces in their gathered 
 involution into substance, and the only substance, 
 is seen to be folly. Then failing this end of know- 
 ledge, to know absolutely by intelligence from 
 selC intdUgmtla ex se, and the self being opened by 
 the self-denial of giving these false ways up other 
 ends of a better sort, descending through the 
 openinc. effected from above, must supplant the 
 first lust of knowledge, and transform it into the 
 .ood and orderly love of knowing. The first col- 
 fections of facts were not, you will remember, 
 fathered for their own sakes, but with the express 
 view of comprehending all things ; a very concrete 
 human passion from the beginning of recoixls. ihe 
 philosophies have aimed at the same thing - o 
 Lclude' universality. It cannot but be tha t he 
 reverse spirit to this, prosecuting facts most fieely, 
 shall yet work them with some limitation to the 
 uses of human life. That a time shall come when a 
 wise physiologist shall say, we have enough physio- 
 logy at present for any soul that our m.nds can se 
 inft : sLes enough and to spare for the corp.-«a 
 architecture of to-day. That a time shall come 
 when all the sciences shall be applied sciences , onlj 
 ;tt some of them will be applied to the uses 
 spiritual society ; to found it ever more and nioi^ 
 on conveniences of high thought and punctual ce 
 tainty attested by very nature ; as the other - 
 applied to the uses of external life and it socnet^ 
 That a turning-point shall then ensue ; and a pubhc 
 recognition be made, that the regeneration of men 
 from their hereditary and acquired evils of character 
 
 TffE FIRE OF USE IN SCIENCE. 
 
 125 
 
 is the true university and school of science, from 
 which alone can issue any pure, progressive and per- 
 manent knowledge of the works of the Lord in any 
 of His kingdoms. It is not likely that the glory of 
 this second science will be lesser than the glory of 
 the first, for it will be of God, burning and shining 
 through the heart and mind of the explorer into the 
 faculties of nature ; creating answerable sight as 
 the river of light flows on ; and putting away as 
 visibly obstructive that self-glory Avhich hardens the 
 heart and darkens the eyes of ambition and curiosity 
 in their 23ath, and forestops them from seeing any 
 detail of the purposes of the Almighty in His 
 works. The science that springs up then as a new 
 city through the mind will not be limited to lecture 
 halls of students and meetings of savans, but the 
 human race will walk for business and pleasure in 
 the sunny streets of its truths. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 THE FIRE OF USE IN SCIENCE. 
 
 There is this forecast of the success of such a 
 revolution in the ends and ways of knowledge, that 
 the applied sciences already occupy a large field, 
 without which science in general would lack a sub- 
 stantial body. Take medicine as an example, and 
 the humble quantity of anatomy and physiologj'' 
 which goes along with it. This anatomy and physio- 
 logy is no more than as it were the general geo- 
 graphy of the various organs and parts, and the 
 broad knowledge of their functions. This is one 
 support of a medical education, and suffices for 
 
4 
 
 126 
 
 THE FIRE OF USE IN SCIENCE. 
 
 practice; indeed a large portion of brilliant practice 
 can exist without it. But being acquired, it is con- 
 tinually enriched with living observations ; disease 
 and health in their external results are added to it ; 
 mental conditions modify it ; emotions inhabit it 
 locally ; climate plays upon it as an instrument ; 
 temperance blesses it ; good cheer delights it ; and 
 in short, the knowledge of this practical anatomy is 
 made into the field of the first set of perceptions and 
 imaginations by which the inner man lays hold of the 
 facts of habitation in the outer covering of the body. 
 It is the purse of all symptoms in which gifted 
 observation turns them into gold. Observe, how- 
 ever, that there must not be too much of it. If it 
 becomes minute and subtle, it will be derisive of use, 
 and will chase away the life which comes from with- 
 out, and supplant it by microscopic nature, ignoring 
 the larger sphere. If practice survives, and the 
 healer is not converted into a covert professor, a 
 thousand little chemical crotchets will contend in 
 his mind for the mastery vacated by broad com- 
 petence. The result is that the applied knowledge 
 is a better basis than the abstract knowledge of pro- 
 toplasm, and cells, and cell-germs, and the intimacies 
 of physical organs; containing as it does the stand- 
 ing forms of life; there is more knowledge of the 
 body of a man in a stable grain of it than there is 
 in a pound of little bits of carnality which cannot be 
 seen as a whole. And if, at any time, common 
 anatomy becomes so full of informations and percep- 
 tions that it overflows with truths, it is easy to open 
 deeper, to be more particular, and to offer a fresh 
 incarnation for the practical science which has as yet 
 no place in forms. 
 
 The same remarks apply to other sciences ; they 
 
 THE FIRE OF USE IN SCIENCE. 
 
 12^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 i-^ 
 
 are more rich in substantial detail the more they are 
 cultivated for their application to the arts and the 
 purposes of life. What so productive as chemistry, 
 in which all the results would be put to use if the 
 discoverer of new substances had his wdll. Chemistry 
 is most favourably separated from mischief ; it is a 
 beautiful island of knowledge, which does not invade 
 the continents of theology and spiritual truth. It 
 advances constantly, because it is more and more 
 required by the growing wants of society, and its 
 history shows that it is an open liand of good, from 
 which careful students can take any gift in its 
 power for the endowment and convenience of the 
 people. And not ambitious beyond its scope, like 
 the physiologist, who would cut life to find life, or 
 the geologist, w^ho pushes dead matter onwards, and 
 contends at last that its rolling ball of years is vice 
 the Creator, what a palace of glittering substances, 
 cohering by their own laws, arises out of the labora- 
 tory where no torture is done, but products at once 
 perfectly natural and artificial are yielded to the 
 mind that contrives and works their makinof. Seeinof 
 no atoms with the senses, yet the genius of a Dalton 
 gives us here an atomic theory, which introduces a 
 kind of astronomy into every natural substance. 
 The salt, the crystal, and the gas, hang in laws 
 as the planets hang in the sky. What a woeful 
 thing it would be for chemistry if it could once get 
 into its head that its main business is to assault 
 theology, and to plant its empire on the ruins of the 
 Christian reliofion. It would be converted into a 
 petty arsenal, and its projectiles would provoke 
 reprisals, in which the peace and powder of the labora- 
 tory would come to an end. 
 
 To sum this up : the abstract sciences, the truths 
 
128 
 
 THE FIRE OF USE IN SCIENCE. 
 
 of nature pursued for their own sakes, are a kind of 
 cerebellum in knowledge, standing at the back of life, 
 underground, in a secret place; full and compact in 
 compressed laminae, with the passions of human 
 nature as it is, ready to burst forth and conquer the 
 world. A needful fire, for without this strong: self- 
 hood mercifully hidden deep down the other motives 
 of men w^ould not be sufficient to warm any pursuit into 
 vigorous life. There is not love enough in the world to 
 take the whole place of any passion yet, and be the 
 passion. So men must work the sciences in abstract 
 forms for their own glory too. This is the root and 
 use of the boundless attempts of the unapj)lied and 
 unappliable sciences. 
 
 The cerebrum of the sciences is human use, the 
 knowledge that has practice and good works for an 
 end. All the honest businesses of life stand between 
 the abstract and the practical sciences, separating 
 them the one from the other, and only allowing 
 conscious communication through the organs of use. 
 Wisdom and intelligence, which cannot get into pure 
 astronomy or geology, or physiology, play into the 
 arts and sciences which subserve an apprehended 
 purpose in the world. In these, man, unobtrusively, 
 from the necessity of the case, is like a creator ; and 
 as they pervade society, and alter history in its con- 
 ditions, the analogies of human life meet them and 
 enter their transparent bodies. The arts of life are 
 the reasons of their being ; and final purposes, unde- 
 niable, present themselves to the reason, which has 
 to enlighten itself by correctly judging how the pur- 
 pose is carried out by the substance. A perpetual 
 soul in nature reveals itself in the unbroken forms of 
 uses ; a soul of purpose in every newly elicited pro- 
 duct ; for nature is nothing but divine-human uses, 
 
 USES, 
 
 129 
 
 
 nothing but final causes plated over for final causes 
 with matter. Every stone of it is architecture. In 
 this inhabitation of ends in the art-nature of the 
 practical sciences, a communication is opened with 
 the larger spaces of the abstract sciences ; and 
 natural knowledge acquires faith that the realms of 
 space and time universal are as much under divine 
 use as the husbandman's field, or the bourse of the 
 city. Infinite space and time die here, and love and 
 wisdom are the new correlates. At the same time 
 the abstract sciences have gained fresh fires, and like 
 vestal virgins feed them night and day ; and they 
 well insist that the field is more boundless than 
 before ; that final causes are for ever interpretable 
 by new common sense into less limited thought, and 
 that the generations of art and science can have no 
 end, to which the practical sciences respond in say- 
 ing, save "the glory of God and the good of man's 
 estate." 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 USES. 
 
 Gutta-percha was made by God Almighty in order 
 that ocean telegraphs should succeed ; oil was made 
 for lamps, and the fruits of the earth for food ; 
 flowers were made that gardens might be beautiful ; 
 and silkworms that silk dresses might be spun. For 
 every honest use, in its time and place, the thing 
 used was made. The uses are souls from Him, and the 
 things are the bodies of the uses. So far the prac- 
 tical sciences. Here their own trade, and their 
 religion, is consummated. The speculative sciences 
 
 step in, and secretly enlarge the statement. Use 
 
 I 
 
 
I30 
 
 USES. 
 
 USES. 
 
 131 
 
 themselves grow, and will grow for ever. The 
 Lord's KinCxDom is a Kingdom of Uses (Sweden- 
 borg). Gratitude to the Lord for it all is the first 
 new position. He in Himself, and then in us, is the 
 instrument maker of all the forms of use. The first 
 ends, or first final causes, have other ends visibly 
 added to them as need comes on : the others were 
 always at hand to step forth and reveal themselves 
 when the roll-call summoned them. The straight 
 and curved lines of the first copy-book are not only 
 for practice towards writing, but in time they are 
 the integers of writing; they are not put aside, but 
 woven and corrected into letters, which are their 
 final causes. The letters are linked into their ends, 
 words ; and there meanings meet the product, and 
 conscious words are now more living ends. Then 
 words by descent of higher meaning become terms, 
 and express the mind. But in all the process the 
 inhabitation of purposes is the animating principle. 
 Strokes straight and curved are not evolved into 
 letters, but previous letters enter them for each 
 class of the young, and engender letters out of the, 
 as it were, inorgfanic forms ; for the strokes have no 
 meaning but adaptation. So the letters are not 
 evolved into words, but existing words take them as 
 atoms, and plate them on in spelling. Nor are the 
 words evolved into meaning ; but previous meaning 
 lays hold of them as its expression. The mental 
 process, the creative process here, is not evolution, 
 but assumption of the lower by the pre-existent 
 higher ; not the push of nature upwards, so that the 
 product is one with the matter, but first the impreg- 
 nation and then the subjugation of the matter, so 
 that the descending organic and organific purpose 
 bares and uncovers itself in the process ; the higher 
 
 end being never enclosed in the lower, but added to 
 it at appointed stages by the teacher, human or divine. 
 Of course the pupil has organic faculties capable of the 
 higher ends, or they could not be received when they 
 are taught. But these faculties also are out of each 
 other, stand in tiers or degrees, and are opened suc- 
 cessively, and for the time the teacher is out of them 
 all, and above them all, and has peculiar faculties of 
 his own for communication. The pre-existence of 
 the hio-her, and its descent, is the principle of know- 
 ledge and of obedience here. 
 
 Thus final causes are enlarged as they are required, 
 and yet are final, or ends, for each particular stage. 
 Ends are organic, and they exist in series and orders ; 
 first organized as embryos ; next as children ; next 
 as adults, and so forth. They inhabit brain and 
 nerve, and muscle and sense, and necessarily follow 
 the organic forms in their distribution, for they are 
 the real man. Consequently they are the spiritual 
 brain, the spiritual nervous system, the will in the 
 muscles ; and they have all the glomeration, fibril- 
 lation, fasciculation, co-ordination, that is correlated 
 to them in the visible anatomy of the body. The 
 student of the body is studying the soul in it if he 
 is engaged upon a pursuit that has true reference to 
 life. ""Ends or final causes are bodies, which will be 
 reimbodied over and over again, beginning from the 
 bottom, and putting it off continually when its use 
 is served ; and this they do for ever. 
 
 The same occurs in nature. All her forms and 
 processes are for ends, for final causes, which are 
 also for ever organic. Grass is for all that can come 
 of grass, now and hereafter. To pasture cattle, to 
 make hay, to make mould, to be beautiful to the eye, 
 to harbour insect and bird, to sell in the market and 
 
1 
 
 
 t I 
 
 t ; 
 
 I 
 
 132 
 
 C/SjES. 
 
 sustain the landlord and the farmer and the labourer. 
 To be made into milk in cows, which themselves 
 are a new departure in final causes. These are its 
 ends. It has others: to modify atmosphere, to 
 receive lio-ht and heat on a new surface, and adapt 
 them to the vegetable creation. It has others : to 
 be a pleasant sward for mankind, to refresh the 
 senses, and give the mind their delight ; to be the 
 floor of pleasant stor-ies and songs, and the tented 
 field of hymns ; to be soft to the feet of little chil- 
 dren, and enter the loving memory of their childhood ; 
 also to feed the natural good affections of artist and 
 poet with its innocent pasturage. It is also meant to 
 be very difficult to draw and to paint ; and thus with 
 tiny blades to chastise artist conceit. It has other 
 ends for the man of science, the philosopher, and 
 the divine. All these ends are intended by the 
 Creator; and indefinite myriads of uses besides. It 
 may also be perverted into exact oppositions to its 
 uses, and the freedom to do the. perversions is also 
 intended in the man, though not at first hand in the 
 c^rass. Thus the grass is a divine office or institution 
 comprising an amazing number of departments. 
 And because it is abused, or because the uses are 
 juvenile, that does not contravene the fact that each 
 blade of grass is filled with final causes. 
 
 As this is so, and as there is a spirit in man 
 which lives when his body dies, the institution, 
 grass, is equated and correlated in the higher life, 
 and wherever the mind travels you know you will 
 find it again with a difference according to the 
 sphere. It is a form, a sentence, in the Divine 
 Word, spiritual in the spiritual world, and natural 
 in the natural. And a high use of its presence on 
 the ground of nature, is, to implant by the external 
 
 USES, 
 
 133 
 
 sense an express image of a real w^ord that has ever- 
 lasting signification. Thus final causes, plane by 
 plane, correspond to final causes, and they all lead 
 up, putting off grossness on the way, to that divine- 
 human life Avhich penetrates and momentaneously 
 creates the whole. Each plane prepares for that 
 above it, because it contains the letters which in the 
 next plane are words, and in the next are truths ; 
 and so forth. But always bear in mind that the 
 whole is substantial and organic. 
 
 So much in brief declaration of final causes. 
 They are momentaneously, as was said above, the 
 creative forces or mind in everything. To find out 
 what they are is to attain a reason of being for 
 everything ; and requires a New^ton for each special 
 case, or indeed much more, an illuminated Sweden- 
 borg. Not a single final cause, or correspondence of 
 such, in its last resort, can be attained by man with- 
 out a special revelation. 
 
 The momentaneousness of God's will shocks the 
 scientific mind, looking at the fixity of nature and 
 her great constancy. But then the will is more 
 fixed than the matter, and though it acts down upon 
 time and space according to their moments, and 
 were it withdrawn they would cease, yet it holds to 
 unvariableness, and is not to be impugned by the 
 mind because it is ever in operation, and never lets 
 nature go. The order of nature is His order ; as 
 has been well said by Harris, '' the laws of nature 
 are nothing else than the immediate volitions of the 
 Almighty." Immediate, yet eternal ; the Divine 
 Love'throuo-h the Divine Wisdom their spring. 
 
134 
 
 CORRELATION OF FORCES, 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 CORRELATION OF FORCES, LOVE, WILL, MIND. 
 
 It seems a marvel that some excelling minds of 
 the present day should have limited scientific thought 
 to the world of the senses, when there is within 
 ken so much more than the senses comprise, all 
 of which inevitably has its science. The correlation 
 and conversion of forces occurs to us here. All 
 forces mean pushes from something behind them, or 
 drawinofs towards somethinof before them, or de- 
 flections of moving bodies by side strings of power. 
 We see the rush of things. Yet the mind, observing 
 the will, is the only thing that gives an idea of real 
 force in direction to some conceived end. How is it 
 then that heat and light and electricity and magnet- 
 ism should terminate the account of mundane force ; 
 and that mental force, the royal percipient of the 
 rest, should not enter into the correlation ? How is 
 it that love, affection, motive, which is the spring of 
 all action, should not be considered on its ow^n plane, 
 and form its own plates in the science of the vast 
 battery of the universe. We know by revelation, 
 and illumination of the rational faculty, and its 
 superior eyes, that there is a Divine Love and a 
 spiritual sun. How easy it seems to bring this 
 into the former correlation. All the world over love 
 is hot and wisdom is light in the languages. The 
 Divine Love and Wisdom, pulsing from the spiri- 
 tual sun, and proceeding through the heavens, 
 strike nature in her prepared germs into suns and 
 systems, into worlds of heat and light, thus propa- 
 
 LOVE, WILL, MIND, 
 
 135 
 
 gating correspondences or correlations through every 
 object. Here also one of the terms is known, yea, 
 self-evident ; love and wisdom are expressions from 
 consciousness and conscience. All that is good and 
 true in the world knows them. Therefore, in workino* 
 the algebraic signs of unknown forces, why disregard 
 the only known figures or correlates from the equa- 
 tion ; why w^ork signs alone when the thing signified 
 is self-evident, and ready to take its place, and 
 eager to be employed, to resolve the rest into 
 known quantities ? The answer must be, that our 
 little human persons, with their loves, which con- 
 stitute only personal fires and forces, are too small 
 to furnish a correlation with the fervid suns of the 
 universe. But in the first place a grain of what is 
 higher, if you please a germ, may be in correspon- 
 dence above with a whole world of what is lower. 
 In the second place, love, so fiir as it is permitted to 
 receive its all from the Lord, is the end for which 
 man exists, and for which the world was made ; all 
 science comes out of it, viz., from the love of science, 
 and even in this way it embraces all we know of 
 nature ; it is love that knows it ; for take away the 
 love of science, and the knowledge of nature goes 
 out, as taking away the sun would wither the skies. 
 In the third place, the little beginnings, the new 
 atoms in the lower sphere, are always the inheritors of 
 the Avhole of the coming sphere. If men or races of a 
 greater order are born, the inhabited world must perish 
 with them, or they will be the only races extant and 
 take possession of the world in time. These mount- 
 ing increments point upwards. Life here, embedded 
 in nature, existing in apparently small quantities 
 like nuggets in rocks, the good rude rocks being in- 
 cluded in God's final causes for nugfcret-mouldinof. 
 
136 CORRESPONDENCES: LOVE, 
 
 points with all five fingers to a realm where life is 
 not in nature, but exists in worlds which are its repre- 
 sentatives and correspondences, and which are more 
 alive than the brain with the mind in it is alive ; 
 being the constantly produced and everlastmg 
 thoughts and affections poured by God through His 
 peopTe there, and constituting a spiritual world, as firm 
 as heavenly virtue, and as safe as eternity. That 
 world is indicated by every tiny form of life here ; 
 and will give future science the right to correlate our 
 poor love and dim wisdom with the vortices of heat 
 and light in solar systems. To just science they are 
 sufficient specimens of the beginnings of that corre- 
 lation. Heat and light, studied in this view, make 
 our main faculties more conscious of their own inward 
 nature ; while they are self-evidenced at the centre as 
 human heat or love, and conscious light or wisdom. 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 CORRESPONDENCES : LOVK, THEIR POINT OF DEPARTURE. 
 
 In this direction, of correspondences, commencing 
 from the known, lies the scientific education of the 
 people of the whole world ; for the heart is head 
 master in the school, and the perceptions of the 
 mind are under it ; and the truths of nature, as 
 they are learnt, will have the better genius of the 
 pupils over them continually, recognizing them as 
 representations of self-evident life in all details of 
 life human and divine. The true imagination and 
 ineffaceable memory of science will be born in those 
 
 new times. 
 
 Modern science has been In a hurry with its 
 
 THEIR POINT OF DEPARTURE. 
 
 137 
 
 correlations, and is invalid because it has left the 
 spiritual realm out of view, as though mind and life 
 were mere words, and heat and light and electricity 
 and magnetism were well-known substantial facts in 
 comparison. Yet the truth is that the latter things 
 are unknown, and in themselves unknowable, except 
 as phenomena, or as correspondences ; while the 
 mind and the life actually mean self-knowledge and 
 substantial love. Hurry in generalizing without 
 these is to be ascribed to a temporal ambition that 
 is no part of the patient life of true science, which is 
 the ass that can carry its redeemer. 
 
 A word at present out of science has been 
 frequently used above, the word Love ; it may be 
 necessary to explain that it does not imply only 
 those outward aftections which are commonly ex- 
 pressed by it in speech, but the radical affections 
 of mankind, directed to whatever objects, as the love 
 of life, the love of power, the love of knowledge, the 
 love of whatever things, visible or invisible, con- 
 stitute the motives of the man, and without which 
 love he would be as a stock and a stone. This is the 
 foundation of his whole mind ; and his intelligence 
 is nothing but the organized way of it. The 
 philosophies of the world do not recognise this, and 
 put mental faculties in the first place, whereas these 
 depend for their substance and existence upon 
 affections, or organic derivations of love, arteries 
 from the heart of love, within them or above them. 
 It is necessary to bear in mind this meaning and 
 position of love, or otherwise it cannot be seen as 
 the universal substance of all souls and all intellects, 
 and the first known term of all correspondences. 
 Without this love recognised in God, — God is Love, 
 — there is no order but that of temporal phenomena 
 
138 CORRESPONDENCES: LOVE, 
 
 in the natural world ; the whole system is a vast 
 dead body breeding life by contingencies of decay ; 
 men and women are the maggots of the atheistic 
 corpse; and science is a perpetual funeral whicli 
 never succeeds in burying out of the sight of the 
 common unperverted heart the death at the centre ; 
 diffusing woe instead of a joyful existence in God. 
 Of suclf science it is said, '' The horses of Egypt are 
 horses of flesh, not of spirit." Egypt, as before, is 
 science ; horses are the understandings of what is 
 true ; horses of flesh are carnal understandings from 
 lusts of knowing by wrong ways, by violations of 
 life, for example ; they are not of spirit ; there is no 
 respiration in them carrying life and thought from 
 the Holy One through all the parts of the scientific 
 man; they are Egyptian idols of self, and they 
 
 cannot breathe. 
 
 All such science is doomed ; like a pillar of salt hi 
 the sea, it will be washed away and perish. It is in 
 the dearest interests of all good men and women that 
 it should disappear. It is not the ^^reign of law," 
 but the cause and chronicle of anarchy. Not a stone 
 or a crystal, robbed of its reasons, that does not cry 
 against it. Plants and trees and cruelly entreated 
 beasts abhor it. The final paradox, it is a vacuum 
 full of self. There are many forecasts of its ex- 
 tinction. As was hinted before, the pressing ques- 
 tion of the education of the people leads directly to 
 an Index Expurgatorms of books and subjects unfit 
 for youthful minds. Topics that happen to be charged 
 with atheism and materialism are like diseased 
 meat, that cannot be allowed by the community. 
 Clearly such branches require to be forbidden. 
 Otherwise they will breed and aggravate all social 
 diseases. There is not an educational institution in 
 
 THEIR POINT OF DEPARTURE. 
 
 139 
 
 the country that would not be poisoned rapidly, as 
 it were with typhoid germs, if the spirit and doctrines 
 of recent utterances at tlie British Association for 
 the Advancement of Science could be communicated 
 in its teachings. The chaplains of every prison, if 
 the germs could leak in there, would find criminals 
 comforting themselves under the avowed godlessness 
 of their betters. Every reformatory would be less 
 manageable from insane license of thought com- 
 municating with former habits, and provoking to 
 fresh license of life. It would be in vain to instil 
 motives into the young inmates where the motives 
 are only expediencies made out of matter by the 
 teacher himself, being, in fact, his own typhoid 
 exuviae filtered through expediency again : the only 
 motives left would be punishments and tyranny in- 
 creasing in scale. All schools, for boys are very 
 metaphysical, would be corrupted by scoffers from 
 above downwards, and religion would be a jest from 
 the beginning of life. These are indubitable conse- 
 quences of the proclamation of materialism from the 
 visible high places of science in the land. And if 
 the land is not going downwards the evil will have 
 to be met, and this can only be done by public action 
 against its sources. It is a question of the sound- 
 ness of the nation's heart, and of the strenofth of its 
 faith in the Lord. Many ardent educators belong, 
 indeed, to the bands of atheism ; but the New 
 Church, working through all the churches, Avill 
 confront them in their passage to the schools. As 
 yet this is only a tendency, but the more the evil is 
 seen the more clear the action against it will be- 
 come, in order that education may be saved. 
 
 J 
 
I40 PUBLIC LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 PUBLIC LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 If false science will be cast out of education, as it 
 must be, it will also be checked in Eoyal Associations 
 themselves in a country which still has the Bible. 
 That will in part depend upon the audiences, and as 
 they gather courage, and call to mind the purport oF 
 true science, they will resist subtle teachings which 
 have nothing to do with human knowledge, and at 
 once insist on the previous question. They will 
 want no professor s opinions about matter and proto- 
 plasm as God's equivalents, but will require his facts 
 from his own material workshop : to those facts they 
 will tie him down, or not hear him. A little more 
 life in this England, a little more fire from the Lord 
 Christ, and the annual gatherings of these assemblies 
 will be too hot with religious war ; they will have to 
 eschew from motives of preservation the causes of 
 it ; hymns as of Exeter Hall will spring up in their 
 midst, and the voice of atheism be drowned. There 
 will then be the same reason for forbidding by law 
 the public proclamation of these doctrines that 
 there is for preventing Roman Catholic processions 
 in the streets— the reason of public safety. No 
 freedom is infringed here. But if, in a hall of 
 science, convened for its ends, the public conscience 
 is attacked publicly or covertly, the public religion 
 is challenged thereby, and combat will ensue. If it 
 is not to ensue, the subject there on both sides must 
 be forbidden. At the same time, the atheists on 
 their platform have full right to speak, but at an 
 association for the promotion of atheism and the 
 
 PUBLIC LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTISM, 141 
 
 cultus of protoplasm. No man who knows what he 
 is about to hear, and who is admitted with an 
 atheist ticket, will be likely to cause disturbance in 
 his own band. There for the present let liim be. 
 
 This then is another way in which false science 
 will meet its doom, by the confusion of its assem- 
 blies, and their closure by the police in the interests 
 of peaceful citizenship. A third stroke will fall 
 upon evil and false science from the power of Parlia- 
 ment. As atheism has called up the New Church 
 and its religion by a challenge, so cruelty summons 
 forth humanity wherever it abides, and here viola- 
 tion of animal life will mount its scaffold. It Avill 
 be forbidden by penal laws. Besides social degra- 
 dation, corporal punishment is the one thing left to 
 teach feeling to future violators, who will thus learn 
 the most important truths of sensation, and of the 
 functions of nerve and muscle, in their own bodies. 
 They will learn the functions of pain, which, in their 
 enormities, are the only verities they have had an 
 opportunity of acquiring from the torture of God s 
 creatures, but which they have carefully omitted to 
 learn. They will learn tenderly how to avoid pains 
 by ceasing to inflict them upon others. The laws 
 which will teach them this are of course not retro- 
 spective. Violators who repent, or at least cease 
 from the actual practice of wickedness, will be left 
 to their own consciences, and to the judgment of their 
 deathbeds, but law, and a merciful society, will 
 forget the past. The books, however, which record 
 their deeds, and teach young men to repeat and vary 
 them by their own firesides, the ''Companions to 
 the Laboratory " will be confiscated and destroyed. 
 They have added a new world to atrocity, and an 
 immeasurable volume to obscenity ; and no Parlia- 
 
n 
 
 142 PUBLIC LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTIST 
 
 ment that considers the ease can prosecute vile 
 publications without taking prime action against 
 thino-s to which the claws of common lusts are tame. 
 The'^stench of this printed bloodguiltiness must be 
 
 burnt out of the land. 
 
 Perhaps the case seems exaggerated ; and it may 
 appear on a superficial view that this violation of 
 livinc. animals all over the civilized world, to please 
 men s wishes, is too small a cause to determine the 
 instability of certain sciences, and to affect the 
 position and public life of all science whatever. The 
 answer is that we have here a most violent disease 
 in science itself, and in the society which tolerates 
 it, a disease of the heart ; and such a malady it is 
 obvious threatens life; and though it may be but a 
 valve wrong, a mixing of bloods that ought not to 
 be mixed, yet for such a body, thus confused at the 
 centre, there is only one end, and that is extinction. 
 Nor wonder; for besides the apparently local break, 
 that wrong valve and its puddle of blood run through 
 every drop and influence every fibre of the scientific 
 man, and prepare him and his society not only for 
 special but for general dissolution. 
 
 The rights of such science, as commonly pleaded, 
 clearly bring it into conflict with Parliament and 
 civil allegiance. If a man can practise abominations 
 because he wants badly to know something, if he 
 alleges ^'scientise sacra fames" as a sufficient ground, 
 he is an ultramontane materialist, who takes secret in- 
 structions to do evil which he likes without regard 
 being had to the conscience of the country embodied 
 in itl laws. Those rights denied, the legal status 
 once disallowed, courts of law will settle the rest, and 
 that great potentate foreign to true science, the good 
 
 THE TRUTHS OF EXAMPLE. 143 
 
 pleasure of the selfhood, will sink into cruelty-felony 
 wherever its dictates are received and acted upon. 
 
 These statements are then not exaggerated ; but 
 record the fact, that any one so great enoi^ity 
 publicly condoned threatens all virtue. And so 
 the life of the nation must go to war with it and 
 cast it out. 
 
 Nota hene,~-T\\e truths of example, the truths of 
 good and bad influence, are at present but slenderly 
 visible to the world. The truths about compulsion 
 are more material, and better known. There is a 
 passage in Troilus and Cressida, where the question 
 is of bringing Achilles to the front to meet Hector 
 before Troy ; and Nestor the Wise says, anticipatino- 
 the issue : — ^ 
 
 '' For the success. 
 Although particular, shall give a scantling 
 Of good or bad unto the general ; 
 And in sitch indexes, although small 2orichs 
 To their subsequent volumes, there is seen 
 The hahjjigure of the giant mass 
 Of things to come at large J' 
 
 This is here applied to good, but reaches also with 
 a strong hand to evil. It manifests how biblically 
 Shakespeare understood the communications of man- 
 kind ; how one God walking with us may redeem 
 the world; and one new rascal or finger of rascal 
 may go far towards corrupting the human race. 
 
 The truths of the infection of example, and of its 
 march and penetration from private to public life, 
 are a vast subject, and beyond the present scope ; 
 but it may be observed that for the eyes of am- 
 bitious materialism and money-getting they almost 
 disappear, and each man is so bent upon himself that 
 
144 
 
 THE SELFHOOD, 
 
 he wishes to set no example, but to push on alone to 
 the goal of his lusts. And hence, although the rush 
 of his successful figure draws men after him in tail, 
 he is an unsightly object, to be hated and run over, 
 and not an example to be followed. His corporate 
 self-love is for power for his class, for himselfs sake, 
 over the public, whose prostrate breasts and necks 
 constitute the race-ground. This is eminently seen 
 in scientism ; and besides that it runs through 
 medical and surgical practice and authorship, and 
 especially through the connuhium of medicine with 
 the state, where among other things it produces the 
 *^ small prick" of compulsory vaccination, it pours 
 down into every thought about the human mind and 
 body, and destroys every truth of example and in- 
 fluence and influx in both. Now the body of man 
 is full of the truths of example ; because it is a 
 hierarchy of upper and lower organs, in which the 
 constant function of the upper should be to lead the 
 lower, and to teach that all disease is the swerving 
 from the higher as guides. The mind also is full of 
 the same authority ; and its throne and soundness 
 lie entirely in the w^orship of its divine exemplar, 
 and in keeping the sensual selfhood at the bottom, 
 and teaching it, by every weighty faculty, how good 
 it is to be governed by the Lord. Scientism voids 
 these truths, and the only present figure in the 
 chaos which it inhabits is its own struggling self- 
 hood imploring condonation, place, and recognized 
 priesthood, from the state. 
 
 The, Selfhood. — Tlie words self and selfhood are 
 frequently used in these pages ; the following ex- 
 planation from Swedenborg will keep the reader to 
 the meaning. '^The nature of self-love shall be 
 explained in a few words ; the delight of it exceeds 
 
 SCIENCE IS DOGMATIC AND DOCTRINAL, 145 
 
 every delight in the world, for it is composed of 
 mere concupiscences of evils, and each concupiscence 
 breathes its delight. Every man is born into this 
 delight, and inasmuch as it compels the mind of man 
 to think constantly of himself, it withholds it from 
 thinking of God and of his neighbour, except from 
 himself and concerning himself; wherefore if God 
 does not favour his concupiscences, he is angry with 
 God, just as he is angry with his neighbour when he 
 does not favour them. This delight, when it in- 
 creases, incapacitates man for thinking above self, or 
 otherwise than under self; for it immerses his mind 
 in the selfhood of his body, and the man thence 
 becomes successively sensual ; and a sensual man 
 speaks in a high and lofty tone about matters of a 
 worldly and civil nature, but of God and divine 
 things he can speak only from the memory. If he 
 is a person engaged in civil matters, he acknowledges 
 that the world was created by nature, and that it is 
 governed by self-derived prudence, and he denies a 
 God. If he is a priest, he speaks of God and divine 
 things from the memory, yet in a high and lofty 
 tone, but in his heart he has little belief in them " 
 [Apocalypse Revealed, n. 692). -^^ 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 \ 
 
 SCIENCE IS ESSENTIALLY DOGMATIC AND DOCTRINAL. 
 
 Science has seemed so free because men have super- 
 ficially thought that science has no dogmas. It has 
 both dogmas and doctrines. These exist in it before 
 it ever touches nature. In this nation it is an 
 inevitable branch from the Christian Church. Where- 
 
 K 
 
146 SCIENCE IS DOGMATIC AND DOCTRINAL. 
 
 ever it has existed it is a branch out of the con- 
 science and rehgion of the time and country. Till 
 now "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" have 
 always been pleadable over its transactions. Its 
 escape from these conditions cannot be permitted. 
 " Do unto others as ye would that others should do 
 unto you," is a fundamental dogma over the practices 
 of science. The existence of God, and the revelation 
 of Him, without which every dogma is inept and 
 inoperative ; the amenability of conscience to God, 
 and thus the sovereignty of conscience ; the immor- 
 tality of man, and the dependence of his future 
 life upon the deeds done in the bodj^ ; the conserva- 
 tion of society in mercy and truth, and thus in the 
 divine order ; the good of eliciting truths that 
 shall educate and not contaminate little children and 
 young persons and simple minds ; the necessity of 
 feeding the heart of professions with lessons of 
 humanity where they are most needed ; in short, the 
 discipline of love to God and man, and the creatures, 
 now and hereafter, — all these embodied in intellec- 
 tual statements, are doctrines of practice in which 
 alone science can live and move and have its being. 
 It is circumpressed by them into the goodly globe 
 of truth. In this globe all the sciences are solid uses. 
 They know what they begin from, and what they 
 end in ; again, " the glory of God, and the good 
 of man's estate." 
 
 Inwardly, then, science is essentially dogmatic and 
 doctrinal : it is saved the trouble of inventing its 
 own soul, by receiving a soul of good from the 
 Almighty. He opens into it by a secret way and 
 directs its thoughts. It becomes alive, and the 
 reflex of life is seen in the mirror of the bodily 
 organs. As Newton's apple was entered by the 
 
 DOCTRINES PRESSING UPON SCIENCE. 147 
 
 universe, and became the apple of vision of the solar 
 system, so the facts of anatomy are entered by their 
 greater circumambient lives, and the organs become 
 visible in their functions as expressions of the indi- 
 vidual soul, and symbols of humanity. The body is 
 transparent, and only requires more and more good 
 heart and soul to see through it. Christian doctrine, 
 once set in the right direction, is the single eye for 
 all the scientific vision that can be given for the ends 
 of man's spiritual use. 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 DOCTRINES PRESSING UPON SCIENCE : A NEW RELIGION 
 
 CLAIMS IT. 
 
 What does Christian doctrine belong to now ? 
 It is truth unapplied in the sciences ; it is wine 
 kept in the vaults of the churches. It has no pub- 
 lic statement of commanding duties for the daily life 
 of investigators. It is God's will-force denied or 
 uncorrelated in the scientific mind. Men have for- 
 gotten its record. It belongs then, it must be 
 affirmed, to the well-kept silence and secrecy of the 
 New Jerusalem, where it is guarded for a time ; 
 guarded away in the very scorn which like Herod 
 would destroy its young life. The words New 
 Jerusalem have been used before : to open silence 
 a little, what do they imply ? They imply a new 
 church, neither Protestant nor Catholic, but capable 
 of entering into all churches and all denominations 
 which are willing to receive it, and of gently re- 
 volutionizing them by love, and reanimating them. 
 They imply the regeneration of ordinary life as the 
 
148 DOCTRINES PRESSING UPON SCIENCE: 
 
 one condition of seeing truth, without which condition 
 the scientific mind has none but superficial paths open 
 to it. This regeneration depends upon personal 
 obedience to the revelation of the personal Lord, of 
 Him who was Jesus Christ on earth. Shunning 
 evil as sins against Him, and then doing good as 
 from ourselves, but intimately acknowledging that it 
 is from Him. Not conversion only, which is but 
 a spiritual attitude of the man, but regeneration 
 which is a daily way and continual combat. Belief 
 in the Divine Word is concurrent with this regene- 
 ration, which lives from the Word; that Word 
 being the name of tlie Lord, and all we know of 
 Him. Belief in the spirit within the letter; in 
 the spiritual sense which is the life of the Word, 
 and which has been opened in these latter days. 
 Belief in the spiritual world, the knowledge of 
 which, definite yet immense, has been also com- 
 municated through the divine rational illumination 
 of Swedenborg. Especially belief in the redemp- 
 tion of man through the incarnation, which is the 
 crowning doctrine of the New Jerusalem : Jehovah 
 in a daily life in the flesh which he assumed, beating 
 down hell in a human character, and thus making 
 a humanity divine, which is henceforth the object of 
 true worship for all creatures. A redemption 
 which can save no man without a good life of his 
 own free choice, but in which salvation is made pos- 
 sible for all who will. Freewill is the ground of it in 
 us, and rationality showing hourly evil to be refused 
 and avoided, and good to be done ; the good being 
 attributed by the same rationality to the Lord 
 
 alone. 
 
 The Lord in second advent has come in this way 
 throuo"h a special illumination of a human mind, 
 
 A NEW RELIGION CLAIMS IT, 
 
 149 
 
 showing clearly, yea scientifically, what he was and 
 did when he was in Judea eighteen centuries since. 
 He has opened the hand of his divine conditions. 
 He will possess all. Not ecclesiastical churches 
 only, for they are at the best the small needful 
 spires of life ; but the whole breadth of man in his 
 multitudes. Not religious rites only ; but the daily 
 life. For every man is a church if he is leadii^ a 
 good life from the Lord's motives. Therefore He is 
 going, at first through chosen men, his men of war, 
 with new consciences, to possess himself of all busi- 
 nesses and affairs, of democracies and aristocracies, 
 of parliaments and potentates, of states and nations, 
 and of public faculties of the mind ; and to open His 
 Divine Humanity into them and upon them, and so 
 to judge them ; so that power, property and know- 
 ledge shall stand at the bar, and be reckoned for 
 good or evil. This is the coming of the New Jeru- 
 salem ; the second coming of the Lord. It is not 
 mystical. Whatever good administration of the 
 daily life from the Lord's motives is effected, is a 
 descent of some portion of the new city. The 
 obeisance of great proprietors to good for His sake, 
 their cessation from artful luxury, and the use of 
 their money for the public weal, taking their own ducal 
 salary out of it with the intelligent and economical 
 hand of conscience, is so far, according to the wisdom 
 and love involved, a distinct planting of the New 
 Jerusalem in wealth and its motives. The acknow- 
 ledgment of power and position as the Lord's engines 
 in man, and the use of both for help in public re- 
 generation, is another and a further descent of the 
 divine doctrines and principles. It cannot be that 
 science is untouched, and occupies no relations to the 
 
I 
 
 150 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES. 
 
 greatest spiritual revolution that has yet taken place 
 over the earth of man. 
 
 It is marvellous to think that churches and states 
 have not expected this thing, but still look to a per- 
 fected Protestantism, or a triumphant Catholicism, 
 as the crown of God on the head of human society, 
 
 marvellous, for it is written down in language that 
 
 may be sufficiently understood, that the New Jeru- 
 salem, with all things made new, is to descend out 
 of heaven from God. The images of the Apocalypse 
 carry no promise of the finality of the present 
 ecclesiasticisms. The revolution itself has come, and 
 all our lives, secular and religious, in their breadth, 
 depth, and height, are face to face with it. 
 
 XL. 
 
 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES ON THEIR 
 
 OWN GROUNDS. 
 
 Primarily now so is science. The fact of the 
 incarnation of Jehovah in the Lord confronts science 
 on its upward way. Science pushes its horns from 
 matter to spirit, and would kill what it cannot com- 
 prehend. But a revealed science has a horn which 
 cannot be passed by the natural power. It can kill 
 any natural science, but itself is beyond attack. It 
 opens into all sciences because it is science with 
 divine right. It is recorded in the Word, and 
 stands firm in history. It is a natural fact, and a 
 subject of natural knowledge, which, as regeneration 
 advances, is converted by the descending Word into 
 spiritual natural knowledge. It is not mystical, 
 but divinely rational ; for the reasons for the birth 
 
 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES 151 
 
 of Jesus Christ, with the soul, Jehovah, indwelling, 
 are more patent than the reasons for the birth of any 
 ordinary man, whose existence may be a problem to 
 account for ; whereas the plain reason in the Lord's 
 case is the redemption of all men. Seen from this 
 point of view, the facts too, not only of the birth, 
 but of the life, and the death, and the resurrection, 
 are divinely rational and divinely natural. Were 
 it possible that a similar being could arise again, 
 what is called miracle must flow from his origination 
 as in the Gospels. From above He instituted a new 
 creation of men, at whose hearts or wills He will 
 knock, and if they open, His divine personality is in 
 them and with them. It is not there mystically, but 
 if men shun what He hates. He will consciously be 
 in them, and then he will empower them to do what 
 He loves, and put selfhood down, leaving it as a 
 natural patch of ground to stand on. And when 
 they are thus capacitated to do His will, and walk 
 in His way, the New Jerusalem will be a conscious 
 society of His creating, as the solar systems and the 
 kingdoms of nature are of His creating ; mankind 
 unviolated, being the wiUing, rational vehicle of it 
 all. The laws which reign in heaven, which con- 
 sist of no mystical elements, but of the men and 
 women who have died in the Lord, and of all chil- 
 dren, will then reach down into home and mart ; and 
 that is the New Jerusalem. 
 
 In saying that none of this is mystical, it is evi- 
 dent that the origin and consequences of these new 
 states are stupendous, and refuse all forecast save 
 that which is given in the Word ; but the meaning 
 is that there are no elements which require the 
 best faculties of the mind to be put aside in order to 
 a reception of these truths. Science can accompany 
 
i 
 
 1 
 
 152 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES. 
 
 with reverence every ftict of the incarnation, and 
 reason be employed upon the same. The Word 
 loves true sciences and just reasons. It was because 
 Swedenborg was correspondentially a fisherman, or 
 lover of natural truths, that he became with his free 
 iViculties a spiritual fisherman, to whom these spiri- 
 tual truths were made known. He was thus the 
 chosen instrument to inaugurate the reign of divine- 
 rational truth. 
 
 Now the region of man s theological mind being 
 inevitably possessed by this new royalty of truth, 
 the Divine Humanity, the present mundane sciences, 
 with their lusts and ambitions stimulating them 
 from below and from behind, confront here no 
 shadowy theos, or incomprehensible tripersonality, 
 but God-man pleading His own evidences, in the 
 Word, in the life, in the consciousness accompanying 
 regeneration, in all surrounding history, and in the 
 analogy, and thus the attestation, of whatever is good 
 and true and orderly in the worlds of man and 
 nature. For rightly seen everything in the past 
 leads up to the necessity, and therefore to the neces- 
 sary truth, of the incarnation ; and the past, the 
 present and the future descend into the New 
 Jerusalem, which is the second or spiritual coming of 
 the same God-man, the Lord. 
 
 The waves of atheism may and will roll in 
 breakers of angry fire against this new rock, but 
 it is a rational rock, a scientific rock, a most defined 
 rock ; and here is the point, that it is a true Peter, 
 an active, aggressive, living, human rock, and the 
 river of the Word that flows and will flow from it is 
 incessant and never ending. All foul sciences and 
 violations will die of it. Materialism and atheism 
 will be tired and worn away by its endless and in- 
 
 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES 153 
 
 undating assertion of its truths. It will open its 
 mouth in its church, and swallow their floods as of 
 no account. The assemblies that have marched the 
 bands of irreligion against its frontier, will be over- 
 borne from their own midst, and beg truce of the 
 invasion of its armed and immitigable lights. In 
 fine, the new science of the Lord in the Word, will 
 press the old atheism until its provocations cease, 
 and it becomes a secret watchword first, and then a 
 cavern in the ground. 
 
 As love, and giving true delights away, are inti- 
 mate in God, so hatred is the entrail of atheism, 
 and cruelty is its hand. Against this, the Divine 
 Humanity opens into evil science. The foregoing 
 pages were begun mainly to protest against scientific 
 violation of hfe. The Divine Man, who first made 
 men, and then becoming a man redeemed His fellow- 
 creatures, and thereby the groaning and travailing 
 creation, meets science in her Association, and gives 
 her idiocy for her deathright. By unnatural inter- 
 course with beasts, how shall she scale the heights 
 of possible knowledge, when the divine love and 
 mercy and purity are those heights ? when these 
 qualities are inmostly the life of every beast and 
 blade upon the surface of the ground? when the 
 only rational scientific question is, what God made 
 each creature for, and how does its make carry His 
 design ? To violate mercy is to murder science ; to 
 prolong and enjoy the violation, is to live in hell 
 upon earth. To expect truth by this way is to enter 
 the madhouse of wickedness. The Divine Humanity, 
 the Lord rationally known, cannot but carry this 
 doom into the heart of every impenitent science. 
 
 From cruelty issues cruelty, and the love of tor- 
 turino" our fellow-creatures here, the animal tribes, 
 

 i' 
 
 154 THE INCARNATION CLAIMS THE SCIENCES. 
 
 proceeds from its own hell upwards into the love of 
 torturing our own race. The British Association 
 tolerates this torture, and lends itself as a Coliseum 
 to the exhibition of it. The Christians here are 
 again in the arena, but on a greater scale than when 
 Kome had emperors. All little children and young 
 persons, all the simple-minded who are taught their 
 Bibles, and love their Bibles, the weak, the sick 
 and the dying, the bride and bridegroom seeking to 
 enter into eternal vows, all who want the Lord to 
 live from, all who through His hope alone do not 
 despair, all who are fallen and look to rise, the mild 
 and merciful who are downtrodden here, those who 
 labour and are heavy laden, all these are in the 
 arena, and atheism would bring them in by batches 
 that the life of life may be torn from them by en- 
 furiated materiaUsms which enjoy the feast. The 
 nation is the victim upon which the education of 
 destruction is to take effect. Now the point is, that 
 the Divine Humanity, treated as a common child, 
 has been challenged in the arena by the atheists 
 themselves, and His voice, '' suffer little children to 
 come unto me " and I will educate them, is heard 
 in whispers first in some consciences. No matter 
 what the arena of the science, or what the confi- 
 dent expectation of professors that the truths of 
 religion are their prey, and that Ave, Scientia, Im- 
 perator, morituri te sahitant, will be heard from the 
 old Gospels : another issue is at hand. The Coliseum, 
 the British Association, is before the judgment bar 
 of this nation instinct with the spirit of a new 
 religion, creating a new age. The children will be 
 saved. The sport of destroying human minds, and 
 of hunting faiths and charities to death, depends 
 upon the sufferance of heaven, and this is reflected in 
 
 THE DIVINE HUMANITY, 
 
 155 
 
 the sufferance of the people. That sufferance will 
 not be extended to it. The sanctity of childhood, 
 and the safety of education, proceed now from Him 
 who was born as a little child ; and thence ascended 
 until he became King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 
 The nation will discover as soon as it pleases, that 
 this presses close on certain knowledge, and is in full 
 panoply a man of war, in the sciences themselves. 
 
 '' 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 eternity, the Prince 
 of Peace." 
 
 avLi, 
 
 THE DIVINE HUMANITY. 
 
 This is the cause now pleaded, and to be pleaded 
 as against the natural atheism of the human mind ; 
 for observe, this is the cause of natural religion; 
 since there can be no natural religion without a 
 natural God, or in other words, a divine natural man. 
 In Jehovah the world had supernatural religion, 
 which in power was not ultimate enough to keep 
 even the Jews under the just government of heaven. 
 In the Lord, Jehovah in the flesh, the last degree of 
 power is assumed, and natural religion is born, not 
 the less but the more natural in that it is divine- 
 natural. Being a fact, this confronts every science, 
 and commands all speculation. By its own body 
 and pressure, it has a right to be represented in 
 every assembly which discourses about the essence 
 of the natural world. It can produce armies of 
 rejoinders to all invasion of its own precincts, and 
 put forward the Word of God, now opened from its 
 
^') 
 
 r. 
 
 156 POSITIVE THEOLOGY COMMENCES 
 
 spirit into its letter, as its representative shield 
 against the faces of materialism. What is required 
 is faith working from love, and having the courage 
 of its principles and convictions. The Lord will 
 assuredly help it by His presence in the midst ; and 
 atheistical congregations may be bent into prayer 
 for a beginning of light, before the militant influx of 
 His power. It is not a question of reasonings, and 
 will not be settled as such ; but of divine-natural 
 religion in the armour of fact, truth, and love, press- 
 ing its opponent, atheism, to the ground, and 
 bindinof him there. 
 
 XLII. 
 
 POSITIVE THEOLOGY COMMENCES IN SWEDENBORG. THE 
 
 INCARNATION. 
 
 Some people indeed have proposed, that theologi- 
 cal time has passed away, that it was an infantine 
 and comparatively savage condition of societies, a 
 belief in nothings as the causes of all things ; and 
 that the scientific age has at length arrived, and 
 positivism can be inaugurated : positivism being the 
 widest and most sifted belief in the informations of 
 the five senses, and in the laws deducible from these. 
 The universality of these laws once attained, the 
 mind has its fairly won sceptre, and the world and all 
 it contains lives, moves, and has its being in the 
 genius of the immortal generations of mortal human 
 selfhoods. But now it is pleaded fer contra that 
 the theological ages are not behind us, but before 
 us; that on the ground of nature they are just be- 
 ginning to dawn; that the birth of the Lord is a 
 natural event, and that, consequently, there is a 
 
 IN SWEDENBORG. THE INCARNATION 157 
 
 divine embryology, and a divine physiology, be- 
 cause there is a Divine man. Consequently there is 
 a divine science which is positive. Not only posi- 
 tive in the truths it holds, but positive, warring 
 positive, from the love of salvation. Yet it is all 
 compact of intellectual truth, and from the Re- 
 deemer it sheds natural hght upon the birth, life, 
 and death of every creature. For to the birth of the 
 Lord in time, the whole world flowed on from the 
 beginning ; the fall of mankind, chieftainless, into 
 ruins, necessitated it. When it took place, a human 
 nature was taken upon Him by the one Divinity 
 who inhabits eternity. No condition of actual birth— 
 a father and a mother— was absent. No greater 
 mystery than any other birth attends this incarna- 
 tion; nay, as we said before, lesser mystery, 
 because there is a plain divine reason for the birth ; 
 and in its very terms a divine presence and power 
 to cause it. That birth opened heaven, and the 
 rifted sky was filled with the host of angels. The 
 child Jesus was a human character with the divine 
 soul within Him. In Him there was nothing inter- 
 mediate between God and man, no inheritance of 
 paternal evils. The purpose ^was redemption. The 
 humanity was assumed that it might front the world 
 in the world. The world had long been under 
 expostulation by the Divinity above the world ; but 
 here it came for the first time face to face with the 
 Divinity in the world. It could only be so by an 
 organic acceptance, by a perfectly, yea divinely 
 natural fact of birth. The frame and character of 
 Jesus grew, and His powers unfolded; every 
 faculty, affection, observation, science, reason, in- 
 tellect, wisdom, expanded; all the departments of 
 a mans character were there; and every temptation, 
 
158 POSITIVE THEOLOGY COMMENCES 
 
 every ambition, spiritual and temporal, every de- 
 fleeting terror, assailed the childhood, and the man- 
 hood. He traversed Egypt and Babylon, the 
 ambition of science, and the love of dominion over 
 souls, in his course. He triumphed over their 
 motives, and from the beginning to the end of his 
 natural life, converted human states into divine 
 victories, and came down as God. By acting out 
 the indwelling Jehovah, He gradually, hour by hour, 
 in assailed faculty after faculty, became the Lord. 
 In the last struggle of the humanity, the last temp- 
 tation to save the natural self at the expense of the 
 crucifixion, He destroyed spiritual death by a natural, 
 but divinely natural, resistance, and overthrew the 
 hells of self love to their foundations ; and then 
 His humanity had nothing left in it that opposed 
 His Godhead. They were naturally, yea divinely 
 naturally one ; and He was and is the Lord. His 
 natural body also was divine ; His very flesh was 
 divine good and divine truth ; He had made it so 
 by no mystical process, but by shunning universal 
 hell w^hich He sensed and confronted, from His 
 daily life ; and consequently, in the act of dying to 
 the mother's selfhood^ the divine life filled His 
 body, and He rose again. It is not a mystery that 
 w^e behold here, but a divine natural glory. The 
 mind sees now that with the conditions nothing less 
 or else could happen. One part of it follows from 
 another as plainly as that the qualities of the genera- 
 tions of men are handed down with increments to 
 their successors. His qualities were handed down 
 by admitted temptations, combats, and victories, from 
 Jehovah indwelling, to the maternal humanity, which 
 w^as put off gradually in the process. And now, 
 throuc^h the Word, in His mercy. His birth, life, 
 
 IN SWEDE NB OR G. THE INCARNA TION 1 5 9 
 
 death and resurrection, have all common sense as a 
 platform in our minds to stand upon. They are the 
 focal point, or rather solar centre of the natural 
 sciences. This can be ignored, and its sun omitted 
 out of the firmament of knowledge ; but it cannot 
 be voided ; it is a doctrinal ship set against the 
 fleets of carnal and sensual science, and with the 
 broadsides of heaven in its charges. 
 
 It is well that the scientific mind should ponder 
 attain and again that mystery is absent here : there 
 is mystery in science, and in Home, one of whose 
 forehead-names is Mystery, but there is none in the 
 incarnation. The subject is indeed above the human 
 mind, until it is revealed, and then it comes fairly 
 into it ; the deeper and holier parts of it are above, 
 and above, and above, and await successive reveal- 
 ments as spiritual use requires ; but ^' the thoughts 
 which are beyond the reaches of our souls " at 
 present — and the most must be for ever beyond, for 
 the Lord is infinite — are indeed unknown, but so 
 seen always as light, that it is plain why we do not 
 know them ; and when this is the case they are not 
 mysterious, although beyond and above our faculties. 
 Put this case before you in regard to the revealed 
 incarnation. A man or a woman inherits a certain 
 human character as a beginning in life. It contains 
 the seeds of many proclivities to evil. Each of 
 these becomes a point of temptation in the life. The 
 teaching of parents, the lessons of the Word of God, 
 the good influences of society, are on the one side ; 
 the desires of the selfhood for gratification are on 
 the other. Truth flows in and shows the man what 
 his duty is, shows him that he is to resist the 
 temptation, and do against it. In proportion as he 
 does the truth, he acquires good, and from it new 
 
m 
 
 i6o POSITIVE THEOLOGY COMMENCES 
 
 truth perceived, and a new and higher sense of duty. 
 Next this, a deeper state, is assailed by temptation ; 
 and if victory in resistance is obtained, a new good, 
 a hic^her truth, and a finer perception result. And 
 so forth until the whole mind is born agam or re- 
 generated, and heavenly motives are planted in those 
 which before were only earthly and insurgent, but 
 are now subdued, submissive, and the natural vessels 
 of human uses in this world. Every conscience, nay, 
 every consciousness, attests to some experience of 
 this fact. Reason and freewill are the human agents, 
 and although given by God and continually sustained 
 by Him. they work as quasi independent powers in 
 these conflicts, with all their light and with all their 
 
 might. 
 
 There is no mystery here, but a wonder that we 
 
 are so poor in doing the thing. 
 
 Turn now to the incarnation of which the whole ot 
 this is an image. Jehovah descended— see Sweden- 
 boro-— as the Divine Truth in heaven, as the Word, 
 into the human character of Jesus. The whole 
 Word of Jehovah, that by which the worlds were 
 made, with its infinite harmonies of truth and good, 
 and with the pressure of Jehovah upon them, flowed 
 down upon that mind, and flowed into it, and said 
 with divine voice after voice, " Thou shalt not " and 
 ^*Thou shalt ;" and this Word, thus combatant against 
 temptations, and thus lived into actions, was made 
 flesh successively in that life,-namely, by absolute 
 obedience to the Word, by absolutely fulfilling the 
 Word. The Lord's humanity was not regenerated, 
 but glorified, and he became God with us. Here 
 then there is not mystery, but incomprehensible 
 brightness. It is divinely loving, divinely wise and 
 divinely useful. It is the exact awful ideal of our 
 
 IN S WEDENBORG. THE INCARNA TION 1 6 1 
 
 own regeneration, in which the higher and the 
 hio*hest life penetrates and vanquishes the lower, 
 until the truths we know, acting upon our hearts 
 or loves, are made into the flesh of our characters. 
 The Lord has redeemed us, saved for us the founda- 
 tions of freewill and rationality against all the 
 assaults of the hells ; and we avail ourselves of re- 
 demption by accepting the necessities of regenera- 
 tion ; and then after death by His mercy we can 
 partake of His salvation. Again this is not mystery. 
 But then the scientific mind must be humble and 
 receptive. It must study the subject long and well. 
 It must not ask questions before information, such 
 as Why the Lord came then ? What Jehovah was 
 doing in heaven when He was indwelling in Jesus 
 Christ? and many others, which can indeed be 
 answered, but not at once to faculties only just 
 separating themselves from the cruel carnalities of 
 atheism ; because the answers are not merely 
 natural, but divine natural, and the faculties are not 
 receptive of them to any great extent at first. They 
 are worse than childish, they are corrupt, and re- 
 quire regeneration to understand the regeneration 
 of man, and still more, the glorification of the Lord's 
 Humanity. 
 
 Now the point made is, that where there is sub- 
 stantial fact, and no unnecessary root of concealment 
 whatever, no mystery, there is the condition of 
 science. Without unkindness to the present men, 
 this may be put forth the more boldly, because in 
 a recent address of the British Association, the 
 position was taken, that all theological discourse 
 about creation was inept there, and must be handed 
 over at once to the geologists, physiologists, and 
 other exact people, for their correction. That re- 
 
i62 POSITIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 ligion was a matter of emotions, instincts, feelings, 
 and of ineradicable poetry, a good old dream haunt- 
 ing songs; confined to which realm, and straitly 
 limited "to no more ultimate pretensions than a 
 little to gild and beautify life, science could have 
 no objectfon to recognize it as a mysterious and in- 
 dispensable somewhat. This is not quotation, but 
 the spirit. Now, in obedience to this call, we put 
 the Incarnation in before that assembly, where it will 
 be discussed some day. It is placed before them for 
 their approval. But then it is obvious that their 
 method must be cautious ; for it is not a matter of 
 literal mythological creation like the letter of the 
 divine Genesis, misunderstood because read without 
 its spiritual sense, but it is a divine birth within 
 late historical time. It has founded the true birth 
 of every man since who has been born again, and 
 therefore has founded a new race on earth. That 
 race has been less than the rest subject to religious 
 emotions, instincts, sentimentalities, and poetical 
 states, considered as floating enjoyments of the mind, 
 and more pressing with all its manhood and woman- 
 hood to live truth, and beat, down evil at its shew- 
 ing; its religion has been a fought fight, life-long, 
 and not a dream. It has thus forcibly opened every 
 faculty to the descending influx of the Lord. And 
 so He, its archetype, did not dwell in emotions, 
 feelings, and instincts, but came on breastwise against 
 hell, and trod it under His feet in its allurements 
 and'promises, in its principalities and powers. Not 
 a bone of Him was broken. The ultimate structure 
 of His human character was penetrated to the soles 
 of His feet, to the business of His daily life, 
 with resistance and obedience. That mighty force 
 now opens upon us, opens upon the halls and 
 
 THE DIVINE MAN. 
 
 i<^3 
 
 - laboratories " of the British Association, opens upon 
 scientific ambition and cruelty, and will be studied 
 for a great reform. The Association has called for 
 It, and It comes. The Son of Man, the Lord knocks 
 at the door, and would sup with that Association He 
 will eat science with them if they please ; for there 
 is no mystery in His sacrament. 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 THE DlVmE MAN THE PRDIE OBJECT OP THE ORGAXIC 
 
 SCIENCES. 
 
 It may be said that these are metaphysical and 
 moral not physical conditions, tliat have been por- 
 trayed above. But on their own shewing, which 
 IS the only shewing, they are not metaphysical; they 
 belong essentially to body and substance. They are 
 m the realm of organic birth, which in this world 
 IS physical. They record beyond avoidance a new 
 genus or manner of man, a divine man. Can science 
 retuse to study a new gmus, especially when, in the 
 wiJl force which flowed and flows from Him He is 
 the Prmce of all organisms ever born into the' world 
 Refusal or not, this fact will be pressed against the 
 breast of science continually henceforth, by men who 
 are called, and chosen, and faithful." And in time 
 the genera and species of time and space will lie' 
 under his ordinating feet. The coming forth of such 
 men with His commission is the condition of the 
 pressure; and come tliey will. On either side, the 
 ^"1 , the love, the liking, is the deepest ground 
 ot the argument. Tl,e professors plead as they do 
 
 Plead fh '^ .^*^^tr*'""'^'^^ '■ *^^ ^-^^"^g -"^^ ^iJI 
 pead the Divine Man because they love the soul and 
 
 Its salvation. When the forces meet, cold reasoning 
 
164 
 
 THE DIVINE MAN. 
 
 will depart as camp following into the rear. Those 
 who are '' called, chosen, and faithful " will stand in 
 their ranks of certainty with organizing power and 
 might. Hotly they will press false science with 
 true science; partial science with entire science; 
 cruel with humane ; and by the result of the combat 
 in the arena of science itself demonstrate the pres- 
 sure of the Divine Humanity, and the omnipre- 
 
 valence of the Word. 
 
 Scientism as a sect of the selfhood is astounded 
 at such a prophecy, and doubts the sanity of those 
 who make it. But the hand of time is open now, 
 and rivers of newness flow out of it. Justice, which 
 is the foundation of science, has of late been busy in 
 the world. It was easy to forecast much that has 
 happened of late years, though not the when or 
 the how. It was easy to be certain that slavery 
 must die, that the worst false glory of Europe must 
 be smitten to the dust ; that surrounding nations 
 that had cowered before it would arise as from then- 
 graves ; that toleration and education must come ; 
 that arts linking men together must overspread the 
 earth ; and that justice and mercy standing as on a 
 rock must have fresh power of appeal in senates and 
 parliaments. And now it is as easy to discern, since 
 the fulfilled commission of Emanuel Swedenborg, 
 that the earth with all its knowledges and powers 
 lies at the feet of the Divine Humanity ; with this 
 merciful proviso, that it will never be forced foi-* 
 acceptance upon any man, but will plead foot to foot 
 and breast to breast with those who oppose it, and 
 make its truth felt exactly in proportion as men are 
 willing to concede its claims. 
 
 There is room also, constantly enlarging room, for 
 all these things to happen ; because under the in- 
 
 SWEDENBORG. 
 
 165 
 
 fluence of a dead church and a false science, all the 
 higher places of the mind are becoming vacant and 
 its faculties unused, and the vacuum calls in the force 
 for which its walls were never calculated — in the 
 present case the powerful truths of the new dispen- 
 sation. 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 SWEDENBORG. 
 
 At this place it is expedient to dwell upon the 
 fact of Swedenborg, which is also, like the roots of 
 all great human changes, a fact of organic birth. 
 Born in 1688, and dying in 1772, he was a practical 
 government engineer, miner and metallurgist in his 
 calHng ; and he devoted himself sedulously to the 
 cultivation of the natural sciences, and to the im- 
 provement of the arts of life. In works on the 
 principles of chemistry he sketched out a theory of 
 combining forms, and regarded atoms as architectonic 
 of substances both in force and form. His contri- 
 bution has been acknowledged by great chemists to 
 some extent ; but the principles he places remain to 
 be worked out by the more gifted chemistry of a 
 coming time. In his Principia, the laws of cosmical 
 change are applied to suns and systems, and a few 
 principles preside over the constitution of the physi- 
 cal universe. None of the restrictions of the literal 
 theology of his day bind the good ambition with 
 which he sought to approach to a comprehension of 
 nature. His scientific effort contains indeed a high 
 correlative to the theories and imaginations wdiich 
 have been since in vogue ; and perhaps the most 
 daring system of evolution that has yet been stated 
 
i66 THE DOCTRINE OF USES, 
 
 —namely, the necessary involution of the first vege- 
 table kingdom in the first mineral kingdom, on 
 planets; Imd the involution of the first human 
 and the first animal kingdom in the first vegetable 
 kingdom; and consequently by evolution the delivery 
 of the pregnant womb of nature, and the birth of the 
 kingdomsrincluding man, from below upwards. But 
 with him the natural process was also the process of 
 the divine inhabitation and manifestation, and not a 
 mineral crystallized, or a blade of grass grew, or a 
 creature breathed, from itself, but from the con- 
 stantly sustaining influx of God. And therefore 
 evolution is but the Word, the substantial almighty 
 truth, momentaneously speaking shapes and forms 
 and functions into being, and then animating them, 
 where they are forms recipient of life, into life. And 
 this great shadow of universal substance is momen- 
 taneously conserved or made into substance by the 
 abiding will of the Creator. He never thought that 
 force does anything without a divine heart and brain 
 and man within it ; for apart from these there is no 
 force, but only collapse. His scientific works on 
 physics are rich in suggestions, and contain many 
 views which will be planted out in the fields of 
 science when she takes to questioning nature for 
 holier purposes than are compatible with her present 
 ambitions. 
 
 XLV. 
 
 SWEDENBOKG FOUNDS HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY— THE 
 
 DOCTRINE OF USES. 
 
 It is, however, in physiology that Swedenborg is 
 most remarkable for our purpose now as a student 
 
 THE DOCTRINE 01 USES, 
 
 167 
 
 of science; and it will be one day known of him that 
 he is indeed the founder of human physiology in 
 distinction to general animal organology. He is not 
 only the founder, but has as yet no successors ; for 
 the very conception of human physiology is not given 
 in the scientific mind. He was able to be that 
 founder, because he had a clear intellectual and a 
 wise insight into that which alone is distinctively 
 human, namely, the soul and the mind of man; he 
 divined apparently from an early age that these are 
 organic, though spiritually organic; and he entered 
 physiology to find how they are reflected in the forms 
 and uses of the bodily organs. If the body has a 
 heart, he knew that the soul and the mind have a 
 heart; and the latter term found, in the will and its 
 derivations, the one can be studied in the other. 
 ''Tell me," says he, ''wliere tclse can the soul be 
 found than in her own kingdom," speaking of the 
 living body. It was to discover the soul that he 
 studied that body anatomically first, and then men- 
 tally opened it. He did not expect to discover the 
 soul by the senses, or to get at life by killing life, 
 but by the correspondence of the uses of the bodily 
 forms, to hear the voice of the soul speaking itself 
 into natural being, and thus revealing its humanity, 
 and suggesting it into the very senses. For the 
 body, under the Creator, the one only life, is first a 
 word in the soul, and then a fiat mouldinof with 
 organic power the seed and the embryo, and at last 
 the more matured furnishing of the temple of organic 
 form, in which use is the first and the last considera- 
 tion. To him here, and throughout his writings, 
 belongs the full statement of the Doctrine of Uses. 
 This, however well brought forward by Bentham and 
 others, has rather limited use than advanced it, be- 
 
i68 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMS. 
 
 cause the current doctrine of utility regards the 
 highest parts of man's capacity as not only useless, 
 but fallacious; whereas Swedenborgs doctrine of 
 uses includes these as the main and everlasting field 
 of utility, which is formulated in his expression, that 
 'Hhe Lord's kinofdom is a kins^dom of uses." In 
 other words, the Lord's kingdom is a kingdom of 
 daily life in which use and its duties are done here 
 and hereafter : the New Jerusalem is, if we may 
 borrow a phrase, a divine secularism, in which men 
 and angels do God's business in doing their own 
 ariofht. This doctrine of uses lies in the heart of true 
 physiology, because all the body exists in order that 
 the soul may come into this world by it, and every 
 function and dependency of the body is a part of the 
 way in which the soul accomplishes its own incar- 
 nation. • 
 
 XLVL 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMS. 
 
 The Doctrine of Form as receptive of life is a 
 department of the same thought. It is a doctrine 
 unknown as yet to science. The present mind essays 
 to study the temple, and cannot see the architecture 
 for the stones. It begins with the matter, not with 
 the mind. It may truly be admitted to be matter 
 thinking. It is as nearly the dust of the ground as 
 a created man can be : dust conflated of human 
 passions — fiery protoplasm at the beginning, fiery 
 hysteroplasm for its end. Its opposite is that forms 
 are the engines of use, and that ideas and plans in 
 divine manform, not protoplasms, are the be- 
 ginnings of all things. This rests upon all common 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMS. 
 
 169 
 
 sense and all analogy. When the first savages, not 
 the first men, made flint knives, it was the form of 
 the implement that made it useful ; it was not the 
 stone matter, for iron would have been better, and 
 steel better still ; but the savage mind took what was 
 to hand, and gave it the form which served as a 
 knife. The present physiology, in its spirit, would 
 study the chemistry of the stone, not the employ- 
 ment of the neolithic knife, to elicit the archseology 
 of these nations. Further on, it would forget the 
 nations in analyzing the stones, because the chemical 
 path leads into physics where men and women are 
 not found. These remarks apply to every tool 
 invented by the mind of man ; it is its shape, make, 
 form, throuofh which all its service flows. For 
 instance, the use of a chair does not depend upon its 
 matter or protoplasm, but upon its having four legs 
 and a bottom and a back suitable for personal sitting. 
 If you sent it in powder for exploration to some 
 eminent physiologist, and he were foolish enough to 
 record his experience about it as observations on a 
 chair, you miglit fairly commit him for better ways 
 of knowledge to your upholsterer, who makes chairs 
 and does not destroy them. Now, Swedenborg saw 
 with intellectual common sense, that form, not matter, 
 is the universal condition of function in the human 
 body ; and that as that body in general is for the 
 soul's use, its forms, in detail, are the exhibitions of 
 the uses which the soul makes of them in detail. 
 He saw, for instance, that the human lungs are 
 for human respiration because of their form ; and 
 furthermore that no animal could use such forms, 
 because it could not lay hold of them with its soul, 
 having no voluntary and intellectual mind which 
 corresponds to them. He saw that respiration, be- 
 
lyo 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMS, 
 
 cause of the form and connections of the luno's 
 because of their association with the other forms, 
 makes the whole body breathe mechanically, gives it 
 the general movement of all its functions, draws it 
 out into acts of living. He saw that tliis respiration 
 in waking hours corresponds to all the states of 
 thought, and that the lung functions are the out- 
 breathed word of the human understanding, which 
 thus plays down upon every organ, and makes it 
 into a moving part of the character of the man ; 
 carrying the spiritual into the natural, and the soul 
 into the body, by a great highroad of organism. 
 All this depends upon form and connections of form. 
 Form itself corresponds to intellect ; it is the very defi- 
 nition of the use of things. Withi n form lies inner form, 
 but this must not be mistaken for matter, it is always 
 architecture. Matter is but the daily bread of form, 
 good bread or bad, adequate or inadequate, as the 
 case may be ; form consumes it for the use and 
 support of the hour s work ; but it is put aside con- 
 tinually and replenished continually, whereas the 
 form goes through its functions of whatever material 
 it may be made, and subsists through its stadia. 
 Only one time comes when the form, the human 
 form, is indeed material, namely, death ; but then 
 the form is only apparent, and the matter is the 
 reality. It is in ruins, a professorial chair of dust ; 
 it corresponds to no organic use, and the wise soul 
 refuses to sit in it. 
 
 This Doctrine of Forms is therefore the doctrine of 
 animation, because the forms fit for life being by 
 spiritual influx into them recipient of life, that life 
 is inevitably with them so long as they continue 
 thus receptive. It would be impossible for a really 
 human body not to be alive, or to be alive with any 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF FORMS. 
 
 171 
 
 one else's life than its own ; because the Lord's life is 
 omnipresent, and flows into everything in its degree 
 according to its form ; the determinant form in 
 itself being dead, but the river of influx making it 
 alive momentaneously. Swedenborg has said, that 
 the cortical substances of the brain are ^^ forms 
 accommodated at once to the bemnnins: of motion, 
 and to the reception of life." Here we have the 
 divine influx converted into organific power and into 
 Avill power in the beginnings of the conscious and 
 unconscious man ; and we have something to look 
 for in the cortical glands which no microscope but 
 wanders farther from, and only an illuminated 
 intellect can liojie to discern. We have something 
 that for the mind is co-ordinate with the life of man- 
 kind and with the starry sky. The problems of 
 animation are thus manifold, and the question. How 
 is it that the human lunofs are alive ? is answered 
 in distinguishing how they, as exact engines of use, 
 or forms of use, carry on their service, in first 
 breathing the body into perpetual movement, and 
 secondly in importing the thoughts and wills of the 
 mind into the lower or corporeal degree. After 
 you have mastered the lungs well anatomically, 
 and by constant observation of what they transact 
 m life ; after you have got a veritable new anatomy 
 of them, as you will do, from this line of discovery ; 
 ponder them also as inside forms, as upright intellec- 
 tual forms, as real forms of thought, which in a mirror 
 they are; as analogues of inspiration; as having 
 with them in their place and poise in the organic 
 sky the whole lung-difterence that there is between 
 man and beast ; and you Avill begin to conciliate life 
 to your anatomy, and have no reason to torture 
 ammals for the dumb guesses their miserable 
 
172 POSTURE AND POSITION OF ORGANIC FORMS, 
 
 oracles can give. The same applies to every other 
 human organ. It has an animation of its own, and 
 reasons for that animation, all under the general 
 animation of the lungs, which may be called, the 
 corporeal consciousness. The form is the accom- 
 plished Word that carries first the intellect, and 
 then the uses of organic life, along with it. And as 
 intellect is light, the moment this is seen light 
 enters, the body becomes transparent ; and indeed 
 under a single-hearted reception of sight from the 
 Lord, even physiologically, yea, even for the British 
 Association, the Word will be realized, '' Thy whole 
 body shall be full of light." 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 POSTURE AND POSITION OF ORGANIC FORMS. 
 
 I.. 
 
 In order to accustom the British Association to 
 these new truths, we will dwell a little upon the 
 fact that posture and position are an essential part 
 of the doctrine of forms. In the animal body these 
 are secured by the skin without and the bones within, 
 and by the innumerable shafts of membrane which 
 intermediate between them, and partition the whole 
 frame, and the organs and organules, into order. All 
 the forms receptive of life are held in this discipline 
 and drill of the power of life. To exemplify, — it 
 will be seen at once that every mechanism is not 
 only fitted for its uses from the first, but requires 
 to be in situ, that is, in corresponding mechanical 
 posture and position in order to perform these uses. 
 For instance, a chair, meant to sit upon, must be 
 
 POSTURE AND POSITION OF ORGANIC FORMS, 173 
 
 placed on its feet ; not bottom upwards, or on its 
 side. A locomotive likewise must be set upon 
 its wheels on the rails, not otherwise. The arti- 
 ficer first, and then the owner, looks to this, and 
 places the utensil, whatever it be. Now, in the 
 human frame, the organs are first set upright in 
 their aim of use by the Creator, and then the 
 man inside them holds them upright as a necessity 
 of his life. They all correspond to a soul capable of 
 uprightness, and are him in this in countless 
 images. Thus the mere position of the human 
 brain, heart, or lungs, is an extension of spiritual 
 laws down into anthropology, and carries with it 
 into the organs and their blood, the doctrine of man, 
 and of man only. No monkey has any order con- 
 tinuous with this ; nothing but the apery of it which 
 is the mockery or monkeyism of analogy. Now 
 this uprightness of human organs, by which they 
 can and do all look up when the man looks up, with 
 their brows to heaven when his brow is to lieaven, 
 and their forehead bent to hell when his is, deter- 
 mines corresponding positions of all the maintaining 
 strands of fibres ; determines the mode and form 
 of influx of every nerve and bloodvessel ; determines 
 the internal liberty or function of the organs. De- 
 termines therefore the posture of life in the whole and 
 in every part ; and rules with its own proper altera- 
 tions in waking and in sleep. Hence organic forms, 
 in their setting, are diflferent for every man accordino- 
 to his genius and character, and ultimately according 
 to his spiritual life. So also in all animals, the way 
 m which the organs are hung in the systema animale, 
 are expressions actual and potential of the varied 
 animal life and character; they are generic and 
 specific for all genera and species. These are truths 
 
•» 
 
 ^\ 
 
 174 POSTURE AND POSITION OF ORGANIC FORMS 
 
 which heedless and cruel analysis destroys, unless it 
 be the dead body which is dissected, and the anato- 
 mist have genius or better gift enough to reinstate 
 the parts, and see them in working gear from the 
 point of view of the soul and representative habits 
 of the living creature. You ought to be able to 
 take the angle of influx of a horse's nerves and 
 veins into its lungs, and to show that the horse 
 life lies in that angle, and in no other ; that that 
 nervous sun and that system cohere together by 
 posture in a harmony ; that the seasons of the crea- 
 ture's instinct are determined by the exact obliquity 
 of its reception of life. So long as this most difficult 
 thino- is not done, there is no distinct elementarv 
 physiology of human or of animal organs. 
 
 II. 
 
 The present mode of physiology bars this field 
 ao'ainst the human mind ; because it explores 
 matter, not form, as the constituent of organization ; 
 and therefore covertly encroaches upon chemistry 
 and dead stuff* while it professes to be working the 
 loo-ic of life. Leaving out form, it omits posture, 
 which is the visible representative of the whole life 
 in the particular part. Man upside down is the same 
 to it as man upright and godlike ; it is the clown 
 of biology. It voids the correspondence of the 
 whole with the parts ; and the organs become 
 vagabond from purpose, and characterless. Then 
 more general chaos comes ; and all flesh is held to 
 be the same flesh ; because in the physiological 
 shambles where what was once organization lies 
 
 OSTURE AND POSITION OF ORGANIC FORMS. 175 
 
 about in pieces, the architect of the ruin can see 
 Httle diflference between the nerve matter, muscle 
 matter, or lung matter of a dog or a human being. 
 The consequence is, a physiology irrespective of form 
 as the mechanism of use, and as the product of a 
 creative and redemptive mind ; a weltering physio- 
 logy compacted of matter common to the whole 
 animal kingdom ; as was said before, base hystero- 
 plasm answering to base protoplasm. In this 
 physiology, intellect is lost, and capacity of thought 
 is drowned. From it, no laws of the soul can be 
 seen in the body, when yet the soul is all in all 
 in the body. No divination can carry the lamp of 
 analogy through the unsensual avenues of the ever 
 active organs ; for in the absence of the godly sino-le 
 eye the whole body is full of darkness ; and thus to 
 materialist thought, man's earthly frame is not his, 
 but a cup of beast elements ; at best, when it is 
 built up by the most skilful hands, a solid structure- 
 less pyramid of permanent inhumanity. The doc- 
 trine of forms as the vehicles of uses, and of posi- 
 tions as the rails on which forms run, is the rescue 
 from this chaotic state ; and this doctrine in intellec- 
 tual and physical clearness is communicated to 
 science in the writinofs of Swedenbor'T 
 
 It need hardly be said that the present physio 
 logy lies like a swamp under the house of medicine ; 
 and confuses the medical mind longing to see into 
 the seats of disease, and the means of cure. It 
 turns aside medical genius from reverent respect of 
 our bodily life, and prevents the jewels of form and 
 use from shining through the eye of the physician 
 into the symptoms of the patient. It also makes 
 surgery Hcentious, by making flesh of little account, 
 and excisions done on other people lawful beyond 
 
176 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES. 
 
 the golden rule. And further, it vitiates public 
 health, by diverting it from the higher regards of 
 health, which are first spiritual, and then natural ; 
 and throwing the whole burden of it upon official 
 external arrangements touching only the lowest 
 
 oTound of cleanliness. 
 
 XLVIIT. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES. 
 
 The Doctrine of Degrees is another organon 
 or instrument of divine light, unknown to science 
 at present, but communicated in the writings of 
 Swedenborg, and most clearly in his theology. 
 It is the doctrine of the successive planes of creation, 
 which are also planes of that fundamental correla- 
 tion called correspondence. It w^ould require a 
 volume to illustrate the subject, but a few words 
 may begin it. Degrees then are of two kinds, con- 
 tinuous and discrete. Continuous degrees exist 
 where a grosser medium passes to a rarer, both 
 being in the same plane. Thus for illustration, the 
 whole natural world is one continuous degree, in the 
 sense that it is all dead and in itself passive nature. 
 However subtilized or sublimated, in itself it makes 
 no approach to life, but the sun's light and heat are 
 dead heat and light as the stones of the ground are 
 dead. True, natural substances, when organized, 
 become receptive of life, but it is life brooding above 
 them, and then flowing into its form in them, which 
 makes them live. Thus nature is a bounded plane, 
 and of itself cannot mount above itself. The 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES, 177 
 
 spiritual world, which is not a world of spaces and 
 times, but of states and their variations, is a plane 
 beyond nature, and which invests nature, and clips 
 space and time into divine order. It is not con- 
 tinuous with nature, but in a discrete degree above 
 it ; and having in it the same forms as nature, as 
 the permanent appearances of the spiritual states of 
 its inhabitants, substantial as their immortality, the 
 natural world corresponds to it form to form, and 
 the two are together by this correlation. But the 
 border between them cannot be infringed : the dead 
 world is only acted upon by the living world by in- 
 duction of correspondence, that is to say, by spiritual 
 mflux ; but by no elimination of grossness can any 
 element of matter, space, or time, intrude into the 
 spiritual realm. Thus naturalism is put off as shoes 
 before the mind can conceive or admit the existence 
 of a spiritual life. 
 
 The human body is formed as an image of these 
 conditions. Its great organs and solids are one 
 degree, the lowest. Above and within these, 
 though never becoming them, are its firmaments of 
 bloodvessels ; and set in these though never becom- 
 ing them, are its suns of nerves. The nerves end, 
 as the rays of solar light end in earth and sky, in 
 the bloodvessels, but tliey are adjoined, not conjoined 
 to them. Swedenborg has clearly shown them as 
 vaso-motory, regulating calibre by ever-varyino- in- 
 flux; but also as vaso-sensory ; and still again as 
 vaso-inspiratory nerves. They are in short vaso- 
 humanitary, for they carry the whole man's life and 
 character into the blood field below them. They are 
 however discreted by impassable barrier of their 
 plane, from the bloodvessels; as the latter are 
 discreted from the organs into which they also flow. 
 
 M 
 
178 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX, 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX, 
 
 179 
 
 And so also the mind in the body is more greatly 
 discreted from the nerves into which it flows. Thev 
 are its dead fittingnesses, which it must use to 
 descend by influx into dead nature. But you can 
 no more reach mind and brain by natural analysis 
 of them through the senses, than you' can reach 
 Hamlet by crucifying Shakespear's pen. So also by 
 no analysis or ratio of mind can you attain the 
 next degree, or the spiritual man who lives after 
 death ; the boundaries grow more comprehensibly 
 impassable the higher the plane. The more you 
 rack the life of the natural man in the vain attempt 
 to discover the spiritual, the more you fall into 
 denial, and your science succumbs to death. 
 
 These planes of degrees admitted, limit the 
 ambitions of science ; and suggest that a certain 
 worthiness is the claim for admission of the mind to 
 any more inward degree of things. It is impossible 
 to transcend created boundaries, except by beino^ 
 above them as well as below them in your own heart 
 and mind ; say, in your spirit ; and by a harmony of 
 each with each existing in yourself Into such 
 science, whether of organ, bloodvessel, lymphatic, 
 nerve, mind, aflection, or their spiritual corre- 
 spondents, no man can force himself, though he may 
 be prepared by an adequate life, and afterwards be 
 admitted by the Lord. 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX. 
 
 These views are a direct combat against the 
 doctrine of physical flux and influx as represented in 
 
 the existing schools of naturalism. They are the 
 assertion of spiritual influx as final, causal, and 
 omniprevalent in nature. Physical influx implies 
 that primordial matter, the mystical body of matter, 
 has in it or behind it a push that works it upward, 
 and that at certain stages of the forcing it becomes 
 protoplasm, the weird cauldron of nature, and by 
 further injections and exjections, it fights its way 
 until it becomes vegetable, animal, and man ; the 
 earliest and silliest of the latter species being the in- 
 ventors of God, whom their gifted descendants again 
 resolve into protoplasm. Swedenborg differs from 
 this. He admits the whole influence of the natural 
 upon the spiritual ; but always with the complicity 
 of the spiritual. It is the degradation of the spiritual 
 mind that allows it. The degradation of man, who 
 is the end of nature, is the fall of nature also. Yet 
 nature is so far unfallen that it exhibits the dominion 
 of the divine in the creation, and vindicates spiritual 
 influx as the path of order, and physical influx as 
 the appearance which requires to be reversed to be 
 
 correct. 
 
 It is important to dwell a little more upon 
 physical influx, because it is not only a wrong 
 method of thought, but leads to wrong actions. If 
 material nature can push its way from below up- 
 Avards, if the body can make the mind, and after- 
 wards tacitly govern the mind, all conditions come 
 to be treated physically, and diet and climate sub- 
 stitute the soul. This is now a common scientific 
 creed ; but it rests upon fallacy. '' Every man who 
 behaves as if he has a soul, knows he has one." 
 The human soul, by revelation, by intuition, and by 
 experience, is inexpugnable. So is the human mind 
 as an immortal personality. Conscience too assures 
 
i8o 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX, 
 
 it True, it is denied, but not from rational grounds, 
 but because many minds and souls love to deny it. 
 This opens the field for those also who love to affirm 
 it ; and on their side they have all the substances of 
 proof, with the counterproof that both nature and 
 conscience are in ruins if matter not spirit is the 
 rulino- power. Remember then, that the battle 
 here,°and all these battles, will be fought primarily 
 from the affections on either side. 
 
 The influence of the body upon the mind is often 
 cited as a convincing argument that the mind is but 
 a condition of the material organization. So also 
 the decline of faculty in old age, and the obliteration 
 of memory then, and when disease weakens the 
 frame. But the body is indeed the medium and 
 instrument which incarnates the mind, and through 
 which the mind works. If you vitiate the instru- 
 ment, the work is marred ; but that only proves 
 that the worker has his hand on it imperfectly ; not 
 that the instrument is the worker. If the flute is 
 cracked or tuneless, the flute player is limited by 
 its imperfections ; he may be discouraged if he can 
 get no other flute ; but his powers are independent 
 of and above the present flute, and he has to bide for 
 a better instrument. So a brain, once sound and 
 sane, may fall into ruins, and the mind that played 
 thoughts through it will produce but fragmentary 
 and disordered touches of thought where clearness 
 and coherence were once the rule ; but the mind is 
 all there when the ruined cerebrum is either cured 
 or discarded ; and being itself the essential brain on 
 which the other was but the mortal plating, its 
 capacities are unaffected, and will recur in a second 
 life in higher forms ; that is to say, if the man has 
 not materialized himself All this is obvious. The 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX, 
 
 i8i 
 
 difficulty of reconciling the two parties, of spiritual 
 influx, and physical influx, respectively, clearly de- 
 monstrates that the source of each creed is in the 
 heart, and not first in the head. 
 
 The creed of physical influx produces bad scientific 
 actions. It produces bad actions in all degrees ; but 
 here only science is spoken of. If matter, evolving 
 itself, be the way of making life, if there is no 
 creation of life from above by an influent divine 
 life, then science will make knowledge, and en- 
 gender itself, by following the same path. It may 
 fairly expect to pounce upon life and its formula by 
 closely hunting in the pack of matter. Life also 
 there being conscienceless, and holiness being out of 
 its predicates, is a corpus vile on which experiment 
 (short of being hanged for making it) is reasonable. 
 The immediate outcome is the cruelty spoken of at 
 length in the foregoing pages. Physical influx 
 being admitted, the scientific counterpart of it is the 
 physical ingress of knife and poison to see what the 
 influx is doing, and how it can be managed ; and to 
 watch it in the centres of agonized nerves where 
 haply life may be some day caught as a manu- 
 factured article, and the process be successfully 
 imitated in a new medical Manchester. Might not 
 immortality be had in this way, and the poor dreams 
 of religion be reahzed in the laboratories of viola- 
 tional science ? This life's love exists within physical 
 hiflux. It may be added, that spiritual and mental 
 death lie in it. According to men's faith it must 
 be unto them. If they deify matter, and then 
 act as machines of passion, they must become in 
 another life the express images and persons of their 
 aggression, and undergo their own cruelty from each 
 other. 
 
l82 
 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUX. 
 
 By divine spiritual influx the Lord, from lils own 
 single personality, through planes and chains of 
 mediations, through the heavens, through all human 
 minds and wills, through the senses of mankind in 
 all w^orlds, and of all creatures, through the forms of 
 the uses of all things, each according to its granted 
 identity— is omnipresent in both the spiritual and 
 natural worlds, and binds them together in a divine 
 order which falsehood and evil and their correlates 
 can never infringe ; for it includes both heavens and 
 hells, both of them supreme in order. This is the 
 creation. All religion and love can live in it. 
 Through the creed of physical influx w^e have athe- 
 istic materialism pondering what is external, super- 
 ficial, temporary, and dead, and accepting the sum of 
 it as all that can be known of life and substance. 
 This is insanity the opposite to the creation, and at 
 war wdth every science that is correlated to either 
 world. And no true love can ever have a leasehold 
 cottage in such a creed. 
 
 Enough has now been said to indicate in some 
 measure the front which Swedenborg presents equally 
 to the science of his own and of this day. His position 
 is that of a man of capable genius for physics and 
 physiology, animated by an ardent belief in a Divine 
 Person, and in the soul as His image, and determined 
 with reverence to examine by these lamps of faith the 
 concealed avenues of form, structure and function, 
 and to discover in part how they too are the embodi- 
 ments and images of the man who is the true soul 
 inside them. In carrying out this process, his induc- 
 tions and deductions contain truths, human truths, 
 or in other words there is a spiritual sense reigning 
 in physiology, answering to the fact that the soul by 
 creation reigns in the body, and God in the soul. 
 
 SPIRITUAL SIGHT OPENED. 
 
 183 
 
 These works we heartily commend to physiologists. 
 But it must be remembered that the principles and 
 method being the reverse of those at present in vogue, 
 and the aim also ; the whole cast of the terminology 
 being alive, as beseems a science of life ; it requires 
 some little time before the scientific reader perceives 
 the important positions which are won, and the laws 
 which extend the powers of thought to an insight 
 which is beyond anything permitted by the present 
 systems. Moreover, the discoveries of investigators 
 since lie strewn over the field of Swedenborgs 
 Economy of the Animal Kingdom and Animal King- 
 dom, two works which are exclusively devoted to the 
 human body. But these works cannot be pieced to 
 physiology as materialism and violationism have 
 made it now. They require to be studied and dis- 
 cerned in their philosophy at first-hand. 
 
 Two of his phrases may be noted here as distinc- 
 tive of his creed of nature. " Subsistence is per- 
 petual existence, and preservation is perpetual 
 creation." And " one thing alone is perfectly clear 
 to me, that all things flow in provided order from an 
 end, throuc^h ends, to an end, and that the wor- 
 shippers of nature are insane." 
 
 L. 
 
 SPIRITUAL SIGHT OPENED. 
 
 Swedenborg found the soul represented in the body, 
 and thus that the body is the natural equation of the 
 soul ; and his physiological physical works constitute 
 an amazing drama of living representations. Yet 
 his genius, as humble as it was aspiring, could not 
 of itself unlock the door that leads from the repre- 
 
i84 
 
 SPIRITUAL SIGHT OPENED. 
 
 SPIRITUAL SIGHT OPENED, 
 
 i8' 
 
 sentation to the reality. At the top of his own 
 efforts, while yet in full work in the chambers of 
 imagery, his spiritual sight was opened, and he saw 
 souls as human beings. In other words, he saw for 
 nearly thirty years the men and women he had pre- 
 viously known in the world, and innumerable others 
 besides, all dwellers in the spiritual world ; he saw 
 that they were distributed into spiritual societies 
 according to their affections, good or bad ; and that 
 their lot, happy or unhappy, answered with divine 
 strictness to the life which they had loved and ac- 
 quired to themselves here on earth. He also saw 
 that the world they inhabit, the places, like the 
 organism of an extended universal body, correspond 
 exactly to the souls who dwell there, and change as 
 the states of those souls, those men and women, 
 change. He learnt, not saw, that the spiritual world 
 is thus human from its beginning, because Jehovah 
 from eternity is a Divine Man ; and thus the mankind 
 of all universes streaming into the spiritual world 
 is organized by Him, Jehovah, into what Sweden- 
 borg calls Maximus Homo, the Grand Man ; each 
 person, in his place, being an organic constituent 
 in some province, organ, or member of this humanity, 
 of which Godman is the soul. Tiie solution was a 
 simple one ; instead of abstruse souls, all souls are 
 real and concrete, and visible and tangible ; im- 
 mortal men and women ; emancipated to heavenly, 
 or bound to hellish, uses, according to their fitness 
 for either ; the fitness being determined by what they 
 love, and thus call good, and what they delight in. 
 
 Science reigns here. In the first place there is 
 reality, which is the bread of science. Then as a 
 theory, or naturalli/, the whole thing is true, or con- 
 sists of truths, just as the Newtonian theory is true, 
 or as the circulation of the blood is true ; it accounts 
 
 for all the facts of its own vast case. Next it is 
 spiritually true, because it enforces by awful con- 
 siderations the needful dominion of the spiritual oyer 
 the carnal man, and carries down divine justice 
 through every fibre and every administration of 
 society, and penetrates this world with the rays of the 
 uses of the New Jerusalem. Next it is celestially 
 true, because it shows what heaven is, and that love, 
 the celestical principle, is all in all in the creation. 
 Also that love makes its own light, which is wisdom 
 first, and then spiritual intelligence; and that natural 
 intelligence of the Lord's works springs from no 
 other source, but shines down from Him. Next it 
 is rationally true, because a new faculty of reason is 
 born of it ; a new ratio between the life before death 
 and the life after death, whereby it is given to man 
 during every moment, in every act, to live the one 
 life for the sake of the other,— to live down his 
 selfhood for his Lord. 
 
 It is of course scientifically true, as true as 
 chemistry or geology, as soon as science honestly and 
 in good faith investigates it. 
 
 It is also personally true. And here science must 
 enlarge her boundaries to the dimensions of the good 
 heart and the good message, that is to say, to Gospel 
 dimensions. Along with its self-evidences to each 
 bosom, which are attestations permitted to us from 
 conscience and reason, and without which all else is 
 vain, because otherwise there is no court of appeal in 
 men, comes the fact, that the greatest and sanest 
 intellect since the Lord's incarnation, Emanuel 
 Swedenborg, throws down his unquestioned honest 
 word that he has been intromitted by the Lord into 
 the spiritual world, into heaven and into hell, and 
 has seen these things with spiritual senses correspond- 
 
i86 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME. 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME. 
 
 187 
 
 I i| 
 
 ing to his bodily senses. If the narrations commend 
 themselves for all other reasons, divine and human, 
 as they do, this honest word of a man is a crown 
 of personal evidence, a certificate avouching the 
 spiritual world to all mankind. 
 
 LI. 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDE^X^E SUPREME. 
 
 Such reality is everywhere granted by providence 
 
 in these great affairs of use and salvation. Since 
 
 the beginning spiritual openings have been effected 
 
 in the hardened walls of human nature. Seers and 
 
 prophets have made revelation personal, and honesty 
 
 of weight for the most important facts. Things that 
 
 outgo daily experience have been attested over all 
 
 the world by the personal character of the narrators. 
 
 Honesty will establish anything, especially when 
 
 one honest man after another, in every age and 
 
 country, deposits his stone of experience, and the 
 
 unpremeditated building rises under an unseen hand 
 
 into heavenly proportions, and becomes the only 
 
 fitting abode of conscience, of affection, of love, and 
 
 of religion. Such personal evidence is the highest 
 
 testimony of all, for every virtue is behind it ; it has 
 
 unique eyes for observation ; it is counterchecked by 
 
 other honesty like its own ; its flaws are of time and 
 
 space and expression, the necessities of epochs, which 
 
 the spirit within purges away ; it stands on a final 
 
 divine basis, on character as a substance; and 
 
 accordingly the persons of men have been made the 
 
 means of the revelations of both the Old and New 
 
 Testaments. " I, John, saw the Holy City," says 
 
 the divine Apocalypse. ''I, Emanuel Swedenborg, 
 
 had my spiritual eyes opened to the spiritual world 
 in 1743, and this continued constantly till death in 
 1772," is the similar testimony of sight of that 
 humble man. In both cases the affirmation is per- 
 sonal ; in both, enlightened reason and the common 
 sense of mankind will in time accept the conclusions 
 as their own. 
 
 Granted, any free man may deny these positions, 
 and refuse assent to all he cannot repeat in his own 
 experience. By this method, the world is made up 
 of planes, strata, of denial. The lowest people, by 
 their reason and science, cannot see what the people 
 of the plane above them see, and deny it. The next 
 layer denies the positions of the one above it; and 
 so up to the top layer, which denies God, because in 
 their way, of impersonality to themselves, they 
 cannot see him. Both states, of acceptance and 
 denial, follow from the laws of heaven and of hell. 
 There is a text Avhich illustrates this. ''The 
 kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into 
 a far country, who called his own servants, and 
 deUvered unto them his goods, to every man 
 according to his several ability." The kingdom of 
 heaven is the dominion of the divine truth ; it 
 comes from the Lord's personality acknowledged 
 and obeyed in daily life; it recedes from natural 
 observation, and is obscured as by distance in this 
 mortal life, lessening and lost to the view as a man 
 travelling into a far country. It goes away ap- 
 parently, that it may be not tyrannical, but influ- 
 ential. *'His own servants" are the truths we 
 know and the uses we make of them. They inherit 
 in our persons the personality of our Master ; to 
 them he delivers his goods, and these are appro- 
 priated to us in the vessels of life which we have 
 
1 88 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME, 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME, 
 
 189 
 
 If 
 
 ' ) 
 
 \ A 
 
 :i 
 
 1 
 
 \ 
 
 «,! 
 
 
 deliberately formed in our characters. The point 
 sought to be illustrated here is, that personal attesta- 
 tion, as it is the highest of proofs, is so guarded from 
 profanation that it is the most susceptible of denial. 
 This is the going " away into a far country." The 
 pressure of every such truth is regulated by divine 
 statics, to leave free choice of acceptance or rejection 
 to the will. And thus the apparent weakness of the 
 personal argument is but the mercy that will not 
 overbear the faculty of will, and destroy the founda- 
 tion of humanity, which freewill is. But in itself 
 the highest personal experience, and the organization 
 of such experiences, are omnipotent, and there are no 
 bounds to their power of attestation of anything in 
 the natural or the spiritual worlds ; or in regard to 
 the incarnation, the birth, death, and resurrection of 
 the Lord, w^hich are both in and above the w^orlds, 
 and w^hich found in their own divine reasons the 
 faculties which acknowledge them. 
 
 The science of personal attestations of these high 
 things is one with the jurisprudence of the truths 
 of religion and spiritual life ; and in the trial in 
 w^hich divine truth submits itself in its statements, 
 as it always does, to human reason, the persons of 
 the witnesses are necessarily involved. At tlrst, 
 the nature of their statements is less in question 
 than the character of the witnesses ; necessarily so, 
 because the statements for the most part cannot be 
 judged until they have made and enlightened a new 
 mind to receive them ; whereas the ability, virtue, 
 good faith, and coherence of the witnesses can im- 
 press at once if fairly weighed. Thus the four 
 Evangelists come into court with the full power and 
 pressure of honesty and sanity. The report is ex- 
 traordinary ; but they had something new to human 
 
 nature to tell ; a message of facts that has to create 
 a faculty for its own reception ; and in the mean- 
 time their four persons and four voices are an un- 
 contradictable proof in their favour. There is no 
 witness against them in the whole world, except 
 that to the uncorrected natural man, the message is 
 not likely, which at first it is certain that it never 
 
 can be. 
 
 In truth, all the lower sciences repose upon 
 feebler bases than the personal truth of their dis- 
 coverers ; and upon poorer counterchecks in their 
 issues. They depend upon the capacity of the com- 
 mon mind to repeat the experiments and observa- 
 tions under all circumstances; and they rely for 
 correction upon the perpetual elimination of natural 
 mistakes. Whereas these personal knowledges, 
 sciences, or truths, cannot be repeated at will ; they 
 involve an inspiration, or an illumination, of the mind 
 that conveys them to men; and their correction 
 age by age, which also takes place, is only a cor- 
 rection of^'the sense of the letter ; and is effected by 
 fresh and fresh apprehension of their spiritual side ; 
 and moreover they appeal to a high justice and 
 affection in their audiences, or their court is not 
 constituted. They are regenerations of the mind 
 itself, and are acknowledged as they regenerate. 
 
 The end is, that the completion of all the sciences 
 without exception depends upon divinely commis- 
 sioned persons, who from above, with their word, 
 their truth, their revelation, front the array of facts 
 advanced from below upwards, and supply informa- 
 tion and life which are organic, and which in time 
 the lower nature of things substantially attests. 
 Thus material science even is feebly personal, and 
 requires much to be taken for granted. Spiritual 
 
I) 
 
 I' 
 
 190 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME. 
 
 science which completes material, is divinely 
 personal ; and shines by its own inherent light ; and 
 it takes nothing for granted but the humility, 
 sincerity, and open-mindedness of its devotee. 
 
 Passing from testimony as the highest ground of 
 faith in fticts, and from Swedenborg as an un- 
 contradicted witness to a new world of spiritual 
 observations, a few words are needed regarding his 
 peculiar case. As a seer, though for extent, 
 exactitude, and compass, no such man is known in 
 history, yet his case is supported by a subordinate 
 army of seers co-extensive with human annals. The 
 spiritual world has often been opened through 
 organic internal sight in various degrees. For the 
 most part these accounts concur with each other, 
 and with Swedenborg s vast experiences. In all of 
 them the spiritual world is blessedly harmonic, or 
 terribly correspondential. In all of them holds 
 what Swedenborg says, that heaven is divine justice 
 with divine mercy, that hell is such justice without 
 such mercy. In all of them men and women are in 
 human forms, and the character of each person 
 determines his form and his circumstances. But 
 Swedenborgs case supplies the key to the rest. 
 His organism w as prepared from his birth upw\ards ; 
 his natural body and senses were thus capable of 
 an acquiescence which allowed of the emancipation of 
 the spiritual man from their influence, and of his 
 intromission then into the spiritual world. He was 
 there as a full man while also he was here on earth 
 a full man; an amphicosmic person, indigena 
 tttriusque mundi. Respiration coincides with the 
 plenary inspiration of which the human body is 
 capable ; and in him respiration could stand with 
 the bodily frame in its guardianship, holding natural 
 
 PERSONAL EVIDENCE SUPREME. 
 
 191 
 
 life, while the spiritual body passed consciously into 
 its own spiritual world. Thus he was twice born. 
 His spiritual eyes and spiritual mind were opened 
 about 1743, and he saw and apprehended the 
 heavens and the hells, and the world of spirits, 
 which is the preliminary state in which the good 
 put off the external evil states and habits which 
 cling to them, and the evil put off" the shows of good 
 which then do not cling to them ; in both cases by 
 temptations corresponding to those which all men 
 pass through here on earth ; character being thus 
 cleared of its practical evils, or of its pretences to 
 good and non-essentials. The Lord Himself opened 
 the eyes and mind of Swedenborg by a personal 
 appearance. He revealed Himself as a Divine Man, 
 once Jesus Christ in Judea, but after his completed 
 victory over hell and death, as the incarnate Je- 
 hovah, the Lord. He also gradually, because 
 rationally, opened to Swedenborg the spiritual sense 
 of the Word of the Old and New Testaments, which 
 is recorded in his great work. The Arcana Ccelestia. 
 Here the Word stands as the Logos, inexpugnable 
 to human criticism. In one sense, no matter who 
 of prophets and evangelists wrote it, or where 
 it was penned, the Lord of the internal sense 
 wrote it. The mountain of its defences cannot be 
 taken, because it is the Lord's divine natural and 
 divine rational life, in, and above, the world ; and 
 closed against the profane. It was in a prepared 
 human organization that this opening was effected, 
 and through a prepared adequate mind of a man 
 that the new knowledge was promulgated by the 
 press. This is personal evidence of divine-rational 
 things, and divine-rational evidence of personal 
 things. 
 
192 
 
 ILLUMINATION OF REASON 
 
 ILLUMINATION OF REASON 
 
 193 
 
 I 
 
 i! 
 
 » I 
 
 LII. 
 
 ILLUMINATION OF REASON. 
 
 The new point here is, that the Lord's commu- 
 nications to mankind through Swedenborg are 
 through a man at the summit of his natural powers 
 and efforts, after a considerable lifetime spent in a 
 reasonable search for the evidences and characters 
 of the soul and the immortal state. Speakmg 
 naturally, a sublime reason w^as engaged in most 
 earnest striving in these processes. There was an 
 ardent human love behind it, to lead the sceptical 
 scientific mind by a new avenue in its own field to 
 religious faith. He stood here, one may say as an 
 Englishman, as a Shakespear in the midst of the 
 willing sciences. They knew his voice, and ran 
 into the forms of his genius. In all this, a rational 
 faculty capable of instructing mankind on their own 
 platform, was slowly developed from his early years. 
 His labours were colossal ; and great streams and 
 lakes of thought exist in his unpublished scientific 
 manuscripts to show what he traversed towards his 
 end. The point gained was, a reason enlightened 
 by the perception of new natural truths not war- 
 rino- with religion, but capable of becoming the 
 vehicles of spiritual truths. To this reason the 
 Lord descended, and in no way superseding the 
 freedom or faculty of the man Swedenborg, He 
 communicated to him an illumination adequate to 
 the purposes of His providence, and thereby gave 
 to the world an illuminated reason, a new manner of 
 man, and through him a rational revelation. This 
 
 can be nothing less than a coming of the Lord; in- 
 deed, unless a prior claim be made for some other 
 instrument, His second coming, His rational second 
 coming. Now the first coming disappointed the old 
 religious w^orld, which looked for a great king, and 
 behold a little child laid in a manger, a man of sor- 
 rows, and a death on the cross. And the second 
 coming is equally far from the mark of religious 
 expectation. It has with it nothing that is written in 
 the letter of Scripture, though everything that is 
 contained in the spirit within the letter. Pre-emi- 
 nently it is the Lord's gift to mankind. The elder 
 religious dispensations w^ere not fully given to man ; 
 they were shown to him for his guidance, and sat 
 upon their thrones to receive his homage and com- 
 mand his obedience. But the dispensation of the 
 New Church through Swedenborg is a divine present 
 to the human family. And it is so because it has 
 been passed through the reason of a finite man 
 proved and approved for that design, and in the 
 consociation with heaven thus brought about, it is 
 for every mind, a perpetual exhortation of that 
 text, '' Come let us reason together, saith the Lord." 
 It is a new position in history, where every new 
 position is a substance and has its consequences. 
 There have been many divinely enlightened men in 
 the Christian ages; but that is not what is here 
 imphed ; the new point is a human reason possessed 
 and illuminated by the Lord, whose works are 
 rational works, and can be attested as such by the 
 common relidous reason of mankind ; which reason 
 therefore as it arises is the inevitable realm of the 
 Lord s New Church. 
 
 Whilst we are upon this subject, we may observe 
 that the end and issue were as little reckoned upon 
 
 N 
 
 h 
 
II 
 
 
 » t 
 
 m 
 
 ril 
 
 1 94 ILL UMINA TION OF REASON. 
 
 by Swedenborg himself as the first coming of the 
 Lord in the flesh was expected by the Jews. To 
 the very last of his own thoughts, he sought the soul 
 and the spiritual life as abstract verities, to be 
 organized indeed into a body by sciences and their 
 doctrines, and to constitute thus an incarnate philo- 
 sophy, as it were a body of truths, and thus a soul 
 within the body. If this could have succeeded, 
 there would still have been mystery in the back- 
 ground, and for all but philosophic moments, the 
 grave behind all. But the end was bigger than the 
 apparent means, because the means had in them 
 other means unseen. It is instructive to recognize 
 in Swedenborg the shortness of the hand of the 
 natural man at his best, when he reaches it into the 
 unknown by his own proper power. The unknown 
 is seemingly put farther back, but remains unknown. 
 And when the true knowledge comes, it disappoints 
 the world, is no sequent of striving ideas, and is 
 ^'foohshness to the Greeks." Even Swedenborg 
 expected the soul to reveal herself, clad in immense 
 attributes, and visible to the mind's eye of the 
 inmost thought. 
 
 Thus, in his Economy of the Animal Kingdom, 
 after illustrating the position that the soul, '' when 
 emancipated from the bonds and trammels of earthly 
 things, will still assume the exact form of the 
 human body," he proceeds thus—'' And live a life 
 pure beyond all imagination. Then, that is to say, 
 the soul will live its own life, namely, in its own 
 intelligence, in the representation of the universe, in 
 the intuition of ends, in the beginning of determi- 
 nations ; a life inexpressible by words ; incommuni- 
 cable in its degree to the body ; the inmost life of 
 itself ; a life left to itself ; subject to no lower lord— 
 
 ILLUMINATION OF REASON 
 
 195 
 
 neither. to the imagination, nor its allied cupidities; 
 a life most distinct, unanimous, constant, immutable ; 
 above the nature of the sublunary world ; beyond 
 time ; almost apart from degrees and moments, 
 except that myriads of its moments and degrees will 
 equal but one of ours, and yet myriads of ours will 
 not appear to it as one appears to us : a life only 
 terminable in its representations and intuitions by the 
 created universe. The ear, though it lies in a carved 
 recess in the petrous bone of the temples, neverthe- 
 less can drink in sounds from no mean distance. 
 The eye, although but a little ball shut up in its 
 orbit, penetrates nevertheless to the sun and stars, 
 and by the assistance of art, pierces into the sub- 
 stances of nature's purer sphere. The mind goes 
 even beyond the stars. What, then, is the range of 
 the soul, which is above the mind, a representation 
 of the universe, order, truth, above the rules which 
 govern effects, in the very aura of the universe ? 
 Nay, but in respect to its operations, it does not 
 terminate with nature, but is capable of regarding 
 ends beyond nature, and therefore of rising to the 
 Creator. Why should I say more ? If the mind 
 would represent to itself the perfections of this 
 exalted life, it must rise above itself, and out of the 
 region of the abstract take ineffable forms of things, 
 and then so far as it is persistent there and lifted 
 above the lower mind, thought carries it away, I 
 know not whither." 
 
 But now, in a moment, by divine simplicity of 
 fact, Swedenborg s spiritual eyes were unsealed, and 
 lie saw, not souls in a philosophical manner, but 
 men and women and children who had deceased, 
 with all their " bodies, parts, and passions," leading 
 human lives characteristic of themselves. He saw 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 196 
 
 ILLUMINATION OF REASON 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM. 
 
 197 
 
 them with his substantial eyes. In time he saw- 
 also much more, namely, the gradual great altera- 
 tions of all personality in the heavens and the hells ; 
 but after his actual eyes were opened, he saw no 
 human entities, but they were all men, women, and 
 children, who were the more substantively human, 
 the more men and women, the more they became 
 angelic. 
 
 Nothing can be known of these subjects without 
 revelation, and very little without rational revelation. 
 Where there is no experience there is no knowledge, 
 but only presumption of fact, and all true spiritual 
 experience is in one kind revelation : you command 
 it by no existing senses, but it comes to you from 
 its own ground. Immortality is not demonstrable, 
 save by immortal sight in which illuminated reason 
 sees. It is therefore clear that those who reject 
 revelation must be dubious about their own exist- 
 ence hereafter. By the spiritual appearances 
 recorded in history, any man who values facts at 
 their own estimate, may know that men and women 
 exist after death, though how long or how they 
 exist that deponent showeth not. But this is a kind 
 of revelation. By the common light of the Christian 
 religion as it exists in the churches, men may aver 
 human immortality, though it is mingled and 
 sullied with the grave. This also, notwithstand- 
 ing that it is obscured, is revelation. By the 
 opened eye of the New Church, immortality is seen 
 immediately, with the grounds and reasons of it, as 
 it were the place and conditions, in the existence of 
 the Lord and the nature of man. This is indeed reve- 
 lation, and all subordinate revealings are gathered 
 into its certainty. But apart from these sources, 
 and their correspondents in the old collateral reli- 
 
 gions, which are themselves decayed revelations, 
 nothing is knowable or conceivable of man when he 
 dies ; as how could it be where there are no facts, 
 and no faculties to apprehend them. '^ Perhaps it 
 may be so," and '' perhaps it may not be so," are the 
 " be all and the end all " on this subject, of human 
 reason unassisted by divine. To any serious man 
 who considers the case, there is God s showing here 
 that His revelation exists. 
 
 LIII. 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM. 
 
 Many pious persons are alarmed at the present 
 audacity of naturalism, and see therein a grave 
 danger to the existence of religious faith. They 
 may be reassured by the following considerations. 
 In the first place, on the side which it turns towards 
 practice, and we may say political life, it leads out, 
 as we have shown abundantly, into a class of cruel 
 deeds and scientific despotisms always tending to in- 
 crease on opportunity, and then to retreat on pretexts 
 before the public eye ; and parliament and police in 
 all countries are already on its track here. Even 
 Royal Commissions, however courtly to sins, are 
 preliminary to law and police. Especially it is a 
 serious check to naturalism that its attempt in the 
 sciences of life shall come to be limited by the 
 world's conscience embodied in penal statutes. And 
 this may betoken that other of its actual ways 
 will be watched and apprehended. Then secondly, 
 its methods and dogmas ignore life except as a 
 function of matter, and accept the visible world as 
 
198 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM, 
 
 the all of things ; leavmg out the tiers of the mind, 
 and all excepting the senses, even when working 
 problems, and enacting laws and denials, with facul- 
 ties which are not senses, with passions, imagina- 
 tions, and domineering desires, each handmaided by 
 its own intellectual delusions. In this omission, 
 naturalism is taken in flank by modern spiritism, 
 and indeed, by ancient spiritual history, both of 
 which consist of sensual phenomena. A late 
 German writer says on this subject : *' Spiritualism 
 is founded on authenticated facts, which mortify 
 denial, and thus show that there is a spiritual 
 sphere or world of causes, acting independently of 
 the phenomenal sphere of natural action. Apart 
 from astute counterfeits and malicious deceptions, 
 which afford no argument, sceptical science or 
 materialism by these manifestations is put into the 
 awkward position of desperately denying, without 
 being able to deny. The torment natural science 
 feels is quite excruciating. It is the contortion of 
 Lucifer looked upon by Christ. The manifestations 
 are material facts, in which an intelliofent or free 
 and spontaneous agency, thus of human spiritual 
 beings, at a slight glance is discernible. Unable to 
 deny the facts, science tries all sorts of impossible 
 hypotheses and imaginary fictions to explain their 
 physical character by ordinary causes." ^ This little 
 war contests the frontier of naturalism, and cripples 
 its forces ; and the more so because naturalism 
 carries the conditions of the enemy in its own vitals ; 
 for its dragon, spiritism, is its own tapeworm pro- 
 jected from within ; not a spontaneous generation, 
 but the very will and body of spirits clay born here. 
 The opposition, however, is not real, and it may be 
 
 * Sjnrititalism and its Causes and Effects^ by Baron Dirckinck Holmfeld. 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM, 
 
 199 
 
 foreseen that naturalism will some day make its 
 peace with spiritism, and so endeavour to annex the 
 second life to its own dominions, and to carouse 
 with naturalism beyond the grave ; and when that 
 end comes, as it will come, magic will have its text- 
 books and laboratories, and be pompously reannoun- 
 ced from professors' chairs. Swedenborg has already 
 seen this issue of naturalism in the spiritual world. 
 Again it seems probable that penal laws may have 
 something to do with the practical side of this later 
 development. We shall recur to the subject of 
 spiritism when we treat of the brittleness of science 
 further on. In the third place, those who are 
 spiritually minded, and can be instructed respecting 
 the causes which are at work within this momentous 
 epoch, will find that a new dispensation of religion 
 has been given ; a new outpouring of the divine 
 wisdom suited to the whole duty of man, a new in- 
 flowing of the divine love into human faculties. 
 This implies an alteration of the mental climature ; 
 that the old arctic and temperate zones of man are 
 under comparatively tropical conditions as regards 
 their vital sun. It implies that freedom to grow 
 and to do, to think and to will, is increased. That 
 every good cause is manned and encouraged, and 
 every evil cause inflamed, by the new influx of life 
 into all ; for " He causes His sun to shine on the 
 just and on the unjust." Thus the descending truths 
 of the incarnation imply upheavals of the atheism 
 opposed to them ; and the marshalling of the forces 
 of both for war. And here naturalism is besieged 
 in its soul by a perfect account of itself given by a 
 power which is not its own. It is drawn in state- 
 ment, and its ways and doctrines are written out 
 beforehand, so that it has no strategy that is not 
 
200 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM, 
 
 in its opponent's hand. It is the field of an influx 
 which not only serves it with its fresh apparent life, 
 but reveals its heart to the religious mind. A 
 counter- proof of this is, that its present conceits 
 have been long foreseen, as any reader may know 
 by consulting Swedenborg s works. A fourth thing 
 is, that it has a dead church to prey upon, and it 
 seems to gain great extension and easy victories 
 here ; indeed to have important allies in the 
 rationalism of many of the clergy. But here its 
 triumphs threaten nothing that is not already perish- 
 ing ; and a mind that is voluntarily " spouse of the 
 worm and brother of the clay," fills a permission in the 
 divine decree, "' Let the dead bury their dead " : it 
 is the scavenger of evil and false theologies, and eats 
 them up. Fifthly, the honest external churches in 
 the world count for much in estimating the pros- 
 pects of naturalism. These are not the dead church 
 excepting in so far as the men in them reject the 
 new light of heaven ; and there is no reason to sup- 
 pose that they will in the main reject it. The out- 
 ward foundations of religion, the national churches 
 including their denominations, are a public array 
 upon which scientism and naturalism make no 
 impression ; and in so far as these churches are 
 faithful to the Lord, and inculcate responsibility of 
 rulers and ruled to Him in daily life and in every 
 administration of wealth and work, they will, in 
 the end, by increasing practical good from above 
 downwards in society, enlist the body of the work- 
 ing men. These have everything to fear and nothing 
 to gain by naturalism, which in making life of little 
 account, and knowledge of much, treads at once 
 upon the cottages of this world, and the humble 
 hopes of the next. Far therefore from fearing 
 
 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM, 201 
 
 naturalism because of its vaunts, we see it impri- 
 soned in stone walls, and hear it as a voice proceed- 
 ing from many cells ; its originalities and madnesses 
 are written down in full apocalypse ; it is inevitable 
 and expected ; and rises against the divine natural 
 Man that it may be conquered, and placed under his 
 feet. 
 
 Prevailing contempt of human experime^it, and of 
 the powers of natural substa7ice, — This subject should 
 have been noticed earlier, but the occasion for it be- 
 longs to the day. Experiment on living animals has 
 been condemned in these pages; and poisoning and 
 pollution of animals for alleged purposes of medical 
 science, has been signalized as wicked. There is 
 however a set of experiments, orderly; if rightly 
 done, harmless; philosophical, and tending directly 
 to human uses, which is on record, and taken no 
 notice of by the violationists. We allude to "the 
 proving of medicines," by Hahnemann and his 
 followers, on the living body. They and their 
 willing patients in their rightful persons have been 
 the martyrs of a new science, and homoeopathy, true 
 drug medicine, is the result. These experimentalists 
 have done themselves no harm, have committed no 
 suicides, but have watched the vibrations of different 
 drugs upon the organism throughout, and tabulated 
 the body of these effects in human forms of grouping. 
 They have found drugs that touch precisely chords 
 within, and noted the symptoms they make, and from 
 these effects have constructed a system of correlates 
 of human diseases, and a book of exact roads to 
 reach and cancel them. Long experience has shewn 
 that they are not wrong in the correspondences 
 indicated, or mistaken in the cures brought about by 
 actively inducing them. This wealth of facts elicited 
 
202 THE PROSPECTS OF NATURALISM, 
 
 directly in the living human body, for the body, is 
 vast beyond that gained from irrelevant animals in 
 the troughs of the violationists. And yet they, who 
 crave experiments on life, ignore all this experience ; 
 and though it is curative knowledge, they go after 
 that which, on their own shewing, is only possibly 
 and inferentially helpful, and cannot be proved to 
 have commerce with cure. This is contempt of 
 righteous and benign experiments, and disqualifies 
 the ignorers for any seat in the colleges of nature. 
 
 Furthermore, the action of infinitesimal qualities 
 of drusrs. an action as substantiate as the sun at 
 noonday, is despised by the same violent school ; 
 and here, the most surprising properties of matter, 
 and its deepest laws, are affronted by them. That 
 decillionth and centillionth doses of drugs should 
 perform the solid cures they do, is an amplification 
 of material powers of the greatest significance for the 
 mind, and carries matter upwards, changing all com- 
 mon ideas of it : shews indeed that with Hahnemann's 
 heart behind it, matter is as benignant thought, 
 searches the body for rescues and good works, and 
 carries precision of help to otherwise impossible 
 recesses. Bacon says, "the subtlety of nature ex- 
 ceeds the subtlety of the human understanding." 
 But the violationist understanding denies the subtlety 
 in order that it may admit nothing which is superior 
 to its selfhood. Here it is out of science, — Homo 
 natures negator — et tunc interior es. It is also out of 
 humanity, treads gentleness under foot, and makes 
 war with the lamb. Vaccination is the counter ex- 
 emplar of evil on the practical side. Instead of 
 combating the great diseases, cholera, typhoid, and the 
 like, by means that go with known cure homoeopath i- 
 cally to their seats, the tendency, and now the pro- 
 
 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY. 203 
 
 position is to put poison after poison by inoculation 
 into the blood, — all this, we are told, is being tried 
 with a view to manifold ultimate compulsions — so 
 that mankind from infancy shall be scarred with 
 every damnation lest death come to mind or body 
 from any possible absence of the devil. 
 
 Note then that the prevailing school relies upon 
 no experiments on life, but those that are violent, 
 horrible, second-hand, and fanciful ; and that its 
 admiration of the laws of nature and the powers of 
 matter stops short wherever these become admirable, 
 rational, and divine. Reckon also from this cause 
 the prospects of naturalism. 
 
 LIV. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY. 
 
 Divine and natural reasons are at hand to prove 
 the cardinal place of the sciences which are conver 
 sant about the body of man. It is in physical 
 nature the head and front of the proper studies of 
 mankind. It is the most difiScult of all, because it 
 involves every faculty in the pursuit ; if one is left 
 out, some realm of the human frame is made desert 
 by the omission. The method of the science implies 
 a voluntary coincidence in the plan of the scientific 
 mind with the will and purposes of the Maker; for 
 those purposes become the uses of which the body is 
 the express organ. According as these uses are 
 seen, there is daylight in the firmament of physiology. 
 
 As a subject of knowledge, the body of man has 
 
 not only a human soul in it, but a divine soul ; for 
 
 it has been the field of the incarnation, of the advent 
 
 of Jehovah in the flesh ; and the divine human body 
 
204 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY, 
 
 thus extant upon earth is the ultimate mediator 
 between God and man. The Lord is essential man. 
 Herein the human form is holy ground. It still 
 remains the central and now solar object of physio- 
 logy; divine light never repugning, but regenerating, 
 natural light ; and inasmuch as physiology is the top 
 of the natural sciences, this divine entry and claim 
 upon it amount to a divine reinstitution and consti- 
 tution of those sciences. 
 
 The Divine Man when in Judaea, went forth in 
 uses physiologically, and restored the decayed and 
 withered functions of sick and lame and impotent 
 human bodies ; and knowing what was in man, 
 became the physician of his race, and his first advent 
 was accompanied by a reconstitution of the power of 
 health, and of healing, among his followers. The 
 creation was completed in Him, and the divine 
 image in the human form was in all practice reasserted 
 by Him. The physiology of the true man as 
 separate from that of the ruin man, is henceforth 
 the physiology of the Highest in man. 
 
 In the Lord's second advent, through the illumi- 
 nated reason of Swedenborg, where He taught truths 
 that none can know without His immediate teaching, 
 and opened faculties which He only can open, the 
 preliminary way of the advent lies again through the 
 human body ; this time through its manifest sciences 
 of anatomy and physiology, whose regeneration 
 began as the preparatory rational truths passed 
 through them. Why this was is now plain. For 
 the human body is the place, symbol-book and ulti- 
 mate of the soul in internal knowledge : it is the 
 expression of the maximus homo, humanity, and 
 hence of the divine order of the universes of heaven 
 and hell : it is the analoofue of all arts and sciences. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY, 205 
 
 and of the human mind and society on earth ; and 
 writes out in compact shape and function what these 
 are in forms transcending sensual vision. It is the 
 earliest assembly and meeting-place for man, and in- 
 troduces him to himself and his fellows here in a guise 
 the upw^ard relationships of which will never cease. 
 Its diseases and destructions are the models of all 
 punishments under spiritual laws ; its elevations the 
 likenesses of all supernal commissions and inspira- 
 tions. In its main parts, the heart, the breath or 
 spirit, and the like, it supplies the central words of 
 the Word, and sits on the right hand of revelation. 
 It is the scientific key to the communications and 
 circulations of good and evil in society, which on the 
 bad side has its spinal and great sympathetic nerves 
 and plexuses of evil, whereby lust calls to lust, crime 
 evokes crime, leagues of wickedness unknown to the 
 wicked are sworn, and the strands of sin anticipate 
 nature and death, and by induction adjoin the sym- 
 pathetic fibres of pandemonium. 
 
 Therefore both the first and second advents con- 
 cern the human body and its sciences, and hence the 
 truth and conservation of those sciences is a special 
 object of the divine regard ; and its motives and prin- 
 ciples herein have been announced in two dispensa- 
 tions. Practical good in the body is the first advent; 
 practical rational truth, newly founding and com- 
 manding the good, is the second. The salvation 
 of the body by these principles is the last reason of 
 the existence of its physiology. 
 
 Here we see in plain knowledge the reason of the 
 special assault upon these human sciences, and of 
 the attempt to tear them to pieces, and throw them 
 to the beasts to devour. We see why violation and 
 its suggestions are bent to make an abomination of 
 
2o6 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY, 
 
 desolation of the animal kingdom, and to drive the 
 destruction upwards, piece after piece, through the 
 truths of the human form. For that form stands 
 right over against the infernal gates, and closes in 
 their power. It so stands by the inhabitation of 
 divine natural truths wnthin the organs of the body 
 itself, which is thus consciously the castle of the 
 organic images and resting-places of freewill, and the 
 mundane centre, answering to the Word, of the science 
 of correspondences, which is solar in the intelligence 
 of the new humanity. The war, therefore, between 
 physiology and its violator is a foreseen war on one 
 side, and a necessary war on both sides, and the 
 existence of religion and society are pledged upon its 
 
 issues. 
 
 But the increase of human organology, and in 
 general of the sciences of the human form, will be of 
 slow attainment, for even in a regenerating society, 
 not every man is adequate to perceive and register 
 organic principles, still less to receive the illumina- 
 tion which alone can transfigure this knowledge, and 
 make it into a body of truths. The flesh to the 
 fleshly is hard to be thought of as the vessel of the 
 spirit. And such knowledge will less be written in 
 scientific statements, and more be poured forth as a 
 general spiritual light forbidding and denying pro- 
 fane research and inference ; whereby the field will 
 be cleared and the way prepared for new good. 
 Moreover w^e may here discover that progress of 
 knowledge in the usual sense is a delusion of the 
 natural man; and that high truths especially are 
 o-iven as they are wanted, through high instruments 
 fitted for the purpose; that they are not in the 
 market and forum of mankind ; and that there are 
 no more of them to be had until those already given 
 
 THE FUTURE OF HUMAN ORGANOLOGY. 207 
 
 have been used adequately. Also that such use of 
 them is the only means to the genius, the God-given 
 eye, which sees more. And this supplies a criticism, 
 not an unkindly but a discerning criticism, of those 
 knowledges in which natural progress is possible, 
 and shows that if unlimited they are wildernesses of 
 facts in which the mind loses itself; or else that 
 they become truths in subserving the arts which 
 minister to the natural life ; and thus limited, loop 
 on as justified uses to the outer garments of the 
 human form. 
 
PART III. 
 A NEW CHURCH. 
 
 LV. 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 
 
 Nothing but a study of Swedenborg s works, in 
 which a thing new to the race of man, namely, a 
 rational revelation, is conveyed, can have any voice 
 in deciding upon their contents. They besiege and 
 in time will capture the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil, and hold them in bonds ; and they ask for no 
 treaty of peace in the meantime. They are throw- 
 ing their bridges over now into the hostile cities of 
 
 science. 
 
 The New Church, the New Jerusalem, is con- 
 strained to occupy this position, because no other 
 church can do so. All other churches are possessed 
 by mythologies which do not belong to the rational 
 mind, and which can throw over no bridge into 
 accordant truths of nature. There is nothing 
 organic, no apprehensible divine truth in their 
 tenets. These tenets have no personal authority 
 either of the Lord, the Word, or a commissioned 
 messenger, but are the outgrowth of the always 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 
 
 209 
 
 questionable life of the historical church. At best 
 they are the formulas of public opinion about divine 
 things, old and new. Scripture disowns them as 
 superadditions. They are not theories, still less 
 truths, of Scripture, opening the mind to see it 
 rationally ; but things apart, settled in councils by 
 majorities of fanciful and imaginative hierarchs, in 
 whom the last lust of hierarchy has forced doctrine 
 into shapes most suitable for the ends of dominion. 
 Obviously they are unrelated to science; when it 
 becomes atheistic, they can parry none of its attacks ; 
 for their theism is as unlikely as its atheism. Is it 
 more likely that one ''divine" person decreed the 
 death of another to save mankind in their sins from 
 their sins, than that there is no God at all ? The 
 existence of such gods would curse mankind, as the 
 bare creed of them has cursed it. Salvation by 
 faith alone would obviously do the same, by carry- 
 ing all evil unconquered, into heaven. From such 
 things there is no passage into the daily natural life 
 and faculties of mankind ; they have no regenerative 
 power. This is all written out in modern history. 
 The Pope of Rome sees the evils of the present 
 insurrection of science against God and His Word, 
 but strikes no bolt home ; his wrath is purely of his 
 position ; he might be expected to be very angry at 
 such free winds blowing about his scarlet infallibility, 
 and to thunder and lighten as it were in token of 
 the second coming of Jupiter in modern civilization. 
 But he does not know that true science is indis- 
 pensable in work, and divine in origin; and that 
 true theology must be able to throw bridges over 
 into it, and to communicate with the heart of its 
 truths ; and that if there is no such theology in his 
 churchy it must be sought in a New Church. The 
 
 
 
2 1 o THE CH UR CH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 
 
 Protestant churches are just as much at fault in the 
 conflict with atheism as the Papal church is : they 
 have the same mythology, and no theology ; the 
 night of their creeds is thick with the wandering 
 stars of irrationalism, which are easily put out by the 
 pursuivant rationalisms which hawk in the ecclesias- 
 tical sky. In fact, the Protestant churches " hold 
 their own " less than the others, composed as they are 
 of free bands ; they abandon doctrine to the enemy, 
 and proclaim its unimportance ; and throw over- 
 board almost anything at the bidding of rationalism. 
 At best they are arks in which good conduct and 
 human virtue are acknowledged to be right, and 
 where they bide their time until more light, ex- 
 pected generally out of natural science and progress, 
 comes. 
 
 Doctrines are necessary. — A word here concerning 
 the importance of doctrines. In regard to the truths 
 of the natural w^orld, the difference between the 
 savage and the civilized man lies very much in the 
 fact that the savage man has no doctrines of nature, 
 and the civilized has many. And the more, the more 
 exact, and the more commanding in the faculties the 
 doctrines are, the more pow^erful is the citizen, and 
 the more complete the material civilization. The 
 doctrines of the natural world are the truths of the 
 physical sciences. They come from careful and 
 extensive observations ; these suggest laws and prin- 
 ciples ; gradually they form an order corresponding 
 to wider and wider tracts of natural fact and opera- 
 tion ; and at length, from being '^ scientifics," as 
 Swedenborg calls them, they become truths. With- 
 out such truths in some abundance, man inhabits 
 only the lower strata of nature and time, and is even 
 less perfect in his place than the animal creation. 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 
 
 211 
 
 The present point is, that doctrines are indispensable 
 here because nature is essentially an order, a cosmos, 
 and compliance with the laws and rules of that order 
 is needful to participating in its powers. The theory 
 of gravitation, of universal attraction, of heat, lidit 
 electricity, magnetism, is the doctrine of those sub- 
 jects and sciences ; and by means of their doctrines, 
 the mind holds them in its domain, and all the arts 
 Avhich embody these powers or expressions of nature, 
 grow in proportion as the theory or doctrine is true 
 and complete. If nature were a great vagary, the 
 converse thing would be to make the best of it, to 
 pick the chaos for daily morsels as a chiffonier picks 
 up his bits, and not to think beyond each meal. Now 
 the question, it may be called a moot question at 
 present, of the possibility, not to say utility, of doc- 
 trinal truth in the matter of the Word of God and 
 the spiritual world, has, as in the case of nature, to 
 deal simply with the reality of both these realms. If 
 the Word is but Jewish literature, and the life after 
 death moonshine, clearly no doctrine need be enter- 
 tained about them. On the other hand, the Word 
 being divine because of a divine spiritual sense con- 
 tained exactly within the letter, and the spiritual 
 world being an immeasurable creation which receives 
 us all sooner or later into its bosom ; it is clear that 
 the man, whether dignitary or humble layman, who 
 has no definite doctrine about the Word, no sciences 
 become truths here, is a theological savage ; and if 
 he admits a life after death, but ignores all the means 
 to an exact knowledge of it, he is voluntarily a spiri- 
 tual savage. Two upper realms are lost to him, and 
 his only participation in them is, that being in them- 
 selves all powerful and pervasive, they are an atmo- 
 sphere which, unconsciously to himself, keeps his 
 
/ 
 
 212 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 
 
 mind alive; though as exactitudes of number, 
 weight and measure they are not apprehensible to 
 
 his reason. 
 
 Doctrinals then are the indispensable readers of 
 all reality, and to say that they are not important in 
 any subject, is to say that that subject is artificial, 
 imaginary and unreal. This unreality in regard to 
 truths is the state of the churches now on earth. 
 They contain no sciences of their own subject matter, 
 viz., the Word, and the spiritual life here and here- 
 after; none, that is to say, equivalent to the physical 
 and mathematical sciences; they inhabit the letter, and 
 read the burial service, and criticism meets them in the 
 one, and scepticism at the other ; and in their defeat 
 they retreat into authoritative rites and vestments, 
 and disappear from their express world of regenera- 
 tive duty as the privileged *^ mystical body of 
 Christ ; " and a cloud of fancied uniformity shapes 
 itself into a shelter for them at the end of the day. 
 
 The idea of a church militant is abandoned here ; 
 and except in outward action and opposition of my 
 church against thy church, no spiritual warfare is 
 waged. Rome is not militant, but sitting still and 
 holding to her seat, feeding upon converts, and not 
 upon the daily divine bread of regeneration,— gorged 
 with outward things. She eats peers and incomes, 
 and is satisfied. Protestantism is not militant, but 
 cedin^" one province of thought after another to 
 inimical naturalism. The reason is that neither of 
 these old churches has any true doctrines left. For 
 true doctrines are the weapons of all spiritual war ; 
 as in physics they are the tools of all mental com- 
 mand over nature. In each case they are the instru- 
 ments of instruments, and prolong intelligence in 
 unexpected reaches through the frames of their 
 
 THE CHURCH MILITANT IN SCIENCE. 2 13 
 
 respective worlds. Thus, for instance, the true doc- 
 trine of the Lord as an incarnate divine man, the 
 doctrine of the divine humanity, from above meets 
 atheism, and beats it down, and step by step claims 
 the creation and its sciences. So the true doctrine 
 of the Word, that it is the Lord's divine voice, 
 celestial in the supreme heaven, spiritual in the 
 spiritual heaven, and a natural letter on the earth, 
 meets scepticism, and blocks his passage to holy 
 ground. And again, the true doctrine of the spiritual 
 Avorld, that it is the Lord's love and wisdom creative 
 of, and ranging through, planes or universes of repre- 
 sentative and recipient forms; and that in its order 
 there are many mansions, and a characteristic room 
 for every character; and that the death of the 
 mortal body introduces the man or woman thither 
 at once ; this true doctrine meets the sceptic at the 
 grave, and stops his dominion there. Truly atheist, 
 critic, and Sadducee are not abolished, because they 
 are freewills, and their thought flows out of their 
 Avill, but they are fought against, which is what a 
 church has to do, and fought against with statements 
 so organic, so powerful, so experimental, and so long, 
 the immortal loves and lives of the human race 
 standing behind like Teuton women in a second 
 array, and urging on, that the opposing forces are 
 carried away as in a river by divine truths pour- 
 ing through their doctrinal forms. 
 
 Such doctrinal combat was impossible until the 
 illumination of Swedenborg furnished the weapons 
 of war. The upper sphere of all minds was invaded 
 by the lower. Plainly, the sanity of man, and his 
 good conduct, depend upon subordination in himself. 
 He is created in degrees or planes of power and 
 nature. These are to press from above downwards 
 
214 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY, 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY, 
 
 215 
 
 I 
 
 that his order and equilibrium may exist. Take off 
 the real pressure of the upper plane where God 
 abides with man, and the lower degrees are in 
 immediate insurrection. They expand, and to a 
 permitted extent fill the vacant space of faculties. 
 The man explodes. In our time we have seen him 
 explode nationally, from want of the almighty 
 pressure upon his mad free-will. The same thing is 
 visible individually all around us, and is according to 
 the most ordinary laws of statics. Nothing but 
 combat from above, the new heavens bowed down, 
 and coming nearer to the earthly ground, coming 
 nearer in stupendous organic doctrinals, can reduce 
 mankind to order, and restore the lost balance of the 
 states. 
 
 LVI. 
 
 THE ANCIENT CHURCHES ENTER SCIENCE AND COMMAND 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 It is necessary now to give a brief summary of the 
 doctrinal and real informations which proceed thus 
 militant out of the writino^s of Swedenboro-. This 
 has often been done before in a masterly manner by 
 other expositors. It is attempted humbly here with 
 perhaps the new end of showing that the statements 
 of Swedenborg, unlike those of the first Christian 
 churches, meet and front the case of science, feed 
 honest science with true wholesome food, and rebuke 
 wicked sciences with adequate power. Also that 
 those statements are experimental, authoritative by 
 personal claim and self-evidence afterwards, so doc- 
 trinally true that they stoop down from the highest 
 
 heaven of the duties of men and women to the soles 
 of the feet of physics without a tremor in the divine 
 curve ; and so organic that the undoubted reality of 
 nature meets here a loving but greater reality for 
 the man and his soul ; the end being that for religion 
 the life here and the life hereafter are one life, one 
 duty, and one world. 
 
 Three human natures. — And first, why was 
 Swedenborg needed ? There have been several 
 divinely established churches on the eartli ; and 
 each, by its own selfishness, its self-love actuate 
 against the higher love within it, has perverted itself, 
 and come gradually to an end. This is an organic 
 process which we see also in operation now : the 
 Lyellian doctrine helps us here. The first church 
 was called Adam, a celestial church, a church of love 
 and its divine inspiration, a church not of intellect 
 but of the affections and perceptions of love. It 
 knew God and nature as well as a little child knows 
 the father and the home. Its declension is signal- 
 ized in the fall, in Cain, in all the proper names, 
 each definitely significant, from Adam to Noah, 
 when its extinction was typified by the flood, lusts 
 and direful persuasions w^orse than falsities destroyed 
 the first human nature, the first church, Adam. 
 The word orofanic must often be used here, for the 
 end assigned : and the above is an organic statement 
 corresponding to innocence and infancy, and parallel 
 with childhood and its gradual decline before the 
 onward way of the actual and hereditary will. 
 
 The second human nature, quite different from the 
 first, is from Noah to Abraham, the second or spiri- 
 tual church. In this church love audits perceptions 
 as '* very good," did not exist ; they were no longer 
 guides, but had been desperately bad masters over a 
 
2l6 
 
 ANTHROPOLOG K 
 
 ANTHROPOLOG V. 
 
 217 
 
 I] 
 
 fallen race : the lioflit of celestial truth which had 
 once shone from them was extinguished. The first 
 freewill was destroyed, being drowned in its own 
 insanities. The flood typifies its devastation. The 
 Noahtic churches reach from Noah to Abraham. 
 That portion of the Word which treats of the 
 Adamic and Noahtic dispensations is written by 
 correspondences typifying spiritual things, and is not 
 historical. In the Noahtic church a renmant of the 
 first human nature was preserved ; all the clean 
 creatures remaining of it went in pairs into the ark 
 w^th the humanity called Noah ; and the Lord 
 created to man a separate intellect with a faculty 
 of conscience therein, to perceive truths by an intel- 
 lectual way, the affectional way being destroyed, and 
 thus to guide mankind from the side of truth, when 
 the side of good and love could no longer avail. 
 The rainbow set in the clouds, with its prism of 
 distinctions, is the correspondence on high of that 
 guiding and promising intellect. It had to beat 
 down the reign of lusts, which had suffocated the 
 first faculty of perception ; and its promise and 
 covenant was, that man should no longer be drowned 
 in the former evils. This was the spiritual church. 
 The names from Noah to Abraham are its exact 
 nations, peoples, and epochs. It was a divinely 
 organic conscience in the race ; a vast edifice of 
 intellectual light, the stones of which were corre- 
 spondences, whereby all inward things were sym- 
 bolized and arranofed for the hiofhest human uses. 
 Hereby it had power; and as nature now is laid 
 hold of by our science, so nature yielded then to the 
 hand of the revealed science of the early men, the 
 science of correspondences. Truth was induced by 
 representative forms, and ran with its mighty force 
 
 into arts and states and cities. This was accom- 
 plished through the ancient Word, now lost, by 
 which the Lord mediated with his peoples. That 
 Word was written by pure correspondences, the first 
 eleven chapters of Genesis being a part of it. 
 
 In all this, reality and organic verity, the battle 
 of the truths of a conscience spiritually given 
 against evil and its lusts, are paramount ; there is 
 no place for clerical mystery ; but a record of the 
 passage of human nature through a series of strictly 
 organic developments tending and pointing to the 
 present time. As the elder faculties are destroyed, 
 new faculties are created, new forms of intellect, a 
 new conscience, and the restoration and rebuilding 
 of the ruin, man, is accomplished in ways worthy of 
 the Divine reason. It is not a mythological theme, 
 but one of transcendent history in accord with the 
 sore needs of the race. It has left behind it Imo-e 
 spiritual fossils, which are as capable of study since 
 Swedenborg, as the mammoths and mastodons of 
 the geological strata. 
 
 This second, or spiritual, church also perished 
 through a long line of declensions, by violating all 
 the truths it knew, and perverting the real power 
 of all its correspondences : it perished into ecclesias- 
 tical magic, which is the abuse of divine forms and 
 symbols ; and into infernal priesthoods. The in- 
 ward command of the truths of the spiritual con- 
 science through its symbols was no longer recog- 
 nized by mankind ; and the name of God was 
 lost. 
 
 Ethnology has much to gain from a consideration 
 of the writings of Swedenborg. They reveal the 
 strong and the weak points of existing views of the 
 races of mankind. They proclaim by a spiritual 
 
 ^ 
 
2l8 
 
 ANTHROPOLOG K 
 
 experience that the first men created were in a 
 simple and humble state, but with hearts and heart 
 perceptions capable of receiving bj/ regeneration 
 celestial love ; hearts into which heaven then opened 
 down, and which thus conjoined them with heaven. 
 Adam is the most ancient or celestial Church ; the 
 creation of the first chapter of Genesis is the creation 
 of the spiritual man on the way to the celestial ; the 
 creation of the second chapter is of the celestial man 
 himself. '* The celestial man is the seventh day on 
 which the Lord rested " (Swedenborg). The pro- 
 cess involves the Prse-Adamite races, whose condition 
 was seen by Swedenborg in the spiritual world, 
 where all men and women are extant. Of these, 
 those who by their own resistance, were not able to 
 be raised into the state, Adam, are a j)oor and feeble 
 population of aboriginals, who refused to advance. 
 They did not fall, but they would not rise ; and it is 
 an almighty law that God cannot regenerate those 
 who will not be regenerated ; regeneration must be 
 every man's own act and deed, and herein God does 
 it for him ; having so created him that he must do 
 it as of himself, acknowledging afterwards that it is 
 of God. There are then here three different human 
 natures in this most ancient people : those who 
 would not be regenerated, and remained at the 
 bottom of the scale : those who were regenerated, 
 and became Adam, became celestial men and 
 women ; and thirdly, the degenerate descendants of 
 the celestial church, who again fell to the bottom 
 of their nature, and their God-given faculties were 
 there suffocated in their lusts. These positions 
 contain ideas that cannot be neglected by ethno- 
 logical science, and they communicate with physio- 
 logy, and its account of the procession and changes 
 
 ANTHROPOLOG Y, 
 
 219 
 
 of organisms before the foetal man becomes outward 
 or is born. 
 
 Passing to the Noah tic or spiritual church, we 
 have also three human natures included, namely, of 
 those who refused to be regenerated into it ; of 
 those who did attain it ; and of those who fell from 
 it again into atheism and mal-creation, and lost 
 God into gods. These distinctions, though unrecog- 
 nized, are scientifically true in all conditions of man- 
 kind. In the long state called Noahtic by Sweden- 
 borg, the race was brought out of Adam as an 
 embryo remnant out of a dead mother, was saved 
 from suffocation by birth, and was made to breathe 
 the outer air of truth and liberty, which corresponds 
 to the creation of the intellect, and of all motive 
 from without. This is organic, historic human 
 physiology. 
 
 When the first or celestial church perished, 
 founded as it was upon primeval conditions of im- 
 mediate love from God and light from God, it left 
 no remains to attest its peculiar nature ; for it had 
 not written or built, but had lived. On the other 
 hand, the second church, or the church of the 
 primordial correspondential intellect, the church that 
 understood the correspondences in all things which 
 the first church had perceived, left great ruins in 
 many countries. It had been spread over Asia and 
 extended to Egypt, and its mental kingdoms and 
 provinces were wide and distinct. Egypt, Babylon, 
 and Assyria, with their legends, sculptures, temples, 
 and the strange human nature which all these be- 
 token, mark the lapse of this second church throuofh 
 dehnite organic stages, into idolatry, decay, and 
 extinction. The science of correspondences was lost 
 out of the human mind when. this church perished. 
 
22Q 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY, 
 
 ACCORD OF GEOLOGY, 
 
 221 
 
 ' 
 
 The tenure of its mighty endowment sustained 
 momentaneously by the Divine influx, had lain only 
 in the fidelity of its conscience, and when this was 
 voided, the collapse and idolatrous disgrace of its 
 intellect were consummated. 
 
 The third church had a second Word of God con- 
 ferred upon it in the Jewish religion, a Word 
 organically adequate to its peculiar wants. It was 
 a church of natural forms, rites, and ceremonies 
 divinely instituted, the forms corresponding to the 
 order and laws of heaven, by the dwelling within 
 which obediently, Jehovah was present to this out- 
 Avard representative of a church, and in His Word, 
 and in His temple, guided the peculiar people 
 through a natural organic ecclesiasticism. The 
 capacity that forms possess of being inhabited by 
 souls when they are fit to be so inhabited, has been 
 dwelt upon before; it is so little apprehended by 
 naturalists now, that they must open a new mind in 
 themselves in order to understand it ; but it lies at 
 the basis of the comprehension of the Jewish dis- 
 pensation ; as also it lies at the basis of all nature, 
 and of all physiology. Suffice it to say, that when 
 a divine organism of forms is once instituted, in 
 worship, in rite and ceremonial, and in the Word, 
 the Divinity is present in that form as a soul in its 
 body. The Jews, among whom that form now was, 
 spoke with God through its faces, and God was 
 naturally with them. They understood nothing of 
 the lost science of correspondences, but they lived in 
 and under the divine natural power of the cor- 
 respondences themselves. They inhabited and re- 
 spired external nature, and were limited by it, and 
 obedience then was the whole duty of this third 
 manner of man. 
 
 . The beginning of this representation of a church 
 was in the revelation of Jehovah to Abraham, as the 
 one I AM ; the end of it was in the incarnation of 
 Jehovah in Jesus Christ. From the first it swerved 
 from obedience into stiffheckedness ; patriarchs and 
 judges, priests and kings, prosperity and punish- 
 ment, the voices of prophets, did not hold it up ; and 
 it was desecrated and devastated from head to foot 
 by a third aggression of self love, as the two former 
 churches liad been by a first and a second. It came 
 to its end. 
 
 We seem thus to be reading a human accord of 
 the epochs of the history of the planet. All is 
 organic here. Palaeology has food for new informa- 
 tions ; and geology in its record runs towards mea- 
 suring its pregnant discoveries w^ith the several 
 organic spiritual constitutions which one after the 
 other, in linked succession, have appeared in man- 
 kind, and disappeared. In each separate case, three 
 different human natures are involved. It may 
 be that the New Church will discover corre- 
 spondentially, that the physical history of our 
 planet with its periods, writes out also the tablets 
 and frescoes of the wars of Jehovah with mankind, 
 and characterizes their several exact rejections of the 
 organic love and light with which he has endowed 
 those great faculties here called churches in their 
 order. 
 
 LVII. 
 
 ACCORD OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 The naturalist may put in a plea that these 
 events have been transacted in late geological 
 
222 
 
 ACCORD OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 -^1 
 
 III 
 
 >ii 
 
 epochs, and comprise but a small space of time. 
 This may, or may not, be true, and is not im- 
 portant yet to determine. For inasmuch as man is 
 the natural end or final cause of creation, and salva- 
 tion or mans angelhood the end of man, all the 
 fluxion of form and substance and event from the 
 be^nnning is organically poured from one of these 
 ends to the other, and the character of the function 
 is written out upon each nature as it passes ; the 
 world being prepared from the first for perpetual 
 conservation of its own ends, and for perpetual war 
 with destruction from inevitable freewills and their 
 spiritual allies and empires. Therefore the length of 
 time, the duration of periods, and the mistiness of 
 epochs, is a small matter when the almighty end is 
 seen : geological time with whatever millions of 
 years is in the close grasp of theological time, 
 however long this planet can be reckoned back on 
 the clocks of older planets, all time has but existed 
 from the Lord Jehovah to the Lord Christ, and now 
 to His second coming, as the One Lord of all. His 
 love, through heaven first, and then witli humanity 
 in His mercy's arms back to heaven, is the Creation 
 as well as the Creator and Eedeemer. In organic 
 fact, He is all in all. 
 
 In hi«*h illustration of this subject, we cite a 
 passage on the ends of creation from The Divine 
 Providence of Swedenborg. ''Heaven is divided 
 into as many societies as there are organs, viscera, 
 and members in a man ; and in these no one part 
 can have any other place than its own. Since 
 therefore angels are such parts in the divine celestial 
 man, and none are made angels but such as have 
 been men in the world, it follows, that the man who 
 suffers himself to be led to heaven is continually 
 
 ACCORD OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 223 
 
 prepared by tlie Lord for his particular place, which 
 is done by such an aflfection of goodness and truth 
 as corresponds to it : and into this his proper vplace 
 every man is enrolled after his departure out of the 
 world. Tliis is the inmost purpose of the Divine 
 Providence concerning heaven. 
 
 ''But the man who does not suflfer himself to be 
 led to and enrolled in heaven, is prepared for his 
 place in hell ; for a man from himself continually 
 tends to the lowest hell, but is continually withheld 
 by the Lord; and he who cannot be withheld is 
 prepared for a certain place there, in which he is 
 also enrolled immediately after his departure out of 
 the world. This place is opposite to a certain place 
 in heaven, for hell is in opposition to heaven. 
 Therefore as a man angel, according to the aflfection 
 of good and truth, has his place assigned him in 
 heaven, so a man devil, according to the affection of 
 evil and falsity, has his place assigned him in hell ; 
 for two opposites disposed in a similar situation 
 against each other, are held in connexion. This is 
 the inmost purpose of the Divine Providence con- 
 cerninof hell." 
 
 Now in view of these two designs, which must 
 as fairly be taken for granted as that there is a 
 supreme Lord, and that good is good to Him, and 
 evil is evil, it is obvious that His creation in all its 
 stages since the beginning is with express reference 
 to man ; and that if millions of ages existed before 
 man appeared, the purpose that ran through them is 
 only the more persistent for its length of way. If 
 heaven, or hell, are prepared for every man, they 
 exist as divine foundations to receive him. Thus 
 Swedenborg says that it has been given him to per- 
 ceive that heaven is so immense that it cannot be 
 
?24 
 
 ACCORD OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 % 
 
 ^1 
 
 filled to eternity. It stands ready in anticipation of 
 continual inmates. And ^'in my Father's house," 
 says the Lord, "are many mansions." Applying 
 this to nature, it also has stood ready from the be- 
 ginning. In its events and forms, it represents 
 both heaven and hell, and corresponds generally to 
 the inhabitants who journey across it voluntarily to 
 one or the other. It corresponds thus from its first 
 inception. And therefore in tracing the successive 
 epochs, and floras and faunas of the planet, human 
 correspondence permeates them just as if man were 
 present, which he is indeed in the creative potency. 
 Evil forms are created as the indications, and 
 reactions, and prisons of evil. It is inevitable from 
 the freewill of man, and they are ready for it. 
 Were there no design, but weltering of protoplasm 
 to hysteroplasm, to and fro, this would be absurd ; 
 but where there is divine design, it is irrefutable. 
 It is but the preparation of the earth for man. 
 Every government that founds a colony, and a 
 planet is a colony, works on the same lines of fore- 
 thought. Its possession of the land where the 
 future colony is to be, is first a possession by its 
 own laws, and its penal laws are among them. And 
 it does not wait for successive criminals and build a 
 jail after they are convicted, but a jail of prudent 
 dimensions is provided beforehand. The proe- 
 civic country is full of rights and privileges and 
 difficulties before a man steps upon it, or there would 
 be no order when he arrives. Bare annexation 
 takes out laws and statutes as it were preliminary 
 creations. And so nature under the government of 
 God is prepared in her first forms for all the con- 
 tino^encies of mankind. 
 
 SOCIAL DECLENSION IN BOTH WORLDS, 225 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 SOCIAL DECLENSION COINCIDENT IN THIS WORLD 
 
 AND THE OTHER. 
 
 Before speaking of the fourth human nature, the 
 Divine Humanity, it is necessary to say something 
 of the organic psychological effect of the decline and 
 decay of these great churches and societies upon 
 the earth. This effect follows laws as exact and 
 inevitable as the ascertained laws of matter; nay, 
 more inevitable, because the laws or habits of matter 
 can clearly be suspended or lifted up when a greater 
 than matter is here, which is not often the case yet ; 
 whereas these spiritual laws depend upon the 
 inalienable right of freewill to do w^rong, which 
 God Himself never takes away. He is greater than 
 any freewill, but freewill is man, and God does not 
 infringe him. Now whenever a church, or a divine 
 dispensation in our race, is declining, the declension 
 takes place in two ways which always coincide. 
 The race becomes more abandoned and wicked here 
 on earth. The race becomes also more vile in the 
 spiritual world. How? Simply by the race on 
 earth dying, and being taken into the spiritual 
 world, and colonizing it. Death alters nothing 
 organically, but adds the scope and practice of a 
 higher world of powers for good and evil. So it is 
 that the millions who die in ages when the race is 
 declining from good towards evil are continually 
 poured into the spiritual world. Every deathbed is 
 a bhthbed there. 
 
 .'•'I 
 
226 INDIVIDUAL AND GENERAL JUDGMENT 
 
 LIX. 
 
 INDIVIDUAL AND GENERAL JUDGMENT TAKES PLACE 
 IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 
 
 The natural world peoples the spiritual, — Further- 
 more, by organic fact, spiritual similars are together 
 as soul and body are together. For instance, this 
 London which sends its millions up there from 
 generation to generation, necessarily and organically 
 has above it a spiritual London continually re- 
 plenished with its departed inhabitants, abiding 
 there for a longer or shorter period of our time, of 
 their states, until their onward march is decreed by 
 the all-disposer. For comparatively few can undergo 
 at once the vast change from earth to heaven, or 
 from earth to hell. Thus the spiritual world is in 
 organic communication with the natural world, and 
 lies above it as a plane of divine influx. In all the 
 three cases adduced above, of the Adamic, Noahtic, 
 and Israelitish Churches severally, the spiritual 
 world above each, had been filling almost from the 
 commencement with evil men and women dying 
 hence; it was a vast union of infernal empires 
 obstructing the divine light and heat, and pressing 
 down the earth into helpless subjection to its power; 
 reproducing in what the Scripture calls the heavens, 
 the Babylons and Assyrias and Egypts of the 
 lower sphere. The first pressure is always against 
 freewill, the person in the man. Under that pres- 
 sure, mankind could no longer think and act freely, 
 but were coerced by organic relationship of power, 
 by breach of their frontiers, by possession and obses- 
 
 TAKES PLACE IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD, 227 
 
 sion, to think and act from hell. Whenever free- 
 will begins to waver so, man is at stake, and God is 
 at hand. Dignus vindice nodus. He bows the 
 heavens, and comes closer with insupportable influx. 
 The poor obscure simple good are refilled with life. 
 A divine judgment takes place. The good are 
 formed into fresh nations and peoples, into great 
 accordant societies, and brought heavenwards. The 
 evil are also organized, and conveyed to organic hells 
 which correspond to them. Each judgment, of 
 which one exists at the end of every church, is thus 
 a reorganization of the spiritual world ; and a forma- 
 tion of new^ heavens above man, and of new hells 
 beneath man ; and after each judgment a new organic 
 freewill is imparted to the men and women of the 
 now succeedinof church. 
 
 When the Lord was born upon earth, the state of 
 things mentioned above, had arisen, and mankind 
 was no longer free, was no longer at its own disposal. 
 To use an expressive American phrase, human nature 
 was ^'played out." The primordial aflFections of man, 
 the true protomorph, the celestial church, had 
 perished from the earth into lusts, and the divine 
 love was no longer received directly. The first con- 
 science, the rainbow of heaven, the human organ of 
 the divine wisdom, the spiritual church, had perished 
 into monstrous creeds, priesthoods and mythologies; 
 its correspondences were perverted into magic; and 
 Asia, Egypt, and Greece were strewed with their 
 remains, with lifeless creeds instead of spiritual lives 
 of men. The third church, the theocracy of forms, 
 the representative of a true church, not the reality, 
 in which formal obedience was the divine demand, 
 had also perished by perpetual violations; reward 
 and punishment from above no longer kept it ; and 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 «• 
 
228 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH. 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH 
 
 229 
 
 
 the Israelitish race, as a centre, was moved from its 
 place. The natural man, as previously the spiritual 
 man and the celestial man, was in full decay. Now 
 the earth subsists because tliere is orderly communi- 
 cation witli the Lord somewhere upon it ; in other 
 words, because there is a true church somewhere. 
 And the heavens in the spiritual world subsist 
 organically on that church as a basis, and by it are 
 fed with continual individuals. And therefore, if the 
 human race is dying out, the divine end is perishing. 
 This was threatened at the end of every dispensa- 
 tion, and w^as averted by the Lord by a new creation 
 of man in man; by a New Church. 
 
 LX. 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESIT. 
 
 The end now, Swedenborg tells us, was foreseen 
 by the ancient men from the beginning, that when 
 human nature was in plenary corruption and decay, 
 and in the true sense there was ''no man" left, the 
 Lord, the divine man above the heavens, in whose 
 human imaore and likeness man was made, would 
 become a divine man upon the earth also by taking 
 upon Himself our human nature. This He did 
 divinely and organically through the Virgin Mary, 
 by the gate of birth. There was no other way by 
 which the Divine Natural could be assumed; no 
 apparitional God or man could do it ; nothing but 
 incarnation. There was no other God to assume it 
 but the one personal Jehovah. There was no 
 mythological Trinity, but the I am of eternity. It 
 has already been stated in these pages that the Lord 
 
 thus took upon Himself a corrupt human nature — 
 there was none incorrupt — and in it, by successively 
 passing from childhood to full manhood, and travers- 
 ing every faculty of man. He was exposed by 
 victory after victory to fresh assaults of hell, until in 
 His humanity He reigned over the entire dominion of 
 evil, and personally and alone trod the winepress, 
 and effected a divine judgment, and imposed a 
 divine order upon all His enemies. When this is 
 rightly seen the Gospels attest it; it is the proof of 
 the Gospels, and they are its counterproofs, and a 
 redeemed humanity is its issue. 
 
 As we are bound to bear each other's burdens, so 
 are we bound to deal humbly with those who deny 
 these things. Many deny the possibility of them. 
 There is however nothing that would conclude 
 against the incarnation, and the Divine humanity, 
 unless it can be established that atheism is true, and 
 also good and useful; for if Jehovah loved His 
 children. He would, as has been shown successively, 
 follow them up to save them from that only hell- 
 fire which is made of evil lusts. If they fell out of 
 love, out of the celestial degree. He would go after 
 them in mercy, and show them wisdom and intelli- 
 gence, and teach them to curb lust by the light of 
 conscience which is wisdom. If they fell out of 
 conscience. He would again in mercy follow, and 
 give them external motives, rules and forms of 
 divine significance, and ask only outward obedience 
 where the internal man was destroyed. And when 
 this also failed. He would come Himself upon the 
 scene; He would become the combatant for man, 
 by being born; His soul, the Lord Jehovah, 
 His body, virtually and representatively, sinful 
 humanity. 
 
230 
 
 THE WOltD MADE FLESH, 
 
 Another impossibility may perhaps occur to some 
 physiological minds, that the Lord the Creator 
 could not thus come into human nature; that the 
 conditions of birth were not present. Jehovah is 
 however the All Father; and a divine father is 
 infinitely potent compared to a human father. As 
 the Creator of all organization, of all forms of being, 
 merciful fatherhood is His essential prerogative : 
 fatherhood for purposes throughout; which no 
 mortal man is. The Father then is present, the 
 purpose is divinely adequate, the human nature 
 unresisting, the conception sure. As Creator, He 
 has always been in divine nexus with all His 
 creatures; He has opened substantially into every 
 life from the beginning, and momentaneously sus- 
 tained it; His divine, celestial, and spiritual influx 
 has been more real than our faculties formed from 
 sense can conceive ; all for ends, final causes : nothing 
 then can prevent the downward prolongation of the 
 same divine truth, the same divine power, first to 
 the Virgin, then to the Holy Thing which was born 
 of her, and of whose first humanity she was the 
 mother. It is a divine addition to conception, 
 because a new purpose which thus only could be 
 fulfilled, demanded its accomplishment. 
 
 There are those who think that if ordinary pre- 
 cedents of birth be the rule, an exceptional precedent 
 must be disallowed; as though the common and the 
 exceptional would cancel each other were both 
 admitted. No fear can be less grounded. The 
 latter substantiates the former both in reason and in 
 fact. The very reason of it was that the human 
 race was so perishing, that natural birth, through the 
 vices of parents, the accumulated decay of genera- 
 tions, and the downward pressure of the anarchies 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH 
 
 231 
 
 extant in the spiritual world, would have surceased, 
 unless a divine child, who by successive outbirths 
 of His own virtue grew up to man, and commanded 
 the whole situation of both worlds, had come upon 
 the scene; had, in other words, been born. The 
 fact has followed : human generation and genera- 
 tions have been perpetuated by the advent of the 
 Redeemer. Since, and under. Him, orderly love has 
 been re-born. He has illustrated the ends of the 
 first creation by accomplisliing them in His person 
 in a second creation. Birth by natural parentage 
 when a natural man is to be born ; birth by divine 
 parentage when the divine natural man is to be 
 born. The cases are different because the issue is 
 different; but both are under one law, of salvation, 
 and they complete each other. 
 
 The truth is we think darkly, because sensually. 
 We regard this world as substance; the spiritual 
 world as hypothesis; and God as a theory. The 
 harder and more unyielding anything is, the more 
 like stone or metal or matter, the more real and 
 lasting the mind just above the senses supposes it 
 to be. The reverse is true : matter is less real than 
 force; force than will; the mind than the spirit; 
 and spirit with its world, and all below it, is but 
 the Word of the true substance, that is to say of 
 God. Moreover, as reality ascends, so also does 
 organization. The higher planes, the mental, the 
 spiritual, are transcendently more organic and expres- 
 sive than the physical and material. And so when 
 it is said by Swedenborg that the Lord Jehovah 
 descended for incarnation as the divine truth, be it 
 on true principles admitted by the open mind, 
 though it cannot be realized, that that divine truth, 
 that imparted seed, is more in substance, form, love, 
 
232 
 
 THE WORD MADE FLESH, 
 
 than worlds can portray; an infinite manhood, whose 
 voice, the Word, creates worlds. Space and size are 
 not His measures, but love. Carry this to the con- 
 ception of the Lord, and let the stream of living 
 substance descend from no narrower thouofht. All 
 science attests these positions when received by the 
 mind; they meet science, and outwardly regarded 
 can be science ; except that they are also more, 
 being divine truth full of the work of divine love. 
 
 By very creation, we are kept in ignorance of our 
 own next ororanic stao^e, and think of it as nothinof. 
 The little children of this world walk about amonor 
 the men and women quite ignorant of their loves, of 
 their motives and thoughts, and in fact almost of 
 their lives. They only know them as fathers and 
 mothers in the light of food, and love, and care; by 
 no means as begetting substances. If they reason 
 as to where they came from, they think they are 
 found somewhere; never that they grow organically 
 from substantial seed. Substance and its questions 
 never occur with regard to any plane above you 
 which your affections do not care for. This runs 
 upwards into spiritual things, and is the measure of 
 the quantity of materialism. It is not however 
 blameless in men and women as it is in children; 
 the latter, for good reasons, are precluded from 
 adult knowledge; and the limit is their nursery; 
 the men and women have their higher mind and 
 future state revealed to them if they will accept it ; 
 revealed because their natural minds cannot find it 
 out of themselves; and if they deny it they are 
 wicked children who stunt and twist their spiritual 
 lives and forms; as it were, voluntary embryons 
 racking the dark womb of matter. Their own 
 science ought to teach them that this fact of non- 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ULTIMA TES. 
 
 233 
 
 knowledge of what is next above them is a part of 
 nature; which they have to compensate by a watch- 
 ful opening of the mind to every direction from 
 which information from above may come. In fine, 
 the indispensable prerequisite of all science other 
 than aggressive materialism is to become as a little 
 child, praying, waiting and working for the help of 
 the Good Father. Vice versa, the one condition of 
 materialism is intelligentia ex se, to know the limits 
 of all things from self; and where facts from above 
 are obstinate, to make the will of the man by syste- 
 matic denials the measure of the planes of creation. 
 By this means, urgently pursued, the lowest stratum 
 of things becomes the mind's abiding place; and the 
 world is exactly of the size and hardness of the self- 
 hood. 
 
 LXI. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ULTIMATES. 
 
 A few words here may be said conveniently on 
 another organic subject, namely, Swedenborg's doc- 
 trine of Ultimates. His terms are few, and easily 
 mastered by the careful reader, but they require 
 strict attention. Now all completed creations proceed 
 from their first principles or protomorphs in char- 
 acteristic organic order to their full development, 
 which in the language of Swedenborg is their ulti- 
 mate. In this way the human body in this world is 
 the ultimate of the man who dwells within it. 
 Therein he comes into his last realization. So body 
 is always the ultimate of spirit. The whole natural 
 world is the ultimate of the spiritual world. The 
 
234 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ULTIMATES, 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF ULTIMATES. 
 
 235 
 
 letter of the Word is the ultimate of the spiritual 
 sense which is the Word in heaven. Jesus Christ, 
 become by His own victories the Lord, is the 
 ultimate of Jehovah. Further, the ultimate 
 degree, the thing in act and in fact, is in all 
 its power; or ''all power exists in ultimates." 
 Take the body away, and the man has no longer 
 power of pressure in the natural world; he can 
 only have it then in the spiritual world, in which 
 again he is embodied and ultimated. Take the 
 natural world away, and the spiritual world would 
 have no power, because no basis; and its everlast- 
 ing end, of replenishment by fresh men and women 
 for ever, would also perish. Take the letter of 
 Scripture away, and the spiritual sense would have 
 no basis or resting place in human minds, and the 
 divine purpose of the Word would perish. For 
 " the ultimate degree is the complex, continent, and 
 basis of all that precedes it." It is the complex, 
 because it involves all in a common realization. It 
 is the continent, because it contains all and holds it 
 too-ether. It is the basis, because it founds and 
 establishes the end, and fixes reality. The earth is 
 such an ultimate or basis, intended by the Lord to 
 support the kingdoms of nature. The whole crea- 
 tion is represented in it; and it blossoms and lives 
 upwards again because of its complex substance 
 and effort of ends. It is the containing mother 
 of the creatures. 
 
 When Jehovah could no longer address Himself 
 to an ultimate church upon the earth, the Divine 
 Government in men had no foundation, and the 
 Divine Word no response ; and but for the incarna- 
 tion, the world, being useless, would have perished. 
 In the incarnation, Jehovah put on the ultimate 
 deo'ree; and thus gradually assumed all power in 
 
 heaven and on earth. Conquering the human sensual. 
 He put on the divine sensual; he can now be seen; 
 He is the Lord of the senses. In conquering the 
 human rational. He clothed Himself with the 
 divine rational; He is the king of reason: come 
 let us reason together saith the Lord. He triumphed 
 over the carnal by excarnation: by a true transubstan- 
 tiation into divine flesh, which is the infinite love of 
 good: therein He rose from the grave. This process 
 of incarnation and victorious excarnation was effected 
 in order that He might be the Lord in ultimates, 
 as He had been from the berinninof Jehovah or Lord 
 in first principles. And being Lord in ultimates, 
 He has taken to Himself all power here, and is the 
 Divine complex, continent and basis of the natural 
 worlds. Freewill no longer outlies Him, but still 
 subsisting intact in consequence of His redemption, 
 is strictly individual, but subject in its universal 
 issues to the mastery of His kingdom. Since He 
 assumed the divine natural. He is on earth, as in 
 His divine spiritual and celestial ultimations He is 
 in heaven; and all that is good and wise in man- 
 kind can see Him when the eyes are right. Wo 
 cannot indeed see Him any longer in His infirm 
 humanity as Jesus of Nazareth, because He is no 
 longer a singly placed natural man, but a divine 
 natural man presentable all over the planet at all 
 times to all men; the visible object of prayer; 
 the opener of heavenly joys in mortal hearts when 
 they shun infernal pleasures ; the speaking Lord 
 in conscience ; He knocks at the door of all 
 wills, and beseeches to be let into their primest 
 motives ; in short. He is omnipresent ; and the 
 only limit of His power is of His ordaining ; it is 
 His divine respect of freedom which is mankind. 
 
I 
 
 f I 
 
 t 
 
 236 SWEDENBORG A RATIONAL TEACHER 
 
 This power of the Lord in ultimates is an organic, 
 and to come lower down for a present purpose, a 
 scientific necessity of the case. When a great man 
 comes upon the scene, a great statesman or an 
 imperial mind, he has a certain power in ultimates 
 so long as he is alive ; and if he is a great lover, or 
 a great founder, he leaves an allegiance, or an edifice, 
 behind him, in which he still rules providentially, 
 thouirh when he dies, no lono^er with an ultimate 
 rule. His heavenly mission is quite different from 
 his earthly one; and thither, to heaven, all his 
 person has gone, and he knows no more of earthly 
 things. The Divine man founded His own regime. 
 But when He died on the cross. He rose again to the 
 disciples in the natural world. And now, to His 
 disciples. His continued personality is extant in their 
 natural world. The pressure of His omnipresent 
 empire on every faculty is extant. He is here, and 
 exactly as omnipotent as mankind will allow Him to 
 be. He can be omnipotent, because He has been 
 incarnate, and is now God in ultimates. Any indi- 
 vidual may exclude and ignore Him from the will 
 and the mind : nations and continents may do the 
 same; but in His divine natural power He reserves 
 judgments; and these become swifter and swifter as 
 His teeming years run on. 
 
 FROM THE WORD, 
 
 237 
 
 LXII. 
 
 SWEDENBORG A RATIONAL TEACHER FROM THE WORD. 
 
 He sent Swedenborg to teach mankind out of the 
 bosom of the Word these and many other things. 
 He sent him to teach the truth pertaining to Him- 
 
 self, and to the celestial, spiritual, and natural uni- 
 verses. But until Swedenborg was given, the human 
 reason had no relation to these stupendous subjects. 
 Christian theology, like astronomy once, was mytho- 
 logical and imaginary: it was for the most part 
 beyond the intellectual mind, and its vacancies were 
 supplied by the arbitrary votes of declining churches. 
 As in the days before Copernicus the starry heavens 
 outlaid the knowledge that could become science, so, 
 before Swedenborg, the divine truth of the incarna- 
 tion of Jehovah, the one God, in Christ, did not enter 
 the domain, or the possibilities, of intelligence. But 
 thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls to-day are 
 a new soul in our souls to-morrow; when the Lord 
 the Revealer pleases. Indeed, as before hinted, 
 there is nothing new in these successive entries of 
 subjects into sense, knowledge, science, intelligence, 
 wisdom, and love. The process is one phase of the 
 history of the human race. Two necessities stand 
 over it. One, that mankind shall diligently care for 
 the thing or the realm to be investigated, and be 
 willing to put aside the preconceptions and conceits 
 that have held the knowing faculty in their pro- 
 visional bondage previously. Next, that the Lord's 
 time shall have come for opening the matter. That 
 time has now come for the divine organic truths of 
 the incarnation to become actual knowledges to men 
 and women; and if knowledges, sciences; and if 
 sciences, truths; and if truths, guides and leaders of 
 life, or means to good. The subject has become 
 rational and super-rational; a creator and redeemer 
 of reasons. It fills love, it regenerates intellect; and 
 its firm tread is heard as it marches upon science, to 
 create the scientific faculty which is to apprehend it. 
 Swedenborg is the spiritual Copernicus who, coming 
 
238 SWEDENBORG A RATIONAL TEACHER 
 
 upon the cycles and epicycles of old theology, has 
 shown the unity and centrality of the incarnate 
 Lord; the simple divinity of the process by which 
 He came to us ; the perfect analogy of His life as 
 aofainst evil with our lives as ao^ainst evil : in other 
 %vords, of His glorification with our regeneration : 
 thus of the solar majesty of His working righteous- 
 ness with our well-doing: and also the correla- 
 tion of all forces that are good and true, whether 
 physical or mental or spiritual, with His Love and 
 His wisdom. Swedenborg is also the spiritual 
 Newton, to whom it has been given to expound the 
 true constitution of the spiritual world, and to show 
 that attraction, which spiritually is love, reigns there 
 also, and that men cohere into societies, and separate 
 into extenses, and revolve round their own central 
 objects of life, according to what they love, and tend 
 to, and feel delight in pursuing. So that heaven 
 and hell are constituted as it were by its mighty law, 
 and clothed upon with corresponding many mansions 
 all built out in order from the one correlator, the 
 Lord. He dwells in the spiritual sun, whose planes 
 or planets are the celestial, spiritual, and natural 
 lieavens. Those who hate and deny Him in heart 
 and life, by His mercy have their abode in corre- 
 sponding hells, where the sun of self is thick dark- 
 ness and darkness that give infernal light. 
 
 These positions are like nature, excepting only that 
 they are above nature. They cohere with the pro- 
 cedure of the natural world. They suggest a pur- 
 pose and a soul to the forms of nature. They 
 carry space and time higher to where they become 
 subordinates, and flexible as mind. You can will 
 and think them into being, and they are. They 
 carry up the kingdoms of nature, and subordinating 
 
 FROM THE WORD. 
 
 239 
 
 them also, they receive souls, and good and evil 
 name them for qualities, as Adam, the most ancient 
 church, named the beasts and birds. Especially do 
 they carry up human history and the mind of man. 
 For in the inner deeps of all of us there is a great 
 wave of self-evident truths ever coming on, and to 
 those who will listen to its silent roaring, the now 
 revealed truths of the Lord, the Word and the 
 spiritual world, are attested by special voices from 
 that sea, which, arising at once from within and 
 from without, seem so true, that they are none other 
 than the structure of the mind itself, perceivinp- its 
 own-created harmonies. Hence it is that the in- 
 structed consciousness of man can perceive that 
 Swedenborg s revelations are indeed its own conse- 
 quences, its own necessities, its own desires, and 
 whether it be good or evil, its own delights; in one 
 word, its own abiding and spiritual world. As for 
 human history, Swedenborg, from the Lord, not ex'se, 
 is the historian of the spiritual world, and his accounts 
 cohere with the records of our race upon the earth; 
 they cohere physiologically, socially, metaphysically, 
 according to all needful principles of law and public 
 order and morals, according to all governments, poli- 
 tical and ecclesiastical, according to all priceless 
 value of liberty, with the principles which make, or 
 which mar, the world. But in his writings these 
 domains are the subjects of divine justice and mercy, 
 and the concurrent philosophy of his history is the 
 exact action and pressure of the Lord's name, of His 
 qualities, upon events. Therefore the human history, 
 which looked at from without is chaotic, for the most 
 part the crime sheet of mankind, revealed and illu- 
 minated from within, is organic; it is the history 
 of the Divine Man, the Divine Statesman, dealing 
 
240 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 since the beginning with His kingdom of heaven and 
 with His empire universally. This has been illus- 
 trated before in these pages in the record of the 
 churches. 
 
 LXIIL 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 All exact knowledge coheres with other know- 
 ledc>'e. Incoherence demonstrates that the equation 
 is wrongly stated in some of its terms on one side or 
 the other. For instance, the position that the sun 
 revolves round the earth coheres with nothing but 
 the fallacious sight: there is not a single analogue 
 of the truth of the case in the normal universe. The 
 Selfhood, making all things unimportant in com- 
 parison to itself, is its only similar. It flouts all 
 true ideas of relative importance. It is against all 
 preponderance, and all government. It is the fly 
 on the wheel causing the progress of the car. ^ It 
 falsifies the sun and the stars and the firmament into 
 smallness in order that they may exist in its conceit. 
 But the true order of the solar system once gained, 
 its theory presently becomes equated with all nature; 
 an apple falling to the ground may suggest the cords 
 that spread the tent of creation; the cohesion of 
 every stone on the ground is a carrying-out of the 
 same view; chemical affinity is nothing but the 
 flowering of the doctrine into mineral marriages 
 innumerable; the rotundity of the earth; the safe 
 pressure of antipodes towards antipodes; are part 
 and parcel of one large truth vibrating through as 
 many harmonies as there are diverse things. Now 
 it is impossible that the true theology, the true 
 
 CORRELA TIONS OF THE OLOGY. 241 
 
 natural religion, of which the Word made flesh, the 
 incarnation, is the crown, should not, being divine 
 truth, assert itself in theory in every one of the 
 subordinate sciences; that it should not with a 
 divine hand modify them all, and make them plastic 
 to its purposes; that it should not correct their 
 fallacies, and rebuke their fantasies, falsities and 
 superstitions, just as the modern astronomy with 
 the sun for its centre has destroyed the Ptolemaic 
 astronomy, and corrects with just thought the eyes 
 of all the world that think they really see the sun 
 go round the earth. 
 
 Herein, through correspondences, we discern the 
 existence and function of great and new touchstones 
 of truth. The two worlds, of nature and spirit, being 
 inevitably correlated, whatever views are isolated 
 from the correlation are not truths pertaining to 
 things. For example, the leading dogmas of the 
 first Christian church have no correspondence with 
 knowledge, or organic faculty: they equate with 
 nothing in the Lord s creation. Tlie three persons 
 in the Godhead are perturbation to the unity of 
 nature. Science must either be arrayed against this, 
 or pass it by with careful neglect. It is mystical, 
 not rational; and the mind requires an artificial 
 organism in it created by itself to receive it into rest. 
 The descent of the second person into incarnation to 
 save the humaa race from the vengeance of the first 
 by a death on the cross, satisfying justice vicariously, 
 is like nothing in human justice, stands alone in the 
 faculties of mankind, is attested by nothing but the 
 votes of churches, is no hypothesis, still less theory 
 of the letter of Scripture, and it is impossible to show 
 how any but a vicious redemption could be wrought 
 by it. As for any attestation from the history of 
 
 Q 
 
242 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY, 
 
 our race, such substitutions of the innocent for the 
 guilty, give the guilty immunity and make them 
 worse ; and the tribunals which allow the fact 
 are accursed. If the good redeem the rest of man- 
 kind, it is by reigning over them, and teaching tliem 
 subordination and then self-help, not by paying their 
 debts. It is superfluous to say that there is nothing 
 in created nature that does not pass by the atonement 
 without being able to say one word to it. Here 
 then is a second mystery out of all correspondence 
 with known thinofs, human and divine. So also the 
 faculty of apprehending these dogmas, compulsory 
 faith shaped by authority, is a false faculty which 
 can lay hold of nothing else. It cannot eat one 
 crumb of the bread of knowledge. A single natural 
 truth placed in it would explode it; for reason would 
 begin to be evolved, questioning would ensue, and 
 the very purpose of the faculty, to receive blindly on 
 trust and the information of second parties, would 
 be vacated. The reason is obvious: it is not a 
 created faculty, like the reason, the will, the affec- 
 tions, or the senses ; but an artificial morbid state, 
 representing the decay of the perceptions and 
 charities of churches since the beginning. It com- 
 poses men by voting that they see when they 
 see not, and hear when they hear not. But it 
 is alien to all the manly and virtuous operations of 
 the mind. Nature worked by such a faculty would 
 speedily fly away in phantasms. Imagine any 
 science with a pontiff in the middle of it, and com- 
 pulsory faith working it through decrees. Imagine 
 the universal modern Galileo worked by the Pope. 
 All facts would be gone in a moment; all knowledge 
 recanted; all degradation of experiment achieved; 
 and natural blindness with instruction to use the 
 
 CORRELA TIONS OF THEOLOG K 243 
 
 fancy be recognized as novum organum. Faith in 
 mysteries, therefore, corresponds to nothing, and has 
 no countercheck, and no world. 
 
 The weight of the faith also corresponds to 
 nothing divine. It is alleged that the man who im- 
 plicitly believes these mystical dogmas is saved by 
 his faith without the works of the law. In a wicked 
 world it is to a great extent impossible to do right, 
 to carry religion right down, and by it regenerate 
 all life; and therefore faith in Christ's work is 
 vicarious for human virtue, and faith alone saves. 
 Here again there is no correlation, no cor- 
 respondence with anything human, natural, or 
 divine. It is an attempt to escape out of the 
 window into the sky, when gravitation presses, and 
 the earth is the only footing. In human work, 
 ceasing to do evil, and learning to do well, are 
 the modes of true life, and apply througliout. Faith 
 in something else than this ceasing and this learn- 
 ing is irrelevant. There is no conscience in it ; or 
 only a compulsory conscience proceeding from the 
 same authority as the faith. There is no nature in 
 it; for all her processes are downright careful 
 exact work carrying principles and ends, and faith- 
 ful to performance as their reason of being. There 
 IS nothing divine in it unless you first create your 
 divinity, and then put this into his exactions. It is 
 against all the Lord's doing ; for His whole life was 
 a battle of deeds, and He became divine justice 
 and judgment, not by alone believing on the 
 Father, Jehovah, but by practically, through re- 
 sistance to evil after evil, and falsity after falsity, 
 and temptation on temptation, conquering earth, 
 hell, and heaven, and reducing them to divine order. 
 One thing more is not in it, hope for mankind. It 
 
244 
 
 CORRELA TIONS OF THE OLOGY. 
 
 is the very despair of that regeneration of the present 
 world which the Divine Truth descended to effect in 
 the Lord ; and a test of this is that our clergy who 
 believe most in justification by faith alone are of 
 all men the greatest despairers for the earth. The 
 atheists and materialists believe more in some kind 
 of natural regeneration, and so far in a mirage of 
 the New Jerusalem, than do the ecclesiastics of the 
 first Christian churches. 
 
 The hopes of the future life are as baseless as is 
 the faith of despair for this life which inspires them. 
 What cannot save in the world cannot save in the 
 heavens. For example, the blind faith that im- 
 perfect men and women from the world by laying 
 hold of Christ can in dying be at once translated 
 into " glory," corresponds to nothing wise or good ; 
 and common sense rejects it. Such a change in 
 faculties would violate and destroy all faculty, and 
 personal identity, including freedom, would melt 
 away on the instant. There is no process in it, as 
 there is in everything divine ; consequently, no 
 truth, or reference of the past to the present and 
 the future. It correlates with juggling, not with 
 salvation. In the spiritual world, men are led on by 
 stages, swift, or slow, according to their states, 
 towards final conditions of good, or evil ; they are 
 led by divine management to put off their apparent 
 selves, and to come into their most real selves ; and 
 for every state a corresponding place is prepared ; 
 they are led by processes which strictly equate with 
 their first education in this natural world, where 
 the appearances of good are indispensable to com- 
 mand success in life ; only that in the upper world 
 this world's ideal is realized, and it is the realities of 
 good which gain the prize. Thus it is all work in 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 245 
 
 both worlds, the shunning of evil, and the doino- of 
 good. The end in heaven is more transcendent than 
 we conceive ; the glory of the Lord, not personal 
 glory, shines round about those who attain thither; 
 but it is necessarily founded on the character of the 
 man, as the character is founded upon the practical 
 life ; so that the stupendous gift can be received 
 without destroying the will. Heaven is a divine 
 Charity Organization Society, with an infinite 
 Capitalist of love, peace, innocence, joy, power, 
 w^ork, delight, as its sustainer. All at first are 
 paupers there, except that they will to do His work. 
 He knows better than we that gifts cannot be given 
 unless they can be also received. From the mercy 
 of His own blessedness He doles out the largesses 
 of salvation so as not to spoil His angels; for 'Hhe 
 heavens are not pure in His sight;" and '^He 
 accuses His angels of folly;" all Avhich is but 
 another stage of the doings of His hand in nature; 
 whereby He will have men to help themselves as 
 the one chief help which He can give them. In 
 this experience, dwelt on at large by Swedenborg, 
 the spiritual and natural worlds are correspondent, 
 and the education of mankind here serves exactly for 
 the place it is to fulfil in the human life to come. 
 
 Besides the " immediate glory " party, the church 
 has in it another, which may be called the party of 
 the immediate grave; implying virtually the sleep 
 of the man till the day of judgment, and the resur- 
 rection then of the dust into the man. This, it is 
 obvious, corresponds also to nothing. There is no 
 knowledge in the grave, and nothing but morbid 
 dogmatic fancy in such an idea of non-existent 
 existence. The truth is, that the man rises by pro- 
 cess immediately that his fleshly heart ceases to 
 
246 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY, 
 
 beat ; he is indrawn by the Lord into the other 
 world ; his spiritual senses are unclothed of mor- 
 tality, and are opened to perceive the universe then 
 about him; just as his natural senses as a baby 
 were opened at first to the natural world. This is 
 experience, and here is continuity of being with 
 only a difference of degree. The man and woman 
 is still a full man with every organ represented ; for 
 this man it was, and no yeast of protoplasm, that 
 was used as architect to build up the mortal organs 
 here. The Lord, in His higher office, through the 
 plan of the spirit, built out into nature and matter 
 a subordinate spirit, which should spell the syllables 
 of creation before reading the same syllables as 
 words in the Word in heaven. It has been seen 
 before, and will again be seen, that the judgment 
 on men is not at the end of the sleep of the grave 
 in this world, but being a judgment on the spirits 
 and purposes of men, commences by processes as 
 soon as death takes place, and is continued and com- 
 pleted alone in the spiritual world. No judgment 
 of spiritual beings is plausible or possible in nature, 
 where the spiritual is concealed. 
 
 Allied by subject only, not opinion, to these two 
 parties, of immediate glory, and immediate grave, is 
 another class of minds, who will have it that in both 
 worlds there is a steady necessary progress of man- 
 kind towards divine ends; that the human race is 
 always on the advance upwards and onwards. This 
 is as contrary to experience as the glory theory: 
 history is against it; for if there were no fall at the 
 first, as these people insist, the record of mankind is 
 full of nothing but mighty falls since. Falls of great 
 organic systems of minds ; whole faculties swept 
 away, and supplanted by others; falls of churches 
 
 CORRELATIONS OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 247 
 
 and empires ; falls of individuals all around us in 
 the battle of life. Therefore this creed, of the 
 necessary progress of the species, is correlated with 
 no experience, and contradicted by all circumstance. 
 When man insists on self, and on being left to him- 
 self, he falls, and having a freewill, has a right to 
 fall; he falls individually and collectively: when 
 his collective fall is complete, the Lord intervenes ; 
 reduces the fallen state to order that it may not 
 propagate ruin further ; introduces a new divine 
 state, in which those who choose have a fresh point 
 of departure : and thus Himself ensures another 
 progression, but not on the basis of any " progress 
 of the species," but rather on its proclivity to retro- 
 grade. All this is attested in sufficient measure in 
 the natural world ; it corresponds to history, and 
 fatherhood, and statesmanship; it is transcendently 
 like the action of every great and good man who 
 has governance given him here : he is perpetually, by 
 law, ordinance, punishment, repressing the disorderly, 
 and raising the fallen; at present he has hardly any 
 other mission : and the Divine Man, of whom all good 
 rulers are ima2:es, does the like. The writings of 
 Swedenborg here again are organic, scientific, full of 
 common 'sense, and in harmonious correspondence 
 with all experience of life. And they are correlated 
 to good, which has to discern, admit, and combat 
 evil; not to put it into pseudophilosophical series 
 and compromise with itself. 
 
 One other doctrine shall be mentioned which again 
 lacks correspondence, and which therefore nature 
 abhors : the doctrine that death is the annihilation 
 of the man. This too contradicts experience, and 
 dares not face it. It is superfluous to say that the 
 position is correlated with nothing, because it is of 
 
248 
 
 DEATH CONFIRMS BELIEFS, 
 
 nothing, and is nothing. It asserts nothing as its 
 end. It affronts every science. It counts the force 
 of all love of life striking the anvil, death, as 
 nothing : whereas death becomes white hot momen- 
 taneously under the stroke of surceasing life with a 
 second life from the Lord. More absurd than the 
 glory theory, more superstitious than the grave 
 theory, more false than the necessary progress of 
 species theory, it is, if held in heart and not in mere 
 intellectual impotence, the crowning dogma of the 
 fool. That this belief has enthusiastic admirers, 
 who lose no opportunity of enforcing it to simple 
 audiences of men and women, and therefore to little 
 children, demonstrates its spiritual origin from the 
 heart and the liking, and its prevalence in the 
 spiritual world. It is the permitted creed and com- 
 fort of hell to believe that there are no divine ends 
 of perpetuity; that the inhabitants make them- 
 selves, and continue themselves, by their own ability. 
 Those who hold the annihilation theory in this 
 world, ought in common decency of society to 
 proifer it only to wilful murderers, violators, 
 robbers, and villains of a deep dye, because, though 
 false, it is their proper gospel, and excuses them in 
 their judgment here, and from their judgment to 
 come. Those also who will to hold that nothinsr 
 can be known of the life after death, are of the 
 same class, but in its interior cave. 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 DEATH CONFIRMS BELIEFS, GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 Here it occurs to remark, as a strange continua- 
 tion of nature and unexpected correlation, that death 
 
 DEATH CONFIRMS BELIEFS 
 
 249 
 
 does not alter radical beliefs in the way it might 
 superficially be thought to do. Swedenborg has 
 much experience on this point. The disbeliever in 
 what is truly spiritual carries his disbelief with him 
 into the spiritual world, and there heartily maintains 
 it. He believes in the body and the world, which 
 is then hell, as all. The wilful denier of God, the 
 heart-atheist, denies Him in that world with a more 
 potent aversion, and is spiritually turned away from 
 Him with a success which is impossible on this 
 earth. He is an atheist from his first brain forms 
 to his last fingers' ends. The disbeliever in the 
 resurrection, after the first astonishment of revival 
 is over, gradually walks back through mental, now 
 also bodily, paths, to a complete denial of a future 
 life, and an equal oblivion that he is in that life. 
 It is more hard to quit these confirmed states in 
 the spiritual than in the natural world ; because the 
 spiritual world is single ; the natural is one world 
 within the other ; and in the natural degree, truths 
 are taught by a separate intellect, which can impress 
 them upon an unwilling will ; whereas, in the 
 spiritual world, the intellect proceeds directly from 
 the ruling love which commands the will, and 
 carries it out with the full boldness of the spirit. 
 As Shakespear says of a fiery horse : 
 
 '^ He sees his love and nothing else he sees. 
 For nothing else with his proud sight agrees." 
 
 Absolute necessity in repression, enforced by punish- 
 ments, is the only thing that curbs, not alters, the 
 human spiritual animals in the hells. 
 
 This coincides, correlates, exactly with the inward 
 experience of men and women here. If they are 
 not growing better, by resisting evils as sins against 
 
250 
 
 SPIRITUAL SCIENCE 
 
 the Lord, by regeneration, they become more and 
 more fixed in their habits of wrong, in their mental 
 states [and perceptions ; their intelligence gradually 
 bears a smaller and smaller proportion to their bad 
 affections; rebukes them less and less; and they 
 come into a final mental state here before they 
 are received into the final world corresponding 
 organically and bodily to that state hereafter. 
 This is a scientific truth, undeniable, supplemented 
 only by Swedenborg, who saw it carried out to its 
 created losfic of ends in the nether universe. 
 
 LXV. 
 
 SPIRITUAL SCIENCE IMPLIES SPIRITUAL REVELATION OF 
 
 ITS GOD AND ITS WORLD. 
 
 It has now been shown pretty extensively that all 
 real subjects have scientifics belonging to them, 
 exact knowledges, and that those subjects which 
 have none such, are arbitrary and baseless fancies ; 
 which held by the will are falsities ; and loved by an 
 inflamed will are insanities. 
 
 It remains to point out that science must have 
 real objects at both ends of its field. It is com- 
 monly said that science proceeds from the known to 
 the unknown, the object being of course to make 
 the unknown again into the known. This is true 
 in knowledge, but must not without a complete re- 
 servation be carried over into reality. Were it so, 
 nature and spirit would be the bubbles and play- 
 things of science, and not its limits and nurses. To 
 put the matter in another way, and avoid abstract 
 propositions, the field of inquiry must be given, or 
 
 IMPLIES SPIRITUAL REVELATION, 251 
 
 there is no object to investigate. Then, from the 
 part seen and understood, science proceeds with its 
 mind to the part seen and not understood. But 
 both parts must be equally seen. For example, 
 terrestrial physics are naturally studied with success 
 before solar physics, and yet the sun, be it ever so 
 little understood, is brighter and bigger than the 
 earth to the very senses : the sun is given ; the 
 inquirer has not to make the sun as well as to make 
 the knowledge of it. This is an image of other sub- 
 jects. The object of science must always be given, 
 and be sensible and fact, or science proceeds from 
 the known to the unknown, in the sense of losino- 
 itself in the unknown, and hurling its process from 
 beginning to end into nonentity. 
 
 Now nature is a revelation of facts to the senses : 
 if there were any man who wilfully denied this re- 
 vealed universe, and accepted onlyhisown mind, count- 
 ing the frame of things as shadow and the unknown, 
 it is easy to see that his scientific life would be a 
 phantasy, and that the more reality were preached 
 to him by things, the more he would rebel, and 
 call out for some other universe than the real one 
 to push into and to conquer. He would make the 
 mistake of attempting to proceed from the known to 
 the unknown both in knowledofe and in fact. This 
 is what theism and atheism do actually, so far as 
 experience, knowledge, science, intelhgence, and the 
 wisdom applicable to all these faculties, are con- 
 cerned. They occupy themselves with an attempt 
 to pass from known fact to unknown fact, instead of 
 from known fact understood to known fact not 
 understood, but subject to understanding. These 
 remarks do not apply to affectional, but to scientific 
 and intellectual things. The corollary to be drawn 
 
252 
 
 SPIRITUAL SCIENCE 
 
 r w 
 II 
 
 is, that if God is not given in experience, science lias 
 no end but the always unknown; which amounts to 
 saying, that science with all its strides walks towards 
 incurable iornorance, or to its ow^n annihilation. 
 There are not w^anting scientific minds which accept 
 this conclusion : they make order to hand it over to 
 anarchy. Assuredly this does not belong to honest 
 science ; but the human faculties are associated, and 
 sometimes interlocked ; and, as before pointed out, 
 false philosophy has got into science, as witness the 
 British Association, and is working it for the ex- 
 press purpose of coming head foremost against the 
 wall of the unknown; an old trick of philosophy, to 
 knock the brains out of science, 
 
 Swedenborg has enabled us to reverse the process; 
 and by the statement of divine truths concerning the 
 incarnation and the reasons of the Lord's life on 
 earth, he has abolished the unknown from fact, and 
 placed a perfectly known and seen God in the front 
 of His universe. This is the only possible salvation 
 of science, as well as of the human race. That God, 
 the source of all good and of all truth, should be 
 knowable for what He is as nature and man are 
 knowable. And the first question for the natural man 
 inevitably is, Who is God? in other words. Has He 
 shown Himself personally in history? This, given in 
 the Gospels for the wise and the simple, is settled bya 
 divinely illuminated reason, the beginning of a New 
 Church, for the intellectual and the scientific mind, 
 by a complete theory, which culminates in the truth, 
 that He who was Jesus Christ in His suffering com- 
 batant humanity, is the Lord Jehovah Himself. 
 Every eye hath seen Him, and they also who 
 pierced Him; every heart knows Him either by accept- 
 ance or rejection. There is no claimant for the throne of 
 
 IMPLIES SPIRITUAL REVELATION, 253 
 
 our allegiance but Himself In His divine humanity 
 God can be known more perfectly than man can be 
 known in his consciousness, his origin, his history, or 
 his hopes. The reason is that He is good, which 
 man is not ; and good is calculable, and consistent, 
 and true throughout ; a firm basis of inquiry and 
 knowledge, helping the knower and the inquirer to 
 be better as he proceeds; so that at last it will be 
 true that ''the knowledge of the Lord shall 
 cover the earth as the waters cover the sea." The 
 sea is scientifics generally; the knowledge of the 
 Lord is the divine truth, governing all subordinate 
 fields, and leading to regeneration and final salvation. 
 The Word is the firmament and w^orld of this truth. 
 Consequently, the natural world, known and seen, is 
 the beginning of scientific thought ; the Word, 
 known and seen, is the end corresponding to the 
 beginning. Its spiritual and celestial senses within 
 the letter are the movement of the Lord through the 
 heavens into our minds, which they will, if we 
 please, re-create, until even mundane science itself 
 will be gifted by them to understand whatever is 
 spiritually useful and necessary respecting the con- 
 ditions of creation: beyond which no honest ordeily 
 science can desire to go. It is obvious that if you make 
 intimate acquaintance with the maker of any machine, 
 and wish to learn of him, he is the best authority for 
 teaching you its purpose, its adaptations, its history, 
 and its realized use. The Lord is the Maker of the 
 cosmos; and none but He, by revelation from 
 Himself, can instruct the human faculties, that 
 salvation, all of which He wrouorht, and reofeneration, 
 which we have to accomplish for ourselves ; and thus 
 the making of men and women perfect as He is 
 perfect, are the ends or final causes of the whole 
 
254 
 
 CONCEITS IN SCIENTISM. 
 
 created universe. Meantime, the dilemma of the 
 present natural science is, either to accept the Lord 
 in the Word, or else to measure inevitable con- 
 clusions with the unknown, and to walk with ever 
 painful steps to its own annihilation. It could all 
 be annihilated even in this nineteenth century, and 
 with it all the arts too ; the railroads could cease to 
 run, and the telegraph to give messages ; the daily- 
 papers could die out ; if only godless degradation of 
 society were to triumph, and honesty to depart 
 before triumphant selfishness : for all of it, science 
 as well as the arts, is kept up by a constant influx 
 from the Lord, and does not come of itself; but this 
 influx alone lifts man continually above his lusts into 
 the possibilities of wonderful invention and daily 
 honest workinof which distino^uish this the infant aire 
 of the New Jerusalem. The **stability of civiliza- 
 tion " is always at stake unless the Lord is moving 
 in it and over it. 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 CONCEITS IX SCIENTISM, AND SOCIAL CHAOS THEREFROM. 
 
 Hitherto the argument has proceeded by the 
 method of correlations or correspondences, and we 
 have found that mankind is divided in itself, and 
 that at a certain height the human faculties break 
 off*, and being definite, exact, knowing, scientific, and 
 rational below, they become in theological matters 
 inept, and impotent, and have to make themselves 
 artificial organs of blind faith in order to deceive 
 themselves with a show of exactitude in arbitrary 
 creeds and articles. The faculties are however as 
 
 \\ 
 
 CONCEITS IN SCIENTISM. 
 
 255 
 
 much broken short in scientific men as they are in 
 churchmen; the method of correlation accuses the 
 scientific also of blind faith and lack of investigation. 
 If they are not imprisoned in thirty-nine articles, it 
 is only that they have not thought fit so to declare 
 them. They are imprisoned in the dogma of action 
 that you can successfully explore nature and take 
 no heed to God. Also that you can break life and 
 love open, and have life and love before you. Also 
 that space and time are infinite, and nature eternal. 
 Also that you come everywhere to the unknown. 
 Also that one creature by self-evolution chano-es 
 into another, whereby a great part of the mental 
 space of science is filled with missing links, and the 
 mind, which never has found and never will find one 
 of them, is fatigued and devastated. Also that 
 atheism is established, and politic selfishness moral. 
 Also that the greater selfhoods of corporations are 
 better than the little ones of individuals. AVith 
 many other conclusions utterly broken away from 
 all astronomy, geology, physiology, chemistry, 
 mechanics, and other real sciences. These positions 
 correspond to, and correlate with, nothing; true 
 science has never struck them, and they have in 
 them none of the force, light or heat by which exact 
 knowledge below, received into reason, would pre- 
 sent a plane on which higher knowledge comino- 
 from abov^ could preparedly represent itself 
 
 The truth is that the scientific mind, and neces- 
 sarily therefore science itself, is full of lusts and 
 falsities, and the positions recorded above are the 
 signs of these terrible interpolations of non-faculties 
 into the field of knowledge. And what happens 
 with ideas, happens to men. The agents and 
 abettors of the false thirty-nine articles of modern 
 
256 
 
 CONCEITS IN SCIENTISM, 
 
 SPIRITISM. 
 
 257 
 
 i 
 
 *t 
 
 *i 
 
 science have a supreme delight in being out of their 
 own proper places. They break between their real 
 fitness and their assumed functions. Some eminent 
 man who is great in natural experiment undertakes to 
 illuminate the '' British Association" with regard to 
 the to him probable material nature of the Godhead. 
 Obviously his opinions on this subject are not led 
 to by his genius or his vocation. H e had better 
 continue his experiments honestly ; and if he 
 wishes practically to benefit his kind, embark in 
 chemical works with new auspices of invention. 
 Another eminent person towers from the pulpit of 
 his protoplasm, and pronounces for the ferment of 
 the slime of nature, and the goal of the unknown, 
 leaving aside the Almighty as of no consequence to 
 his thoughts. He resolves nature into a pabulum, 
 which by mystery evolves stomachs, and these pro- 
 duce men and women ; but his view capacitates him 
 for no vision beyond some profession of rag-picking 
 on the way to paper, or some factory of extractum 
 carnis where flocks and herds end in soap, or beef- 
 tea. This aspiration, to be above one's own mind, 
 and this insurrection of men against the uses they 
 could fulfil admirably, this pushing into some other 
 place and station than one's own ; the determination 
 of these comedians to deal only with tragedy ; of 
 these salaried clerks of matter to be high priests 
 over the mind and the soul, would be only ridicu- 
 lous if they had no audiences, and if holy things 
 were not involved; but they deride the Lord; and 
 there are masses of men and women under tliem, 
 listening to their words, and ignorantly believing 
 that a professor great in light and heat, or in 
 physiology, when he is annually voted to the throne 
 of science in those realms, becomes oracular on every 
 
 subject upon which he opens his mouth. As if every 
 butler became a duke in the servants' hall of science. 
 Thence the spread of wrong places, in other words, 
 of ignorant arrogance, all through society. Thence 
 a papacy in science; a voted infallibility in its little 
 intellect; and practical deeds of devils on the maxim 
 that science can do no wronof. 
 
 LXVII. 
 
 SPIRITISM. 
 
 These states of science involve a singular delicacy 
 of position ; the bubble has to balance itself nicely 
 between inward and outward forces, and to work out 
 its own precarious salvation with fear and trembling. 
 It can afford no fair sailing; there are so many cur- 
 rents that would burst it. The human heart is a 
 rock ahead. Birth and love and death are very rude 
 to it; and for the most part it absents itself from 
 festive and funeral occasions; for nearly all hearts 
 cuff* and abominate it there, as the kingdom of birds 
 cuffs an owl out in the daytime. The livino- groves 
 detest it. But there is one special combatant which it 
 has to meet, and must meet, to wit, spiritism, which is 
 indeed the hete noire of modern materialism. Here 
 science quits her avowed tactics; and her prepara- 
 tion for the fight with this arch enemy consists 
 in no buckling on of armour; that she leaves to pro- 
 fessional jugglers; but in putting her head into a 
 bush of thorny dislikes, and exposing behind the 
 proportions of her materialism. In a word, she 
 voluntarily puts out all her senses, and puts on all 
 her pretexts^ before the encounter. Whether so 
 
 B 
 
258 
 
 SPIRITISM. 
 
 SPIRITISM, 
 
 much agonized fear of the question, and so much 
 heat of hatred against a verdict on the other side, 
 is a usual condition of successful inquiry, let science 
 herself decide; but of the magnitude of her horror, 
 and of its incapacity to reason and experiment, the 
 history of the pending controversy is full. 
 
 To tliose who have investigated the phenomena 
 of spiritism without foregone aversion, it is easy to 
 see that scientism lies at the mercy of the affirmative 
 side. No negative article is written about it that 
 does more than reiterate in one form of phrase or 
 another, that it is of course all delusion and impos- 
 ture, A crowd of creeds, from atheism to Calvinism, 
 are the rifle pits from which it is attacked ; these 
 are kept as invisible as possible ; but the noisy rifles 
 never hit the subject or its professors, because they 
 are only hatreds, and charged with no scientific balls. 
 Several distinguished men of science have already 
 succumbed to the invincible evidence oflered by 
 spiritism. The rest in the main must follow. For 
 the battle of evidence 
 
 '^ once begun, 
 Tho' baffled oft, is ever won." 
 
 This will confound the front of science in so far as 
 materialism is pushing it to the unknown; it will 
 show that all motions cannot be resolved into forces, 
 but that you meet the human forms of men and 
 women at the other end : that the deeps, generally 
 invisible, are compulsorily and cogently personal. 
 It will show that there is another world which is 
 one with this world, and thus as in the old Edda, it 
 will break in the crown of the stone-headed giant. 
 materialism, with his own iron pot ; for the Thor of 
 mere naturahstic fact here smites him. It will con- 
 tradict before the common world the position that 
 
 259 
 
 the amount of force in nature is necessarily one and 
 constant, by showing invisible wills become visible, 
 and added momentaneously to the force of the race 
 and the push of the world. It will show that the 
 dogmas of matter are relative, not absolute, and that 
 impenetrability, hardness, space, time, &c., are only 
 leased conditions, and can be suspended at will. It 
 will show that materialism is a disease, a polysarkia, 
 and tliat the bigger mankind is with it, the weaker it 
 is, and the more immovable; and that most of the pre- 
 sent canons of scientific thought are but the symp- 
 toms of grave sickness in bedridden sciences. It 
 will show science that men and women, when they 
 die, are not dust and ashes, but people, and comport 
 themselves very much as they do in this world. It 
 will not show anything of God but to the godly, or 
 of the Lord but to those who receive Him already; 
 but it may lead up minds towards higher places 
 where new powers of receiving truth are given. It 
 may, or it may not. But at any rate its influence 
 on future scientism is unquestionable, and must be 
 calculated by those with whom progress is the word. 
 It seems to lie in far countries outside the pagan 
 papal Eome of scientific culture, comfort and splen- 
 dour; and to have no relation to its geography at all. 
 Yet in the great central city there is a rumour of it. 
 There will one day be a cloud of it, horse and foot 
 and flags, seen from the walls. There will be a de- 
 structive spirit Attila in the city of science. There 
 will be capitulation, and whatever Attila involves. 
 
 This end of a mental state is felt in the conscious- 
 ness of medico-scientific cliques. It is demonstrated 
 by the quick instinct with which they close ranks 
 against the admission of anything but material and 
 carnal truth; and by their instant attack on all but 
 
26o 
 
 SPIRITISM. 
 
 respectable phenomena. Every fresh birth of the 
 other order comes into a world of sticks and staves 
 bent upon destroying it; into a world of Herods. 
 Some poor fasting girl is treated as dynamite which 
 may blow up the colleges, and carefully extinguished 
 as dangerous to knowledge. '^ Peculiar People/' and 
 those who pray for health, are hunted down and ex- 
 terminated. Mesmerism, and such practices, are 
 stamped out with fiery heels. Medical men, poor 
 things, are voted by the rest to know all about it; 
 especially because they have certificates of insanity 
 in their power; and they are abused by the rest 
 to tell the world that leeching and blisters would 
 have cured the disease, revelation, had they been 
 applied behind its two ears, Jew and Christian, 
 early enough. By these means science goes on 
 armour-plating itself; and angrily stopping up every 
 hole of attack; and especially at length, for dear 
 safety's sake, those five holes called eyes, nose, ears, 
 taste, and touch. When the process is complete, 
 science, for fear of death, will have succumbed to 
 herself as her undertaker. For fear curdles into 
 death, especially the fear of the supernatural; it pre- 
 cludes observation, and destroys sight, and gives 
 cruel lunges all round at everything suspect; it 
 faints as it acts, finding a terrible afterthought from 
 mere air and non-resistance. At present it is im- 
 possible to deny that this fear of ghosts is running 
 cold down the back of scientism. 
 
 Beyond what has been already expressed, that 
 spiritism may break up gross infidelity, by demon- 
 strating to sense that persons are bodily persons 
 still though their once bodies have been put aside, 
 no heed can be taken of the subject by the New 
 Church, for it is at best a set of permitted human 
 
 SPIRITISM, 
 
 26r 
 
 exposures, only important according to their truth, 
 which here is of the lowest elements. The mani- 
 festing spirits seem to exhaust their mission in show- 
 ing themselves. That they have heads, and legs, 
 and arms, is the pith of their revelation; a lesson for 
 materialism to learn. For the rest, they talk like 
 common folks, and give out no more light than the 
 commonalty does in general. As well ask your 
 costermonger the constitution of the natural world, 
 when a Newton is wanted; or about the constitution 
 of the spiritual world, when a Swedenborg is re- 
 quired, as converse with spirits upon their opinions. 
 Perhaps, however, one other result accrues for 
 spiritism of experiment ; for it brings down to itself 
 as a nucleus, the true ghost-histories of all ages and 
 nations, which have kept a belief in immortality 
 alive in the darkest times and places, and helps to 
 pile them into a record. And on the practical side, 
 it is certain that spiritism takes away, except from 
 scientific professors, the awful fear of ghosts; for 
 children brought up in spiritism, of whom there are 
 now some millions, are almost devoid of horrors of 
 the kind. This is important for the health of brain 
 and mind; a temporary branch of healing. It is 
 not to be attained by the scientific way of denying 
 spirits; but by recognizing them as facts, and under- 
 standing who they are. It may thus be blessed in 
 being of service to some little children. 
 
 The facts of spiritism then are true, though not 
 the babble, excepting that it is real babble; and 
 being true they are correlated to science, and must 
 be taken account of; no matter if the field be low, 
 and deal with the correlation of tinker below with 
 tinker above, still it is correspondence and correla- 
 tion, and walks the bridge of reality; and in this 
 
262 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION. 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION 
 
 263 
 
 >k 
 
 || 
 
 if 
 
 respect is unlike many religious creeds, and unlike 
 atheism and materialism, which are the formal 
 knowledges of nonentity. The worst feature of 
 spiritism is, that it leads frivolous persons to ask 
 Tom, Dick and Harry of the ^' spirit-life," what 
 their views are of God and the universe; and to 
 place importance in the answers because they are 
 spoken from the presumed higher rostrum of the 
 other life, wliicli may turn out to be impertinence 
 from the spiritual pillory. Yet this misfortune of 
 table turners is correlated in the audiences of the 
 British Association, who ask molecular philosophers 
 and violationists to enlicrhten them about the orisrin 
 of things; and do not reckon that "materialized" 
 ghosts under the table of science cannot tell greater 
 or more misleading lies on subjects beyond their own 
 menial lives, than tortured livinor doo^s tell throuofh 
 their philosophers about similar high subjects, upon 
 the top of the same scientific table. 
 
 LXVIII. 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION. 
 
 If these views be correct, science is on the way to 
 all that it now regards as most superstitious. In 
 this connection Swedenborg comes to hand with 
 spiritual experience of an important kind; for lie 
 noticed in the other life that those scientists who 
 deny God and worsliip nature, become magicians 
 after death, and cultivate the black art with assi- 
 duity. They work by the perversion of corre- 
 spondences, being jugglers in real things. Thus,— 
 certain forms allocated together, from the universal 
 
 life of the spiritual world have organic functions; 
 and by managing the forms, the influx is determined 
 into definite channels of evil power, of which pos- 
 session is one. They can make false brains in other 
 people's brains, and so hold the proper mind in 
 abeyance even in its own kingdom. This is often 
 done here, but mentally only; in the spiritual world 
 it is done bodily also. The Lord came into the 
 world to overrule it. Now the superstitions of 
 matter, which get into nature to eliminate God, are 
 the preparation for these direful doings in the other 
 life; they are fungi of the lust of power over minds, 
 which at present shed their spores all through the 
 brain of science. Once give in to a passion for root- 
 ing religion out of man, and placing matter in its 
 stead, and you have the condition of infernal magic 
 within you; and are equipped for the career of a 
 possessing demon. This new chapter, as was said be- 
 fore, correlates exactly with mental possession here; 
 with the aims of the papacies both of ecclesiastical 
 and material science. Like the rest which Sweden- 
 borg avers, it is but the revealed branches of a tree 
 whose roots are visible and tangible in the common 
 experience of mankind. 
 
 Superstition may be defined as a fixation of the 
 mind in the belief of inadequate causes and reasons, 
 and the expectation of consequences from those 
 causes, and of lidit from those reasons; as when a 
 man prays to an idol of his own making, and looks 
 for help from it ; or poses a cell germ, and blows it 
 up into a god. On this showing, is not the faith 
 that the secrets of nature can be tortured ftoni her 
 by violation of life, a superstition of the Dahomey 
 kind? Is not the belief that the five senses embrace 
 all reality, and that other senses than these showing 
 
264 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION 
 
 265 
 
 a new world, cannot be opened, a superstitious 
 negation ? Is not the conviction that science can 
 ultimately comprehend nature, a belief in an intel- 
 lectual fetish ? Is not the worship of intellect irre- 
 spective of the regeneration of the heart, an artifice 
 of evil and a moral fetish ? Is not tlie article, that 
 an audacious scientist is ex officio a consulting theo- 
 logian, a superstitious position ? Is he not on this 
 assumed platform as an idol of wood or stone, with 
 the misfortune of seeming to be alive in his mouth ? 
 Observe, the holding of these beliefs in suspense in 
 the mind does not constitute superstition ; it may 
 constitute unhealth, or feebleness, and arise from 
 incapacity to dispel prevalent clouds cf opinion; but 
 it is the fixinof or materializinof them: the beins: cer- 
 tain of a number of absurdities of negation, and 
 infinites of the finite; and applying them from the 
 nursery to the church, as education and thought, 
 that makes them into wood and stone of the 
 faculties, before whose awful pretension the scientific 
 mind bows down in its annual temple. 
 
 To the claims of the incarnation and the Divine 
 Humanity as the suj^reme facts of nature, and 
 therefore the supreme objects of science ; also of 
 the historical existence of faculties in man which 
 apprehend a world superior to nature ; to the line of 
 religious descent from Jehovah the Creator to the 
 Lord the Redeemer; to the sacred books and 
 histories of nations, and to the prophets and seers 
 of the Bible, the science of the day has only for 
 answer, immaturity of brain, or disorder uf the ima- 
 gination. It is the largest notice to quit ever given 
 in this world, with the smallest power to enforce the 
 notice at the back of it. The notice returns upon 
 the prosecutors. Why are not their states of mind 
 
 imperfect and disorderly? The disbelief in spirit is 
 a paralysis of imagination arising in the chiefs from 
 a stony heart; inward and outward disease combin- 
 ing in their discourses. Disbelief in the Lord is 
 paralysis of process, whereby scientific hands cannot 
 feel or grasp when they touch the greatest fact on 
 record ; a thing solid to every faculty when it is 
 informed, and not diseased. The non-examination 
 of Swedenborgs writings because scientific minds 
 dislike them, is a failure of reason before evidence, 
 and unfairness pleaded as a method; a principle of 
 elimination which is a corruption of mental justice; 
 a disease of the social brain. The catalogue of these 
 diseases might be endless in detail, for one of 
 them is in face of every great and living truth, and 
 formally ignores its life-giving power. It is futile 
 to talk of revelations as diseases, without remember- 
 ing that scientisms are diseases. Truly there may 
 be false revelations, and impostures of revelation; 
 but so also from the beginning there are false and 
 evil sciences, and arrogancies of science; the reason 
 is, that the human will has its own part, of freedom, 
 to play, in both departments; and it mixes evil with 
 the good, and folly with the wisdom, of either. The 
 conclusion is, that those who throw away revelation 
 because it has " outlived their liking," give no 
 security that they will not some day throw awaj^ 
 science for the same spreading reason of aversion. 
 It is the human mind that is here at stake, and 
 in its present mood, insecurity is strongly inscribed 
 upon the disorderly processes of its collective 
 brain. 
 
 The argument that the spiritual world is a creation 
 of a diseased imagination and fancy, is met by the 
 fact, that the denial of that world is a result of the 
 
266 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION 
 
 POSSESSION AND SUPERSTITION 
 
 267 
 
 blindness of the understanding arising from the 
 hardness of the heart. 
 
 To give up Jehovah of the Old Testament, and 
 Jesus of the New, for vague and trumpery material 
 guesses, is a lunacy like that of supposing one's own 
 straw to be the sceptre of the universe. The 
 exchanging of such things for such things, shows a 
 total want of number, weight, and measure, in the 
 interior mind ; and consummated superstition. 
 
 To teach doubt and denial of holy things ; and 
 doubt and denial which in the intentions of their 
 authors must go into the nursery, the infant school 
 and into all education, implies a dreadful disease in 
 tlie adult heart. It may be said, these things must 
 be taught if they are true; but then observe, they 
 are evil; and it is a complication of disease of the 
 moral heart with disease of the corresponding lungs 
 and brain, not to know, that no truths are evil; and 
 that those positions which are evil are false also. 
 As stated before, Swedenborg has demonstrated 
 that good is primary; produces all truth as heat 
 produces light; coheres with it; attests it; and is 
 its living and justifying heart and soul. And it is 
 goodness within that makes any truth into the daily 
 bread of education. 
 
 The common truths of religion, such as the 
 fatherhood of God, His divine goodness and love to 
 man, consequently, His Word, His divine instruc- 
 tion through revelations and churches, His coming 
 when it was needed, by incarnation ; thus His 
 redemption of fallen human nature ; His second 
 comino- bv an illuminated human mind, are the 
 grand truths of creation; and brought down into the 
 natural understanding, they may submit to be called 
 a rational theory of nature, because they are trutlis 
 
 regarding the purpose of man, who is the end of 
 the creation. To give up these facts until other 
 better and more explicit ones producing the same 
 ends are announced in detail, is to give up the 
 human faculties : 
 
 '^ To enter again the ancient sty, 
 Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." 
 
 Criticism is an organ that does not deal with 
 nature or spirit, but with art; hence, whatever sub- 
 jects are moved from the domain of human into that 
 of divine authorship, are no longer amenable to 
 criticism, but to enlightened understanding, to that 
 faculty which deals with truths, and to that science 
 which leads up to truth. Through Swedenborg, 
 the Word, as demonstrably divine, has swept wdth 
 all its stars into the upper heaven of science, and 
 criticism has no telescope which reaches its facts. 
 After counting the letters of the letter, the critical 
 method surceases; and reverent sciences themselves 
 revealed for the purpose, take up the divine natural 
 theme, the heaven within the Word. 
 
 Churches and states may be in full decay, but 
 there is a remnant of j)ersons who individually are 
 not involved in the ruin. Evil practices may pre- 
 vail, yet some who are led by superior example to 
 follow them, may not be criminal in their hearts. 
 It is the general sphere which is lost, and the 
 leaders, the dominant affections, which are to blame. 
 Thus in the foregoing pages, whatever is said of the 
 evils of science, of its atheism, and cruelty, is not 
 applied to particular men; for no doubt there are 
 violators of life who think they are in the way of 
 truth, and therefore justified, with weak heads and 
 natures gradually taking this persuasion from 
 
 1; 
 
268 
 
 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 J 
 
 others. It is the general realm of conscience and 
 understanding which is destroyed; and all wills are 
 destroyed that inhabit it; yet as individuals many 
 will come out, abjure it at length, enter regeneration 
 and gain a new will, and belong to another order. 
 Thus much is necessary to be repeated here, lest it 
 be thought that spiritual wickedness of the will is 
 charged upon those who are led in blindness and 
 weak deference to do things which are wrong in the 
 name of class and science. Judgment against the 
 evil thing is general and final; the judgment on 
 each person involved in the charge, is particular, 
 and according to his affections, intentions and oppor 
 tunities, he receives acquittal, or condemnation, and 
 is led upwards, or downwards. 
 
 LXIX. 
 
 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 It now remains, after long apparent digression, to 
 pursue the natural stream of divine communications 
 which at length resulted in the commission of 
 Swedenborg. In, and after, the incarnation, an 
 everlasting church was founded in the person of the 
 the Lord. The divine Leader had appeared, and in 
 nature, as a man. He was Lord of nature. The 
 world was redeemed from the overbalance of evil, 
 and freewill was restored to man. The early Chris- 
 tians absorbed His life in their hearts, and grew 
 from it. They knew and acknowledged His divi- 
 nity of which their consciousness was full. They 
 were a simple though a commissioned people; and 
 
 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH 269 
 
 had to confront the old world, and if possible to 
 conquer it. They waged holy war personally, but 
 history shows that they could not conquer the world 
 as a general sphere of infernal power. The history 
 of the first Christian Church is a record of indivi- 
 duals martyred for the good of the truth, but 
 becoming fewer and fewer in i3roportion as the 
 Church extended, until the organization of eccle- 
 siastical empire absorbed them all, and the old 
 heathenisms with modified rites and doctrines were 
 handed down under the name of the Christian 
 Church. In course of time, every fact and doctrine 
 that the Lord came into the world to establish 
 was altered and subverted. The simple apostolate 
 became a hierarchy, like the Babylonian, Assyrian, 
 and Egyptian priesthoods. Its love of power over 
 the bodies and souls of men is written in the wars and 
 persecutions of eighteen centuries. The combat of 
 the Lord against the hells, whereby He became one 
 with Jehovah, is lost in a doctrine of three persons 
 with unintelligible functions, and witli the mystery 
 of evil constituted in the person of the Father. 
 The unity of the Lord is not in the Church. The 
 doctrine of faith alone attempts to lay hold of 
 redemption, and leave out regeneration, and yet 
 grasp salvation, making creed and assurance of all 
 account, and the man and the daily life, of shunning 
 evils as sins first, and then doing good afterwards, oi 
 no account. Hereby ecclesiasticized religion has' no 
 reference to conduct, but much to external appear- 
 ances, and the bettering of this world is hopelessly 
 referred to the future world. The knowledge of 
 God gradually lost, and the divinity of honesty un- 
 recognized, the mind had no sources of spiritual 
 perception left, and consequently darkness, spiritual 
 
270 
 
 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH, 
 
 1 
 
 l< 
 
 k\ 
 
 ii 
 
 darkness, has more and more invaded the churches, 
 until they can no longer answer a single question of 
 the common heart. Thence theology is declared to 
 be unprogressive, the quod semper, quod iihique, quod 
 ah omnibus, becomes the rule of belief; and the 
 papacy appealed to on any question simply answers, 
 '^As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall 
 be." In this way religion stands quite isolated 
 from the faculties, and is a foreign body in the 
 rational being. The churches, failing to be the 
 embodiment of the divine humanity, and to hold 
 humanity with its common life and mental faculties 
 in their folds, have invented their privilege as '* the 
 mystical body of Christ," and plead their own un- 
 assailable authority as a doctrinal organon. The 
 arbitrary assertion of spiritual power is wliat is left 
 to them; and they attempt to make this co-extensive 
 with temporal power. The sun of revelation has 
 set into priesthoods. This is the end of the old 
 Christian Church. It happened because love, the 
 only charity, and with it the light of truth, the 
 proper field of faith, diminished, and died out, age 
 after age; and the truths of doctrine, which are the 
 embodiments, advanced positions, and defences of 
 the divine love and wisdom in men, also died, and 
 monstrous beliefs took their place. 
 
 This can be read in history by those who discard 
 mystery from their minds as a mode of explaining 
 the past. But what cannot be read except in 
 Swedenborg is the dignus vindex Deus, God present 
 for the occasion and the need. In the middle of the 
 last century, about 1745, the Lord in a personal pre- 
 sence appeared to him in London, and opened his 
 spiritual senses, that he might perceive and declare 
 the things in the spiritual world. He also opened 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 
 
 271 
 
 and illuminated his mind, that he might receive and 
 write down the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. 
 And He taught him, through the Word thus un- 
 folded, the true doctrine regarding Himself: how 
 that all Scripture portended, and was fulfilled in, the 
 divine humanity which He assumed when His con- 
 quest over the universes of evil was complete. He 
 reinstated in knowledge, love as the central sun, and 
 Himself as the divine love and the divine man 
 within it — in ejus medio residet Jehovah Deus ; and 
 gave new doctrines of charity and life to man, con- 
 stituting on the earth the body and substance of a 
 New Church of mere regeneration. Not a mystical 
 body, but a luminous body of self-evident truths, 
 supported and shining by the serviceable good within 
 them ; a veritable body of the Lord, adequate in us 
 for the whole duty of man, and for the right conduct 
 of all the business of this life. 
 
 LXX. 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 
 
 When Swedenborg was thus prepared, and after 
 he had been for twelve years a denizen of both the 
 spiritual and the natural worlds, the last judgment, 
 on the dead Christian Church, took place in the 
 spiritual world ; and he was commissioned to Avitness 
 the mode of it. This was in 1757. The reader w411 
 remember that similar judgments on the Adamic 
 Church, on the Noahtic Church, and on the Jewitrh 
 Church, had taken place already. One common 
 necessity brought them all; the necessity of the 
 restoration of the equilibrium between good and evil, 
 
272 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 
 
 and thus of divine order, among men and spirits : 
 the necessity of saving freewill, which is man, from 
 hell, w^hich is his antagonist. 
 
 Mighty as such things are, they are now among 
 the least mysterious of events. There is a supreme 
 Lord ruling the two universes of this world and the 
 other. Nations and peoples are either getting better 
 or worse : if worse, they are sinking from evil to 
 evil. As they die, every generation of them is trans- 
 planted into the spiritual world. This follows the 
 fortunes of the natural world, and is filled with evil 
 men and women, w^ho form societies corresponding 
 to the inner lives of the societies which the same 
 men and women have left on earth. These societies 
 cohere by correspondence, by sympathy, and mu- 
 tuality of action, by mutual attraction, on tlie two 
 sides of the veil; they cannot but co-act, because they 
 are spiritually similar, and spirit is in similarity, not 
 in place. The upper tier of evil people pervert the 
 love and light of heaven, and shut it from the lower, 
 just as they do in this w^orld. The understanding of 
 divine things perishes in the upper darkness ; and 
 the love of the same things is supplanted by deep 
 within deep of influent into inherent selfish lusts. 
 Hell has the upper hand. For such a state of things 
 there is no human cure ; great men cannot be raised 
 up in it, but great and destroying demons, still con- 
 trolled by the Lord's Divine Providence, come forth. 
 Here is dignus vindice nodus; a last cry of creation 
 for God the Redeemer. 
 
 Put aside atheism and annihilation as drunkenness ; 
 discard the grave as holding any man; refuse all 
 word of progress for evil ; refuse evil as undeveloped 
 f^ood; see human characters in human persons as 
 immortal; abash the thought that nothing can be 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 273 
 
 known of spiritual things because you yourself know 
 nothing ; and it is impossible not to recognize from 
 history the need for timely judgments of God if the 
 human race is to be saved from destruction. It is 
 impossible not to recognize that Last Judgments 
 have taken place before the revivals of the race in 
 Judaism, in Christianity, and now in the Church of 
 the New Jerusalem. 
 
 Per contra, were atheism true, there would be no 
 judging power. Were the sleep of the grave true, 
 there would be no population to be judged; but the 
 generations would be cleared off by the worms. 
 Were evil good in the making, and wickedness but 
 imperfection, progress w^ould be ensured by the 
 ferments of sin ; the selfishness of the w^hole world 
 would redeem that of its nations, and the selfhood 
 of nations purify the selfhood of individuals. But 
 then as surely as these positions are lies, so surely 
 the now revealed fact and doctrine of the judgment 
 of those great spiritual societies called churches, in 
 both worlds, are true and substantial. Here, the 
 science of history will attest the facts; and the 
 merciful interposition of the Lord, which is now a 
 revealed truth, and a scientific complement to 
 historical science, shows how the facts, unmanage- 
 able by man, are met, and grappled with, in His 
 divine statesmanship. It is nothing else than the 
 supreme government of the universe reasserted on 
 the supreme scale in regard to the gathered societies 
 of ages. It is a necessary fact in the history of im- 
 mortal beings, men and women. 
 
 Each church, so long as it is faithful to the divine 
 love and light within it, is the centre of the world, 
 and governs or modifies the circumferences, the out- 
 lying nations and peoples, from that centre ; just as 
 
 s 
 
274 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 
 
 in a single person, each of whom is the church in its 
 least form, the religion is the central fact which 
 modifies the life. In other words, each church dis- 
 pensation (we do not now speak of ecclesiasticism) 
 is the medium by which the Lord, through heaven, 
 communicates with mankind. And being in the 
 ultimate world, i.e,, nature, this church is " the 
 complex, continent, and basis" of the heavens above 
 it. They rest upon its integrity. And when it 
 perishes, a new dispensation is a necessity of the 
 position. Nevertheless, the whole of the old state 
 is left in the world, and has to be disposed of, and 
 gradually, as the freewill of mankind permits, to die 
 out. Nothing violent is effected at once against 
 obdurate priesthoods and ecclesiasticisms here ; 
 having no internal perception, they are unaware of 
 their supersession by another order of things, and go 
 on apparently as before. What has happened is, 
 that the Lord has left them, and they gain no 
 radiation from Him as a centre, but they still possess 
 an abundant selfish life both inherent and influent. 
 They contain multitudes of individuals who belong 
 really to the new order of things ; who receive its 
 influx; and carry it out into new lives. By the 
 preponderance of these individuals they may be 
 transformed into organic branches of the New 
 Church. In speaking therefore of the passing away 
 of the old church, the meaning is that the dis- 
 pensation is closed, not the voluntary churches and 
 chapels of any people ; many of these may and will 
 be opened to receive the next dispensation. Many 
 also will not, but like the Jews will adhere ex- 
 ternally and literally to forms of truth that are no 
 longer true, because they have lost their good. The 
 reception of the new love and light in the conscience 
 
 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 275 
 
 and intellect, and their transference ultimately to the 
 heart through all daily duties done in their service, 
 thus the doctrines of God become, reverently speak- 
 ing, the practices and habits and callings of men, are 
 the credentials to the faithful of their part in the 
 new dispensation. The old church passed away 
 because of all its primitive doctrines not one was 
 left that could open down into the conduct of life, 
 and steadily insist upon men becoming in their 
 weekday affairs better and wiser from the Lord; the 
 New Church has arrived ; and its doctrines, flowing 
 out of tlie gospels, and from all the Word, through 
 rational channels, run directly into the conduct of 
 life, and are its prime motives in every realm, 
 individual, marital, communal, political, and social. 
 They constitute a pervading religion of life. 
 
 The English under Judgment. — It is not possible 
 to give details of the events of the Last Judgment; 
 these may be read in Swedenborgs work on that 
 event. It proceeded from centres to circumferences; 
 from the Protestant nations and peoples gathered in 
 the spiritual world, to the Eoman CathoHc; because 
 the greater light, of investigation and freedom, was 
 among the Protestants, and the open Bible; and the 
 clearer light not lived up to, is judged, condemned, 
 and superseded, before those who are in possession of 
 no Bible and of only obscure and second-hand light, 
 are judged. This is historically obvious when we 
 know of it. Now, what is pertinent, and a grave 
 fact for the nation, is, that the English, in their 
 religious communions, were the first people that 
 were judged ; because, as Swedenborg says, ^' The 
 English are in the centre of all nations in the 
 spiritual world; " and they are in the centre because 
 of the spiritual hberty which in their minds they 
 
276 THE LAST JUDGMENT IN 1757. 
 
 possess; to put the matter in an English way, be- 
 cause they have enjoyed, and do enjoy, civil and re- 
 ligious liberty. The southern nations, and the 
 "Roman Catholic States, which do not appropriate 
 such freedom, had long been displaced in the 
 spiritual world, and their judgment was indicated 
 and prepared ; and correspondingly, the battle of 
 freedom had been fought successfully against them 
 in this lower world. But political freedom and an 
 open Bible cannot save a church, or do more than re- 
 form it politically for a time, unless the faculties are 
 open to heaven, and the regeneration of life comes 
 thence. One has only to look at the middle of the last 
 century to see how dead and dry the world was then. 
 Good Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Garrick were 
 its ideals ; often sitting within a mile of Sweden- 
 borg as he received and wrote his pages. It was 
 not'^inappropriate that his call was in London, that 
 his main life was passed in London, and that his 
 works were chiefly written there. He foresaw that 
 the English mind allowed his right to speak, and 
 that however strange the message, that mind in the 
 long run would give it the welcome that belongs to 
 strangers. The Lord in a luminous appearance at a 
 house in the east end of London, where the Lord's 
 light is so greatly needed still, cannot rightfully 
 astonish those who remember Jehovah in the burn- 
 ing bush before Moses in Midian. Nor is it 
 inappropriate, that while Swedenborgs natural 
 person was in Clerkenwell, his internal man should 
 be taken up from the outward London, to witness 
 the Last Judgment in the spiritual world upon the 
 gathered English race from their first to their last 
 centuries; and the formation of the new English 
 heavens, and the new English hells opposed to tlicni. 
 
 CONTEMPORAR V HIS TOR V. 
 
 277 
 
 LXXI. 
 
 CONTEMPORARY HISTORY. 
 
 A volume might be written of historical justifica- 
 tions, to show that, since the middle of the last 
 century, some great inward cause has reigned, and 
 produced the diflference in the quickness of the 
 human mind ; a cause by the perturbations and new 
 conditions of which some vast new body of heaven 
 must be inferred as exerting its weight in the 
 human system. Intolerance of mental slavery, how 
 it has risen in men! How states and churches have 
 rocked and ruined under its volcanic throes ! What 
 revolutions and wars have devastated settled 
 societies ! What afflux of power has come into the 
 intellectual aspirations and conceptions, and into the 
 daily work of mankind ! What industries and arts 
 unknown to the past, span the planet in their fingers! 
 Wliat rapidity in history ! What questioning of 
 the old, and expectation of the new; and what 
 happenings of the unexpected ! What severe pres- 
 sure of nations and men to their duties : what 
 hard work, and what good food, compared to the 
 old days ! What break up of old authority, and 
 division of hierarchs among themselves ! What 
 plain internal dissolution of churches and doctrines I 
 What megatherian indiflferentism ! What a sanded 
 floor of atheism, as the intended arena where 
 all souls and all saints are to be slauofhtered 
 mentally at the last great day of imperial scientism! 
 Nay, but also, what mighty achievements of honest 
 business-like science ! Clearly there has been an 
 influx into things, and on the human side it is not 
 true, or feasible, that the amount of force in the 
 world remains the same : that dulness is convertible 
 
278 
 
 CONTEMPORAR V HISTOR V. 
 
 i 
 
 into intellect, or old coaches into express trains, or 
 the decadent manhood of races into renovated youth. 
 To effect the change, it is necessary that the renova- 
 tor and redeemer come from without. Swedenborg 
 has given a sufficient history of the change; no other 
 writer has attempted it. It is the early springtide 
 of the New Jerusalem with the tree of life replanted 
 on the earth, quickening all minds towards a new 
 and universal religion wliich will have common life 
 and business for its cathedral, and the incarnate 
 Lord, visible for ever through the opened clouds of 
 the Word, for its one high priest. 
 
 The obvious counter-statement is, that the move- 
 ment now is calculable from the past, and is the 
 natural development of arts and sciences. This 
 also, like Swedenborgs word, lies under the necessity 
 of being an assertion; but it takes its position for 
 granted, and shows no adequate force : indeed it only 
 reiterates the fact, and gives its own assurance as 
 an explanation. Swedenborg supplies a complete 
 theory of the stream of events, granting which theory, 
 the issues follow in a natural course. A removal of 
 aged and pernicious obstruction from all minds; a 
 removal of hereditary incompetence deeper than the 
 grave ; a new freedom to think, to will, and to do ; 
 a new influence from the right hand of a new leader, 
 the lord of men; a new^ mind in the world in which 
 that leader is made visible, so that man is His 
 nation, and He is their statesman henceforth; the 
 families of heaven and the families of the earth 
 coming together mutually in Him : hope, faith and 
 joy re-born : reason illuminated, and admitted into 
 revelation, and reason itself revealed; science bap- 
 tized with fire from new heavens ; love assured of 
 all, and human kindness to triumph because it is 
 the Lord moving ; the sermon on the mount set 
 
 CONTEMPORAR V HISTOR K 
 
 279 
 
 in the waiting-place till gradually and stealthily it 
 becomes the heart in the law of the land, and governs 
 public and private administration : since these things 
 have happened within, there is an end of the case, 
 and a world renovated and upspringing is but the 
 natural call of mankind into blossom and fruit by 
 the unclouded sun of the New Jerusalem. 
 
 All this being true, it would not be improbable 
 that Swedenborg, the commissioned messenger of it, 
 should be also despised and rejected of men, and 
 nothing solid be known about him. Tacitus, with 
 his wonderful perception of national character, saw 
 no importance in the early Christians, and did not 
 forecast their drama. The reception of a message of 
 reproof and judgment by an unwilling audience, is in 
 the inverse ratio of its importance, and the sound of 
 it is drowned at first in audible disapprobation. 
 
 It is then certain that Swedenborg has opened 
 rational causes for the spring in advance which 
 society on earth has made since the middle of the 
 last century; that he has exhibited ''a pattern seen 
 on the mount," according to the principles of which, 
 events have flowed in foretold, expected, confirmatory 
 sequence; and which prophecies of a world of 
 changes yet to come, all proceeding from that voice 
 in the New Jerusalem, '' Behold I make all thino-s 
 new:" and also that materialism and atheism have 
 stated, and can state, no causes for the novel events; 
 that they hold no germs from which development 
 can issue; but have complacently taken their own 
 selfhoods for granted as the factors of the most 
 wonderful and unending revolution in modern history. 
 Copernicus smiles at these Ptolemies of their own 
 egotism as a centre. 
 
 Another consideration grows out of these spiritual 
 
 ^H 
 
28o 
 
 CONTEMPORAR V HISTOR V. 
 
 f 
 
 I 
 
 events, viz., out of the Last Judgment, and the 
 planting of a New Church upon earth: they are 
 remarkable in what they do not do. AVhile the 
 whole earth is moving under them with the pressure 
 upon it of new heavens and a new earth to be 
 realized in practice, and in theory, in truth and in 
 righteousness, some things have no power of going 
 on, but drop cadaverously from the ranks, for they 
 are wounded unto death. The existing churches 
 with the old theology in them make no advance with 
 the rest of things: they are propped by charity by 
 the roadside on the senile bench of '^ quod semper, 
 quod iihique, quod ah omnihus,' instead of sitting in 
 the divine chariot, " Behold I make all things new." 
 Some may think that this means that they are be- 
 hind the age; but it imports far more, that tliey are 
 left out of the divine influx. They themselves pro- 
 claim the removal of their candlestick in their jealous 
 incapacity for progression. And it may be stated 
 broadly, that whatever subject, or science, or theo- 
 logy, is not now manifestly advancing, is left out of 
 the new order of things, and subject to the nature of 
 decay. Materialism and atheism are visibly stuccoed 
 on the same board of stagnation with the old theo- 
 logical mythologies and ritualisms; there is no new 
 element in them since the days of Lucretius; they 
 pose nothing with the same gravity though with more 
 stucco than he did, and nothing does not materially 
 but only verbally alter from age to age. We have 
 then a complete testimony to the stoppage of 
 churches and anti-churches amidst the general march 
 of the world ; in other words, to Swedenborg s 
 position, that the first Christian Church is a dead 
 branch, and in all its departments has come to an 
 end. ' If more could be added to the evidence, it is 
 
 ANOTHER SIGN, 281 
 
 the outward attempt of the old churches to dress like 
 the young church; the resort of ecclesiasticism to the 
 tailor for the renewal of youth; and that babbling of 
 the past which belongs to the end of a life; and 
 which is characteristically exhibited by a large 
 section of the mythological churches at the present 
 time. 
 
 LXXII. 
 
 ANOTHER SIGN. 
 
 A strict consequence of the recovered freedom of 
 mankind arising out of the last judgment, and the 
 new force of divine truth striking upon all intellects, 
 is found, as we have said before, in the audacious 
 infidelity of the age; in short, in the increment of the 
 powers and qualities of that disbelief which springs 
 from the heart. For what the last judgment did for 
 this world by reinstating *^ freedom of thinking and 
 willing," in other words, civil and religious liberty in 
 the mind itself, was to increase human power in 
 both directions; so that the influence of heaven could 
 be potent and paramount for those who will; and 
 the influence of hell could, with no violation of free- 
 dom in self-possessed men, exert its subtlest forces 
 in corroboration of their intellectual and voluntary 
 lives. This is what we see now; a battlefield of 
 freedom, and on it an awakening of good and evil 
 from a long trance to fight again on the earth and in 
 the air, with enginery unknown to past ages; that is 
 to say, with perceptions of their own ends, and 
 po^yers to carry them forth, arising from the emanci- 
 pation of thought, and from its receiving the inspira- 
 
282 
 
 ANOTHER SIGN. 
 
 ANOTHER SIGN. 
 
 283 
 
 4 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 • 
 
 tion of faith in the Lord on the one side, and the 
 inflammation of the glory of the selfhood on the 
 other. The wide indifferentism too is a symptom of 
 infernal emancipation from good. All this is scien- 
 tifically true of every man s consciousness. Let him 
 be resolutely striving for good of life, and then 
 increased freedom of faculty, conversing also from 
 without with new education and instruction in truth, 
 enables him to w^alk with new power towards re- 
 generation, though falsities contradicting the truths 
 may and will arise in him and attempt to harass his 
 feet. On the other hand, if self be his adopted 
 centre, the pressure of the same truth will produce 
 inward vigour of denial, and subtile intellectual ways 
 of asserting it, and these will develop with great and 
 systematic skill a new mind round the imperilled 
 Ecjo. These processes are extant in all individuals 
 more or less ; and they are also visible in the state of 
 the age. In short, vast faculties of good and evil 
 now possess the world, and replenish it and multiply 
 in it; on the one hand they are the manifestation of 
 the New Jerusalem; on the other, they are the 
 counter manifestation of the new hells; and the 
 new freedom of the race is the divine balance be- 
 tween these two empires. 
 
 It is necessary to bear in mind that the knowledge 
 of these great events in the spiritual world is not 
 the condition of the propagation of their effects. 
 Nothing of Swedenborg's revelation of them is 
 known to the general world, and yet they are organic 
 facts within the body of history and private life, 
 which exert incalculable power by their own gravity 
 and force. Few know that the heavens have been 
 newly arranged by divine order, and opened down- 
 wards upon the earth; but all receive the new light, 
 
 and think and will from it with greater capacity; 
 few know that the spiritual bosom of the Word has 
 been opened, but yet it gives the milk of the light of 
 life to the good and true of all churches. The funda- 
 mental fact here is not a propaganda of doctrines 
 from a centre of authority, but the oncoming of a 
 new^ day to the arctic mind of the past, and a new 
 man full of kingdoms appearing under its meridian. 
 There were no inhabitants there before, but snow^ 
 men and snow women. There is a population now, 
 the children, all of them, of the altered relations of 
 the spiritual sun; but their consciousness of whence 
 their estate springs is nil; nor can they account for 
 themselves, excepting as self-developed, upon any 
 other scientific principles, than that a new dispensa- 
 tion from the Lord has rio^hted the balance of things, 
 and cloven down to them with that liofht and love 
 which are the hfe of all minds. But the divine 
 principles which are tlie agents subsist whether with 
 or without the concurrence of human knowledsre: 
 for they are not dogmas or scientifics, or even per- 
 ceptions, but determinate divine epochs, organic like 
 the history of the human race correlated to that of 
 the planet, only more organic, because the life of tlie 
 history of the spiritual world is brought into the 
 correlation, and is the principle of power. 
 
 Note, however, but as belonging to another subject, 
 that those who receive these things willingly as 
 from heaven, receive them in themselves, and the 
 selfhood is re-created by them; those w ho do not so 
 credit them, receive the new light and its powers on 
 themselves, and attribute them to scientia ex se, 
 science from the self, and to intelUgentia ex se, 
 intelligence from the self The one set receive them 
 internally, and they are open all the w^ay to the 
 
284 
 
 THE WORD. 
 
 Lord; the other externally, and self opens into them, 
 and with no organic rights or similitudes claims 
 them. The scientifics that run out of the latter 
 condition are falsities from their first principles. 
 
 LXXIII. 
 
 I 
 
 THE WORD. 
 
 The source of the new light is the Word, in the 
 divine truths of which the Lord is present to the 
 w^orld. It will be kindly remembered by the reader 
 that there is no attempt in these pages to give a 
 detailed statement of the doctrines of Swedenborg, 
 but rather to show that there is a correlation 
 between them and all that is real and accepted in 
 other fields, and especially that tliey fiice science 
 with new facts for exploration. This is the case 
 with the doctrine of the Word. Every true know- 
 ledge must have something to go upon besides 
 internal conditions and conjectures. It must have a 
 field, an ultimate world, or it will be dependent 
 upon the thinkers imagination. Now for the 
 highest plane of the intellect, the religious mind, the 
 Word is the world that is to be studied or known. 
 And besides the Word there is no other field. 
 Not accepting it, the religious consciousness of the 
 theist is forced to think out and conjecture God 
 according to his own state and character, and to 
 cultivate an anthropomorphism of the most privately 
 personal kind ; besides which, knowledge is impos- 
 sible, because there are no facts in which it can 
 inhere. A keen intellect with no senses placed 
 down in the natural universe and endeavouring to 
 
 THE WORD, 
 
 285 
 
 comprehend it by cogitations, and love it with 
 affections, is the analogue of a theism which ignores 
 revelation, and would fain have knowledge of God. 
 The Word in its letter is the missing universe of 
 His all-real truths. Here there is something sub- 
 stantial to be studied, and scientifics can begin to be 
 formed ; and man, '' the minister and interpreter of 
 nature," can take his place also, since Swedenboro* 
 as the minister and interpreter of the Word. In its 
 lines, it is infinitely commensurate with our finite 
 faculties, and can fill them with its knowledge. As 
 against the poor estate of the theist, reverently 
 believing that there is a God, and hoping and aspir- 
 ing to think out something of Him from nature and 
 the mind, observe the scientific privilege of the New 
 Church accepting the Divine Humanity of the 
 Lord, the Word made flesh, and the divinity of the 
 Word enshrined in the pages of the Bible. If 
 theology is all this, and if this can be correlated 
 with the operations of the rational mind, a field of 
 sciences, knowledges, and truths, vaster than those of 
 nature, and agreeing with them, is now for the first 
 time revealed to the conscious gaze of the human 
 mind. 
 
 Theism. — The aspiration of theism to a creed of 
 God, is impossible to adjoin to a scientific hypo- 
 thesis of the world; for that such a fabric as the 
 visible formal universe should be created by a benio-n 
 God, which the supposition is, and that a conscious 
 mind, male and female, with large religious faculties, 
 should be, so far as we have experience, the crown 
 of it, and that He, the All-possible, should have 
 left Himself unmanifested, a prey to imagination and 
 conjecture, when yet shape and form for every other 
 thing are his representative creatures, his easiest 
 
 ^,1 
 
286 
 
 THE WORD. 
 
 THE WORD, 
 
 28 
 
 I 
 
 manifestoes, is an anomaly to the human heart and 
 intellect. It declares that the rest of things can be 
 definitely known, but that the exact God and 
 fashioner is a guess; that He who has a divine 
 heart cannot show a divine face. On these terms 
 also he must remain for ever inscrutable. The 
 closest thinkers of the atheistical school arrive 
 at the conclusion, that the unknown and un- 
 knowable blocks the way at the far end of 
 knowledge; but they solve the problem to their 
 own content by denying an apprehensible God; 
 while the theist craves a God, and necessarily be- 
 lieves that faculty is given whereby in some way 
 to reach one ; and yet no manifest God is in view. 
 The position is the more remarkable because the 
 hio-her, nobler, tenderer, and more religious the 
 theism becomes, the more likely it is that theism 
 itself is untrue, because it is less likely that such a 
 deity as then touches the heart, should not reveal 
 Himself plainly, yea most plainly, to His suffering 
 and sorely needing creatures. The same remarks 
 apply secondarily to the life after death and the 
 spiritual world. The atheist gets rid of the subject, 
 at the peril of his faculties, for ignoring is a dan- 
 gerous desert to a being who worships experience 
 and thought. But the believer in an immortal state, 
 in proportion as he believes it substantially, is more 
 and more at fault if he refuses to extend his belief to 
 an attested manifestation of the spiritual world to 
 the men and women in the natural world; and if he 
 does not affirmatively look far and wide to see that 
 manifestation where it may be found. This is a fair 
 scientific process. If there be a God, the first 
 likely hypothesis is, that He shows Himself exactly 
 to instruct mankind; search then for Him where 
 
 perhaps He may be found, in revelation. If revela- 
 tion contains Him, revelation is the continent of 
 the theory and truth of His presence in the world. 
 So if there be a spiritual world, seek it, not in fancy, 
 or imagination, or thought, or in any affection, or 
 beside any grave, but in its actual revelation. Now 
 these actual revelations, besides the general voice of 
 history, are only two, viz., the Bible on the one 
 hand, and the writings of Swedenborg on the other. 
 If any man can bring other universes of divine truth 
 into the arena, let him do so; or let him honestly 
 study and make induction of these. 
 
 In claiming for the Word the reality that belongs 
 to the realm of sciences, we necessarily resort to 
 the spiritual sense, which is co-extensive with the 
 letter, and has inspired it into existence, and which 
 cannot be fairly denied by any but those explorers 
 who have studied the whole case in Swedenborg. 
 It is not so patent a realm at first that the human 
 faculties can deal triflingly with it. The spiritual 
 sense is the theory of the matter. It is incumbent 
 upon the scientist to examine whether the tlieory . 
 fits. He has never believed in the possibility of 
 such a sense. He ought therefore honestly to guard 
 against prejudice as an end of inquiry. He must 
 admit the possibility provisionally, or he cannot 
 proceed. He must, as Swedenborg says, be, for 
 the trial, in the duhitative affirmative, not in the 
 diibitative negative state. This is common to all 
 investigations in which a hypothesis is undergoino- 
 trial; or a theory, proof; or a truth, establishment. 
 
 I 
 
 t 
 
288 ABSTRACTIONS PUT ASIDE. 
 
 LXXIV. 
 
 ABSTRACTIONS PUT ASIDE. 
 
 Further, the theory of an internal sense living 
 within the Word as the spirit within the body, is 
 unlike any other theory in this respect; that it is 
 not an abstract principle, such as gravitation, and 
 the like; but involves the correlation of two organic 
 universes. The internal sense of the Word is the 
 internal Word, just as the spiritual man of the other 
 life is the real man, with all his '' body, parts, and 
 passions." In glory and in power, it is unlike the 
 natural sense, as the angel of the man is unlike the 
 man. And yet the correlation and correspondence 
 are perfect; so perfect, that the spiritual sense, by 
 revelation, can be opened down into the higher 
 natural faculties, and be rationally and scientifically 
 received by them. Being consummately organic, 
 the divine man in complete speech adequate to every 
 diverse ear in heaven and upon earth, it opens 
 theory downwards into nature, and principles are no 
 longer sufficient, but corresponding body and sub- 
 stance reveal themselves within the letter and the 
 mortal frame. The truth in which the hypothesis 
 first, and then the theory closes, is the divine man 
 uttering the Word. So again with regard to the 
 spiritual world; it is not a set of internal principles 
 and cogitations, not a supreme act and fact of con- 
 sciousness, but a spiritual universe and cosmos cor- 
 responding to the universe of nature. And so again, 
 with the spirit after death. That spirit is not a 
 thouc^ht or a virtue, or an affection disembodied, 
 but a man, who corresponded to and with the mor- 
 
 ABSTRACTIONS PUT ASIDE, 
 
 289 
 
 tal man who was here before death. Thus in these 
 three spheres now revealed, the principles of truth 
 are themselves bodies, forms, substances, and hence 
 pressures, and the wealth of quantity comes into 
 the coffers of the intellectual mind. The Lord will 
 not have us so poor that great faculties shall be 
 spent upon abstract hopes, but He reveals Himself 
 organically as the one only Man; He speaks the 
 organic word through the heavens down into the 
 letter for the churches; he opens the great abstrac- 
 tion, death, and the bodily persons of all who have 
 gone are seen in character and in work; and with 
 the vision extended, the spiritual world comes down 
 close upon sun and system with its own suns 
 and systems, and gives itself forth, entire, organic 
 and bodily, as the principle of nature, and the 
 philosophy of mundane knowledge. Science is thus 
 elevated from the attainment of principles and rules 
 only, to the knowledge of the men of things. Heat 
 above, which is love, the hottest of heat, fills heat 
 below, which is natural fire; light above, which is 
 wisdom, fills natural light, to which it corresponds; 
 attraction above, which is sympathy and cor- 
 respondence of aflfection, enters attraction of bodies 
 below; and the correlation of the known qualities of 
 the two terms, furnishes a more powerful organon of 
 exploration than has yet existed in the sciences. 
 Also, freedom is conserved, and extended. For, 
 given the upper term, the divine and the spiritual, 
 and the poor audacity of the mind which violates 
 science when it chatters atheism, is put aside as 
 nothing; science can be merely natural with no 
 temptation to be godless; and greater application of 
 legitimate powers can be maintained; the single eye 
 comes into investigation; and we recognize the 
 
 T 
 
f 
 
 290 ABSTRA CTIONS PUT ASIDE, 
 
 function of that solid pressure of truth which by 
 demolishing the vacuum above rebellious falsity 
 makes men greatly free. What a world of false 
 ways of knowledge are eliminated here. The death 
 of conceit alone which it involves opens new eyes 
 for the natural mind, nay, new achromatic lenses for 
 its skill in the natural sciences. 
 
 For, observe, no man is bound to study the 
 spiritual side of the equation excepting when he 
 pleases. He may select natural truth alone as an 
 organon, and prefer to gain that on its own ground. 
 But when he admits the other ground, and some- 
 thing of the correspondency, if he goes beyond 
 natural fact, it will not be into materialism, but into 
 reality. This amounts to a true resting-place, a bed, 
 for the mind; and will prevent the weaker order of 
 explorers from the alarm of finding that they are 
 nowhere at the end of an honest day s work. 
 
 It is safe to predict from these grounds that a 
 revolution is preparing for the thought and imagina- 
 tion that is at present vested in scientific pursuits; 
 that whenever the mind comes within hail of ab- 
 stract principles, it will demand the human world to 
 which they belong, and carry them into its illustra- 
 tion. This will ensoul knowledge, and embody soul; 
 that is to say, by discerning the soul, and recogniz- 
 ing the body of it. Swedenborg has given fine 
 examples of this in many fields. For instance, as 
 was said before, the lungs correspond to the under- 
 standing; they are to the body what the under- 
 standing is to the mind. The heart and arteries 
 correspond to the will and its afiections; it is the 
 pulsing will of the involuntary organic kingdom. 
 Study each term separately, elicit anatomy and 
 physiology; then take account of human nature, life 
 
 ABSTRA CTIONS PUT ASIDE, 291 
 
 and experience in outward and inward observation; 
 and afterwards parallel the function of understand- 
 ing with the function of lungs; the metaphysics 
 with the physics; and the function of will with the 
 function of the heart; and you will observe a strict 
 correlation between the two planes of induction. 
 Again, as the heart and the lungs are conjoined in 
 an organic marriage, the truths which pertain to the 
 conjunction of the will and understanding, and 
 which are perceived in experience, meet the first 
 case, and form with it planes of induction. A jewel 
 here is, that one of the terms is self-conscious, and 
 when enlightened can be self-evident; and thus this 
 super-position of sciences leads not from the known 
 to the unknown, but from the visible known to the 
 mental known; from natural light, to revealing 
 light, to spiritual light. It was by these processes 
 that Swedenborg in the example now given, was 
 capacitated to understand the natural and mental 
 function of the heart and lungs in a sense which no 
 physiologist had ventured to open; and also to see 
 into human nature, and the important reciprocal action 
 of the will and understanding, not only by deep 
 inward perception, but by having his perceptions 
 projected upon the representative plane of the organic 
 forms which are the fleshly tables on which he studied. 
 Thus he won not alone principles but the speaking 
 bodily souls of things. He won plane after plane 
 of final causes; but these more organic than their 
 efiects. He saw that the will, the end of the heart, 
 is itself a spiritual heart, given into the inner body 
 of the mind; and with its own blood in it, the blood 
 of organic truth, which makes all the organs of the 
 spiritual man. And so, in the coming sciences, 
 materialism and bare metaphysic will be nothing. 
 
 i> \ 
 
•r 
 
 1 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 292 r^^ AFFECTIONS. 
 
 and viviperception will be all in all, and will consist 
 in a constant appearing of life over the forms of 
 things; the life abiding in the mentally illuminated 
 form of the forms; in personality after personality, 
 in men and women, the deeper you go. It was a 
 divine corollary of this new opening, of greater 
 reality than the opening itself, that Swedenborg 
 passed through the mental, which is directed down- 
 wards here, to the spiritual world; and saw life and 
 death over again in the greater universes, where the 
 sun is alive, and the moon is alive, and the earth is 
 alive, because they are the instantaneous creations 
 and correspondences of the divine love and wisdom 
 and use, fashioning them through and to and for the 
 states of the immeasurable census of the populations 
 of the spiritual world. 
 
 LXXV. 
 
 THE AFFECTIONS. 
 
 Throughout this work, and in all expositions of 
 the statements of Swedenborg, the word affections 
 is of frequent occurrence; and it has been before 
 explained that it is not to be confounded with the 
 modern metaphysical word '' emotions," which signi- 
 fies a certain affluence and overflow of feeling upon 
 a given point; but not organic form, substance, and 
 stasis, which aff*ection implies. To put a parallel, 
 affection in one place corresponds to the capillary 
 arteries of the cheeks; emotion, to the momentaneous 
 state of blushing in those vessels. The affections 
 are the internal arteries of which the ruling love is 
 the heart: they are determinations not emotions; 
 
 TIfF AFFECTIONS, 293 
 
 fibrous intentions always there and always beating, 
 not occasional affluences. Any point of any one of 
 them can in a moment be laid hold of by the love, 
 and become a will. Emotions are almost the opposite 
 of this generally. For example, the love of family 
 is a powerful heart in the human mind; from it go 
 forth affections, arteries, to the various members of 
 the family, near and remote. The conjugal family 
 love is correlated in the two sides of the heart. The 
 arteries given off first are the love of the immediate 
 children; steady, fibrous, ever-beating parental affec- 
 tions. The more remote affections or organic ar- 
 teries of this ruling love, run to the other kindred. 
 The family tree of the affection in the intention of 
 the mind's nature and creation is complete, whether 
 brought into function in this world, or not. Any 
 member of it may be withered, and the love that 
 runs to it be weak, poor, and incomplete: but the 
 affectional anatomy remains the same. A man may 
 also consciously regulate and enrich the blood of his 
 affections in any direction by noble processes of will; 
 for this heart and its arteries are given over to his 
 spiritual care. He may and does build his own 
 spiritual anatomy, and create his spiritual sympa- 
 thetic nerves, according to his deliberate behaviour 
 here on earth. The same remarks apply to all the 
 other ruling loves in a man; they run side by side 
 through the mind; have each their own currents, 
 and are convoluted into only one heart and one 
 arterial system, which is the ruling love which is the 
 life, and its derivations to all the objects of life, 
 which are the organs of the man. Thus the love of 
 country is a powerful heart, and its vessels, which 
 are patriotic affections, run to every great cause in 
 which a part is to be played, and pulsate through 
 

 
 
 I 
 
 11 
 
 294 DIVINE ENTRANCES INTO SCIENCE. 
 
 the good of the motherland with constant streams 
 and1)eatings of heart. The family stream is in the 
 patriotic stream, and vice versd; and each sustams 
 the other with life. These remarks upon a great 
 subject, which opens like a sea of correspondences 
 and considerations before the view, are introduced 
 here parenthetically, in order that the reader may 
 know that the writings of the 'New Church do not 
 mistake evanescent feelings for important factors m 
 the life of mankind; and that the position that love 
 is the life of man is consubstantial with the human 
 heart and its chambered organization; and that the 
 further statement that the affections are derivations 
 of the love, touches upon an exact anatomy and 
 physiology of the inner man, and correlates with all 
 the acts of will wherein a man does nobly, or ignobly, 
 in his relations of love, or hatred, with his fellow- 
 men. The bare statement begins to introduce the 
 created order of the body, and of the soul, into the 
 mind which is the meeting-place of both. Future 
 time will study such vast things; the beginning only, 
 from Swedenborg, is now and here. 
 
 LXXVI. 
 
 DIVINE ENTRANCES INTO SCIENCE. 
 
 How great the change of the death and resurrec- 
 tion of the sciences will be, may be seen from a 
 slight instance already extant. Consider physics 
 before the law of attraction was, we need not say 
 established by Newton, but before it was dreamed 
 of. The coherence of the world was sensible enough 
 though hardly formulated; but its unity and immen- 
 
 DIVINE ENTRANCES INTO SCIENCE. 295 
 
 sity were not in sight. Attraction entered it, and 
 the orbs were spaced in their order. The sky as one 
 being stood up on its true feet before the aggrandized 
 imagination, and the telescopic arts that were need- 
 ful to follow the head of nature as she was lifted 
 up, were developed in their series. And all this 
 because the universe became recognized as the body 
 of attraction. Attraction was not a great soul for 
 a man who was more than a magnet to propose for 
 the acceptance of things; but it was a physical soul 
 where there was none before, and it was also a cor- 
 respondence pliable to life and love, and it slid into 
 science, say rather it was breathed from above into 
 the nostrils of science; and it at once became the 
 heir of the ordered immensities of space, holding it 
 by thoughts telling of living immensity. If now 
 this one unintelligent principle could accomplish these 
 results, what will be the eiffect when the divine 
 humanity of the Lord, the Word, and the open 
 spiritual world, are admitted, not as rules and 
 formulas, but as personal final causes, into the cos- 
 mology and physiology of man and nature ? Nature 
 which coheres by attraction, will shine with self- 
 evident light, and glow with love, as the convoys 
 from above near her, and take station as souls within 
 her. Her doctrines will be opened for heavenly 
 admissions. As it is said in the Psalms, " Lift up 
 your heads, ye everlasting doors, that the King of 
 Glory may come in. The Lord of Hosts, He is the 
 King of Glory." If the wisdoms of the inner gate of 
 God into heaven require to be continually lifted up 
 for his admission into the soul, how great the liftino 
 up and the revolution must be as He is to be ad- 
 mitted continually day after day into these mortal 
 faculties of science, and to pass through them also 
 
 n 
 
2 96 DIVINE ENTRANCES INTO SCIENCE. 
 
 as the Shekinah of His illuminating person. No 
 parallel between the lowest savage and the highest 
 scientist as the world considers him, can give illus- 
 tration of what the difference will be. It will be as 
 between a true life reigning in the scientific faculties, 
 and mere death and selfhood: between attraction 
 which holds the universe together as a stone; and 
 personal righteousness and judgment with the same 
 universe in the hollow of His hand. 
 
 Under this light, the creatures will be re-named; 
 spiritual nomenclature wdll be a battery of light 
 induced over and into science. Adam, that is, the 
 Adamic or celestial Church, perceived the natures of 
 all birds and beasts as words most heavenly, spoken 
 forth as divine truths by Jehovah ; those which were 
 opposites were also exact organic divine truths in 
 their foundations; they were all celestial mental 
 qualities separately organized for delight and pro- 
 creation of what is remotely human in the world. 
 This knowledge is coming again in the New Church, 
 but in intellectual and rational forms, adequate to 
 the subdual of the iron and brazen age, and to the 
 consummation of the men of the sciences, with woe 
 to the maltreaters of animal life, to the high priests 
 and Sadducees of cruelty. In forms also adequate 
 to the devastation of atheism with its subsidiary 
 theism, and of materialism with its underground 
 mentalities. There can and will be a natural history 
 of animal souls, from the perception of analogies first, 
 and then correspondences, whereby the forms and 
 habits of birds, beasts and fishes will be explicable 
 from the knowledge of what these creatures mean, 
 and therefore are, in the human universe. At present 
 they are named and classified from their hair, or their 
 feathers, or their teeth, at any rate, from outermost 
 
 DIVINE ENTRANCES INTO SCIENCE. 297 
 
 differences ; they will one day be named from the 
 distinct affections which are their lives, which are 
 their loves ; and from their correspondence with the 
 same affections in mankind : also further, in planes 
 of nomenclature, from their functional forms in the 
 spiritual world, natural, spiritual, and celestial; where 
 they appear again with endless variety as representa- 
 tives of spiritual states. The animals mentioned in 
 the Word, the horses, black, pale, and red, the white 
 horse, the horses of fire, the lion, and the lamb, each 
 having exact being and meaning, nay, the compound 
 animals of vision, which are no longer mystical, 
 because they are now intelligible in Swedenborg, will 
 open down into natural history, and connect it with 
 the divine life in the New Jerusalem. 
 
 The divine truth also opens down into optics. For 
 it is the Lord enlightening, and light is its correspond- 
 ence in nature. Like the lungs, it expands nature from 
 darkness into apperception. It gives ocular under- 
 standing its ground of being. It is the first though 
 not the greatest of natural forces. It is twofold, 
 natural and spiritual. Natural light in its strength 
 puts out spiritual light; the sun of nature, as 
 Swedenborg says, is seen as a black disc opposite to 
 the sun of heaven. Yet there is correlation between 
 the two considered in order; the one illustrates the 
 other; the lower is the plane of induction towards 
 the higher; and the higher or spiritual is the plane of 
 deduction towards the lower. The first deduction 
 may be, that as truth is the moving principle of the 
 mind, the commanding motive for going on to better 
 and better things, the luminous inner man or conscience 
 continually radiated from the Lord, so the light of 
 every day carries the motive of nature, and draws on 
 and heralds her through her courses. There is indeed 
 
298 
 
 ANALOGY. 
 
 no light without heat, no truth or wisdom without 
 love ; but a condition of remoteness comes, in which 
 light properly takes the first place, the heat is imper- 
 ceptible, and the action is properly named from the 
 licrht. This is a pure correspondence of what the 
 living light, seemingly unheated or impartial, does 
 on the man ; and the motive force of light in physics 
 correlates with this property of the light of the mind, 
 and with the light of righteousness which is from the 
 spiritual sun. Here it may be noted that great dis- 
 coveries will become abundant when correspondence 
 as a principle of deduction enters upon the wealth 
 of natural knowledge. Theology will fill photology 
 with attributes, as the light of the eye is opened 
 upwards to the true light that enlightens every man 
 who comes into the world. The Word made flesh, the 
 Logos of John, is the Pisgah from which science in 
 Sw'edenborg sees before it a promised land of 
 deductive knowledges covering the whole field of 
 natural light. 
 
 LXXVII. 
 
 ANALOGY. 
 
 Analogy has been mentioned above: it is a lesser 
 term than correspondency, and implies the resem- 
 blance and looking of forms to each other on the 
 same plane of thought and observation. A mouse 
 is analogous to an elephant, and a cat to a lion, but 
 the two beings do not correspond. A spiritual 
 horse, which is a formal manifestation in the higher 
 world of some organic understanding of spiritual 
 truth in the society in whose fields he moves, cor- 
 responds to our natural horses; and is the proto- 
 
 ANALOGY, 
 
 299 
 
 morph or divine seed of them; for the planes of cor- 
 respondence are creative; the higher being an 
 exact vivifying seed to the natural matrix of the 
 lower; so that it is true that horses are conceived in 
 the sun, but in the spiritual sun, where they are the 
 forms of divine reason, and whence they are projected 
 as successive equine architecture, each inhabited by 
 an understanding soul as its reason of being, until 
 they appear as material horses in the world. This 
 is Genesis; the divine forms of things, the divine 
 thoughts, divinely intellectual, luminous, self-evident, 
 condescending through the separate heavens, clothed 
 upon with beautiful appearances in each, every ap- 
 pearance rationally equated with its indwelling light 
 of soul, and closing at last, by seed, germ, and birth, 
 through a similar generated form, in the animal 
 of the earth. This is Protomorphism, the creative 
 Word moving organically in and from heaven, and 
 exactly opposite in doctrine to Protoplasmism, which 
 is the slime-word of the earthly mind. 
 
 Here we see again, and the thought is so difficult, 
 though now and then self-evident, that it is well to 
 hold it whenever it is caught, that the light, the 
 movement, the divine gift of science which is travel- 
 ling to our human system, and which comes from a 
 new sun of righteousness, will not comport with 
 killing living creatures for the secrets which they do 
 not contain; but will consist in perceiving their 
 affections and carefully correlating these with their 
 incarnation, which is nothing but their loves 
 built out into flesh, and flowing forth in their 
 living habits; and then in noting the revealed cor- 
 respondence of these affections with their spiritual 
 qualities; the mental analogues, as a third term, being 
 elicited afterwards. In this way alone, earthly 
 
300 
 
 ANALOGY. 
 
 science gains a soul, and that soul owns a Lord ; and 
 the intellectual mind can have for constant gain of 
 theory the organic passage of those souls into the 
 natural lives which they illuminate, and with which 
 they rationally cohere. 
 
 Sailinof aofainst the stream of creation, and ignor- 
 ing creation as a fact, analogy of the lowest kind has 
 been largely worked of late. Now analogy, without 
 correspondency, is the Serbonian bog of science into 
 which its armies sink whole. For because of the 
 correspondence of all nature to God, and to man. there 
 is nothinor in the world, whether natural or artificial, 
 that is not in some real sense analogous to every - 
 thinof else. The lines of nature are all fluent with 
 analogies. All the species under a genus are ana- 
 logues. Considered irreverently, a certain apishness 
 reigns through mere nature; and mere nature can be, 
 and is, so considered. Cucumbers are like smelts. 
 Certain plants are like butterflies, certain beasts like 
 men, and certain men like beasts; the latter in no 
 bad sense, but as suggestive resemblance often 
 noticed. In these analogies, which are general, 
 creation is not imported. They are testimonies to 
 the unity and harmony and dovetailing of nature, 
 and to the oneness of its source; as it were marks of 
 perpetual brotherhood and sisterhood and of all near 
 and remote relationship, springing up everywhere on 
 the way of things. But they do not mean that one 
 thing is made out of another. So to speak, they are 
 all matter-relationships, a flock of maters or wombs 
 with no masculine principle in their midst. So they 
 are all of one sex; they fit series regarded from 
 without, but not organism, and engender nothing. 
 To separate them from their final causes is to forbid 
 generation, and yet expect gestation; out of which 
 
 ANALOGY. 30 J 
 
 conditions nothing but windy disgrace can come. 
 Nurse science may make all the baby linen for ex- 
 pected children, and have the basket of appointments 
 with the pincushion ready, but the children will 
 never appear: there is nothing organic inside to 
 evolve. For conception to take place, previous cor- 
 respondence of substantial final causes with natural 
 eflfects or matrices, is wanted; and in the present 
 voluntary widowhood of science from her Lord and 
 Master, this correspondence is not given. 
 
 If these considerations are not admitted, absur- 
 dities of method ensue. For as everything has 
 points of likeness to everything, any line of departure 
 may be taken to arrive at a result. Any organic 
 mite may as well begin the series which is to end by 
 evolution in man, as any other; a forked radish may 
 be set up as plausibly as another form ; it only wants 
 to evolve life, and a good human head instead of a 
 grassy top, and the work is done. The evolutionists 
 draw such great bills on nature payable on de- 
 mand, that this claim might easily be included. 
 Moreover, they expect that nature will honour mere 
 pretences or imitations, whereas these when formally 
 made, sicken conception. Coming near to man in 
 seeming, the imitations of him, the apes, are more 
 remote from his qualities, excepting when he is a fool, 
 than other beasts; just as all apishness is the very 
 aversion of the thing aped; and when the thing is 
 high, and the intention in front of it apish, the case 
 is one of profanation. Take the true qualities of an 
 animal as the substance of its nearness to man, its 
 tameableness, its docility or capacity for education, 
 its power of serving in the order of society, its look- 
 mg to man and attachment and aflfection, its march of 
 progress up and down with its masters fortunes; its 
 
 ,t' 
 
 I 
 
 F 
 
 
 I 
 
302 
 
 ANALOGY. 
 
 ?» 
 
 cognizance of little children, its gratitude and clieer- 
 fuf obedience and pliancy to the home ; and it is 
 obvious that in these shaping qualities you have a 
 quarry of animal marble that might be hewn into 
 the image of a man if nature was anybody, and could 
 do it. Moreover, a horse is nearer to a cavalier even 
 in looks, and a lamb to a baby, than an ape or a 
 young ape is to either. Under orders for a few million 
 ages from within, a horse's long nose would more 
 easily pull back and shorten into a man's, than an 
 ape s spring out where there is no quality inside to 
 push it. The pressure of soft things can control the 
 form of hard ones; stones hollow by water, bones 
 are yielding before aneurisms, and skulls are 
 plastic to brains; matter is the clay and force the 
 potter; but the evolutionists make the hard and un- 
 yielding to be active, and the fluid and forcible to 
 be passive; the fixed grin to be the origin of human 
 expression, and mimicry the faculty pregnant with 
 mind, instead of being, as it is, the stage and theatre 
 
 of folly. 
 
 *' Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, 
 What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands? 
 Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What 
 begettest thou? or to the woman, What hast thou 
 brought forth?" (Isaiah xlv. 9, 10.) 
 
 It is not wonderful that the ape should play a 
 distinguished part in modern scientism; and that 
 this should arrive by natural evolution and selection 
 at dmia naturce magister et mterpres; because pre- 
 tentious and aggressive analogy is a mental ape with 
 an endless imaginary world for his grimaces; the 
 very ^'missing link" craved by the philosophers of 
 apery. It is not seen to be an ape, because it sits 
 with its back to the objects it mocks. But not the 
 
 ANALOGY, 
 
 303 
 
 less does it mould its thoughts upon mimicry of that 
 which it is turned away from. Having seen man 
 already, it makes him out of the monkey : it imitates 
 him into its philosophy : this is apish. So all through 
 nature it takes the higher creature and result from e'x- 
 perience, and then mimics it into hypothesis. It puts 
 man into monkey, and then gets him out of monkey. 
 The process is one of rendering things subjective in 
 order to deal with them as you please; in the present 
 case, to make men-apes into men. Again we come to 
 the result, that men-apes, not uncommon to experience, 
 are the most unplastic stony clay for this potter; the 
 type of what cannot be humanized; the stamina of 
 jest that can be raised towards nothing; the hardest 
 meanest grins of things; the breed of mockery and 
 profanity in form. Dean Swift saw the obverse of 
 this when in the decay of mankind into Yahoo-apes 
 he placed horses as the superior creatures worthy to 
 Hve upon the earth. "The dust of the ground" 
 spoken of in the second chapter of Genesis, with the 
 Lord God forming man out of it, signifies in a field 
 that cannot be entered by science, a neutral material 
 close to the creative hand, and not charged with the 
 fixed gravitation of the gorilla. 
 
 In the former pages of this work, we have spoken 
 of the circulation of evil, and shown that the parts of 
 it cohere in one mental system or man-monster, the 
 organs of which are sympathetic with each other,' and 
 excite each other to action, producing from one stem 
 the most various functions of crime. These look 
 different, as the evils of the heart look difl^erent from 
 the evils of the loins; yet they are one as their 
 society is one. The same may be said of the circula- 
 tion offalses. In any age the theological falses are 
 reproduced in the scientific falses. The men of 
 
304 
 
 ANALOGY, 
 
 science have indeed no idea that they are the apes of 
 these ^^ betters." But there is only one mental body 
 in the world, and theology is always the head of it, 
 and science the automatic spine of that head. In 
 this system all lies are one grand organic lie. The 
 faith in the evolution of the lower into the higher 
 ex se, of the ape or of any animal into the man, the 
 faith' that justifies that doctrine, is a subsidiary 
 branch of the old church faith, that men, by a happy 
 impress on their minds, whatever their past lives, 
 their past aperies, can be translated and become 
 angels. The gorilla, nature-struck on some point of 
 him, becomes a man by the same process by which a 
 rascal, faith-struck, becomes an angel. The "imme- 
 diate glory" of the happy rogue is assumed by the 
 incautious theologian; wiiile the scientific man omits 
 definite time; but this does not impair the parallel- 
 ism. In both cases the past life is of no account, 
 and a scratch from without or within is the new 
 determinant. The rest of the falses of science can 
 be paralleled with falses of theology, doctrine by 
 doctrine ; and the theological fibres that animate the 
 infideUties of science be traced anatomically into 
 exact strands of the motor and sensitive system of 
 the general scientific mind. 
 
 Let it be repeated then that analogy is but the 
 relation of likes to likes, and demonstrates kindred 
 and consanguinity all through the world ; but cor- 
 respondence is the deeper harmonic relation of oppo- 
 sites to opposites; their personal fitting because 
 they are oppositely analogous ; and their creative- 
 ness because of their fitness which is their mutual 
 love. Without this acknowledgment of correspon- 
 dence, science is a lone woman, ever barren, and ever 
 waiting to see reflected in her mind the outcome of 
 
 CORRESPONDENCY, 305 
 
 the children of creation; with the acknowledgment, 
 she is a married faculty of two minds in one, the 
 spiritual and the natural; and in her combined man- 
 hood and womanhood, she can conceive from the 
 Lord the conception and birth of the creatures, 
 one by one, if it is needed to be shown her for uses 
 above her exploring sphere. 
 
 •r 
 
 LXXVIII. 
 
 CORRESPONDENCY. 
 
 Correspondency is the harmonic relation between 
 a higher and a lower plane; and imports that the two 
 spiritually and naturally cohabit, and their union in 
 the divine order is followed by perpetual creations. 
 
 The Word is written by mere correspondences, in 
 order that it may unite in its embrace the two worlds 
 to which every man and woman is meant to belong 
 if he or she pleases, namely, heaven and the earth. 
 We have seen that correspondences are of immense 
 force; and that they import the introduction of all 
 souls by influx into all bodies; that they sustain the 
 frame of nature, and lift into higher animation the 
 life of mankind; that they come from within, and 
 are the way of creation. They are also the way of 
 redemption. The Lord came into the world by 
 birth that He might live here as Himself, and con- 
 quering the world, the flesh and the devil, present 
 in nature where there was to His vision no man, 
 one man who by His victories was Jehovah, and is 
 the Lord : a plenary correspondence of God on earth. 
 His visible frame, and His words and works, in- 
 volved divinity; and every power of creation flowed 
 
 u 
 
 1 - 
 
3o6 THE WORD CONJOINS HEAVEN &- EARTH 
 
 then and since through His Divine Human nature. 
 He testified that His human form is the end and 
 cause of all things ; and that the redemption of man 
 lies within it. He is perpetually present now by 
 correspondences in the planes and firmaments of the 
 Word. 
 
 LXXIX. 
 
 THE WORD CONJOINS HEAVEN AND EARTH. 
 
 The "Word is not doctrinal alone, or much so 
 upon the surface, only sufiicient for the guidance of 
 men's lives, not for full comprehension by their 
 natural understandings. It is spiritually conjunc- 
 tive, and therefore creative and regenerative. It con- 
 sists therefore not in moral or metaphysical terms, 
 but in created forms, historical and visional. There 
 are in it the two planes, of induction, and of deduc- 
 tion ; as it were the conditions of a divine battery 
 of truth and love. And the mode of it in feeblest 
 word and conception is like this. It is extant, an 
 open book, in all the heavens, and upon all the 
 earths, with a difierence according to every race, and 
 every sphere. When it is devoutly read here, its 
 images strike the natural mind, and the meaning is 
 absorbed : if the reading is, *' I saw a lamb stand on 
 the Mount Zion," the mind reverently apprehends 
 somewhat of the Lord's presence in the central 
 innocency of His omnipotent love : the spiritual 
 sense shows this to mean the Lord in His divine 
 humanity, in which He is essential innocence. But 
 by correspondence, the angels who are with the 
 man, seeing the same form, " a lamb stand on the 
 
 THE WORD CONJOINS HE A VEN 6- EARTH 307 
 
 Mount Zion," think in their way, not from the 
 symbol to the thing symbolized, but obversely, 
 from the divine humanity to the lamb, which is the 
 visible presentation. Thus the spiritual and natural 
 thought come conjointly and creatively together in 
 the Word; because there is no space, but similarity 
 of state conjoins and completes. 
 
 How often do those who are still left on earth, 
 resort to a place, or a book, or a hymn, which was a 
 favourite with a dear mother, for example, who has 
 passed into the heavens, in the secret hope that 
 there is some communion thus with the departed. 
 This is a yearning for correspondence with that soul 
 in all senses. If it be cherished ^in the Lord, it 
 cannot but consummate some communication of 
 the affections. But unless this be sought through 
 the Word, there is no sufficient agreement in the 
 telegraphic language between the upper and the 
 lower country. It touches love, but is not an arti- 
 culate voice. Now the Lord when He went away 
 from our natural senses, left a book, the Bible, the 
 Word, in which we can always walk when we want 
 to find Him, and also when we yearn to find what- 
 ever is good and true from Him in each other; in 
 which the words are real at both ends, under the 
 death line, and over the death line ; and understood 
 in the same sense at both ends, though from 
 nature to spirit in the one, and from spirit to spiri- 
 tual form and then to natural form in the other. 
 A book thus of divine remembrances and conjunc- 
 tions. That book, the Bible, as Swedenborg says, 
 is dead in itself; but is continually vivified by the 
 Lord through those who have it and love it in 
 heaven and upon earth. For the purpose of con- 
 joining heaven and earth, it is written in an im- 
 
 If 
 
 h 
 
3o8 THE WORD CONJOINS HE A VEN &* EARTH. 
 
 mortal language; not in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or 
 English, but in the language of correspondences. 
 These, in other words, are the forms of the creation, 
 and they contain the same spirit, and therefore have 
 the same meanincy, in both worlds. And thence it 
 is, as was said before, that devout readers on both 
 sides of the grave come together in this divine 
 appointment, and meet in sacred affections, and 
 corresponding lines of truth. It is genuine spiritual 
 communion over which death has no power, because 
 natural personality is eliminated from the holy place. 
 By the same provision the Lord is met everywhere 
 in the Word, and the spiritual sense conjoins itself 
 with the natural in the mind of the devout reader. 
 
 If such a great fact exists, if there be a divine 
 organ for conjoining all kindred minds beyond the 
 power of death to sever them, and such a conjugial 
 apposition of planes of life between heaven and 
 earth, such a marriage in the Word ; if divine truth 
 spiritual and divine truth natural creatively fit each 
 other thus; it is plain that the coming of the kingdom 
 of heaven, and the realization of the Lord s prayer 
 in society, and the creation of its church, depend 
 upon the open revelation of the Word given in the 
 writings of Swedenborg. The possibility, the 
 knowledge, and the science of this are shown in no 
 other way. It is a rational, ascertainable revelation, 
 which though undiscoverable by the human mind, 
 may be verified by it, and afterwards be accepted as 
 a divine possession; standing above the mind as a 
 feeding light and love, the source of all truth, genius 
 and faculty. 
 
 It can be studied, though only on its own con- 
 ditions, of " dubitative affirmative," not " dubitative 
 negative," and a reverent, humble, teachable and 
 
 THE APOCAL YPSE RE VEALED. 309 
 
 most open spirit of inquiry is the first condition of 
 conditions. In this it is not altogether unhke other 
 subjects new to the mind. The student, generally 
 speaking, must be a pupil of the thing studied, and 
 not Its master, or lawgiver. He must accept the 
 axioms of mathematics before he can enter the pro- 
 positions. For the occasion at any rate he must 
 open perception itself to affirm the axiom of a Lord 
 God, of a heaven, of a spiritual world, and a spirit 
 m man ; and the postulate of a revelation having 
 personal reference to himself and to all other beings. 
 He may with these provisional states of admission 
 upon him approach the Word as the new kingdom to 
 be studied. And if he can conquer himself so far as 
 to discern that he knows nothing about the subject 
 to begin with, and therefore has at first no objections 
 to make, he is equipped for a fair and hopeful entry 
 into the divine mathesis. 
 
 LXXX. 
 
 THE APOCALYPSE REVEALED. 
 
 Perhaps the best book that the reverent scientist, 
 who owns his emptiness on these subjects, can study,' 
 is The Apocalypse Eevealed, by Swedenborg. It 
 has many qualifications for instruction. Not being 
 historical, but written by pure correspondences, the 
 Apocalypse in its natural sense does not carry the 
 mmd in a strong current, but the symbols are free to 
 receive and bring down the spiritual life. The 
 white horse and his rider can more easily signify the 
 Lord supreme in the pure understanding of the truth 
 of the Word, than if the symbol were part and parcel of 
 
 .1 1 
 
M^ 
 
 310 THE APOCAL YFSE RE VEALED. 
 
 apparently mundane history. For the learner there 
 is the advantage of something abstract and mathe- 
 matical in the concrete images which body forth the 
 revelation. In one sense they are the truths, ideas 
 and events of the divine intellect in apprehensible 
 forms. And the symbols being a great handful, 
 often ^repeated, and always with reference and ex- 
 actitude, as from past to present propositions, with 
 constant backward openings to living axioms and 
 postulates of spiritual necessity, the working of them 
 so to speak, is learnt; the woof from the inner Word 
 to the outer is noticed in its lines; and the symbols 
 are confirmed in their meanings by repetition to the 
 scientific faculty. Then the Apocalypse, the easiest 
 book in the Word to follow in its spiritual sense, is 
 also the ultimate book of the Word, and illuminates 
 the spiritual sense of the whole as the end of the 
 divine drama. A perceptive delight follows in the 
 discovery that the most inscrutable member of the 
 biblical records opens its bosom most easily, and is the 
 least secretive, to the spiritual key in the only hand 
 which can unlock it. Moreover, the Apocalypse with 
 overflowing light treats of the end of the old church, 
 and of the beginning of the New Church, or New 
 Jerusalem, and consequently of the prodigious for- 
 tunes and destinies of the present day; and thus the 
 spiritual sense correlates with history, and is con- 
 firmed by it, though it cannot be criticized from 
 history; because it does not treat of outward events, 
 but of the principles and institutions of good and 
 evil as they work towards their ends and consumma- 
 tions in the natural world. The prophetic nature of 
 the spiritual sense, its opening from above into the 
 time and space of mankind, also reveals itself under 
 a scientific garb, and rationally illustrates prophecy, 
 
 THE A UTHORITY OF S WEDENBORG. 3 1 1 
 
 while it points with open hand to the history which 
 is soon to come. It is the book of the doom of the 
 churches and the anti-churches, and treats necessarily 
 of science itself in its old form and in its new. The 
 book of the divine exploration of humanity before 
 the last judgment in 1757; of the mode of the 
 judgment; of the new order which succeeds; and of 
 the Divine Humanity as all in all, the King of 
 Kings and Lord of Lords. It is not however a 
 commentator s interpretation that Swedenborg shows, 
 a meaning of the letter, but a new concrete Word, a 
 new spiritual Word or body, which is a soul and a 
 mind in the mind and body of the letter; just as t 
 man in the spiritual world is not an abstraction and 
 metaphysic of the man in nature, but a complete 
 man in every sense of the term; an immeasurably 
 detailed man. This is a stumblinof-block to the 
 metaphysician and the scientist; he expects a pure 
 reason and he gets a man, clothed and in his right 
 mind, instead; and so in the Word, he expects a 
 pure exegesis, and he finds a new Word on a second 
 divine plane of reality. 
 
 THE AUTHORITY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 A word is proper here concerning the authority of 
 Swedenborg. It seems as if it were appealed to as 
 absolute and unquestionable, but it is not so. It has 
 no likeness to the authority of a church, of a voting 
 council, or of an infallible Pope. It decrees nothing. 
 He himself says virtually. Head and judge of what 
 I say, but wuth reason : use the rational faculty fairly 
 
 fl 
 
 *L 
 .•I 
 
 s\ 
 
 \ 
 
It 
 
 I 
 
 312 THE A UTHORITY OF SWEDENBORG, 
 
 and honestly with all its light upon me. Over a 
 spiritual temple of the New Jerusalem he saw 
 written, ''Nunc licet I' and the interpretation was, 
 "Now it is allowed to mankind to enter intellec- 
 tually into the mysteries of faith." His authority 
 therefore for personal things is that of his personal 
 character; and for the doctrines and principles put 
 forth, their verisimilitude as the theory and truth of 
 each case before inscrutable, and then their commen- 
 surateness with reason, and lastly their reaching 
 down into the common sense of mankind, where they 
 meet the whole question of use to man, and settle in 
 it and found upon it. In short, the authority of 
 Swedenborg is the constant verdict of the jury of all 
 the best faculties of human nature and knowledge 
 proclaiming with a substantial voice. This is so, and 
 this is so. The authority is therefore continuous and 
 correlate with the authority of the multiplication 
 table, though the apprehending faculty and condi- 
 tions are different. And it is irrational and unneces- 
 sary to embargo the whole assent of any man to all 
 Swedenborg s positions, when many a man does not 
 know the positions, and cannot assent upon them 
 rationally, and as it were swear to them. What we 
 do know is so self-evident at last, and so light-giving, 
 that the mind need not doubt that the rest is worthy 
 of the illuminated man ; but no dogma of authority 
 can be reared to cover unknown grounds or preten- 
 sions, where the exercise of the rational mind is 
 appealed to in order that the authority itself may be 
 authenticated. In a word, the old churches appeal 
 to privilege and traditive dogma, or to blind faith, 
 and the Pope to his own infallibility, as authoritative ; 
 Swedenborg appeals to the human mind itself in its 
 rational faculty, and claims from it, as it opens more 
 
 IMPERFECTION DOES NOT HINDER. 
 
 Z^Z 
 
 and more, a new authority of its own in spiritual 
 things; the authority of private reason first, and of 
 universal private use. 
 
 LXXXII. 
 
 HUMAN IMPERFECTION DOES NOT HINDER. 
 
 Nor is Swedenborgs use to mankind deranged 
 in consequence of any shortcomings which were the 
 result of the imperfections of his mind, or of the 
 limitation of his age. A man is no perfect being 
 who can supersede the faculties of other men; and 
 his instrumentality for high ends, while it confers all 
 its benefits upon his fellow-creatures, inevitably de- 
 clares his own struggles and imperfections. The 
 higher the instrumentaHty, the more the divine way 
 and light in it reveal the weakness of the medium. 
 When Swedenborg tells us that the spiritual sense 
 of the Word was communicated to him by no angel 
 or spirit, but by the Lord alone, it need not import 
 that his rational mind to which the communication 
 was given, was at all times and in all respects ade- 
 quate to the message; that his knowledge of the 
 letter of Scripture was unfailing, or his scholarship 
 miraculous, and so, beyond the condition of the 
 learning of his age. His receptive faculties were 
 natural, though clearly illuminated. Being natural, 
 they belonged to the eighteenth century and not to 
 the nineteenth. The river of truths which he dis- 
 covered to men, the Euphrates and the Nile and the 
 Thames of the Word, is water of life from the Lord 
 alone. His shape of statement is in the form of his 
 own mind, and shares its limits. A great writer 
 
J 
 
 I 
 
 !|1 
 
 111 
 
 314 IMPERFECTION DOES NOT HINDER. 
 
 complains that all his angels and spirits Swedenbor- 
 gize. The complaint strikes at the root of author- 
 ship He might as well object that Shakespear has 
 written his own English instead of all the languages 
 of all his characters. What else could the spirits and 
 angels do, seeing that in order to be presented to 
 this world at all, their high speech had to be trans- 
 lated into Swedenborg's natural mind; for they could 
 not be reported verbatim where, in their articles, the 
 two lancruages and planes are absolutely incommen- 
 surate. ''Rightly seen, the personality of Swedenborg 
 in the case is of twofold use. First, it bnngs the 
 matters home to us men because they come through 
 a plain man's voice. Secondly, it constitutes freedom 
 along with rationality into the proper student of the 
 writings of this herald. You are to take nothing 
 for granted ; only keep your mind open to the good, 
 the true, and the useful. You need quash no criti- 
 cism, provided on this ground of openness, it pro- 
 ceeds from the dubitative affirmative, not from the 
 dubitative negative bias of the heart. The integrity 
 of the writings of Swedenborg is their claim to the 
 attention of mankind; and this itself is an organon 
 for clearing away mistakes and imperfections; let us 
 rather say, for coming to a full perception of the 
 progressive character of the works. 
 
 The Word of the Lord stands now on the same 
 ground thus far, that the letter apart or in itself 
 belongs to the past, and reflects the minds and 
 styles of many writers; and moreover, in the Old 
 Testament, is addressed to a people who required a 
 writing by appearances which are not apposite to 
 Christians; for Jehovah with Jewish passions is the 
 divinity of Judaism: and this appearance of the 
 Lord is not a real truth. Yet the spiritual sense is 
 
 A NEW MIND FROM CORRESPONDENCES, 315 
 
 contained, and is the precious kernel defended 
 against Judaism by the rough shell of the letter 
 which exercised divine statesmanship of uses for a 
 time. 
 
 The spiritual sense will do a work in restoring the 
 canon of Holy Scripture. Criticism is paving the 
 way, though it appears to be vivisecting and destroy- 
 ing the letter. But when the spiritual sense is read, 
 and new generations live in it, and in true doctrines 
 derived from the letter, an illuminated canon can be 
 the result, and readings be adopted from perception 
 divinely given, so that each age shall be signalized 
 by some restoration of the jods and tittles of the 
 Word, whose whole kingdom is to come. 
 
 IF- 
 
 LXXXIIL 
 
 A NEW MIND FROM CORRESPONDENCES. 
 
 To return to the subject of correspondences, it will 
 be found to have an important bearing upon the 
 fields of human knowledge. It is in fact, so far as it 
 is revealed, a world of trutlis standing over things, and 
 waiting to be incorporated with them, and to give 
 them living souls. Take for example the correspon- 
 dences of animals, or of elements, in the Word; of 
 the horse, the cow, the sheep, the dog; or of light 
 and heat. The horse corresponds to the understand- 
 ing of truth; the cow, to good natural affections in 
 their organic verity; for affections are forms, if we 
 can see them, and live upon the spiritual hills: 
 the sheep corresponds to the good of innocence, 
 which is an organic inhabitant intimate in all heaven, 
 and sheep and lambs appear around it as its ultima- 
 
 
i 
 
 316 A NEW MIND FROM CORRESPONDENCES, 
 
 tions : the Good Shepherd can have none other than 
 his own innocence as his flock. The dog corresponds 
 to lusts, which are organic ; and in the plastic world 
 above, these work their way forth, and show dogs in 
 the spiritual sphere. Light corresponds to divine 
 light, which is the daylight of truth from the Lord; 
 and heat to His divine love. The influence of these 
 correspondences upon the minds which receive them, 
 is this. They stand within, impregnable to natural- 
 ism, and invisible to its eyes, and straightly limit it 
 to the surfaces and skins and hairy bodies of things ; 
 they have done with it excepting that it is under 
 their feet. And because the correspondences stand 
 in a great army in the Word, and front nature now 
 friendly to spiritual truth, the new mind cannot but 
 endeavour to discover the. spiritual truth in the 
 natural; to perceive in the sheep for instance, the 
 very table and signature of innocence, which is its 
 explanatory soul ; to read this in its habits and ways, 
 in its form, in its organization, in its little lambs : in 
 short to work this innocent science from above down- 
 wards, or from the Word of God to the works. 
 This royal process entitles reason afresh as it passes 
 through us. The same holds of the other instances. 
 This therefore is the march of divine self-evidence 
 upon the creation, and the capture of it for the uses 
 of the natural human mind. Of course, the new 
 points of light are feeble indeed; for at this day who 
 knows anything rationally and organically of *^ under- 
 standing of truth," of '' good affections," of '' the good 
 of innocence," of ''divine light," and of '^ divine 
 heat"? But they are new points of light; that is 
 the main first demonstration; and by the mercy of 
 the Lord who is essential light, they determine to 
 themselves currents of light according as they are 
 
 SPIRITUAL CREATION OF CORRELATES 317 
 
 implanted in the affections of use and of good. Thus 
 they can continually magnify in light and certainty, 
 and learn their own method, though in the most 
 gradual way; for the human mind is a hard world, 
 and the theological are longer than the geological 
 ages. A wonderful thing is, that these created 
 centres of new light all come out of the opened 
 Word; for the human mind, which often suggests 
 correspondences in poetry and in common language, 
 does not fix them in fact; it is not of their kingdom 
 until the Word dominates it. Therefore the feeble- 
 ness of the shining of these knowledge-stars in the 
 present night, their remoteness, their newness, their 
 nearness as they are appreciated, argues their solar 
 quality, and that each one of them is the indwelling 
 light and life of its own system of things. Constef 
 lated in the Word, they are, in their complex, the 
 central animating sun of knowledge; the effort of 
 the Word is with them; and it is foreshown with 
 rational certainty, that they will enter the knowing 
 faculties by degrees, and show nature in her corre- 
 spondences as the plenum of the divine wisdom : that 
 they will materially proclaim the incarnation of good 
 and evil in every sphere, and exhibit the physical 
 world also as the ultimated theatre of divine iudo-- 
 ments. 
 
 .; 
 
 LXXXIV. 
 
 SPIRITUAL CREATION OF CORRELATES. 
 
 It is all one mightier system of correlates. If 
 force arrested wdll engender the new form, heat, 
 what is there against the revealed fact, that the 
 spiritual understanding of the Word likewise ar- 
 
i\ 
 
 3 1 8 SPIRITUAL CREA TION OF CORRELA TES. 
 
 rested, or passing to a new plane, shall show the 
 horse-form smitten forth on the creative anvil as an 
 organic ultimate; and that the qualities of the 
 houses, black, pale, and red, shall embody and 
 demonstrate the dire quality of the perverted under- 
 standing, and the white horse with the Word of 
 God upon him, the pure understanding \ The cor- 
 relation may be perfect. Study i^t in its extent m 
 the Word, and in all natural knowledge of the 
 horse also, and see whether it is not organic know- 
 
 ^ Correlation itself, what it is, may be seen rationally 
 from these considerations; that it is the wreaking 
 of a superior internal force upon a lower and outer 
 plane, where it cannot be presented in itselt, but 
 only re-presented in an organic or other image Cor- 
 respondence begins from God, and arrest of force 
 may stand as a formula for it in its downward or 
 creative process. The supreme creation of heaven, 
 the celestial sphere, the protomorph of the rest, does 
 not exist without arrest of force, for otherwise it 
 would be merely the divinity still ; whereas it is 
 distinct creation ; divinity abstracting itself, and 
 leavincr its likeness, not itself, as an agent with a 
 freedom in it and around it; a likeness capable of 
 reaction, and therefore a plane of resistance to the 
 divine love, to the divine force. In the ultimate 
 world that is to say in nature, the plane of reaction, 
 or resistance to the divine force, stands forth as the 
 natural man; and afterwards, through regeneration, 
 and then through death, by putting off coverings, he 
 comes into the sphere which he has attained by his 
 life here, and peoples some plane of the first arrest 
 of divine forces into the natural, the spiritual, or the 
 celestial heavens. Each of these, like nature, is 
 
 SPIRITUAL CREATION OF CORRELATES 319 
 
 made of planes of arrest of force, the lowest plane 
 always bounding and supporting the rest. For 
 example, the angelic human affections must go forth 
 below themselves, as well as to the Lord, and to 
 man around them; they must not only, as South 
 says, proceed " in direct fervours of love to God, and 
 in collateral emissions of charity to man;" but they 
 must love, and think, and see, and act, down to the 
 end of creatures and creations; and imaging God, 
 rest there upon the goodly universe of things. This 
 means that they suffer distinct and orderly arrest of 
 force in created and creative planes. And this 
 again means that striking the highest plane out of 
 themselves, their affections externized engender by 
 the divine force which is all in all, the forms of all 
 noble domestic animals, in which the affections are 
 re-presented ; on the lower ground these could not 
 reappear as angelic men and women, but they come 
 to the new Adam as beasts of heavenly use and 
 heavenly burden. Cows and sheep are arrested 
 good affections full of human kindness to the kind. 
 So the thoughts that fly from these affections, strik- 
 ing their limit, and smitten by the stroke into a new 
 order, as heat arrested becomes light, represent 
 winged organic thoughts in the kingdom of all 
 noble birds. On a further plane of resistance the 
 whole vegetable kingdom arises as a harmony struck 
 from the lyre of its ordained degree of life; and the 
 mineral ground in and on which all closes, is the last 
 firm correlation of the divine love and wisdom 
 Who is essential man, and of all men and women 
 "who are man because they are His images and like- 
 nesses. 
 
 The subject seems remote at first; but so does 
 astronomy to the savage man; so does the correla- 
 
 % 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
l^ 
 
 i 
 
 320 SPIRITUAL CREATION OF CORRELATES. 
 
 tion of motion to heat, and of heat to light, and to 
 magnetism. There is no ratio between the latter 
 terms until experience has demonstrated the con- 
 vertibility of the one into the other; after which, in 
 the mind, a kinship springs up, and we find that they 
 are not only real things, but as forces, cognate ; and 
 presently the deduction comes that there is but one 
 force which arrested becomes on occasion all other 
 forces. Now in the substantial correspondences 
 adduced above, there is also experience, though a re- 
 vealed experience, — revealed for the sufficient reason 
 that it could not have been attained without revela- 
 tion; a revealed zoologia and zoonomia. And 
 although at first no man could divine that a lion in 
 the Word is correlate with the mighty power of truth 
 from good (or the opposite), and a lamb, with the 
 good of innocence, and that the arrest of these 
 qualities out of man presents those forms as its ne- 
 cessities, yet when the subject is sufficiently received 
 to be studied, it is found that the higher and the 
 lower terms of the lives, human and animal, answer 
 to each other more self-evidently than motion to 
 
 heat, or heat to light. 
 
 The argument means to imply that because of the 
 novelty of the thought that organic and inorganic 
 creations are all arrests of force and correlates of 
 each other, the thought cannot be rejected, inasmuch 
 as it is the same thought as that which discovers the 
 correlation of natural forces. Forms, wherever they 
 be, are the houses of indwelling forces; and if force 
 correlates with force, the many mansions which it 
 inhabits do themselves correlate also. Thus then 
 forms, full of influx and emitting influx, strike their 
 downward Hmit, and produce the forms next below 
 them, which are their proximate correspondences. 
 
 JUDGMENT B V CORRESPONDENCES, 3 2 1 
 
 If • I 
 
 LXXXV. 
 
 JUDGMENT BY CORRESPONDENCES. 
 
 The subject of correspondences is Word-embracing 
 and world-embracing. It links the perceptive mind 
 of the earliest people, the Adamic Church, to modern 
 science, in the doctrine of correlation. It runs from 
 Genesis to the Apocalypse, and combines the Word 
 into one book, and brings its ages under one inspira- 
 tion. It unites heaven and earth, and in the Word is 
 the grove and trysting-place of the communion of 
 souls. It attests creation as coming down from one 
 source. It opens innumerable universes to science; 
 each larger, and nearer to human love, than the 
 whole field of past knowledge. It is the sea into 
 which all the little rivers of human genius run. It 
 is the drama and scenery of Divine Providence in 
 the worlds. It is awfulness of sublimity and beauty; 
 harmony to the landscape-end for the homes of 
 heaven; justice and judgment from the ground up- 
 wards to injustice and to evil. It builds the out- 
 ward heavens from heavens within the man; and the 
 outward hells from within likewise. It is the realm 
 of consequences, stronger than unauthenticated fate. 
 In short, it is creation as a discourse on the text, 
 ''Do unto others as ye would that others should do 
 unto you;" and it implies that every form is divinely 
 appointed to fit the case of men; to carry forth the 
 delights of heaven, or to bring back the retributions 
 of wickedness. 
 
 Correspondence also enters the realm of circum- 
 stances in the spiritual world; and is now invading 
 the same realm in the natural world. It apportions 
 
3 2 2 JUDGMENT B V CORRESPONDENCES. 
 
 the lot of all mankind at last. It has riches and 
 poverty, dignity and dishonour, power and weakness, 
 in its grasp. In the spiritual world, it is history. 
 In the natural world, where evil often seems to 
 triumph, it is not obviously so. The case can there- 
 fore better be illustrated from the spiritual side, 
 especially as it shines down thence completely into 
 common sense. Let the possession of wealth and 
 honours be an instance. These are apportioned 
 exactly according to the use made of them ; they be- 
 long to no man and to no angel : any proprietor may 
 do what he likes with his own; but then nothing is 
 his own excepting his bare selfhood which cannot be 
 administered in heaven ; for heaven consists in the 
 administration not of natures but of the divine gifts. 
 The princes and dukes of heaven have wealth and 
 power, and splendour of edifices, but it is because 
 their titles and title-deeds are within them ; in a life 
 of correspondences no mean soul can have much 
 more than the value of himself: more he has because 
 of the divine mercy. The great there are only con- 
 scious channels of administration. They are not the 
 proprietors but the prime ministers of the govern- 
 ment of their revenues. Their mental genius and its 
 powers are not for their own glory or supereminence, 
 but for service : if appropriated to self, their minds 
 collapse for that state, and their inspiration ends. 
 These are obvious heavenly conditions, and apply to 
 all the gifts of the Lord. In heaven there are no 
 possible great purses for self-enjoyment; no bankers 
 that can hold a balance for the selfhood ; no securi- 
 ties ; no states ruled for imperial, or national glory ; 
 no books written for fame; no martyrs for crowns; 
 no actors for applause; no newspapers for a public; 
 no privileges but those of superior use from higher 
 
 JUDGMENT B Y CORRESPONDENCES 323 
 
 disinterestedness : no measure of life but the Lord s 
 
 approbation within the man. And now it is to be 
 
 borne in mind, that this, which is but plain if not 
 
 obvious good sense, stands also revealed to experience 
 
 in Swedenborgs writings of the New Jerusalem. 
 
 He knew as familiar acquaintances the rich and 
 
 the poor in heaven, and saw that the wealth and the 
 
 poverty all through is a spiritual fact first, and then 
 
 an external necessity. He knew there that a prince 
 
 not princely in the Lord is an impossibility, and that 
 
 a millionaire centred in his own gold can have no 
 
 gold, because gold corresponds to the good of love. 
 
 He also witnessed the Last Judgment, which 
 
 brought this heaven of things close down as a plane 
 
 of induction of power to the earth. And because 
 
 this coming down, this descent, was and is the 
 
 descent of the New Jerusalem, he showed in and 
 
 from the Word that a divine correspondence is at 
 
 work, and that the same kingdom is impending here, 
 
 and will be realized. 
 
 It is but a correlation of forces. The new heavens, 
 the Lord within expanding them, arrested by the 
 resistent plane of the dominions and riches of the 
 earth, reappear in a new mind among men urgent for 
 the deeds and sacrifices of regenerative natural 
 righteousness. The law first in time is. Property. 
 No man can throw his selfhood — his proprium — to 
 the winds without becoming nobody. And with his 
 inalienable selfhood follow his possessions and 
 powers, material and mental; his genius, his castle, 
 his income, and his influence. These are the bur- 
 dens he has to bear to the end of his day's work, and 
 the government he is bound to administer. They 
 will all require to be spent wisely on the service of 
 others; his private income, voted from time to time 
 
 It. 
 
 I 
 
ill 
 
 ir; 
 
 * 
 
 3 24 JUDGMENT B V CORRESPONDENCES. 
 
 by his conscience, being what is needed by himself 
 as the vessel of his divine use; truly an honourable 
 vessel deserving of honour; a loving, worthy of 
 delight; a bountiful vessel, capacious for pleasure; a 
 beautiful vessel, fit to be centred in beautiful places. 
 But the vessel, in the wisdom and intelligence of a 
 gifted conscience, will take care of itself The 
 major thing is, the correspondence with heavenly 
 doings, the public humane administration. The 
 commonwealth is a great idea; the service of the 
 wealth of each for all, and of all for each; the 
 solidarity of the nation and people. The New 
 Jerusalem correlates with this, but is more than this; 
 the national selfhood is traversed by it from above ; 
 and the Lord descends into the wealth and power of 
 men, and claims them. These are to be administered 
 for men, but for God in men. The idea of the 
 commonwealth is changed as a belonging into the 
 spirit of the new proprietor, into the acknowledg- 
 ment of the Godwealth. Here again is a new com- 
 incy down, and a new channel of administration. 
 
 It will not long be possible in this nation for 
 power and wealth to stand indifferent to the divine 
 claims arising not of desert but of duty from weak- 
 ness and poverty. It will not be maintainable as a 
 fact that the rich and the poor have no relations but 
 those of service and wages. The external circum- 
 stances of the poorer classes are the proper dukedom 
 of the rich. The duke's drawing-room and picture 
 gallery is the measure of what he thinks in his 
 present conscience a man ought to have. It is an 
 expressed word which judges his dukeship with 
 regard to all inhabitation in which he is concerned. 
 At least it imports decency and comfort in all houses. 
 As the New Jerusalem life comes more and more to 
 
 
 JUDGMENT B V CORRESPONDENCES, 325 
 
 confront him with his dominions, viz., the homes of 
 the poor, correspondence must work upon him, and 
 universal rebuilding be the consequence. It is not 
 his business to infringe the freedom of the poor, to 
 police their habits, to vaccinate them, or apply 
 theories to their bodies and lives; every poor man 
 will be increasingly a freeman as time rolls on. But 
 being a duke or leader, a great administrator of 
 wealth, it is his business in his domain to provide 
 habitations into which decency can enter, and where 
 it can have a home; into which family life can enter, 
 and where clean love can Hve, and clean children can 
 be reared. Into which vice and indecency also can 
 enter, and if they are adventitious, be incited to 
 reform; if they are radical and inveterate, be voided 
 out of society, and into bonds, or deserts, by swift 
 excretion and elimination. The correlation of the 
 new heavens, in which righteousness dwells in its 
 city, four square, with the new earth, which is the 
 newly awakened conscience, will exact this first of 
 all for this great town of London, on which, in the 
 spiritual world, the Last Judgment first set its 
 executive mark. Dumb dog London, now vivi- 
 sected in its lowest parts by the landlordism of the 
 love of this world, its gauds and pleasures, will have 
 to be regarded as a living soul, and its whole body 
 treated accordingly. And this must be done first 
 by its dukes, not by its communes. Swedenborg, in 
 speaking of the English in the spiritual world, 
 notices as one of their ''faculties of recovery," that 
 they listen to those who are over them, who are in 
 fact their higher classes. This weighs as a responsi- 
 bility upon wealth and power, without due adminis- 
 tration of which responsibility the commune cannot 
 be properly invaded by the aristoi. The commune 
 
 *i\ 
 
 |.| 
 
326 TRANSFORMATION <&* TRANSFIG URA TION. 
 
 can do nothing of itself; it is general and proto- 
 plastic; clay requiring a potter. *'Men called and 
 chosen and faithful," real dukes, who can serve with 
 the singleness of wisdom which we want, must step 
 forth now to enact the correspondence between the 
 city above, and the city below into which the 
 difficult descent is to be made. 
 
 Enough has now been said to show that correspon- 
 dence, not only as a science, but as a duty, reigns 
 through all that is good and true in either world ; 
 that it builds the spiritual world in its kingdoms and 
 circumstances, in the love that inspires and consti- 
 tutes the freedom of the heavens, and in the justice 
 that closes in the prisons of the hells. Also that its 
 pressure through the two organs, namely, human 
 love, and human justice, is upon society, for conser- 
 vation, reconstruction, repression, and elimination. 
 And that it comes down from a new order of things 
 already instituted above ; and which, with the truths 
 of correspondence from the earliest time, has been 
 made known to mankind by the writings of Sweden- 
 
 borg. 
 
 LXXXVI. 
 
 TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSFIGURATION. 
 
 Passing from the correspondence of higher with 
 lower states, let us look for a moment at the up- 
 ward ladder of correspondence, far more difficult to 
 see than the lower ladder. The lower ladder is 
 transformation. The wave of the higher kingdom 
 of life which is love, striking a prepared lower plane, 
 which is already organific or ovate to receive the 
 loved vibration, and to propagate it, rises up there 
 
 TRANSFORMATION 6- TRANSFIG URATION. 327 
 
 in another form; the innocence within the angel, 
 kindled by the divine heat and light, becomes not 
 only living but heavenly innocence; and lower down, 
 flocks of sheep and lambs with a world of their pas- 
 ture, a new love and light of life, assume visible 
 being, as it were spontaneous sculptures of life from 
 the quarry of the lower plane. Innocent pairs of 
 men and women on one side of the line equate in the 
 divine algebra with flocks of sheep, lower forms of 
 innocence on the other. Transformation is eflTected, 
 and is exactly perpetual. But the divine life in im- 
 mediate correspondence exceeds this law, and is not 
 transformation, but transfiguration. It is indeed 
 plenary correspondence, but the thing attained is so 
 much more than its ground, such a mere bounty of 
 mercy, that it cannot be seen or predicted or at first 
 thought of from the lower plane. The eyes must be 
 transfigured to follow it. The cardinal instances of 
 this are presented in the Lord s transfiguration and 
 ascension. When the disciples went up the mount 
 with Him,— the mount is a holy induction of state in 
 which He reigned over their selfhoods for a time, 
 and consequently they saw with new eyes,— His 
 countenance shone as the sun, and His raiment was 
 white as the light. They could not know from their 
 poor natures what He is like when He reveals Him- 
 self as Himself. By no passage of reason could 
 they believe that it was He, until He took them up 
 the mount. And yet it was an exhibited correspon- 
 dence with His bent and bowed humanity divinely 
 infilled. Each of His precepts, lived in His life ; each 
 line of the Sermon on the Mount ; that common com- 
 mandment, '' Do unto others as ye would that others 
 should do unto you ;" seen in struggle on the plain of 
 the day s work, is a mere morality of the conscience. 
 
 
 !• 
 
 iJ 
 
ir 
 
 328 TRANSFORMATION &- TRANSFIGURATION 
 
 a bowed man and woman of sorrows ; but afterwards 
 on the mount of the revealed love which follows the 
 work, is crowned with the aureole of the spiritual 
 sun, shines in its strength, and has new eyes for 
 the Creator and Redeemer. Also forecasts a new 
 time and world of uprightness, and enters upon its 
 vision; or sees Moses and Elias, the law and the 
 prophets, conversing with the Lord. As it is with 
 '' the mountain of the transfiguration," so also is it 
 with " the greater mountain of the ascension." But 
 herein He was parted from the disciples, and received 
 up into heaven. Representatively He quitted the 
 plane of nature and open perception, and though 
 Lord of heaven and earth now, yet he crowned the 
 freedom of man by becoming invisible except to 
 faith, unfelt save by love, and unauthoritative save 
 for awakened conscience. No natural man could 
 have thought that the Saviour who grasped him, 
 and said. Fear not, it is I ! should seem to leave 
 him, and be parted from him, and become of His 
 own divine freewill, only a memory and an influence : 
 that so the spirit might com^, and under it man 
 decide freely upon his own fortunes. And yet here 
 there is strict correspondence with all that the Lord's 
 life was hitherto, and with tke fact that His mercy 
 is over all His works. His invisibility is the last 
 transfiguration of redeeming love and power. "Verily 
 thou art a God that hidest thyself, God of Israel, 
 the Saviour." In taking the throne of heaven, He 
 confirmed by His own act and deed the freedom of 
 mankind to do well, or ill ; and set His seal on the 
 forehead of the whole earth with its nations and 
 peoples, to the perpetual progress of civil and reli- 
 gious and personal liberty, the new magna charta 
 of empire, of which His ascension is the beginning. 
 
 TRANSFORMATION &> TRANSFIGURATION 329 
 
 As with the Lord, so with the Word ; its spiritual 
 sense is no transformation of the letter, but a trans- 
 figuration; it cannot be divined from the letter, but 
 the knowledge of it comes from above. When it is 
 revealed, it is seen to correspond to the letter, and 
 to be correlate with it; the bridge of correspondence 
 conjoins the two senses. And ultimately the ex- 
 ternal sense or letter becomes to the rational mind 
 so penetrated by the flowing of the internal sense, 
 that it also is transfigured, and the spiritual sense is 
 visible in it. Such is the force of the fact of corre- 
 spondence with the divine influx of life inherent in it, 
 that it is perpetually insinuating souls into things, 
 being in short the ensouling principle of all bodies 
 and forms; the reason of the cohabitation of soul and 
 body, spirit and letter. 
 
 The like case holds with men and women after 
 death; they are the same men and women, the same 
 characteristic people ; in themselves transformed, but 
 if they become angels, transfigured also. The natural 
 mind itself with its modes and perceptions, its 
 '^ senses and categories and pure intuitions" and 
 what you will, has been put aside, and a mind incon- 
 ceivable to man in mere nature, is now the only 
 external plane of perception. No man would know 
 his own internal man after this putting off" if he saw 
 him presented in this world; and yet he corresponds 
 to the whole character of the outer man; not to the 
 lineaments of a moment, but to the purposed ways 
 of the lifetime. A further diflBculty of discerning 
 by natural light the correspondences of transfigura- 
 tion, is, that when the spiritual man is opened to the 
 Lord, and receives Him, he is beyond himself, the 
 divine beauty endows him, and from no spiritual 
 state of his own could he know himself as he then is. 
 
 
 
 •1 
 
 1 
 
330 TRANSFORMA TION d^• TRANSFIG URA TION. 
 
 The like holds also with regard to evil and 
 opposite states. Evil men in their hells are spiritual, 
 mental and bodily monsters according to their reign- 
 ing love of wickedness. On earth, they would not 
 know themselves if their inner monstrosity were re- 
 vealed in its shape. They could not conceive their 
 own consequences. In the hells, they do not seem 
 monstrous to themselves, because evil does not seem 
 monstrous to them but delightful, but if the light of 
 heaven, the divine truth, enters, they know their 
 enormities of form. Swedenborg saw that this light 
 is mercifully not let in upon them, in order that they 
 may still be seemly to each other, and able to 
 associate; when yet they are horrible in the upper 
 reality. They are exact deformities equated to the 
 whole organic nature of the indulgence of self at the 
 expense of heaven and the neighbour. They are not 
 however transfigurations in an evil sense; because 
 they are never carried beyond themselves; but 
 carried out in and into themselves; which makes 
 them monsters. 
 
 There is no image of transfiguration in nature 
 except in the regeneration of men, which however 
 would and will transfigure nature. The Lord was 
 not evolved from the son of Mary, but Jehovah, His 
 soul, by combats against evil, and conquest over evil 
 in a daily life, transfigured the first humanity until 
 the natural became the Divine Humanity. The 
 spiritual sense of the Word is not evolved from be- 
 low from the letter, but it is revealed down into the 
 letter, and illuminates it. The spiritual man is not 
 the sublimation of the natural man, but his subjuga- 
 tion and regeneration. The senses are not the 
 creators of the mind, but the mind comes down into 
 their planes, and there feeds and infils its own grow- 
 
 THE LA WS OF NATURE. 
 
 331 
 
 ing natural organizations. Therefore there is no 
 upward ladder of correspondences in nature alone, 
 but only analogies, of all things with each other, and 
 of beasts with men, and so forth. But creation of 
 form from form is not discernible here; and the only 
 evolution is of things themselves, as of stem from 
 root, and leaf from branch, and flower and fruit 
 in their order. The evolution is always by cor- 
 respondences, marital and conjugial facts and acts, 
 and not from matrices alone. The nature of ma- 
 terialists is a lone woman, the widow of a god, and 
 as such has no children, but only stock, not to be 
 accounted for by matter. 
 
 h 
 
 LXXXVII. 
 
 THE LAWS OF NATURE AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 The regeneration of men in this world, introduc- 
 ing their minds into harmony with the ends of the 
 creation, will however, as said above, produce the 
 spiritual fact of correspondence here also. When 
 the flow of divine ends is received by the freewill 
 unperverted, and in order, the mind of man will 
 consciously co-administer with God, the powers of 
 creation. There are two things for the natural 
 world; the laws of nature in their immeasurable 
 fixity, — the reign of law; the human will having 
 nothing to do with these laws but to obey them ; for 
 the selfhood of man is mercifully their slave. The 
 other thing is the reign of God in man. The con- 
 sequences of this on nature are seen in the Lord s 
 life on earth. There is nothing miraculous in the 
 maker of suns and solar systems, and of men, women 
 
 f 'I 
 
 i A 
 
332 
 
 THE LA WS OF NATURE 
 
 and children, raising the dead, multiplying the loaves 
 and fishes, walking upon the sea, rising from the 
 dead, and ascending into heaven; and the Lord 
 Jesus Christ is that maker. Nature, the breath of 
 His lips from the first, obeys His thoughts, because 
 it is His outspeech. His life shows what will be 
 when collective man corresponds to Him, and carries 
 human correspondences down into nature. 
 
 This is expressed where it is said of the New Jeru- 
 salem that it has *'no need of the sun neither of 
 the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God does 
 lighten it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof." The 
 sun in a good sense is the divine love; but here, as 
 the New Jerusalem does not need the sun, self-love 
 is tlie opposed meaning. Now almost all the world's 
 work at present is carried on by self-love; were it 
 taken away, the industries of mankind would fall flat, 
 and the arms of the toiling millions be motiveless. 
 For self-love is the law of human nature. The moon, 
 the reflective mental organ and faculty, is intelligence 
 from self, intelligentia ex se, which intelligently carries 
 out the good and useful works compulsorily done 
 for the maintenance and in the service of the self- 
 hood. These are the faculties, prime movers in the 
 present world, which the world of regeneration that 
 comes down from above, will not need. The laws of 
 nature will then be voted by senates of life above 
 nature, not by nature. Already they correspond to 
 the states of regeneration. As this is effected, they 
 will be transfigured; the divine sun, which is 
 righteousness, will reign over the natural sun, which 
 is selfhood, and carry it out to conclusions miraculous 
 to selfhood, but corollaries of mans willing con- 
 junction with the Lord. 
 
 These things are hard to be imagined, because the 
 
 ANI? THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 333 
 
 human faculties are deformed by the service of self- 
 ishness, and their intellect and imagination are not 
 commensurate with the ends of nature. Creation is 
 not like their way of doing things. Hence the cur- 
 rent reasons, imaginations, and feelings of men are 
 not capable for the theoretical sciences, because the 
 motives behind are alien to God's motives. The 
 merchant does not make his business for reasons cor- 
 relate with the sea, the land, and the crops. The 
 philosopher does not contrive his theory that God 
 may flow through it for human uses, that the Word 
 may be heard sounding through the works. The 
 scientist does not explore nature that the spiritual 
 laws from which it emanates may be revealed to the 
 lowest honest mind in their ultimate forms on earth 
 The mind moves forth for power and profit and calory 
 and for these things nature does not move. So that 
 her hidden language, which is the Word, is not heard 
 still less understood. Men do indeed love truth very 
 much, but for themselves, not for the good of truth 
 This is the public state, and this is the reason of 
 materialism and atheism, and these are the reasons 
 of non-admission within the doors of nature; and of 
 burglarious attempts to enter her castles of truth by 
 lawless digging and horrid forms of life-breakino- 
 
 In the future, the sects will be tallied off* by their 
 capacity, from their several theological ideas, to open 
 the book of nature. The idea entertained of God is 
 the foundation life of the human mind. It is not a 
 faculty, but an act of reception of the Divine Person 
 All heathen mythological ideas, excepting in so far 
 as they are now interpretable by the science of cor- 
 respondences, have already been tried upon man and 
 nature, and their keys will not fit the lock The 
 mythologies of the old Christian Church are separate 
 
 *i 
 
 H 
 
334 
 
 THE LA WS OF NATURE 
 
 from the nature of things, and their professors stand 
 aloof, and leave nature to the unbelievers. Theism 
 has no key at all, having no ideas, but only a reverent 
 creed : it is a hypothesis of the unknown God ; or 
 rather was such in the days of Socrates : it is other 
 than that now, it is a neglect and denial of the known 
 because revealed God. It cannot make God out of 
 nature or human nature, because as an apprehensible 
 Person He is not in either. It has no mind adequate 
 to '' constructing God," and if logic were not merci- 
 fully overruled by the good affections of the heart, 
 atheism would be its victor. Obviously, the theory 
 of the unknown cannot correlate with the theory of 
 the known, which is nature ; in other words, theism 
 has no motive power to enable it to enter into and 
 ensoul science. Jupiter and Odin and Brahma fit 
 to certain parts of nature and human nature, — not 
 extensive parts, but real ones ; but theism as a theory 
 floats, and fits to nothing, and is so poor and impro- 
 bable in itself, that there can be in it none of the 
 courage to enable it to make marriage proposals to 
 nature. Moreover, the unsearchable One, in refus- 
 ing to reveal Himself to His children, would consti- 
 tute ignorant guessing, and not science, into the final 
 organon of the human faculties. There is now no 
 natural light in theism. 
 
 Into this arena of difficulty the New Church can 
 and does enter, and the Word of God, unlocked in its 
 spiritual sense by the science of correspondences, and 
 the Lord revealed in His divine humanity, stand as 
 the supreme theory of man and nature. The case being 
 this, that God is known, and can in the regeneration 
 of mankind be ever more and more known ; and 
 nature is known, and by honest impartial exploration 
 can be ever more and more known ; and the spiritual 
 
 AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD, 335 
 
 world, the process of God to the ultimates of nature, 
 IS also known; and the harmonizing of these three 
 gifts of knowledge is the entry of the integral human 
 faculties upon the knowledge of creation. As a 
 position and a new capacity, this result is due to 
 the rational revelations made in the writings of 
 Swedenborg. 
 
 The existing sciences are a preparation in Provi- 
 dence for the crowning truth of the Divine humanity, 
 upon which the coherent light of the mind depends! 
 For whoever works them, atheist, theist, or Chris- 
 tian, their order is fated to culminate in man. What- 
 ever does not begin from and end in his visible per- 
 son is imaginary. In tracing nature through all 
 developments up to man, the classification aims at 
 humanity perforce. Even gorillalogy is an arrow on 
 the bowstring of necessity shot for this mark. The 
 beginning is Jehovah creating ; He is the divine man. 
 Permeating all. His image, man, is His final natural 
 work. The perpetuity of his image is His care. 
 Unstable through evil. He renders it stable by taking 
 it upon Hinaself, and redeeming as well as creating 
 it. The chain of order is complete and invulnerable. 
 The divine river of truth mounts as high as its 
 source, and runs from God to God. The deduction is, 
 that by these illuminating doctrines of truth, nature 
 is permeable from one end to the other; her final 
 causes circulate in the arteries and veins of science ; 
 humanity is all in all in her births. Her Maker is a 
 man ; her Eedeemer is a man ; all who die out of 
 her into a higher or a lower life, are men still ; all 
 angels and all devils have been men; and thus 
 wherever science looks she discerns, besides her own 
 special objects, human qualities meant, and human 
 uses intended. 
 
336 E VIL FORMS AND E VENTS. 
 
 LXXXVIII. 
 
 EVIL FORMS AND EVENTS. 
 
 Nature is as full of evil forms as the human mind, 
 and these correspond to perversions in human nature. 
 They are created by God through man in the 
 spiritual world, and to man in tlie natural world. 
 They confront his evils in both cases. They are 
 images and likenesses of his humours, acts, and 
 intentions. On this account it is difficult, perhaps 
 impossible, for any internal artist to avoid trans- 
 planting humanity into animal forms from his pencil. 
 It may seem a contradiction if evil forms were 
 extant on earth before the human race. But God, 
 who gave freewill, or what is the same thing, created 
 man, knew the issues of it. He knew that man 
 would fall into self, and separate himself from God. 
 Creation was prepared for the event as if it had 
 already happened ; and the earth deflected to corre- 
 spond to, and justly to house, the humanity that 
 would be. Swedenborg proclaims the same of the 
 divine law. Moses broke the first tables of the law, 
 and other tables were given; and it was represented 
 thereby that the divine law in its pure expression 
 could not be given to the Jewish race; but a divine 
 accommodation correlated to their state; in which 
 Jehovah appeared clothed in the evil passions com- 
 prehensible to the people; but with righteousness 
 and judgment prevailing; the appearances hiding for 
 a divine statesmanship the light and love within. 
 And so with the world, and the pestilent part of its 
 inhabitants. It stands ready for the foreseen men 
 who will work upon it. And it is a justice, and a 
 
 E VIL FORMS AND E VENTS. 
 
 337 
 
 lesson, and an incitement to industry against evil; a 
 field for moral and spiritual science, and a revelation 
 in every nature of the forms of heaven, and the 
 shapes of hell. 
 
 Men have thought, and the number of such is 
 increasing, that they see over the head of nature, and 
 that her work could be corrected and improved. 
 "Well, so it could if it were her work. But if the 
 aberrations of spiritual and natural evil are necessarily 
 represented in it, then they count for something in 
 the universe, and how much they account for no 
 material thought can tell. They may account for 
 large events and catastrophes of geology; for deserts 
 and poisonous flies; for inclemency, inhospitality, and 
 as it were rascality in nature. If there are infernal 
 universes, immense empires of evil, their constant 
 working upon the system of the world, will tend by 
 severe laws of correspondence to break the first 
 tables of the laws of nature, and to introduce second 
 tables full of despotism, contest and contradiction. 
 The science here must come from the admission 
 of evil as causal and final, which makes ''all creation 
 groan and travail ;" and the cure, from the regenera- 
 tion and elevation of the determinant middle cause, 
 man. 
 
 Doubtless the Word itself is in the same correla- 
 tion, and this, in these times, from want of modest 
 consideration, has been the pretext for a great deal 
 of infidelity and rejection of Scripture. Looked at 
 by naturalism, the imperfections of the letter, exactly 
 coincident as they are with the capacities of human 
 nature, have been used as arguments against its 
 divinity. This they would be were it not that it is 
 the internal or spiritual sense by which it is provided 
 that such a correspondent letter should be brought to 
 
 t J 
 
338 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS. 
 
 mankind. It had to be written to the Jewish mind, 
 and to the early Christian mind. Its letter is its 
 accommodation; its spiritual sense is its complete 
 and final justification. Written otherwise at first, it 
 would have been written to nobody. It has served 
 its divine purposes for thousands of yeq^rs; and now, 
 when it would have perished as a mere letter, its 
 indwelling soul is declared for the New Jerusalem, 
 and it Uves for the whole mind as the light of men. 
 
 As we have said in former pages, the letter has 
 
 been led to the slaughter, and vivisected, and its 
 
 laws brought under the canons of naturalism. It 
 
 will easily recover this in the New Church. Nay 
 
 more, as the spiritual sense is the soul of the letter, 
 
 and as the soul builds the body, any imperfections 
 
 in the outward form or transmission of the letter, 
 
 will be corrected from the spiritual side as its light 
 
 is more powerfully received; the lamp within will 
 
 show the outward organism; and any parts not 
 
 illuminated, will be ultimately put aside. The 
 
 living body repels criticism, and asserts for itself life. 
 
 The Word is a divine manifestation, and capable of 
 
 all acts declaratory of its own person and belongings. 
 
 Especially is it capable of putting off its infirm 
 
 natural humanity, and showing its Divine Humanity. 
 
 LXXXIX. 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS. 
 
 The doctrine of final causes has almost disappeared 
 out of the sciences, and as final causes mean the 
 objects and ideas for which things are made, the 
 belief in a ruling mind in the world, an end of ends 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS, 
 
 339 
 
 in a divine Person, has become an open or indifferent 
 question to the scientists. The doctrine of contin- 
 gencies, or the contest of chances, as of one force at 
 dice with another, has supplanted the doctrine of 
 ends. In this wise, nature is a crew of selfhoods, 
 pleading themselves, and evolving or creating them- 
 selves. Every stone, plant, fish, bird, beast, is an 
 unguided and often for its own aggression a mis- 
 guided selfhood. And this world of strife comes 
 out of the selfhood of science, adopting glory, and 
 ignoring God. It is the close correspondence of the 
 scientist mind itself, all push for property, and no 
 respect for propriety. Now the contingencies of 
 nature are nothing but the friction and so far the 
 despoiling of the true end. Moreover, every series 
 of them, the entire world of chance, the stolidity of 
 the natural war, is provided for, and imprisoned, in 
 other greater ends, which cover, hold down, and 
 recompense aberration. Hell is all contingencies, and 
 struggling unsuccessful evolutions. Heaven is the 
 mighty march of ends to perpetual accomplishment; 
 and the circulation of ends back to the Lord from 
 whom they originate. All the contingencies which 
 have occurred are taken up, and re-absorbed, and 
 purified by repeated breaths of truth, in repeated 
 circulations. Therefore science here has fallen upon 
 the dead parts of things as its building materials, 
 and yet it cannot hold them because they are not 
 only incoherent, but contentious. In dismissing 
 ends, it has ceased to commune with mind, or to ex- 
 pect to meet mind in nature. The last resort is, 
 matter. The subtilization of matter is to be its 
 deity; and much has been said of how respectful we 
 ought to be to matter, and how little we can limit 
 what matter contains. This is true of matter, but 
 
340 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS. 
 
 not as matter. As dead, it does not hold life; as 
 selfship, it does not involve God. Nay more, its 
 subtilization is but a mirage for the mind. Reasoning 
 of, in, and from matter, gravitation pinions you, and 
 you cannot keep the idea sublimed; you cannot keep 
 it thin ; the mind in it will gravitate to the bottom, 
 to the stones, and to the ground. The end of 
 such a mind is materialization; it is of the earth, 
 earthy. 
 
 This, however, again has been foreseen, and a 
 natural revelation, a personal God, a bodily spiritual 
 world, a body of man corresponding to, and built out 
 from, a bodily soul, confronts these contingencies, 
 and will confront them to the end, and re-absorb 
 them. And what survives of science will be a know- 
 ledofe of the mind of God revealed in the creatures, 
 and showing through their forms why they are 
 created. 
 
 The doctrine of correspondences, manifold in its 
 faces, is also the doctrine of ends; for lower things 
 are created for subjection to higher things, and for 
 harmony with them. And the last fact of harmony 
 is union, and unity. And no body, in order, can 
 have any but its own soul. That soul overfills it, 
 and combines with it in detail. That detail exactly 
 corresponds to the lower form upon which it is 
 induced; or, in other words, is a similar reality in a 
 higher degree. So that all things reach upwards by 
 contrasted similars to the first origin; each is an end 
 to the other, and hence they correspond bodily. 
 
 Yet it requires the bodily senses of the spiritual 
 world to be opened in man before he can appreciate 
 its bodies. Most substantial in corporeity, and awful 
 in law, impassable in gulfs, doors and walls, rocks 
 and mountains of the inner mind itself, that world 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS. 
 
 341 
 
 is yet out of our ken if we have no faculties or 
 senses to perceive it. 
 
 It seems probable that the revelations made 
 through Swedenborg will one day be brought into 
 relation with the larger tracts of veritable and veri- 
 fied knowledsre. For as we have seen, he has been 
 commissioned to give from the opened Word, and 
 from collateral spiritual experience, something like 
 a history of the spiritual world, recounting its 
 churches, its judgments, it planes and strata of 
 heavens and hells, its palseoanthropic or Adamic 
 worlds; its celestial, spiritual, and natural kingdoms. 
 So that there is extant for human knowledge a more 
 coherent and luminous statement of the history of 
 that Avorld than exists of the nations and peoples of 
 this natural world ; excepting also that Swedenborg s 
 account reaches down into the commonwealths and 
 churches of nature from the beginning, and bathes 
 them in a light of unexpected explanations. It is 
 therefore a synopsis of the history of man, not as to 
 kingdoms, but as to final states; not as to faculties, 
 but as to good and evil employment ; not as a single 
 being of one pattern, but as palseoanthropic, anthro- 
 pic, and theoanthropic; God and freewill being the 
 common fact which overlies the whole. 
 
 Is it likely that the history of the natural world 
 does not correspond to this history set over against 
 it from the other side of things ? Is it likely that 
 the one set of epochs does not tally with the other 
 set of epochs ? The subject is new, and new light is 
 like darkness at first. But if the mind will carefully 
 study, and let in the light of these great revelations 
 upon geology and astronomy, perhaps truths will 
 become acquainted with truths, facts meet congenial 
 facts, and correlations begin to appear. Already 
 
342 
 
 THE MARCH OF ENDS, 
 
 Swedenborg s works account for the ruins and per- 
 verted records of a various mankind found every- 
 where. They may reach down into the explanation 
 of cosmical revolutions. It would be premature to 
 do more than guess that a sub-event, a contingency 
 of nature, such as the glacial period, might coincide 
 with a clearance of the earth as a more temperate 
 garden for the Adamic or paradisal church; the heat 
 of nature cooled that the tenderest of all races might 
 be in possession of themselves, and in freewill there. 
 For God can veil the sun if imperfect races feeding 
 upon its ardours are to pass away, and races more in 
 the modesty of nature are to come upon the scene. 
 He can quench and cool the passions of solar crea- 
 tion, if love and its native wisdom are to find a first 
 place in the world; as they did in the Adamic or 
 celestial Church. It is difficult to conceive that this 
 should not take place to fit the earth for man s 
 abode, or that any process but veiling, and cold, 
 should accomplish the result; for veiling, and cold, 
 correspond here to the governance of passion and the 
 true reign of love. The earth of monsters such as 
 geology describes, corresponding to the earliest 
 states and passions of unregenerated man (for the 
 earth by solidarity of ends is such a correspondence 
 from its very seed), would hardly be a platform for 
 a celestial Church. The Lord miglit lull it to sleep 
 by moderating cold. 
 
 These are imaginations which we have no right to 
 fix as truths. But herein the function of imagina- 
 tion in science is again discerned, and it is strictly 
 Baconian, because it is experimental. The more 
 imagination there is, the more this is infilled and 
 enforced with high details of ideas, the more organic 
 the truths that press upon it from within to find 
 
 THE NE W IMA GINA TION, 
 
 343 
 
 their mates in the forms and events of nature, the 
 deeper the sense of use to mans religion under 
 which it works, the more prayer and love that lifts 
 it, and the more the Word of God chastens and sub- 
 dues and informs it, evidently so much the more of 
 experimentation, of thought, of real subject matter, 
 it can propose to the nature of things for acceptance, 
 and to the mind of man for theory, and for truth. 
 Imagination in this sense comprises the inner senses 
 active in the service of the mind that would come 
 down from above. Then the eurekas that strike 
 it, descend unhindered through nature, because it is 
 transparent, and they are intuitions from God. 
 
 xc. 
 
 THE NEW IMAGINATION OF ILLUMINATED REASON. 
 
 The scientific men at present are afraid of imagina- 
 tion, and rightly so, because they have no grounds 
 to imagine from but themselves, and because they 
 assign to imagination work like creation, which con- 
 fuses science; whereas its proper function lies in 
 transplanting correspondences into their natural 
 forms. When imagination is seen to be one humble 
 spirit that carries the higher world down into the 
 drama of the lower, it correlates with true knowledge 
 and helps its right eye. 
 
 Swedenborg, apparently one of the least imagina- 
 tive of men, possessed this disciplined faculty to an 
 unparalleled degree, and it enabled him to receive 
 truths that could not gain admission into other 
 minds. Here is one of them,— The sun of the spiri- 
 tual world is pure love from Jehovah God, who 
 
344 
 
 THE NEW IMAGINATION OF 
 
 ILLUMINATED REASON. 
 
 345 
 
 dwells in its midst : the lieat of that sun is love, 
 the liefht of it is wisdom. Here is another : The sun 
 of the natural world is pure fire ; in itself dead, but 
 actuated towards all the subordinate parentage of 
 nature by the living loving sun. The spiritual sun 
 is not God, but His glorious sphere of uses : He 
 Himself within that sun is a personal divine man. 
 Now the scientific mind, having no adequate imagi- 
 nation of the heart, and knowing that our sun is the 
 solid of solids and the weight of weights in its uni- 
 verse, objects to the thought that the centre of 
 massive orbs is dead fire. Its ideas of fire are taken 
 from the igrnited smoke of its own candle. Our 
 experience of fire here is of heated or incandescent 
 bodies; this is the fire of the mere senses. But fire, 
 as itself, is what Swedenborg postulates of the 
 natural sun : not matter on fire, but fire. Wliy 
 should not fire be the most solid and enormous of 
 natural bodies in a creation where everything tracked 
 home is body? It must be, because it is all in all in 
 nature. The spiritual sun strikes the prepared plane 
 of nature at the top, the anvil for the divine hammer, 
 and the answer to the stroke in the dead world 
 is the natural sun: impersonal fire arising on the 
 last plane or limit of resistance to personal fire. 
 The spiritual sun is the first issue of the divine love, 
 and is not abstraction, but the substance of sub- 
 stances; and the natural sun is solid fire, the sub- 
 stratum of its universe. 
 
 The fire of a man is what makes him attractive to 
 those he loves, and weighty to those who oppose 
 him. 
 
 Upon this natural sun two coincident ends work; 
 in the first place the Divine Sun, regulating, moderat- 
 ing, creating; in the second place, the spiritual and 
 
 natural states of men on earth, for upon them as 
 upon a basis heaven and the universe are founded. 
 It is not therefore wonderful if in astronomical and 
 geological history events are recorded which find 
 their correlation in the estoppel of nature and in the 
 dimness of her sun. 
 
 If such principles as these which Swedenborg has 
 given, be true eyes, it is impossible to say what 
 observations they may make, or how much the 
 physical world on its causal or intelligible side, 
 locked as it is against materialism, may be opened 
 with joyous attestation to their awakened gaze. 
 The present night to higher t^uth, with its revelry 
 of scoffing, forecasts an illuminated scientific day 
 from an opposite mind. It promises by its melan- 
 choly stars a solar science over the New City. 
 
 One thinof is certain to the careful student of 
 Swedenborg, that his writings bring into the field a 
 vast array of causes which it has not entered into 
 the heart of previous philosophical man to conceive; 
 and that reverently to try the fitting of these upon 
 the thousand-fold locks of nature will be an employ- 
 ment of the hi^rher science for some time to come. 
 We are bound to no hurry in the case. His books 
 are practically just published and brought face to 
 face with the modern mind. Any amount of work 
 of mistakes is inevitable with such a multitude of 
 keys and locks. Moreover a new frame of mind, a 
 neoanthropos, who loves to affirm the religious truth 
 which the old Adam loves to deny, is the indispen- 
 sable hand to make each trial of fitness, and the only 
 mind that can or will enter the opened doors. 
 
346 LOVE, THE LIFE OF MAN IN SCIENCE, 
 
 XCI. 
 
 LOVE IS THE LIFE OF MAN IN SCIENCE ALSO. 
 
 In nothing has Swedenborg done a greater service 
 to judicial thought, or more gravely supplemented 
 the Baconian perceptions, than in his primary doc- 
 trine, already dwelt upon, that love is the life of man, 
 — qiiod amor sit vita hominis. For this imports that 
 the reigning love and its affections, given in the very 
 seed, and throughout life constituting the natural 
 character of the man, determine his perceptions, his 
 understanding, his intellect, and his imaginations, and 
 rule as an incessant heart in his pursuits. For this, 
 deeply concealed from him for the most part, he is 
 acting and thinking all day long. His impartiality 
 is a fluent part of his affections. His love of truth 
 is a love of those perceptions and thoughts which 
 carry out the springs of his mind; in other words it 
 is the first form of his ruling love. This ruling love 
 allows the intellect to seem to govern it, to seem to 
 show a pure light into which no passions enter, and 
 thus assumes a mental calmness and judicial pose 
 which sit upon and cover the seat of fire : ignes sup- 
 positos cineri doloso. This is possible where it is not 
 opposed. The volume and acerbity of passion behind 
 manifest themselves however when the selfhood is 
 attacked, for the selfhood is the centre of the centre; 
 the love of self at the core. No matter whether it 
 be mathematics, or physics, or astronomy, or geo- 
 logy, so long as the currents of thought from love 
 and its delight which are investigating them are 
 
 LOVE, THE LIFE OF MAN IN SCIENCE, 347 
 
 unattacked, the scientist is comfortable and at one 
 with himself, apparently making watery solution of 
 his truths; but when he has gained a position, formed 
 a theory, and brought it into harmony with self, and 
 made an aureole of it round the head of self-love, 
 any question of its foundations threatens his being, 
 he becomes white hot from concussion w^ith opposite 
 principles, and a fiery solution of truths is what he 
 seeks : and then his fact is, though he dare not say 
 it, for self-love in science will not bear nakedness, 
 sic volo, sic jiiheo, stet pro ratione voluntas. The 
 voluntas, the will, is the ruling love. For, as Swe- 
 denborg says : What a man loves, that he wills, and 
 that he calls good; and the confirmations of that 
 good he calls truths. 
 
 Let us therefore put aside the conceit that there 
 can be impartiality in the speculative or unapplied 
 sciences, or that cold consideration lies near their 
 heart. Indeed, let us cease to believe that there are 
 any unapplied sciences. For they are all either the 
 ministers to the useful or the pernicious arts of life, 
 or else to men's passions for evil creeds, or affections 
 for good ones. In both which cases also they are 
 strictly applied to, and worn by, the latent loves 
 within them. 
 
 History, and the experience of to-day, the re- 
 corded cold furies of learned debate, bear out these 
 remarks, and reveal science not as a senate and 
 balance for weighing the pure gold of truth, but as a 
 duel-island on which revelation and atheism thrown 
 the sword into the scales. The battle as in old Rome 
 will be decided not by gold, but by iron; for neither 
 combatant can get oflf the island, or be bought out of 
 the field. '' Iron " is natural truth : " the Lord " will 
 ultimately ''rule the nations," that is, the evils of 
 
348 LOVE, THE LIFE OF MAN IN SCIENCE. 
 
 men, with the power of natural truth, that is '' with 
 a rod of iron." This does not import that cold truth 
 will prevail, for there is no such thing as cold truth, 
 and if there were, hot men like the present race 
 could not elicit it. But it prophesies that the truths 
 dug out by self-love, and which become its armour- 
 plating in the atheistical sciences, will try hot con- 
 clusions with the divine natural truth embodied in 
 the minds of other men; and the zeal of perception 
 and God-seeing in the latter, will overbear the 
 adversary self, which knows no nature but its own, 
 and after the combat, and the victory, will show 
 where the true iron is; where the truth of the true 
 love abides. 
 
 Nothing of this would be necessary if it were 
 possible for science to have no motives but those of 
 perceiving the most limited relations of dead and 
 living nature. But this is not possible, because the 
 makers of science are men, and men have tier over 
 tier of faculties within them, all of which must go 
 forth and be satisfied. The present visible aim 
 of science is, to gain the whole w^orld, and lose its 
 own soul, — to comprehend all things in formulas 
 of knowledge, and to push self thus aggrandized 
 through the other and upper frontier, and there 
 deify it. As this is the reigning love, the imperial 
 ambition of self, and as indifferentism as a cloak, hot 
 indifferentism, not impartiality, is the body of ap- 
 pearance turned to all appeal for peace, it is evident 
 that the battle, the prolonged war, of these great 
 affections must take place. And Swedenborg has 
 done the work of showing who the combatants are; 
 and of putting the human understanding in its right 
 place, as the vassal of interior passions in the service 
 of evil, and as the minister of useful and good affections 
 
 LOVE, THE LIFE OF MAN IN SCIENCE. 349 
 
 for the glory of God, and the good of man's estate. 
 Ponder then well as a scientific organon, that saying, 
 *^ Love is the life of man," the simplicity of which 
 seems at first to have no contents, yet on both 
 sides it unmasks human nature, and unlocks human 
 nature; and with those who desire to be regenerated, 
 and thus to have the single eye, it corrects human 
 sciences at their fountain springs, in the heart and 
 the motives; and eliminates the ambition to be as 
 gods from the possible ways of knowing nature. 
 
 The position that " love is the life of man " is cor- 
 related with all history, and runs through every 
 ambition and pursuit that has moved in the world. 
 The quality of the love justifies it, or condemns it. 
 There are as many diverse affections of love as there 
 are men and women, and each affection has its 
 delight, which draws it on, and through which it 
 moves. Each delight kindles the mind to coincident 
 perceptions or self evidences. These seen in the 
 glass of things are the truths of that state. By it 
 the man enters his own world, or God's world, as 
 the case may be, in the natural world. This all be- 
 comes ultimately the scientific wealth of the love; 
 as Swedenborg calls it when in the memory, the 
 scientifics. And thus the intellect, the presumed 
 organ of mere dry truth, is on the largest scale the 
 private and public advocate of the greatest truths of 
 good, or of the most monstrous falses of evil. 
 
 Faha mail, — Swedenborg opposes this to vera 
 honi. The word falsities does not commensurately 
 translate the opposition. 
 
350 
 
 THE RULING LOVES, 
 
 XCII. 
 
 THE RULING LOVES. 
 
 No man has yet lived, save only He who knew what 
 was in man, who has approached to Swedenborg in 
 the knowledge of human nature. He has not shown 
 it dramatically like Shakespear (though his books 
 are indeed the drama of the judgments of the ages) ; 
 for the divine judgments which he was commissioned 
 to declare are out of the province of art, which may 
 subsist before, and after, not in, the Armageddon. 
 But the kuowledge was given him with the courage 
 to attain it. His outward character was so kindly 
 and genial, and so peaceable, that had he not been 
 tempered for his mission, it is difficult to account for 
 the audacity of his exploration of human nature, of 
 his front to evil men and women, and to collective 
 evil societies and institutions, and of the final prin- 
 ciples of demarcation between good and evil which 
 reign without compromise in his works. His 
 generalizations are the theory and truth of the world 
 of character. Yet they are never abstractions, but 
 are clothed upon for illustration with the history of 
 churches, states, and individuals, with which they 
 correlate. They go behind apparent motives to the 
 central loves, that is lives, of mankind. Of these, 
 the love of self is primordial; its going forth into 
 action since the beginning, has devastated the 
 highest regions of the human mind; and externally 
 has constituted empire with its consequences, the 
 love of dominion for the sake of self. Its supreme 
 form is exhibited in religion, in the love of dominion 
 over souls for the sake of self. In Scripture it is the 
 
 THE RULING LOVES, 
 
 351 
 
 
 Devil; in the other life it is the diabolical hell, the 
 deepest of all the hells, opposite, foot to foot, to the 
 highest or the celestial heaven, which consists in 
 love to the Lord, and love of self for the sake of the 
 Lord. Wherever it exists, its name in correspond- 
 ence is Babylon. Its most visible representative on 
 earth at present is the papacy, the Babylon that is 
 now being destroyed. The second ruling love is the 
 love of the world and its possessions for the sake of 
 self, and its aim is the capture of the whole world in 
 the interest of the individual selfhood; the false love 
 of place, position, honour, wealth, health, philoso- 
 phies, sciences, not for use but for greed and 
 dominance. Its derivative affections are a great 
 family of lusts; and the exhibition of it lies in the 
 pursuit of the world for self, and not for others ; for 
 the delight of having and holding, and not for use ; 
 for earth's sake, not for heaven s. It is the Satan of 
 Scripture; and its final endowment and establish- 
 ment is in the second or satanical hells, which are 
 opposite to the spiritual heavens, where use to the 
 neighbour is the king and master of life. Against 
 this heaven it stands foot to foot. The whole world, 
 though overruled to order, is the exhibition of it. A 
 fearful love with no faith; fearful that if others are 
 raised up and happier, and if the currents of worldly 
 possession circulate, no riches will be left; it is stone- 
 hearted : its heart holds its blood to itself, profoundly 
 believing that if the body is alive the heart will die. 
 As the love of dominion for self is the great ancestor 
 of evil, so the love of the world for self is the parent 
 of falsity. The third love is the love of pleasure, 
 and in its more superficial compass it enchains the 
 natural man, and in the spiritual world constitutes 
 the natural hells which proximately communicate 
 
352 
 
 THE RULING LOVES, 
 
 with men on earth. It is antipodal to the natural 
 heavens, where the ultimate delights of use are the 
 happiness of the societies. All adulterous loves and 
 perversions of sex have also their own places ; and as 
 sex is immortal in the heavens and the hells, these 
 loves reign from limit to limit in the spiritual world; 
 and their happiness, or unliappiness, pervades every 
 degree. Now these classifications, acceptable as 
 they one day will be to science, are not of the 
 abstract philosophy of the mind, but of simple 
 revealed light coming along the track of experience. 
 They come out of the Word, the internal sense of 
 which contains them. They were shown and con- 
 firmed to Swedenboror in terrible imasfes in lonof 
 visits to the hells; and he has recorded them ex- 
 tensively in his works, and still more visibly in his 
 posthumous Spiritual Diary. There you see what 
 human nature, what the selfhood is, stripped of all 
 its coverings, carried out to its consequences, carried 
 out also through its correspondences into a triple 
 world of evil and false and voluptuous kingdoms 
 which is human nature over again, and of which it is 
 the core, the centre, and the plane. You see also 
 the inevitable limitation of devilism by devilism, of 
 satan by satan, and of pleasure useless and at the 
 expense of mankind by pain. You see also the 
 reign of the opposite loves in heaven, the blessedness 
 of the celestial, the happiness of the spiritual, and 
 the pleasures of the natural angels; and the river of 
 these that flows from the Lord momentaneously 
 into the capacity of each man and woman for putting 
 down the self loves which would impede the trans- 
 figuring angelic influx. 
 
 SWEDENBORG AND FOURIER, 
 
 353 
 
 \ 
 
 XCIII. 
 
 SWEDENBORG AND FOURIER. 
 
 These things are given in Swedenborg, not how- 
 ever as generalizations, but embodied in narratives 
 of the existing states and conditions of men and 
 women in the heavens and the hells; for he was even 
 friendly with both, and talked to them as a man with 
 men. As a gross confirmation in immortality, he 
 was permitted to see all the deceased whom he had 
 known on earth, and it was given him to know who 
 they had been, and what they now are. His 
 accounts as we have said are not dramatic; they are 
 such accounts as such a traveller could give ; they 
 are all like Swedenborg s way of receiving and show- 
 ing things, and like no other man's, personality being 
 not only the highest but the only thing that can be 
 made use of for any purpose of revelation. Yet 
 they are instantly translateable into the uses and 
 truths of the open human mind. And thus this 
 didactic man, the scoff* of some artists and poets, has 
 left behind him pictures and statues and dramas of 
 good and evil which begin above where Shake- 
 spears mind ends, and descend beneath his dramatic 
 feet into realities and caverns of tragedy which his 
 mind, limited to earth, could not know. 
 
 It has been said of Swedenborg that his works are 
 
 but repetitions about good and truth, evil and 
 
 falsity, and the like abstract terms, and that they 
 
 lack the interest and attestation of the variety of 
 
 men and things. This is not true of his works on 
 
 the whole, especially of the spiritual narrations with 
 
 z 
 
 A 
 
354 
 
 SWEDENBORG AND FOURIER. 
 
 which they are carefully interspersed. But it is 
 true that human good and evil, and their amazing 
 consequences, are his theme. And it is true that the 
 inauguration of a New Church upon earth, is his 
 mission. Nor of a New Church alone, but of a 
 renovated society, which stands in apocalyptical 
 prophecy under the name and description of the New 
 Jerusalem. Now many have laboured — mulii 
 sudaruiit — at the institution of a new Jerusalem, 
 and certainly one of the greatest geniuses of modern 
 Europe, Charles Fourier, has attempted the renewal 
 of society upon the principles of ascertaining the 
 contents of human nature, and then carrying them 
 out by skilfully adapted attractions to happy com- 
 bined issues, each passion for all, and all for each ; 
 and with a harmony for a result, which for a truly 
 gifted ingenuity leaves nothing to be desired but ap- 
 plicability to mankind. It might seem as if he had 
 been permitted to show by splendid work like science, 
 by mockeries and mirages of science, a socialism 
 the very opposite of the New Jerusalem, coming down 
 from genius where it stops short of heaven, and is 
 independent of regeneration. It is full of detail, 
 clairvoyant and mighty in its dialectics against 
 corrupt civilization. It shows the wealth to be won, 
 and the love to be enjoyed. It characterizes the 
 failure of common selfishness, and the necessity for a 
 high quasi-selfishness, before the epochs of harmony 
 can dawn. It abounds in splendid conceptions 
 which will be adopted in the future, as of attractive 
 against repulsive industry, and of industrial armies 
 in place of destructive armies. In short, it is a 
 taking world, that only wants inhabitants : but there 
 is no man found. Now upon this No Man, who at 
 present embraces all men, these simple Swedenborg- 
 
 SWEDENBORG AND FOURIER, 
 
 355 
 
 substances of good and truth have to work with re- 
 generative effect before he can constitute a society 
 founded on any new principles. The old ones are 
 ^*played out." There is nothing new in men doing 
 what they like, and coming to the end of it, limited 
 by death, disgust, or by other men. There would 
 be nothing new if all men did what they like, except- 
 ing that the very limits of the hells would be 
 visibly set up in this life; and instead of a man's 
 house being his castle, as in happy old England, he 
 would call upon the rocks to cover him, and would 
 live in them for his own safe society. But posi- 
 tively the only new thing, the only fresh point of 
 departure, that can be done and made on earth, is by 
 this very *'good and truth," than which there is truly 
 nothing else in Swedenborg. The novelty, in all the 
 day's work, of shunning all evils, not because they 
 entail bad consequences (for that motive animally 
 governs hell), but because they are sins against the 
 Lord; and of doing all things as uses to the 
 neighbour. This is the turn in principles; the 
 revolution in human nature; and each such combat 
 of a mind, and such stroke of a work, is a descent of 
 a little stone of the building of that only city which 
 is simple above human mysteries, the New Jerusa- 
 lem. It is the received action of divine truth first, 
 and then of divine good, upon the willing and 
 striving mind. 
 
 As this truth is accepted, and as the evils, per- 
 sonal and administrative, which the truth brands, are 
 avoided because the Lord hates them; and goods 
 are done to the neighbour because they are good; 
 regenerated men and women will be able to live under 
 any governments, or in any kind of societies, which 
 suit the special characters of their minds : in com- 
 
,. 
 
 35^ 
 
 METAPHYSICS, 
 
 munity, in competition, in co-operation. Nay more, 
 as heaven is opened in such regenerative acts, and in 
 their continuance will be generally opened, and the 
 governments, and polities, and socialities, which sub- 
 sist above will open into hearts and minds below, it 
 is clear as noonday that the downward influx, with 
 a delight which former genius never knew, and with 
 a variety as of a creating hand, will shape the swift 
 mechanism of social things, as a potter^s wheel shapes 
 clay ; that the New^ Society thus gifted and guided 
 will take care of itself ; that forethought and money 
 will disappear out of polity; and the largess of pro- 
 vidence be the future. 
 
 XCIV. 
 
 METAPHYSICS. 
 
 One thing that comes broadly out of the psycho- 
 logical and pneumatological revelation of the hearts 
 or loves of mankind as seen in their collective results 
 in the heavens and the hells, is the unimportance of 
 the so-called metaphysical sciences as accounts of the 
 human being. For where a substance requires in its 
 very nature to be corrected or regenerated before it 
 is worth knowing, where it is rapidly in transit to an 
 unknown end, there can be no fixed knowledge of its 
 action until the limit of its movement is attained and 
 known. The faculties of man stand in this case. The 
 terms and science of regeneration, or of degenera- 
 tion, are the account of them on the way: the know- 
 ledo-e of heaven and hell is the only metaphysic of the 
 end. Short of this, even the list and hortus siccus 
 of faculties cannot be complete, because it is in their 
 
 " 
 
 ■* 
 
 METAPHYSICS, 357 
 
 going forth that they are seen for what they really 
 are ; and only the illuminated eye dare see their ten- 
 dencies, much more, their final states. All past 
 metaphysics, not knowing of the spiritual world, have 
 omitted the loves of man out of their calculation, for 
 which reason they have been alien to history and 
 derided by practice ; they have considered men not 
 as seeds that grow and bear fruit, but as stones that 
 do not grow; and they have tended to fix in their 
 studio that nature which is perforce fluent to rege- 
 nerative life, or else wearing away into devastation. 
 
 Another point is, that true knowledge presses. If 
 death were true, instead of being a mere appearance 
 to be corrected ; or if the sleep of the grave were 
 true, as the old churches teach it, the motives to 
 know the spiritual world would be aboHshed in the 
 first case, and confused beyond extrication in the 
 latter. But where the loves which are the lives of 
 men are continuous, and their apparent death is their 
 instant resurrection, and they go to their own fathers, 
 that is to say, to the great affectional societies with 
 which they were in correspondence by acts of life 
 here, the conscience of every day is the metaphysic 
 that is needed, and the knowledge of the aflfections of 
 the heart is the tutor of life. Under these circum- 
 stances, a revelation, from heaven and from hell, of 
 what the afiections lead to, and of what they are, is 
 of prime moment in the conduct of a man. And 
 those theologies which obscure this revelation, and 
 teach that human seeds do not grow into human » 
 trees, but are miraculously wrought into something 
 else after ages of sleep in another way, leave human 
 nature as they find it, but with a bias deepened to 
 self and the world. 
 
358 
 
 ART. 
 
 xcv. 
 
 ART. 
 
 Art, as a cherished exhibition of the faculties, also 
 comes in here. In its various forms, in literature 
 and the fine arts, it will always be an amusement of 
 the cultivated races, and embody the holidays of 
 their minds ; and be measured by honesty of pro- 
 duction, and the gift of passing nature and events 
 through the imagination, and reproducing them, 
 representative and ideal, and thus less temporal and 
 mortal, in drama, in poem and in picture. But this is 
 not the state in which the faculty of productive art 
 can be left at the present crisis. Art is in a pause 
 at this hour. There is material power, and taste, and 
 purchase : great picture-dealing, and supply created 
 by demand. But the spiritual power is lacking, and 
 the ends of art are not accepted by artists. The 
 belief in good purpose, not to say high and holy pur- 
 pose, is as much banished for art, as the doctrine of 
 final causes is chased out of the sciences. And yet 
 this is the life of art, and the condition of its better 
 inspirations. The perception of this fact belongs to 
 the New Jerusalem. Swedenborg tells us from 
 experience that the arts, like the sciences, subsist in 
 the heavens, that the stage and the drama are there 
 as well as on earth, and that in the theatre above 
 pieces are acted '*ex quibus aliquid divinse provi- 
 dentise elucet," — stories from which some movement 
 of the divine providence shines visibly forth. This 
 is a regenerative ray of command to be well heeded 
 by the band of artists upon earth. They could stay 
 where they were in former ages; now they must 
 
 ; 
 
 ART. 
 
 359 
 
 either be more inspired than they have been, or 
 degradation will be speedy. Art must accept re- 
 generation as the means to its new gifts; it must 
 quit amusement, and take to burden-bearing; in- 
 stead of the holy families of Raphael and the past, 
 it must freely minister in a new church to filling 
 the receptive imagination with the beauty of the 
 triumphs of good over evil in human affairs, and to 
 showing the drama of the spirit and the Word through 
 the letter of the world. It must raise mankind 
 towards pity and love and virtue, towards the beauty 
 of holiness, or it will sink into decrepitude. 
 
 In saying this, the fact is not overlooked, that 
 great artists in their best works, do already show 
 the ways of providence, the wreck of evil in its own 
 success, and the way of good as a light for genius 
 where inspiration may join the mind. It is impos- 
 sible to read Macbeth without seeing this exempli- 
 fied. But our position is that this must become the 
 ruling spirit of art, and its secular mind be pene- 
 trated and corrected, not infringed or destroyed, by 
 the pressure of the new responsibility to work 
 towards public and private good. The steadfast 
 spirit of good purpose carries no enslaving or de- 
 grading livery on its back : it is no pedant, but a 
 mighty heart-opener and art-opener. It does not 
 work from set morals, but from the love of God in 
 human kind. Prayer is the proper attitude of the 
 artist, before and often in his work ; and praise after 
 it. This cannot be if his pencil utters idle forms of 
 things, which are for him the idle words which will 
 be judged in the judgment day of his character. 
 
 Contrary to this, the divine right of art to do 
 what it likes, to open its mouth and let out the 
 blasts of its genius from wheresoever it comes, has 
 
36o 
 
 GENIUS AND INSPIRATION 
 
 \ 
 
 been pleaded of late, just as the divine right of 
 science to do cruel evils, is now asserted. And it is 
 contended that if art be subject to religion, it will 
 become didactic and enthralled. Nothing of the 
 kind need be feared. Art, as g^i^asi-creative, must 
 needs be free, and work from its own centre. But 
 like man, it must be free for good, and not for 
 evil; and if there is no good in it, then it must 
 needs be rejected as standing out of the ways 
 of true beauty. Criminal art cannot do what it 
 likes any more than criminal man ; it is in nature's 
 jail. Inspiration with freedom comes down from 
 above, not up from below; and whatever art, poem, 
 picture, or drama, is inflated by hot blasts of passion, 
 or moved by hatred of what is holy, comes out of 
 the selfhood , and glorifies the selfhood in the work. 
 This is essential slavery, though the poet does not 
 feel it in this world, because he is as he thinks only 
 his own slave. But his gratified pride shuts off 
 influx from the inspiring spheres, and in worshipping 
 himself in his production, his creativeness stops, and 
 cannot be resumed. The will that art is irrespective 
 of good, is the paralysis of art; and because such 
 art feeds upon itself, it is ultimately the leanness of 
 art; and may become its unappeasable hunger, foul- 
 ness in its ways, and raving madness at last. Such 
 things have been with fine minds from the power of 
 the disappointment of the deified selfhood. 
 
 XCVI. 
 
 \ 
 
 GENIUS AND INSPIRATION. 
 
 It is a mistake in the realm of art, as well as in 
 life, to regard genius as a final gift which only 
 
 GENIUS AND INSPIRATION 
 
 361 
 
 i 
 
 V 
 
 requires culture and working forth ; for genius comes 
 to an untimely end under these conditions. The 
 first genius is such a gift, but the continuity of genius 
 implies its subjugation and regeneration, after which 
 its inspiration is given. All persons are men or 
 women of genius in some department, and their 
 genius is the first spring and aptitude and delight 
 of th^r minds ; but ^ for the most part they die 
 out into commonplace, and seek from without the 
 second excitement of their lives. This is inevitable, 
 unless the genius itself, kept in industry, at some 
 point undergoes conversion to God, to disinterested 
 use, and works for mankind. Then its inspiration, 
 and we may say immortality, begins; and it works 
 on with no mind that there is any death, or that its 
 function will be arrested, or be otherwise than raised 
 when the man is transplanted into the spiritual 
 world. It is a mighty thing for genius to work 
 under this sense of deathlessness, the opposite to 
 the love of fame which works for immortality here 
 below where immortality is mortal. Swedenborg 
 is a case in point of this second birth and second 
 coming of genius in a man. After a life of great 
 labours in his mining office and at his desk, during 
 which his thought explored, and his pen gave forth, 
 a vast way of truths in the physical sciences, always 
 with the end of use in view, he at length seemed to 
 be on the point of attaining the object which had 
 been latent in his heart from early years, a complete 
 view of psychology in physiology ; or of the mode of 
 the souls habitation in the organism of the body. 
 Here his transcendent genius had done its work, 
 and of itself could go no further. But the main 
 thing had happened; the genius had been disci- 
 plined and had become converted in the process; 
 
362 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY. 
 
 and was a prepared instrument for a new genius 
 evoked by a divine illumination. At the age of 55, 
 he asrain became a little child, and received the 
 kingdom of heaven as a little child. After the great 
 series of works done in his first life, he grew up 
 again through a second youth and manhood in a 
 series of works incomparably important, produced 
 his crowning volume, the True Christian Religion, 
 at 84 years of age; and then passed out in mature 
 manhood into his latent immortal youth. There 
 was no second childhood except as a new and more 
 innocent spring of a constantly replenished power. 
 Of course he had a special mission; but then his 
 case and achievement is a herald and a type of what 
 will be given to all men who will accept God s mis- 
 sions. He drank, as we may drink, of the ascer- 
 tained fountain of youth, of which if genius drinks 
 not, it dies out, but if it drinks well it will have 
 two lives here, and then live for ever. 
 
 There is a time when every selfhood is baffled by 
 its own accomplishments, and sees their end; that 
 is God's opportunity; and the life must then be 
 converted and re-inspired, or decay. 
 
 XCVII. 
 
 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY. 
 
 The world has tried hard to show in Swedenborg's 
 exalted case, that this future life beyond his selfhood 
 was a state of insanity, and that a brain fever stood 
 at its beginning, and accounted for the results. 
 Whether he ever had a fever, or not, may be doubt- 
 
 i 
 
 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY. ^6^ 
 
 ful, but it rests on no record more authentic than a 
 letter written long after the alleged event, by an 
 active adversary of his doctrine, a clergyman of the 
 Swedish Church. In receiving so great a com- 
 mission, in submitting his faculties to open bodily 
 into the spiritual world, in the presence, and often 
 collision, of two worlds in his mind and his senses, 
 it is not possible that his bearing could be under- 
 stood by the people about him, or that his enemies 
 should not attribute the unusual in him to madness. 
 If it were granted that all his state were true, it 
 could not look sane to this worlds prejudice and 
 sensuality. Besides which, no state, except to a 
 cruel mind, binds any man beyond its own con- 
 tinuance. If phrenitis had stricken Shakespear 
 just before he produced Hamlet, no one but a mad 
 doctor who would retain all good patients for life 
 under lock and key for pay, would aver that the 
 Hamlet and all the series of subsequent plays were 
 the result of the brain fever. If they exhibited 
 plain traces of derangement to non- specialists who 
 had no interest in coining insanity into cash, the 
 fever might have had to do with it; but if they were 
 more sane to the end, the fever would be forgotten 
 by the critics, or be adjudged to be itself a fight 
 with some insanity which had hitherto marred the 
 brain, and was then victoriously put aside. It may 
 be doubted whether this victory over some deep self- 
 love, standing at the beginning of a new career for 
 men, ever happens without a great pause of nature, 
 and shuddering of her old privileges and organs. 
 The most of men, especially mad doctors, can bear 
 change so little, that a new idea makes them mad 
 for a time, until they can cushion and ignore it. 
 And yet here, regardless of their own experience. 
 
364 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY. 
 
 I 
 
 they expect the most capacious intellect that history 
 can produce, to stand without a stagger when all its 
 state is overthrown, and the Lord visible in Divine 
 Humanity confronts it, and says in it, ^* I make all 
 things new." 
 
 Fie upon the poor mad doctors that they do not 
 better remember and correlate their own little ex- 
 perience with the vast case of the opening of a 
 Swedenborg! Fie upon a medical profession, which 
 cannot admit a ray of new light without tetanus, or 
 swallow a drop of the waters of new truth without 
 a spasm of hydrophobia ! 
 
 There is indeed every fact to show that Sweden- 
 borg grew continuously more sane from his youth 
 upwards, and more addicted to practical ends of use. 
 In his earlier works, before his manifest divine com- 
 mission, there is the ambition of an easily great man 
 delighting and breathing in his power. There is 
 mighty speculation in quest of truth. If it were 
 possible, there is a noble selfhood ; eloquence second 
 to none in the Latin language, and clothing thoughts 
 that traverse physics only to "wander through 
 eternity." In his theological works, this ceases; 
 there is no transition, but a new plane, of style ; 
 extreme unadorned simplicity; imagination utterly 
 gone before spiritual reality; imagination gone out 
 of the very words, which carry only spiritual in- 
 tellectual forces adequate to bring down the new 
 truths to mankind. The style is calm and trans- 
 lucent. There is no more speculation, or love of 
 truth for its own sake, but commanding statements 
 of truth for the sake of good. There is not, so far 
 as the present writer is aware, a paragraph of 
 Swedenborg's theological works, whether published 
 by himself, or posthumous, that has any other end 
 
 ' 
 
 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY, 365 
 
 and object than to make men and women more 
 personally responsible for their actions here, and 
 thuswise more capable of receiving happiness here- 
 after. Self-help as a condition, and the Lord's help 
 not before but afterwards, is a sum and substance of 
 his writings. 
 
 ^ The truth is that in Swedenborg's case, the medi- 
 cine of lunacy, extended as it is to various parts of 
 psychology, has fallen upon a stone which breaks it 
 in two, and if care be not taken, the stone will fall 
 upon it, and grind it to powder. It is already in 
 two in this wise. Hitherto it has covered the 
 ground not only of w^hether persons are in a fit state 
 to take care of themselves and their property, and to 
 be safe neighbours to other people, but also of what 
 mental and spiritual beliefs, and actions and deter- 
 minations founded upon them, are fit to be tolerated 
 in legalized society. Medicine grasps ambitiously 
 at both these very difierent branches of power. The 
 first part is its legitimate walk, and it is fairly in the 
 witness-box there, though not in the judgment-seat; 
 and when the insane have fallen out of domestic and 
 civil life, they belong to the love of the state; 
 the heads of asylums should be wise laymen ap- 
 pointed by the state; there ought to be no motives 
 of income attached to their keeping, but salaried 
 medical superintendence under lay superintendence; 
 as it is in the United States. Insanity should be no 
 merchandise, and greed lay no speculative hand upon 
 it. Thus specialism, always a snare to itself, and a 
 danger to others, should be limited by common sense; 
 but with all this, medical men are necessarily in evi- 
 dence, and in attendance, in practically manifest 
 insanity. But with regard to the second walk, 
 through the cases of new and therefore necessarily 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 f 
 
 \ 
 
 366 SWEDENBORG FOUNDS A NEW SANITY. 
 
 singular beliefs, experiences, peculiar powers, open- 
 ings of the spiritual world, healing by prayer, and 
 spiritual things generally, medical men have no more 
 to do with these things than shoemakers have. 
 Truly all men have to do with such things, but only 
 in making up their minds one way or another about 
 them. They have power over them, in themselves, 
 and can accept or reject them if they please; but of 
 public power they ought not to have, and in time 
 will not have, one finger. Prejudiced from their 
 legitimate point of view of abnormal states which 
 are insanities, they too easily extend it to all states 
 out of their very small norm, and adjudge these as 
 insanities also. Madness with them is the disease of 
 the day, and they hunt for it everywhere; just as a 
 cancer specialist said to the writer, '^ Cancer is the 
 disease of the day." Let them therefore be limited; 
 for their hands are tamed to the dye they work in, 
 and they want the restraint of law to keep them 
 within bounds with real and convalescent lunatics, 
 and to fence them in and away from new spiritual 
 powers granted from time to time to mankind, and 
 which they would ignorantly imprison and stamp 
 out if England would let them. 
 
 It is incontestable that if mad doctors, and medical 
 orthodoxy, as we have them now, could have had 
 their own way at the time, the leading persons of 
 the Old and New Testaments would have been in 
 asylums; the Psalms and the Prophets would not 
 have been written; the Lords life on earth would 
 have been stopped in His early years; not a miracle 
 of His healings would have been permitted to be 
 done, or if done, would have transpired; but the 
 great seal of medical orthodoxy would have been set 
 upon the grave of divine revelation. In fact it was 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 367 
 
 SO set, for the orthodoxy which did that deed was 
 embracive; though when the stone was rolled away 
 by the angel, the broken little seal is not mentioned. 
 Medicine is now attempting the same sealing with 
 another revelation in the person of Swedenborg. 
 But he too, with civil and religious liberty for the 
 angel who rolls away his medical gravestone, rises 
 upwards, and survives in unimpeachable sanity, and 
 will be regarded in time as the first of the fathers of 
 a new healing. In the meantime, his life and works 
 break the political case of lunacy in two; into the 
 lunacy of patients, which it belongs to the doctors to 
 treat, and the state to hold; and into the lunacy of 
 the doctors themselves, who require to be confined 
 by law and public opinion within their own boun- 
 daries of externed attendance on asylums. The third 
 term, the spiritual man, and his ever new life and 
 liberty, triumphs out of all question. 
 
 XCVIII. 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 A crucifying test on a kindred subject has been 
 proposed by an eminent surgeon. It is this. 
 Whereas the prayer of faith has been said to heal 
 the sick, let a prayer-ward in a hospital be devoted 
 to one set of patients, and an orthodox ward for 
 treatment be devoted to a second set; and let the 
 result be taken as conclusive for, or against, prayer; 
 against which, by the by, the proposer concludes 
 from the beginning. The plan has diflSculties, and 
 for him, dangers. He presupposes for the occasion, 
 
368 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 \ 
 
 that the prayer of faith is so common an exercise 
 that it may be offered up by any person almost in- 
 differently : whereas prayer for the good of others 
 with a practical belief that it will be answered, is at 
 least as rare as large rubies. Moreover, the faith 
 may be well intentioned, but may not be enough. 
 The history upon which all such prayer proceeds is 
 the New Testament, which records the cure of many 
 grievous diseases by the Lord Himself, and a pro- 
 mise that under conditions His method shall be 
 extended to His followers. But among the fol- 
 lowers there was a case where their prayer was of 
 no avail : a case of possession of which He said, 
 '' This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." 
 An unselfish life, a skill of preparation for the prayer, 
 much more difficult to obtain than any medical quali- 
 fication, was here postulated as the condition of the 
 prayer treatment. Without this the prayer-ward 
 would afford no trial, and the failure of the prayers 
 would conclude nothing. Moreover, the motives 
 imposed upon the prayer- ward would not be divinely 
 single, but professional and double; they would be 
 entered by competition from the love of power, which 
 despoils the direct humanity of every calling. They 
 would have in them anxiety for victory, and not 
 simple love of healing suffering men and women. 
 The heads of that house would hate prayer, most of 
 all if it cured, and attribute the cure to nature and 
 fancy. Such an experiment may indeed be made, 
 but for these reasons, it is null and void. And it 
 could have no correlation with, or reaction of dis- 
 proof over, the early Christian times. 
 
 A somewhat parallel thing was tried, if th^ 
 author remembers rightly, by Andral with regard to 
 homoeopathy. He heard of that then new treat- 
 
 FRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 369 
 
 ment, and resolved to test it practically. He de- 
 voted a ward in a Paris hospital to the trial. He 
 went round the ward, and gave each patient what 
 he conceived to be the right homoeopathic remedy 
 according to the book, for his special case. He 
 recorded the results, and found that they were vir- 
 tually nil. And he concluded accordingly against 
 homoeopathy. In this he assumed that homoeo- 
 pathy, which is certainly a more difficult art to 
 acquire and practise than the old medicine, had 
 been mastered by himself instantaneously. Also 
 that it had been so mastered in the face of motives 
 conflicting with it mortally in his own mind ; and 
 under these circumstances had a fair trial. And 
 that the requisite perseverance, impossible in such a 
 case, had been given to the treatment. The truth 
 is, there was no homoeopathy in the events, but only 
 the selfhood of the professor. In the prayer-treat- 
 ment proposed by the surgeon, there lies the same 
 regnant quality. 
 
 So you may see a railway navigator versed in the 
 clay of an embankment, provide himself with sculp- 
 tor s tools, and make images of men out of his 
 familiar materials; and not liking the look of his 
 creatures, yet never blame himself, but proclaim that 
 the art itself is a failure, and that he has no opinion 
 of sculpture. 
 
 The New Medicine. — It is therefore important in 
 regard to things out of the common rule, as spiritual 
 powers coming down into nature are, to acknowledge 
 their conditions; and to notice if those conditions 
 are extant at the present day. The condition of the 
 Lord's miracles was a divine man, who performed 
 them as spiritual uses which could not be done with- 
 out for His ends. At the time of their doing. He 
 
 2 A 
 
370 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 371 
 
 \ 
 
 was penetrating heaven, and subjugating hell, and 
 his victories went out into suffering humanity, and 
 cleared away disease from their path. They were 
 correspondences and ultimations of similar spiritual 
 victories, and hence inevitable correlations. But 
 these conditions are far from the wards of London 
 hospitals. Yet he promised similar powers to his 
 regenerated followers. The practical corollary seems 
 to be, that the state of medicine will mark by ulti- 
 mate signs the state of the Lord's New Church in 
 mankind. That colleges and privileged bodies will 
 less and less include it. That all tendency towards 
 the methods of the New Testament will be accepted 
 as instalments of a passing day. Therefore that 
 gentleness of every kind will supersede force. That 
 courage and perseverance with simple things will 
 forbid casual violence and recklessness. That the 
 prayer of faith will come into the sick-room on the 
 quiet feet of humility, with heaven's raised right 
 hand of power. That its exercise will be a twofold 
 experiment, on the patient, and on the minister, and 
 reveal the spiritual condition of the latter especially, 
 and give him his daily diploma. That ultimately, 
 regenerating personality will be recognized as a 
 special power, and will communicate health, not from 
 itself, but by a divine fiat. This seems to be the 
 road from the present gross systems; and this the 
 goal to which not those systems, but God's providence 
 in and over health, is tending. 
 
 A few words may here be said on prayer itself. 
 The atheists have unexperimentally assumed, that the 
 prayer of a man who believes in God and loves Him, 
 can be tested and measured as a fact and as a power 
 by a mind which resolutely believes in no god. 
 That is a physical mistake. The two brains in the 
 
 region of prayer have nothing in common. They 
 intimately repudiate each other. Prayer, constant 
 prayer, in a mind, when answered below by a corre- 
 sponding life in the day's work, opens the mind to 
 God, and in full trust communes with Him as a 
 divine friend, and brings on, and brings down, new 
 states in that mind which alter it entirely. It is as 
 real a labour and toil as any work of the hands, and 
 the whole machinery of conscious existence is the 
 field w^hich it engineers. If a railway embankment 
 is true, worked by men out of common clay, vast pro- 
 longed states of ordinary mind raised here and levelled 
 there by earnest prayers, are also true of the outer 
 faculties manipulated by the inner; of the grosser 
 man reconstructed by the finer; and of the inner 
 man soliciting the mercy of the divine man. The 
 effects of prayer are therefore correlated in their 
 reality with all good brain-work and handiw^ork. 
 The prayer that moves mountains is not ejaculation 
 with no antecedent life, but exalted life from foregone 
 divine inw ard engineering. Prayer is also correlate 
 Avith all human want and mercy. Only it stands 
 alone as opening us in regeneration to the very 
 succour of God. The atheists deny these positions; 
 the Word affirms them. Happily the arsenal of the 
 two is incommensurate; there is infinite aflSrmation 
 possible, and actual; and faith, however feeble and 
 unenlightened now, gradual in its formation like the 
 world, has God for its Father, and the future of the 
 world in w^iich to put resistance aside, and to come 
 into its kingdom. 
 
 It is often said and thought that spiritual exer- 
 cises cannot alter the laws . of nature, and that 
 prayer cannot influence Him who is the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Neither of these 
 
372 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 positions is practically true as an argument against 
 prayer. In the first place there is no experience 
 about either excepting that which is extant in the 
 Bible, and in religious history; and that experience 
 denies both these negatives. The history of un- 
 faith contains no miracles ; it also possesses no mind 
 towards them ; not even a common critical mind ; 
 for it stands back to back to the history of faith. 
 Say rather it stands foot to foot, and reacts 
 against the possibility of the fruits of faith with 
 constant exact resolutions of the will. We have 
 therefore to learn from the Bible what the case is 
 about miracles by and from the Divine Man, and to 
 study the sense in which they are alterations of the 
 laws of nature. Clearly no divine miracle is a 
 breach of the divine order. If it exists in nature, it 
 is a suspension of her order in personal presence 
 of a higher law. Let us take an inward miracle as 
 an example. Suppose a mind all compacted of 
 selfish motives, and working for selfish ends. The 
 objects of such a mind are its laws of nature. It 
 can all be accounted for upon those laws, and in 
 itself, besides those laws, and itself, there is nothing 
 consciously present. The spirit of God, in His 
 mercy, touches the surface of its freewill, and a 
 revelation of its state, and a new perception, is 
 produced. A divine little truth is received which 
 contradicts all those laws of nature, and perhaps the 
 smallest and least vigorous of their facts is van- 
 quished for a moment. A law of that mind s 
 nature is here suspended by the man's obedience to 
 a higher law. And the process may go on until 
 more or less of the ground of the man is penetrated 
 by the miraculous agency of self-denial, and gained 
 for unselfishness. The possibility of the miracle 
 
 ERA YER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 373 
 
 was latent all the time in the fact that there was 
 some vital remainder in the person which had God 
 near it; and which intimately acknowledged the 
 impact of the truth from without, and forced the 
 man to obey it. But in such a miracle there is 
 neither disorder, nor mystery, for both of these 
 begin to be abolished by it in the character. 
 
 The Lord's action upon earth was an action like 
 this upon His own humanity, in organ after organ, 
 and in faculty after faculty, until its selfhood in 
 every detail was abolished, and the humanity glori- 
 fied. His body, for divine purposes, became divine. 
 It was also such an action upon other men, and 
 when their states, of evil and disease, conflicted 
 with it, His spoken word, and His right hand, sus- 
 pended those states. And it was such an action 
 upon outward nature. For when nature's sub- 
 stances and supplies did not meet the Lord's 
 necessities, they were modified or enlarged by His 
 demand to the measure of those necessities. His 
 promise is that those who really follow Him, shall 
 have greater powers than He put in force. If they 
 have not had those powers, the inference is that 
 men have not followed Him. The substantiated 
 miracle is in no way invalidated by the fact, that 
 other men, under quite different conditions, cannot 
 enact such miracles. A church replete with loaves 
 and fishes, and without the Lord in the midst, is not 
 only different but alien to a hungry flock in the 
 wilderness with Jesus Christ present. His disciples 
 bringing forth the five small fishes and two loaves 
 of their acknowledged poverty, the want of 
 multiplication coming to His divine heart, which 
 increased both the substances and laws of nature for 
 the need of His famishing people. The Lord has 
 added divine unselfishness as a productive and 
 
374 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 administrative power to the laws of supply; when it 
 is in them, they are and will be in so far miraculous; 
 that is to say, they will wonderfully suspend, for 
 divine uses alone, the fluxion of forms, and the 
 course of events; when that unselfishness is not 
 there, nature, unaddressed by Him, takes the usual 
 course; and events follow in their fate which also 
 is of His laws, usual now, not usual under different 
 personal circumstances. 
 
 The analogue and correlate of such miracles 
 exists in the very order and subordination of nature, 
 so that the external world naturally expects and 
 owns them. The first retreat of the solar fire from 
 its accomplished mission, the first permitted con- 
 densation of things, leaves the mineral kingdom 
 standing by itself, but impregnated with the future. 
 The vegetable kingdom then appears, with a higher 
 law in it, and lifts the mineral beyond itself into 
 functions marvellously beyond stones and metals. 
 No mind educated on the latter alone could admit 
 without experience the facts of seed and growth. 
 The animal kino^dom comes aofain with a liiorher law: 
 and life lives and moves where before it was rooted 
 to the earth and grew, and would die of local 
 motion. The natural man comes again with a 
 higher power of law; the precedent kingdoms are 
 marvellously wrought into his body and his will, and 
 subjugated by mental forces which penetrate and 
 humanize them. The process does not end here; 
 the spiritual man claims a new kingdom; a new 
 ascendancy; and introduces laws which suspend the 
 previous courses, wants and selfhoods of mere 
 nature. He imparts a new gravitation, not to earth, 
 matter and pleasure, but to God in daily earthly 
 duty. The spiritual world is a new kingdom again ; 
 and when it appears in nature for its uses, it sus- 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 375 
 
 pends all ordinations below it in its own supreme 
 interest, and uses them for its ends. It does not 
 destroy them, as the vegetable does not destroy the 
 mineral, but builds it into plant and tree, and into 
 functions of growth and reproduction. If there 
 were no spiritual world, the series of natural 
 miracles, vegetable, animal, and human, imposed 
 upon the mineral common-place, would be complete 
 in the ordinary mortal man. But as there is a 
 spiritual world, it is not possible that its manifesta- 
 tions and subjugations should do other than suspend 
 the laws of nature where it touches them. Its laws 
 are those of instantaneous creation; coming down 
 into the theatre of nature, they become laws of instan- 
 taneous creation there also. Just as the vegetable 
 law and personality coming by seed into minerals, 
 make them vegetable ; and as the human law coming 
 into horses, cows, and sheep makes them domestic. 
 The anti-miracle men do not know that there is 
 a world of laws pressing upon the heart and lungs of 
 nature, and aspiring to raise it into new breaths; they 
 think that a miracle-worker is some deluded private 
 will juggling with things; whereas the Sun of suns, 
 and Jehovah therein, is the pressure behind divine 
 miracles ; and the spiritual world forceful upon the 
 natural attests the pressure by usual miracles of 
 creation in every sphere. 
 
 The extent of miracle, depending as it obviously 
 does upon its divine uses, finds also a correlation and 
 as it were a common sense in the impregnation of the 
 lower kingdoms of nature by the higher. The seed 
 in the soil, which is to be the marvel of the soil, 
 does not build up all the ground into plants and 
 trees, but a very small part of it; as the soil itself is 
 a small film on the great mineral ball of earth. So 
 
37^ 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 the next kingdom, the animal, though mainly living 
 on the vegetable, lives in it but does not consume it; 
 or the animal would perish by having eaten its own 
 basis of support, l^or does man, who consumes 
 and modifies what is beneath him, take his food, or 
 extend his power, so as to be destructive, but while 
 cultivating all and feeding upon all, and modifying 
 all, he introduces husbandry and planting, and reno- 
 vates the fields on which he lives by agricultural 
 arts. Thus no danger but perpetuity and increase, 
 arise from the subjugation of the lower planes by 
 the higher, and from the appearance of the higher 
 and less material laws, apparitionally, in the lower. 
 And the case is the same with the spiritual kingdom, 
 obviously more vast than all below it; more vast for 
 two reasons : 1. It is nearer to the Lord, who is 
 infinite and eternal; he clothes Himself with it, 
 and it represents dimension in its essence and first 
 magnitude; a dimension of which space is the 
 contracted copy. 2. Humanly, this kingdom 
 receives all ages and nations of men and women 
 into its arms, and is therefore, for its ends of 
 use, as much bigger than nature, as all ages now 
 and for ever onwards are bigger than one genera- 
 tion. This great kingdom comes upon and in 
 nature, or rather upon and in the natural man, as he 
 comes upon the animal, the vegetable, and the 
 mineral ; and its pressure is personal revelation ; 
 and personal miracle if needed when a new power is 
 to be instituted. Even from all below, it might be 
 expected and foretold that it would do so. It is in 
 the order of nature that it should. Its revelation, 
 and legislation over men, are not in the order of 
 nature, until human nature is subdued to it. That 
 is, because every kingdom has its own laws, and 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 377 
 
 these have their own manifestation. There is 
 nothinsr more alien to the nature of man in the 
 spiritual world at any time when the Lord pleases 
 being manifested in him and through him, than 
 there is to the mineral in the vegetable being 
 manifested in it and through it; or than there is to 
 the vegetable in the animal moving through its 
 forms. Each higher kingdom may be said to live 
 and move in the awe and astonishment of the king- 
 doms below it. But man, having freewill, has the 
 power of denying] the unselfish kingdom above 
 himself; whereas the lower natures are bound to 
 accept their lords, and carry them out into uses. 
 This is why man of to-day will have no miracles 
 unless he does them himself. Now he cannot do 
 them himself, because self is common human clay, 
 a genius always dying out. It is the Lord moving 
 in the spiritual world upon the natural, who alone 
 does miracles; and this, when they are needed. 
 
 Physicists, who are wardens of the order of nature, 
 and would mend and patch any "rendings of the 
 skyey roof," lest their world be cracked, may be con- 
 soled against the probability that any large part of 
 her domain will at present be the theatre of the 
 manifestation of spiritual laws. Powers and matters 
 are obverse in nature. Mineral matter, and aerial, 
 and etherial, are immense compared to vegetation ; 
 and yet were it spread out, and vegetation could get 
 upon it, all would be lifted into one great Yggdrasil 
 or world tree. But the fire inside matter, for divine 
 ends, protects it in its globes. And life, if it could 
 compass this Yggdrasil, would not merely, as it is 
 said in Edda, gnaw its roots and prey upon its 
 branches and its top, but would swallow it up. 
 Animal life however is proportionally limited as 
 
378 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 379 
 
 »> 
 
 compared to vegetable ; it is more destructible than 
 plant life; it destroys itself, and the course of things 
 destroys it. Its power is immense : its weight of 
 matter is relatively small. So the human race 
 has in it a love of possession and domination which 
 would send man into the centre of the earth, and 
 over the solar system, if he could get there; and 
 ''mine and thine" would parcel out the abyss and 
 the firmament into freehold, leasehold, and copyhold 
 estates. But the weight of things mercifully says 
 nay. Vast as the direct empire of man over nature 
 is, it is as nothing to nature herself, but merely crops 
 the summits of her grass-fields. The spiritual world, 
 in all late history, perhaps in all history, likewise 
 merely touches the summits of human personality and 
 faculty, reveals itself to them, appears in them, and 
 so far as they will, modifies them; but does not 
 tyrannically invade them, or do more than converse, 
 sometimes by miracle, with their freewill. This 
 freewill is deflected and correlated all the way down ; 
 in the fierceness of the undomesticable animal ; in 
 the untamed luxuriance of plant and forest and the 
 great elbows of growth; in the inscrutable central 
 earth ; and in the distance of suns and planets. It is 
 forced to permit the connexion of things, by which 
 one kingdom lays hold of another, and the broods of 
 nature are born; but the greater part of each king- 
 dom possesses itself, and is not directly meddled with 
 by its superiors. 
 
 These things are attested on the map, and the 
 small extent geographically of the theatre of revela- 
 tion, in point of fact, the Holy Land, shows that the 
 hand of God touches the creation directly on a small 
 point, and with ordered intent. The Holy Land for 
 long ages had been the theatre of the church and of 
 
 the written Word; it was introduced into the frame- 
 work of divine correspondence, and being represen- 
 tatively, not really, a divine land, there the Lord was 
 born as it were into the externals of His own Word. 
 It was in one family and in one land only that this 
 contact of God with man took place. 
 
 This smallness of contact is also visible in the 
 events of human life. There is hardly a man, if he is 
 fair to himself, who has not some experiences in his 
 own person which belong to the supernatural degree; 
 hardly a family Avhich has not well-verified accounts 
 of visions bevond dreams, of inward admonitions, of 
 voices, of signs before death, of apparitions, and the 
 like, among its members. But such things in the sum 
 of life, though influential, are small in their extent; 
 and out of command of those w^ho experience them. 
 They come and go, and are at present unaccountable. 
 It seems that the spiritual world, the life of which is 
 God's providence, touches with these rare and sparse 
 and yet universal events all human creatures, and 
 keeps up, by a delicate nexus of superior rays, an 
 involuntary sympathetic system of recognition of a 
 life after death; excepting in those who carefully 
 hate and extinguish the rays. But the touch is so 
 small compared to the mass, that the freewill can 
 do what it likes, and subsist either in denial or in 
 afiirmation. 
 
 A deduction may be that the upper planes of crea- 
 tion are always vaster in power than the lower; that 
 the spiritual is solidly mightier and more extended 
 than the natural ; and that, looked at from above 
 downwards, creation is a pyramidal spire diminishing 
 to a point, which point is matter, space and time, 
 with the men and women that they contain for the 
 day. Also that the higher planes are divinely 
 
38o 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 restricted from acting with force upon the lower 
 except by induction of correspondences and unper- 
 ceived influx ; and excepting also by suspensions of 
 natural laws where such are functionally needed to 
 preserve the integrity and renew the life of the whole. 
 Revelation, the Word, the incarnation, spiritual 
 manifestations universal, are such connexions; they 
 are above nature and creation, and they exist. 
 
 Prayer stands recorded as a considerable cause and 
 means of divine interlocutions, and historically, as 
 well as in the Word, nothing is better attested than 
 its efficacy when the conditions of efficacy are pre- 
 sent. Yet scientists think to-day, that if there be a 
 God, He is unalterable, that He changes His face 
 for no solicitation, that consequently all events take 
 their natural course, and that prayer is a nullity as 
 an appeal to the divine nature. They say it may 
 alter the praying man, but by no means the great 
 Being prayed to. Certainly it does alter him who 
 prays, and alters him often supremely, changing 
 despair into hope, confusion into steady light, timi- 
 dity into confidence, cowardice into courage, hatred 
 into love, and the genius of compromise into the 
 spirit of martyrdom. In short, it makes men of those 
 who were not men, it changes ignoble conditions into 
 the highest figures and occasions which the world 
 has seen. And always, in the very height of these, 
 the utterance is, " Not unto us. Lord, not unto us, 
 but unto Thy holy name be the praise." The inspi- 
 ration of the successful prayer state is, that it is not 
 a success of the art of the self-hood, not a pious fraud 
 of ego practised upon ego, but a divine gate between 
 the Lord and man opened by the human prayer. 
 That He stands at the door and knocks. When 
 Jesus prayed in His dire temptation, an angel was 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE, 
 
 381 
 
 present strengthening Him; a visible supernatural 
 minister and form of the Father. It is therefore 
 plain, from all the facts alleged in the case, that 
 prayer, as a benefit and a blessing, and as a wonder- 
 worker when needed, does not belong to the self- 
 hood, but is a real relation appointed between God 
 and man; and that its masterly virtues do not stand, 
 or subsist, upon the platform of human delusion. 
 Virtue comes out of the hem of its garments, and 
 virtue does not come from the person of sham. 
 
 There is no experience to contradict this; no pro- 
 fessor praying as a dodge has ever bettered his case, 
 or proved his point; though it is on record that 
 scoffing has been overmastered by prayer, and an 
 altered mind come to the man on his knees. For 
 the divine mercy loses no occasion to regenerate. 
 In this case it is not the imposture which succeeds, 
 but the imposture which recedes like a beaten demon 
 before a new point of sincerity opened, with some 
 permission of his own, in the praying man. 
 
 But is it true in any good sense that the Lord is 
 unalterable? To say that He has created the world 
 and its laws, and that those laws are permanent; 
 and that the whole goes on now as a vast working 
 machine without Him, is to ignore the history of all 
 religions, and the experience and minds of their 
 votaries; and simply to attend to natural and 
 physical sequences of things. It puts whatever is 
 truly human out of court. Moreover it is a mere 
 hypothesis, not suggested by nature, and repulsive 
 to theology. There is no experience, and no likeli- 
 hood, of laws enacted by an intellect, going on when 
 that intellect, in this case, all intellect, has abstracted 
 itself, and is averted from the laws. Such laws are 
 fetishes. The honest meaning of the thought is, 
 
382 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 that there is no God. But assuming the sum, not 
 the half, of things, religion and nature, God is the 
 Author of both. His laws in nature are for ex- 
 istence. His religion in nature is for heavenly 
 existence, in the salvation of the human race. Reason, 
 by Him opened, attests that in Himself He is 
 infinite and eternal, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
 for ever. But he does not exist only in Himself; 
 He has spoken creation into being; and spoken the 
 Word to man to guide his being. He has connected 
 man to Himself by creation and revelation. On the 
 side which he turns to man, called love and mercy, 
 He alters his face to every condition of his creature. 
 He would be no Lord if He did not govern, no 
 supremely wise Lord unless He governed according 
 to the momentaneous state of His subjects. He 
 would be a mineral, not a deity, unless He were in 
 rapport with the affections and needs of His people. 
 God alters every moment, or He would not be 
 unalterably wise and unalterably loving. Every 
 perpetuated law is an everlasting alteration according 
 to the circumstances of the case. The sum of 
 instantaneous alterations is the law in process. 
 There is no law in statement but the divine wisdom, 
 and circumstances are its field : man makes formulas, 
 but nature is not ruled by formulas, though pieces of 
 her may be skilfully brought under them for a time 
 by human minds. The course of nature is according 
 to the statesmanship of the Lord. He is present to 
 every human mind, especially in its depths, its 
 struggles, and its troubles; and continually workino^, 
 by influences and events, to lead and open it to 
 Himself. He is the brain of the brain, and the 
 heart of the heart, of humanity. He is the only 
 Man. How then shall He not divinely change to 
 
 PRAYER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 383 
 
 meet every want of His creatures? In short, He could 
 not be infinite, eternal and unchangeable unless He 
 dealt in detail ineffable with every contingency and 
 every course of mankind and the world ; unless He 
 played upon every moment of every mind with the 
 stops of His fingers. 
 
 In human affairs, the higher every man is in 
 function from true exaltation of character, the more 
 fixed in his principles, and the more far-seeing, and 
 the more powerful the legislation which issues from 
 him, the more the action under him changes to suit 
 the national freedom which he guides, and his face of 
 each day is a modification suited to the whole face of 
 affairs. The day when there is no change in him and 
 from him according to the wide want and woe 
 beneath him,— that day he dies to oflSce, and mortal 
 change passes over him. His public essence alters 
 when his heart curdles, or his wide hands fall into 
 disuse. The simile is applicable to the Lord, from 
 whom all power comes. He is the Lord because 
 He rules yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and in so 
 ruling has a different nexus or connection with every 
 hour since the first. 
 
 Love means this, and mercy means it, and wisdom 
 means it, and truth means it. And these are the 
 divine things which must be thought of, or God is 
 not thought of. In no sense that metaphysicians 
 and physicians mean, is God infinite and eternal, or 
 God at all. He is not a time before time, for there 
 is no such time. He is not a space within space, or 
 around space; for such space is non-existent. The 
 scientific brain has no experience of infinite and 
 eternal and unalterable, and practises self-deception 
 when it insinuates infinity into a subject on the 
 basis of a yard-measure, and brings eternity out of a 
 
3^4 
 
 PRA\ER AND MIRACLE. 
 
 clock. The religious brain ^'' has revelation of these 
 things where otherwise it could have no experience, 
 and faculty to comprehend them born in the rational 
 mind where revelation meets and enlarges inward 
 and outward experience. The sum is that the Lord 
 is present to us, and when we will, conjoined with 
 us, by His divine humanity: and therein, hears 
 every prayer, and administers its efficacy, such as it 
 is, according to the true need of the person praying. 
 
 The more obdurate a man is, the more he does not 
 alter; and the harder his heart, the more like he is 
 to the unchangeable god of the physicists. In this 
 state wisdom says to him. Change, and regenerate 
 thyself, or woe be unto thee! 
 
 Every case of answer to prayer stands on its own 
 evidence; the right of churches to pray for rain, or 
 of persons to solicit private and worldly blessings, 
 are details which spiritual wisdom alone can settle; 
 and about which religious experience when it comes 
 will have something to say; but in the meantime 
 the evidence that the Lord commands prayer, and 
 hears prayer, and that prayer is the first and highest 
 act of the human mind, which brings supernal help, 
 and re-creates man, overbears the other side of the 
 question, and will overbear it to the end. It will 
 not however overcome the other position, w^hich 
 stands on the fancy that God hears no prayer, 
 because it is not the intellect but the heart which 
 decides against praying, and the heart is un- 
 searchable, and being the love and the will, has been 
 made from the first unassailable, except by a new 
 choice exercised by the man himself. 
 
 * A little boy said to his mother, "Mamma, how big is God? 
 Is He as big as an elephant?" "My dear," she answered, "He is no 
 bigger than you. It is His love and goodness which are so great." 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PR A YER. 
 
 385 
 
 This matter of freewill comes up continually, and 
 is the explanation of what without it is dark. If all 
 were mere nature, with fate flowing through its 
 main lines and its contingencies, God, or fate, would 
 then be everywhere, and prayer would be but a drop 
 in the unalterable river; but as freewill is posed, 
 and poised, at the top, man being that freewill, the 
 fate of good, which comes from God, is in man's 
 hands. Now freewill is a constant appearance com- 
 municated, by which responsibility is appropriated, 
 and good and evil. Being given momentaneously, 
 thus the appearance of separate identity being given, 
 God is creating and upholding man in every second 
 of time, and continually restoring the vanishing free- 
 will, that conscience may exist, and regeneration be 
 possible; and this goes on for ever, in heaven, and 
 in hell. Hence the presence of God is the life of 
 raan, because it is the Sun whose ray is freewill; and 
 the alterations of that presence require to be as con- 
 stant as the man s varying determinations. Nothing 
 changes those determinations so intimately as fervent 
 prayer from the will flowing from, and followed by, 
 the beginnings of a better life. And hence such 
 prayer changes God's action every moment. 
 
 This is as experimental as the acquisition of any 
 of the sciences. Try it, and you will see : reason 
 about it, and against it, and do not try it, and you 
 will not see. 
 
 XCIX. 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PRAYER. 
 
 Where do the scientists find the God, or the force, 
 that is averse from prayer; and how do they confirm 
 
 2 B 
 
3^6 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PR A YER. 
 
 tlieir point of negation ? As nature is unknown to 
 them at both ends, the negation is not a scientific 
 position. Behind protoplasm, and behind the grave, 
 and all over the arc of life, there may be a divine 
 ordainer and hearer of prayer for aught that they 
 can say to the contrary, for their large '^ unknown " 
 may contain Him. They cannot build here upon 
 the God of Holy Scripture, who is the same yester- 
 day, to-day, and for ever; for they do not accept 
 God from Scripture; the sameness predicated of 
 whom is the assertion of His permanent divinity 
 immanent in continual adaptations of revelation 
 since the beginning. Moreover, no known force, 
 form or mode of nature, upon any analysis yet made, 
 yields up fate as a limit; and yet fate must be the 
 proved upshot of all things before a personal creator 
 can be eliminated from the world. Therefore 
 scientism cannot make deafness to prayer out of any 
 observed phenomena. Nor can the metaphysical 
 abstraction, the infinite and eternal, presumed be- 
 hind the finite and temporal, be the thing that does 
 not hoar prayer; for it again is the unknown, and 
 cannot »upply a scientific negation, though it may 
 rniilly yield a nejyation of definition. You may 
 ronjuro negation into it. and then get negation out 
 uf it, but that in all. Such an infinite and eternal is 
 unntMTHHJiry nnleM it projoct« the world and all that 
 in within it into being, and uiiIchh it is presned upon 
 the hiinmn mind; and if it dooH theso two thinffs. its 
 nviitiveniKM ti»ucheM the variable, in the variable in 
 ouunu, in reacted u|M)n by the variable, and acts 
 aroordinjf to it, 6tpei*ially in hucIi a profound changer 
 of men iM earnest prayer is. Therefore scientism Ixas 
 no rational or experimental, no objective or sub- 
 j«oiiv« ground, for the hypothesis, that prayer is a 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PR A YER, 
 
 387 
 
 foolishness of the uninstructed mind. The belief is 
 absolutely without a basis that the Vulcan or rather 
 the volcano of creation is irresistible; and that the 
 Lord's Prayer, like Prometheus Bound, is a puppet 
 in the blacksmith hands of Strength and Force. The 
 preliminary denial of God is the derision of prayer; 
 and at this day specifically the denial of the Lord s 
 Divine Humanity. For His humanity is tender 
 and responsive over His whole creation, and He would 
 appear visibly helpful every moment if man s free- 
 will did not intervene, and had not to be considered 
 in the first place. It is, as we have just said before, 
 the conservation of this freewill that makes Him 
 seemingly absent nearly always, and that renders it 
 necessary for man to strive and struggle towards 
 Him before the will can be helped by Him without 
 impairing its life. The wrestlings of prayer, in 
 which the new freedom conquers the old, and the 
 new man is born, are mighty means whereby man 
 helps himself, God helping him. 
 
 In the circulation of evils and falses, the 
 paralysis of prayer occupies theological as well as 
 natural scientism. The dogma of false immutability 
 accompanies it into the churches; and betokens that 
 fate, and not the Divine Humanity, and man's free- 
 will, are at their centre. Prayer loses its efficacy 
 then, and falls into denial. The axioms of this state 
 are written up on high. ''As it was in the be- 
 ginning, is now, and ever shall be;" says the im- 
 mutable and infallible Papacy. '' Quod semjyev, quod 
 ubique, quod ah omnibus,'' say the arrested churches. 
 The Protestant doctrine of predestination, and the 
 doctrine of philosophical necessity, are stones in 
 the same scientific arch, possibly near its founda- 
 tions. The doctrine of scientism that prayer is a 
 
386 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PR A YER. 
 
 their point of negation ? As nature is unknown to 
 them at both ends, the negation is not a scientific 
 position. Behind protoplasm, and behind the grave, 
 and all over the arc of life, there may be a divine 
 ordainer and hearer of prayer for aught that they 
 can say to the contrary, for their large " unknown " 
 may contain Him. They cannot build here upon 
 the God of Holy Scripture, who is the same yester- 
 day, to-day, and for ever; for they do not accept 
 God from Scripture; the sameness predicated of 
 whom is the assertion of His permanent divinity 
 immanent in continual adaptations of revelation 
 since the beginning. Moreover, no known force, 
 form or mode of nature, upon any analysis yet made, 
 yields up fate as a limit ; and yet fate must be the 
 proved upshot of all things before a personal creator 
 can be eliminated from the world. Therefore 
 scientism cannot make deafness to prayer out of any 
 observed phenomena. Nor can the metaphysical 
 abstraction, the infinite and eternal, presumed be- 
 hind the finite and temporal, be the thing that does 
 not hear prayer; for it again is the unknown, and 
 cannot supply a scientific negation, though it may 
 easily yield a negation of definition. You may 
 conjure negation into it, and then get negation out 
 of it, but that is all. Such an infinite and eternal is 
 unnecessary unless it projects the world and all that 
 is within it into being, and unless it is pressed upon 
 the human mind; and if it does these two things, its 
 creativeness touches the variable, is tlie variable in 
 cause, is reacted upon by the variable, and acts 
 according to it, especially in such a profound changer 
 of men as earnest prayer is. Therefore scientism has 
 no rational or experimental, no objective or sub- 
 jective ground, for tho hypothesis, that prayer is a 
 
 SOURCES AGAINST PR A YER, 
 
 387 
 
 foolishness of the uninstructed mind. The belief is 
 absolutely without a basis that the Vulcan or rather 
 the volcano of creation is irresistible; and that the 
 Lord's Prayer, like Prometheus Bound, is a puppet 
 in the blacksmith hands of Strength and Force. The 
 preliminary denial of God is the derision of prayer; 
 and at this day specifically the denial of the Lord's 
 Divine Humanity. For His humanity is tender 
 and responsive over His whole creation, and He would 
 appear visibly helpful every moment if man s free- 
 will did not intervene, and had not to be considered 
 in the first place. It is, as we have just said before, 
 the conservation of this freewill that makes Him 
 seemingly absent nearly always, and that renders it 
 necessary for man to strive and struggle towards 
 Him before the will can be helped by Him without 
 impairing its life. The wrestlings of prayer, in 
 which the new freedom conquers the old, and the 
 new man is born, are mighty means whereby man 
 helps himself, God helping him. 
 
 In the circulation of evils and falses, the 
 paralysis of prayer occupies theological as well as 
 natural scientism. The dogma of false immutability 
 accompanies it into the churches ; and betokens that 
 fate, and not the Divine Humanity, and man s free- 
 will, are at their centre. Prayer loses its eflficacy 
 then, and falls into denial. The axioms of this state 
 are written up on high. ''As it was in the be- 
 ginning, is now, and ever shall be;" says the im- 
 mutable and infallible Papacy. '' Quod semper, quod 
 uhique, quod ah onmibus" say the arrested churches. 
 The Protestant doctrine of predestination, and the 
 doctrine of philosophical necessity, are stones in 
 the same scientific arch, possibly near its founda- 
 tions. The doctrine of scientism that prayer is a 
 
148 
 
 388 
 
 PERMISSIONS. 
 
 PR A YER AND INFL UX, 
 
 389 
 
 nothing, is a drain and effluvium from these fevers 
 of the churches; its immovable fate, force or god, 
 or universal all, are a fancy; but they are near its 
 fountain-head, they feed it with delirium of self- 
 conceit, and grievously invalidate its commerce with 
 nature. 
 
 C. 
 
 PERMISSIONS. 
 
 There is something stupendous in the withdraAvals 
 of the Almighty that every man may be a person, 
 and find himself somebody. If we reasoned djyrioriy 
 we might suppose that men could hardly exist who 
 because they have found out large fields of small 
 exactitudes in the sciences, straightway exult over 
 Moses and the prophets and the Lord Himself, as 
 bygone mistakes, because they were not micro- 
 scopists, protoplasmists, and violationists. We 
 might have contended that want of shame had no 
 such depths. That a few words of Scripture in- 
 finitely out of the production of such men, would 
 have burnt up their poor abstractions, and left them 
 wailing, ^* Fools that we are." But the reverse is the 
 fact. Insignificance is allowed to fill the world, 
 when men please; no force is used to compel men 
 to recognize the divine light as any other than a 
 match to kindle the wick of science, and then to be 
 thrown blackened on the ground. Mercy is in 
 revelation, and hides it from being revelation to 
 those who hate it. Yet it is the increasing duty of 
 all who think otherwise to come dow^n to their 
 brethren on the plane of atheistical science; to 
 
 approach their states ; and lovingly to combat with 
 them, wonderfully as they are by the Lord permitted 
 to exist. 
 
 CI. 
 
 PRAYER AND INFLUX. 
 
 Coming lower down, tlie analogies of prayer range 
 through living nature, and mercy in many ways is 
 besought by all the creatures. The dog muzzled 
 in the violation trough, and his cry prevented, 
 wags his tail as the last motion by which he asks 
 for mercy where there is no mercy, where 
 the '' unalterable " steel heart of the scientists 
 is supreme. He asks for a Mercy that will surely 
 come. And prayer is peaceably correlated with 
 the solicitation of the domestic animals to man for 
 sustenance and protection; the intensity of this 
 fact is the measure of domestication. It is the 
 relation of natural history to God, whose Psalmist 
 says, " The eyes of all wait upon Thee." The prayers 
 of the eyes of the creatures ! It is correlated uni- 
 versally in human nature, where all that is lower is 
 in one continual conscious or unconscious solicitation 
 to those Avho are higher. And public and private 
 conscience exist as they with instant wisdom own 
 the claim, and grant and work out the prayer. So 
 that man with his dependencies, even apart from 
 God, subsists by prayer. And whoso is out of it, 
 and keeps out, is in the stone-hearted abyss already. 
 In ccmclusion, it has now been seen, that God, 
 having created the universe, has His hand upon it 
 from its origin, and continually. That a god who 
 does not hear prayer and intervene visibly or in- 
 visibly in human affairs, in which freewill of his 
 
39° 
 
 PRAYER AND INFLUX. 
 
 '* 
 
 ^ 
 
 own imparting, prescribes his own divine limits, is 
 unknown to revelation, to personal experience where 
 there is experiment, to history and to natural history. 
 That the existence of an atheist god is supported by 
 nothing in nature or man; and at this day is the 
 culminating juggle of hell practised upon the willing 
 credulity of scientists. 
 
 This not meant coarsely, although the terms are 
 final. They are necessarily so, because since the 
 last judgment, heaven and hell have been opened as 
 factors in human thought first; and afterwards, in 
 affairs; and there is no closing the gates of influx any 
 longer. Not mere good and evil of circumstance 
 will be pleaded in the future wars of faith and prac- 
 tice, but open heaven and open hell. The laws of 
 both can be appealed to, because the laws of both 
 have been made manifest. Self, once regarded as 
 merely natural, is now known and declared to be 
 diabolical. This, in its whole compass, is a new 
 knowledge and a new point of departure for man- 
 kind. It will sharpen every sword on both sides, 
 and heart will meet heart in affirmation and denial ; 
 in inward religious war as well as in outward. It 
 will penetrate into Parliament, and whether tacitly 
 or openly, be the inmost platform of action, and the 
 new demand of duty; the new target of the parlia- 
 mentary scoffer and atheist. It will bring the 
 Bible into the Magna Charta of the rights of rich 
 and poor, and it will constitute the right of prayer 
 into one of the rights of Parliament, without which 
 its needed light cannot be obtained, or its true busi- 
 ness be carried on. Not abrogating the old Prayer 
 Book, it will open the praying senator. * It will 
 stretch a new shield over weakness, and a terrible 
 humanity over the dumb animals of the country. 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH. 391 
 
 It will speak equal rights for men and women, not 
 before the law first, but before the Lord. It will 
 shelter madness from the lust of power and profit. 
 It will steadily disestablish other things that right- 
 eousness may be established; and abolish the 
 privileges of men that the gifts of heaven may come 
 down unobstructed. And all this simply because 
 the New Jerusalem has been revealed; not only a 
 new ideal, but a new real, extant in heaven, and foot 
 to foot against hell; knowledge and combat both. 
 This public and private change is in its small begin- 
 nings now; and comes out of the immeasurable fact, 
 that men are no longer closed in themselves, but are 
 open doors of prayer and influx through which stream 
 the light and power of the second coming of the 
 Lord in a new religious dispensation. 
 
 CIL 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH. 
 
 The new freedom of mankind, originating pri- 
 marily in the last judgment and the new dispensa- 
 tion, and in the opening of the two great abodes of 
 spiritual forces, namely, the heavens and the hells, 
 submits the questions of this age to a strain which 
 is sensible in all minds, and give pauses of silence in 
 the midst of human intercourse, implying a caution 
 as against new dangers on an untrodden way. For 
 where there is a new freedom of action with fields 
 of power ahead, the matter is, what to do with it. 
 This is seen very especially in the perception looming 
 everywhere, of the rights of women. Not to men- 
 tion other branches of the subject, political rights, 
 
 % 
 
390 
 
 PRAYER AND INFLUX, 
 
 own imparting, prescribes his own divine limits, is 
 unknown to revelation, to personal experience where 
 there is experiment, to history and to natural history. 
 That the existence of an atheist god is supported by 
 nothing in nature or man; and at this day is the 
 culminating juggle of hell practised upon the willing 
 credulity of scientists. 
 
 This not meant coarsely, although the terms are 
 final. They are necessarily so, because since the 
 last judgment, heaven and hell have been opened as 
 factors in human thought first; and afterwards, in 
 affairs; and there is no closing the gates of influx any 
 lono-er. Not mere good and evil of circumstance 
 will be pleaded in the future wars of faith and prac- 
 tice, but open heaven and open hell. The laws of 
 both can be appealed to, because the laws of both 
 have been made manifest. Self, once regarded as 
 merely natural, is now known and declared to be 
 diabolical. This, in its whole compass, is a new 
 knowledge and a new point of departure for man- 
 kind. It will sharpen every sword on both sides, 
 and heart will meet heart in affirmation and denial ; 
 in inward religious war as well as in outward. It 
 will penetrate into Parliament, and whether tacitly 
 or openly, be the inmost platform of action, and the 
 new demand of duty; the new target of the parlia- 
 mentary scoffer and atheist. It will bring the 
 Bible into the Magna Charta of the rights of rich 
 and poor, and it will constitute the right of prayer 
 into one of the rights of Parliament, without which 
 its needed light cannot be obtained, or its true busi- 
 ness be carried on. Not abrogating the old Prayer 
 Book, it will open the praying senator. • It will 
 stretch a new shield over weakness, and a terrible 
 humanity over the dumb animals of the country. 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH. 391 
 
 It will speak equal rights for men and women, not 
 before the law first, but before the Lord. It will 
 shelter madness from the lust of power and profit. 
 It will steadily disestablish other things that right- 
 eousness may be established; and abolish the 
 privileges of men that the gifts of heaven may come 
 down unobstructed. And all this simply because 
 the New Jerusalem has been revealed; not only a 
 new ideal, but a new real, extant in heaven, and foot 
 to foot against hell; knowledge and combat both. 
 This public and private change is in its small begin- 
 nings now; and comes out of the immeasurable fact, 
 that men are no longer closed in themselves, but are 
 open doors of prayer and influx through which stream 
 the light and power of the second coming of the 
 Lord in anew religious dispensation. 
 
 CII. 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH. 
 
 The new freedom of mankind, originating pri- 
 marily in the last judgment and the new dispensa- 
 tion, and in the opening of the two great abodes of 
 spiritual forces, namely, the heavens and the hells, 
 submits the questions of this age to a strain which 
 is sensible in all minds, and give pauses of silence in 
 the midst of human intercourse, implying a caution 
 as against new dangers on an untrodden way. For 
 where there is a new freedom of action with fields 
 of power ahead, the matter is, what to do with it. 
 This is seen very especially in the perception looming 
 everywhere, of the rights of women. Not to men- 
 tion other branches of the subject, political rights, 
 
392 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH, 
 
 and rights of education, may be adduced in point. 
 No reason has yet been given, why woman, as an 
 experimental person, should be denied her experi- 
 ment; why any real sphere of life should be closed 
 against her; and her public freewill be abated, or 
 wholly, or chiefly, managed by the masculine free- 
 wall. The despotism over her cannot last; lier 
 incessant cause will wear it out, and tire it to death. 
 When she has been enfranchised, and barrier after 
 barrier has been removed, when no statute not obvi- 
 ously sexual, contains either '' he " or ^^ she " distinc- 
 tively, and all the ways of life are open to her, and 
 property is no longer masculine but human, what 
 will she do with her freedom? There is no possi- 
 bility of forecasting that future. It is adduced only 
 to shew the new strain upon responsibility and con- 
 science whichis coming: and howmucliGod and prayer 
 will be needed to enable her to bear the strain, and to 
 receive the light which is required. Clearly many 
 rights will drop when the power to exercise them is 
 given. Clearly a new education for feminine wisdom 
 will accrue from her earnest desire and inquiry to 
 know what fields she may occupy. It is obvious 
 that freedom and experiment alone can qualify her 
 for knowing her disqualifications; that she will then 
 learn from failures and successes, as men have done, 
 where she is; and become a teacher to herself In 
 the meantime, even now, with Parliament against 
 her, she is inwardly in tlie tension of this new free- 
 dom, and is not sure whether she is to be as a man, 
 or whether there is a whole new womanly side to 
 affairs and the state. 
 
 In her thoughts of education also, the same strain 
 is felt. Is she to be as a young man and a collegian 
 here, and to be made into a man-woman by exactly 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH 393 
 
 that education which it is supposed has produced the 
 present masculine race with its dominant powers? 
 It is not perhaps any person s business to answer 
 that question, but rather it must be referred to ex- 
 periment, of Avhich her new mental freedom is the 
 condition. The world must await the trial, and 
 succour the stress which it involves. There are 
 however one or two points connected with the pre- 
 sent pages which may be cursorily dwelt upon. It 
 is evident that woman has the same mental powers 
 as men, but differently sexed and centred. She can 
 enter in her way into all arts and sciences; she can 
 sit on thrones, command and lead armies, exert 
 eloquent speech, make excellent literature, practise 
 medicine and perform surgery, preach in pulpits, and 
 receive divine communications. In short, the scale of 
 her powers is co-equal with all things. She can do in 
 every department what she has an adequate affection 
 for doing. But what perhaps she cannot profitably 
 do in the long run is, to lay hold of things on the 
 purely intellectual side, and enter them thus. Her 
 heart predominates, as the head predominates in the 
 man. Now this being the case, to give her equal 
 chances with man, a complete rehabilitation of know- 
 ledge in her interest also, is necessary; that she may 
 learn a corresponding heart-truth in every detail 
 for the man s head-truth. Man has the advantage 
 of all his own intellectual experience gained through 
 his own effort by his own sexual process of thought; 
 woman has no present advantage of the kind before 
 her; and must be content to enter upon the faculties 
 of man, and their acquisitions, at second hand. This 
 is a grave consideration for the advocates of the high 
 education of women; indeed for their general edu- 
 cation at all; that the intellect of the heart, that 
 
394 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH, 
 
 beautiful intellect, should have no knowledge ot 
 nature and things, and no learning, at first hand, 
 but only what supplants its freedom, and is com- 
 pelled upon it by the intellect of the head. It 
 argues the throwing away of a marriageable quality, 
 the abeyance of the woman's intellect before the 
 mans. 
 
 Is she to rewrite history, to reconstruct f:cience, to 
 reproduce metaphysics, to reinvent the arts, from 
 her own womanly intellect, so as to have a world of 
 her own, and introduce it into harmonious and con- 
 jugial relationship, as of the heart-mind with the 
 head-mind, with the existing intellectual fabric and 
 art fabric which is so preponderantly of masculine 
 growth? That can hardly be intended; because 
 what has been done hitherto belongs to the past, and 
 no copy of it is possible; nay, no new original which 
 follows the old lines. Moreover, it is to be hoped 
 that the man has done, and is doing, the coarse work 
 of thought, invention and practice; and that his 
 partner in the days of time is to be saved that 
 labour. Nevertheless, it may be thought that 
 woman's mind has a sphere of its own in every- 
 thing; and that all things through her faculties, now 
 that they are being filled with the new freewill which 
 is creative, will reappear in their true heart-forms. 
 They will be grouped and gathered more closely 
 round Use, and loop up speculation where its sweep 
 would destroy household goods. The universe seen 
 by her will be smaller and more domestic. But it 
 will more easily be the Lord's universe where man 
 hitherto has seen only God's universe. The final 
 truth of things lies that way; and therefore the 
 scientific eyes of woman will be less artificial, and 
 will see into the heart of things by that sympathy 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH 395 
 
 which is the mother of thought. Now the thought 
 that conies out of a true sympathy is full of the 
 finest natural truths. It cannot therefore be sup- 
 posed that the New Woman will not be a minister and 
 interpreter of nature, and have in the long run her 
 own arts and sciences accruing ; but rather that while 
 man gives the inductions of experience gathered 
 from human society and the planets, she will give 
 the deductions, and crystallize them in that house 
 not made with hands, the home. Out of this the 
 society arises, and the state. The new woman will 
 therefore be present by heart-truths all through the 
 commonwealth, and will be prime minister of the 
 new man in his permitted administration of the God- 
 wealth. The coin of regeneration will pass through 
 her fingers in its payments and to its ends. 
 
 There is one thing also that is noteworthy about 
 woman; in an age of free speculation like the present, 
 her mind is the last resort of the old religious senti- 
 ment, though not perhaps the first recipient of the new. 
 She holds religious society together. Therefore, in 
 her new perceptions, as well as in the domestic root 
 of them, she compresses useless immensities of 
 thought within bounds, and limits masculine science 
 as well as she can in its insane aspiration to be a 
 violator, an atheist, and a god. There is something 
 of business in the broom which she thus wields, to 
 keep the dust, and dirt, and rubbish of the masculine 
 speculator from settling on her floor. As she sees 
 this more clearly, and presses the matter of her com- 
 pulsory cleanhness more particularly, science will 
 have to thank God and her for making it once more 
 into the seer of the mundus, the neatness of the pro- 
 priety of things. She will handle her instruments 
 for the corners of the mind's ceiling, and bring the 
 
396 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH, 
 
 spider and cobweb of materialism out of one, of 
 naturalism out of another, of deism out of another, 
 and of atheism out of a fourth; and put these im- 
 TnunditicB, these parasites and monkeys of the mundus, 
 into the kitchen-fire, and say to her maids, that is to 
 say, to her sciences, — The home spoilers shall have no 
 place where I am, they are creatures of dirt, good 
 for neither man nor beast : see to them diligently for 
 the future that none of their eofj^s be left here. 
 
 Though these be her functions analogously put, 
 and they sound like those of a housewife, and are 
 in the highest degree those of a housewife, and of a 
 mother of children who must be cleanly, and of the 
 helpmeet of man who wants a sane home, yet they 
 are intuitions and pressures upon the body of the 
 science of the world. In compelling its decency, 
 they will redintegrate its truth. The female veto on 
 the evils and falses of science, and on the passage of 
 these into acceptance and legislation, is the most im- 
 portant scientific function and responsibility which 
 are demanded of her in these years. But from this 
 private basis, other offices and commissions will 
 arise; and perceptions in series as the New Church 
 descends. 
 
 It is said in the Apocalypse, a book to which we 
 have already invited the attention of scientists, '^ I 
 saw a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon 
 under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve 
 stars." ^'The woman signifies the Lord's new 
 church in the heavens, which is the new heaven, 
 and the Lord's new church about to be upon earth, 
 which is the New Jerusalem. . . . The woman ap- 
 peared clothed with the sun, because that church is 
 in love to the Lord ; for she acknowledges Him, and 
 does His commandments, and this is to love Him. 
 The sun signifies love. The moon was seen under 
 
 WOMAN UNDER THE NEW CHURCH. 397 
 
 her feet, because the church on earth, not yet con- 
 joined with the church in heaven, is understood; for 
 the moon signifies intelligence in the natural man, 
 and faith; and its appearing under the feet signifies 
 that the church is about to be upon earth. Other- 
 wise, the feet signify the church itself when it is 
 conjoined with heaven. It is to be observed that 
 there is a church in heaven as well as upon earth, 
 for the Word exists in heaven: there are temples 
 also, and preachings in them there, and ministerial 
 and priestly offices; for all the angels there were 
 once men, and their departure from the world was 
 only a continuation of their life. . . . ^ Upon her head 
 a crown of twelve stars' signifies the wisdom and 
 intelliofence of the New Church from knowledges of 
 divine good and divine truth from the Word. A 
 crown on the head signifies wisdom and intelligence : 
 stars signify the knowledges of divine good and 
 divine truth from the Word; and twelve signifies all 
 things of the church which have relation to its good 
 and truth." {Apocalypse Revealed, 533, 534.) 
 
 This revelation of the coming church of course 
 does not signify woman apart, yet plainly it does 
 signify a feminine or receptive relation of the new 
 human nature to the Lord, and reaches down by 
 correlation to the whole position of woman with 
 regard to those three leading planes, love, wisdom, 
 and knowledge. It dispenses for woman also, all 
 the knowledges of good and truth. It referred only 
 to one state. It preceded the birth of the man- 
 child, that is to say, in the New Church, the true 
 doctrine of the Lord and His incarnation : the man- 
 child who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron; 
 to reign over evils by the power of divine natural 
 truth, which is signified by a rod of iron, *^ and at 
 
398 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION, 
 
 the same time by rational considerations from 
 natural light." It preceded the coming of the great 
 red draofon face to face with the woman in her child- 
 bearing; that is to say, the doctrine of justification 
 by faith without the life of love; a great red dragon 
 being the organic appearance of that doctrine in its 
 grouped multitudes of followers in the spiritual 
 world. This passage therefore, for our present very 
 small view, may be accepted as a declaration that 
 the new man and the new woman are in a church in 
 which all the knowledges of what is good and true, 
 and in the ultimate fact, all the sciences, will crown 
 the conjoint mind of the race, and be its prerogative 
 in the church and its royalty in the world. 
 
 cm. 
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 The chief means to this in the intellectual and 
 rational faculties, (which however are strictly subor- 
 dinate to regeneration in daily life, and fluctuate with 
 it continually,) is the restored Science of Correspon- 
 dences. This in its essence is gentle, humane, and 
 perceptive; descending through the afiections, con- 
 stituting a field of new intuitions, and inheriting all 
 former domains of science, but especially ranging 
 over the free fields of the natural creation as its daily 
 w^alks. It is a science of peaceful delights and 
 attractions, organic with innumerable principles, each 
 the perception of a creative purpose, or of aliving soul; 
 so it knows what the creatures are by knowing their 
 good, and seeing it carried out in their forms; this 
 carrying forth being organization. It brings down 
 the spiritual and the social also, and sees them 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION, 
 
 399 
 
 imaged and working in these subordinate forms, and 
 consequently is a real presence of the knowing mind 
 pervading nature; human character being printed 
 off* in creation, whose forms are its intelligible words. 
 It also brings the divine Lord into knowledge, first 
 in the correspondences of the extensive "Word, and 
 second, in the answers to these correspondences 
 throughout nature. It therefore consists of thought 
 within thought, and of perception within perception : 
 nay, of affection and delight within and within. More- 
 over, it leaves all other honest sciences standino-, and 
 is a new incentive to the exact prosecution of them all. 
 On the side of Use, what may not be expected 
 from it in its very gradual development under 
 regeneration? At present the forms of the creation 
 are for the most part used in only a general way, but 
 the science of correspondences is the science of par- 
 ticulars and specifics. George Herbert says, 
 
 ^' Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 
 Find their acquaintance there." 
 
 The flesh however does not usually know how to 
 cull them. Correspondences supply the eye and the 
 hand and the application. A walk in the fields with 
 that eye opened would suggest more cure of disease 
 than all our pharmacopoeias, and open mines of pre- 
 cious substance for the purification of the blood and 
 the body. It would speedily make the good side of 
 nature into the tree of medical life. This will be 
 eflfected by the revealed correspondence of the evils 
 of hereditary and acquired character with the diseases 
 of the frame, and of the diseases Avith their corre- 
 sponding plants, aggravative and curative. Something 
 considerable of the kind has already been done by 
 Hahnemann in Homoeopathy; but in the way of 
 detailed experiment with poisons, not through the 
 
400 
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 \v 
 
 intuitive collocation of correspondent planes of forms; 
 his method being synthetic from below, while that 
 of correspondences is true to the human mind's ulti- 
 mate place of power, and is synthetic from above. 
 
 Then, for another thing, correspondences are a 
 compound memoria technica or art of remembrance 
 in nature; and we know what a feeder for the intui- 
 tions of truth a great and constant memory is. And 
 again they enable the mind to travel rapidly through 
 related kingdoms of forms, seeing principles under a 
 diversity of appearances which would baffle the un- 
 opened mind of the naturalist. And moreover, they 
 arc a perpetual teaching in the daily walk, for any 
 one of them, truly perceived, will write its own 
 school-book, and pass with a power of amusement, 
 and a sense of imparted faculty, into the minds of 
 even young children ; and be as tenacious and easy 
 as on the obverse side, nicknames are. A friend of 
 the writer s, the late A. J. Scott, that earnest and 
 genial educationist, who probably felt no special 
 interest in the science of correspondences as given 
 through Swedenborg, remarked that he should like 
 to see the subject in its bearings on education, in 
 which he was inclined to think it might occupy an 
 important place. Doubtless this was a wise forecast; 
 for the definite relation of things from their source 
 downwards and from the mind outwards, is the very 
 justice and harmony of knowledge, which ^' absorbs 
 and incarnates " all details, presents them in actual 
 forms, and hands them over as held words into the 
 primers of a new education. With regard to mental 
 philosophy also, though that is not our subject here, 
 the perception of correspondences is constitutive, 
 both by abolishing abstractions from the mind, by 
 giving the Word of the Lord anew to its field, and 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION 
 
 401 
 
 by supplying an endless command of the materials, 
 the true stones, out of which the mind itself is built. 
 All this constitutes a science which men and 
 women may enter equally; and here therefore we 
 have the field to which both sexes can resort, and 
 where each can perceive and utter its appointed 
 truths. The old sciences are the albumen of the 
 Qgg\ but this is the yolk, with at present the 
 pu7ictum saliens, and then the pmictum vivens, and 
 last to come, the Hving chick. It may be doubted 
 whether the intellectual sciences of the past belono* 
 productively to woman ; it cannot be doubted that 
 the perceived science of the descent of the divine 
 mind, and then of collective and single human 
 characters, thougli all forms, and their representa- 
 tion in all, will be but half a science, and a dwindling 
 half, if the feminine voice be not heard speaking 
 in all its sweetness through the instructed musical 
 air. This science is not artificial, but created; it 
 is all nature and faculty together : how could the 
 half of nature, and the half of faculties, elicit it, know 
 it,^ hve in it, and love in it? It is a reproductive 
 science, and so, not male alone. In this science lies 
 the marriage of the masculine with the feminine 
 love of truth. The Word is its instructor in the 
 way, and the uses of a new life are its children. 
 The new woman on her head will have its crown of 
 twelve stars. 
 
 One strange realm of forms is brought within the 
 
 scope of the opened rational mind by the reception of 
 
 the knowledge and life of correspondences : namely, 
 
 the compound animal forms seen in the prophetic 
 
 and apocalyptic visions. The reader will bear in 
 
 mmd that the spiritual world is a plastic and 
 
 representative world, whose spaces are really states 
 
 2 c ' 
 
402 THE NE W ED UCA TIOJST. 
 
 and whose times are the variations of those states. 
 It results that whatever there is in a man or a 
 woman, in a society, in a kingdom, or in a church, 
 is bodied forth in real forms without them ; as we 
 saw just now that the gathered church organization 
 of salvation by faith alone, without charity which is 
 the active day's work of love, presented itself in 
 vision as a great red dragon : great from the vast 
 acceptance of the doctrine; red, from perversion 
 and destruction of love, which itself is red in the 
 opposite or good sense; and a dragon from the form 
 and power of its warfare against heaven in man. 
 
 Swedenborg gives his own inductive experimental 
 proof of this signification of the dragon, which can- 
 not be gainsaid without a contrary experience. His 
 words are : '' That the dragon here means those 
 who are in faith alone and reject the works of the 
 law as not conducive to salvation, has sometimes 
 been testified to me in the w^orld of spirits by 
 actual experience. I have seen several thousands 
 of such assembled together, when they appeared at 
 a distance like a dragon with a long tail, that seemed 
 full of prickles like thorns, which signified falsities. 
 Once also there appeared a dragon still larger, who, 
 raising his back, and lifting up his tail towards 
 heaven, endeavoured to draw down the stars. Thus 
 it has been manifested before my eyes that no 
 others are meant by the dragon." {Apocahjim 
 
 Revealedy n. 537.) 
 
 This is but one instance of such creative embodi- 
 ment, of which there are many other examples in 
 the lioly Scripture. The cherubs were an instance 
 of a divine composition of animal forms; they 
 signify protection of spheres which are thus 
 guarded from invasion; whence after Adam and 
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION, 
 
 403 
 
 Eve, the celestial Church, fell from its place, a 
 cherubic sword waving every way barred against 
 human re-entrance the gate of the forfeited Eden. 
 The manifold beasts seen in Ezekiel are other 
 instances. If they were all grouped, it would be 
 found that they constitute a realm of forms. The 
 mythologies, paintings and sculptures of Assyria 
 and Egypt, derived from the perverted remainder of 
 the correspondences of the second or spiritual 
 church, have brought these or analogous forms into 
 history; and human-headed bulls and the like are 
 the result ; and in the last resort in Greece, where 
 the spiritual life was reflected in art, the centaur is 
 one of the forms that struggled down from the old 
 religion thither. Ancient and modern fable and 
 caricature are the last reflexion of this realm which 
 was peopled with such portentous images in the past. 
 It cannot die, because it is of the very nature of the 
 mind itself touched by the spiritual world. There 
 is indeed nothing which naturalism and scientific 
 materialism would more promptly scout than the 
 proposition that such forms have any verisimilitude 
 in real things. Even the great sea-serpent keeps 
 these chalky gouts of the mind continually on 
 guard and in alarm lest something should be sub- 
 stantiated which is not to hand at will, and 
 which is too wily, and too big a circumstance, for a 
 museum. Swedenborof has thrown rational liofht 
 upon this matter of compound animals, to the 
 extent indeed of showing the mode of their genera- 
 tion in the spiritual world, the very necessity of it, 
 and then the mode of their introduction (through 
 the openness of minds to the spiritual world by 
 actual intromission thither as in his case, or by 
 vision, real representative sight, as in the case of 
 
«t 
 
 404 THE NE W ED UCA TION. 
 
 the prophets and John the Evangelist,) into the 
 religions, mythologies, architectures, and fables of the 
 natural world. The case is a simple one, or at least 
 a compound of simples. It has been shown before 
 that the creative correspondential wave or undula- 
 lation passing through man, striking the next 
 lower and therefore resistent plane without him, 
 rises up into the next inferior correlate forms; 
 so that the intimacies of innocence in heaven, 
 besides their own provocation of human states of 
 beatitude, angelic newness of infancy in themselves, 
 engender sheep and lambs as forms on the celestial 
 fields. This for the individual. But for the 
 society, it is grouped according to its doctrines and 
 principles of love and truth. These also are repre- 
 sented, but in a compound degree, on greater planes 
 of resistance. It is especially the Word, and the 
 reception of it by the angelic men and women, that 
 is thus embodied ; as in the four beasts full of eyes 
 before and behind, '' In the midst of the throne, and 
 round about the throne, four beasts, full of eyes 
 before and behind. And the first beast was like a 
 lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third 
 beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was 
 like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each 
 of them six wings about liim ; and they ivere full 
 of eyes within " (Rev. iv. 6-8). And again in 
 another place there is this description: "And the 
 shapes of the locusts were like unto horses pre- 
 pared unto battle ; and on their heads were as it 
 were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the 
 faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of 
 women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. 
 And they had breast-plates as it were breast-plates 
 of iron, and the sound of their wings was as the 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION. 
 
 405 
 
 sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. 
 And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there 
 were stings in their tails " (ix. 7-10). And yet one 
 more instance : *^ And I stood upon the sand of the 
 sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having 
 seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten 
 crowns, and upon his head the name of blasphemy. 
 And the beast which I saw was like unto a 
 leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and 
 his mouth as the mouth of a lion" (xiii. 1, 2). 
 For the detailed interpretation of these forms, 
 the reader is referred to Swedenborg s Apocalypse 
 Revealed, The general remark here made is that 
 the leading doctrines of the human mind, its 
 philosophies, its theologies, and its anti-theologies, so 
 far as they guide life and practice, and admit man 
 to the Lord, or voluntarily shut him ofi* from the 
 Lord, are substantial organizations within society, 
 manifold in their parts, many-headed monsters 
 sometimes ; and that if they could be imaged on the 
 sky, or thrown upon any photographic disk of this 
 world, they would telegraph and photograph them- 
 selves out into just such forms and appearances as 
 the Evangelist here describes from his vision in the 
 Apocalypse. It stands to reason that they must; 
 the correlation of forces will have it so. But of 
 mercy, and of nature, the atmospheres of this dumb 
 lower world are not adequate to be the wombs of 
 the representation. But in the living atmospheres 
 of the spiritual world, where all elements tend 
 momentaneously and successfully to the human 
 form and its correspondences and planes, the states 
 of societies flow into these images whenever a 
 divine representation of them, for ends of use, is 
 permitted to those to whom these states pertain. 
 
I 
 
 406 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION, 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION. 
 
 407 
 
 These things are therefore ultimate facts of self-in- 
 struction. And e codo descendit yv^Oi a-eavrop is by 
 them attested in and from the Word. 
 
 The apparent decency, even where it is completed 
 by mitre and tiara, of any public department of life, 
 does not forbid that were its external canonicals, 
 mental and social, put aside, and its naked loves, 
 what it delights to plan and longs to do, laid bare, 
 and projected out upon a truth-telling firmament of 
 spiritual representation, it would not be seen in that 
 organific light as a great red dragon making war upon 
 the truths of the Lord. In point of fact, this is the 
 form in which the Protestant Church, still great and 
 decorous upon earth, was shown to John under the 
 spiritual skies. The Woman met that form, and 
 will meet it again and again in her agony, until the 
 New Church is founded in the life of nations and 
 
 peoples. 
 
 " ' And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as 
 a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to 
 be carried away of the flood.' This signifies reason- 
 ings from abounding falsities to destroy the church. 
 The serpent signifies here, as before, the dragon 
 which deceives, and the woman, the New Church. 
 Water signifies truths, and in the opposite sense, 
 falsities. A river signifies truths in abundance, and 
 in the opposite sense, abounding falsities. Out of 
 the mouth of the serpent signifies reasonings. . . . 
 The reasonings of those who are meant by the dragon 
 are all from fallacies and appearances, which, if con- 
 firmed, appear outwardly like truths, but within they 
 conceal falsities in abundance. . . . ' And the earth 
 helped the woman ; and the earth opened her mouth, 
 and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast 
 out of his mouth.' This signifies that the reasonings 
 
 from abounding falsities which the dragonists pro- 
 duce, are brought to nothing by the spiritual truths 
 rationally understood, which the Michaels, of which 
 the New Church consists, adduce. The earth which 
 helped the woman signifies the church as to doc- 
 trine; and as the reasonings from falsities which the 
 drao^onists produce are treated of, the means by 
 which the earth, that is, the church, helps the woman, 
 are truths from the Word. To open her mouth sig- 
 nifies to adduce those truths. The river which the 
 dragon cast out of liis mouth signifies reasonings .... 
 to swallow the river signifies to make these rea- 
 sonings come to nothing." {Apocalypse lievealed, 
 n. 563, 564.) 
 
 It may here be remarked that the destruction of 
 these falsities, which mainly concern the unimport- 
 ance of good and the all-importance of truth, takes 
 place representatively by the yawning of the ground, 
 by the apparent action of the earth herself. This 
 reaches down into evil and false science also, which 
 is in the end of the tail of the great red dragon, 
 beinof a material faith without life. The text there- 
 fore portends the ultimate rebellion of true external 
 physics against the floods of atheism and material- 
 ism; the battle of matter itself against the lie ; and 
 thus the emancipation of the doctrines and vitals of 
 matter from its demon, materialism. 
 
 If theology is thus represented from one end of 
 the sky to the other in the Word, and the red 
 dragon hoisted that all may see it, physiology, which 
 embraces the whole doctrine of the body of man as 
 including his mind, and whose state is an ultimate 
 reflex of that of theology, cannot be left out, but has 
 its own share in the image and the picture; say 
 rather in the life and movement of the dragon. No 
 
4o8 
 
 THE NE W ED UCA TION. 
 
 human mind without open vision can declare what 
 the specific physiological state may be as manifested 
 in a form; but as the spiritual world is the power of 
 bodying forth collective inward conditions, and giving 
 them a just local habitation in exact frescoes, we 
 know that the present physiology is already written 
 down, and revealed when needful on the pages of 
 the book of the immortal life. If the shape be on 
 the animal plane, it must be composite ; and the 
 several factors of physiology have organic signatures 
 there. The lust of extorting the secrets of life by 
 invading it from without ; the lust of destroying the 
 animal world to batten the selfhood of science ; the 
 lust of crucifying nature as Christ was crucified; the 
 atheism which wields the instruments of the scien- 
 tific inquisition; the foolishness of believing in an 
 insight into the human body, the image of the temple 
 of the Holy Ghost, by the violation of beasts ; the 
 madness of attempting to build the heart of healing 
 out of the bricks of cruelty; these and many more 
 elements must contribute to the terrible blazon of 
 physiology coiling on the spiritual walls. Whatever 
 the shape may be, it is sufficient to know that the 
 end is mental destruction, and that Mene, Mene, 
 Tekel, Upharsin, is written over its banqueters in 
 letters of judicial rational light for the new age. 
 
 For not an atrocity has entered into it that is not 
 garnered and ingrained into its form. As with 
 human beings which carry their inherited and 
 acquired evils in their constitutions, in which they 
 are manifested in mortal forms at last ; so with 
 societies, theologies, philosophies, and sciences. They 
 all carry and accumulate the diseases of which they 
 die; degenerations first, then, from stress of circum- 
 stances, acute maladies; and then succumbing of life, 
 
 NE W CENTRES OF SPIRITUAL LIFE, 409 
 
 and decay. Physiology has reached that point. 
 Never so large in appearance and girth as now, never 
 so tenacious of its own wealth, or so greedy of acqui- 
 sition, never so reputed by the old speculators and 
 gamesters around it, never so much looked up to by 
 the brood of false hopes which expect its inheritance, 
 never so near the purple of empire, it is yet gasping 
 and senile, and sells itself to the arch-enemy to 
 secure a new lease of existence. The cruel old 
 physiology, from which human nature has suffered 
 much, and is not better but worse, is upon its 
 deathbed. 
 
 CIV. 
 
 NEW CENTRES OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 The same state may be alleged of the human mind 
 as a selfish organon. As we have previously seen, 
 several collective human minds have already been con- 
 summated, and have died out; the Lord, from above, 
 and from without, by His interposition, raising up 
 among men a new mind, capable of a new career, and 
 of regeneration. Both these events are now taking 
 place. The dying out does not necessarily occur by 
 the destruction of the race, and at first it is not 
 obvious, though it is usually accompanied by great 
 wars and revolutions which break the old state in 
 pieces; by heaving of the grounds of society up- 
 wards; or by glacial epochs of indifference and 
 numbness, to prepare a tabula rasa and a new plane ; 
 and probably these things will be seen in the present 
 catastrophe. But it rather implies the displacing of 
 the former centre from its post of dominion, and the 
 
410 
 
 NE W CENTRES OF SPIRITUAL LIFE, 
 
 I 
 
 constitution of new necessities and principles as a 
 centre in its stead. The Protestant and Catholic 
 churclies, and the atheisms which are their scurf, 
 the Protestant and Catholic atheisms, are the centres 
 which are now displaced; and the new centre in its 
 extent is a plane of rational freedom, and in it a tiny- 
 spot of light, the recognized New Church, the herald 
 of the Sun of ri ofhteousness : the liHit cominor 
 necessarily before the orb, as in Genesis, in which 
 the dawn day precedes the sunrise day. 
 
 In a former chapter we have seen what the 
 attestations are that a New Church is descendinof 
 upon the earth from the new heavens constituted 
 after the last judgment in 1757 of the prepared 
 people who had lived since the beginning of the first 
 Christian era. This New Church revealed in the 
 waitings of Emanuel Swedenborg, from its founda- 
 tion in the Word, is the new mind, whose pressure 
 is felt in different degrees in all human bosoms, 
 shaking human nature exceedingly, and rousing the 
 old churches and anti-churches into an apparent life 
 of combat and unrest. They do not know what has 
 happened, but fury and fear are poured out upon 
 them. Under the pressure, and its reflex actions, 
 they are all forced into accord upon one thing, and 
 that, the most alien to them all, namely, the in- 
 definite extension of civil and religious liberty, in 
 order that each, now hopeless of enthralling the rest, 
 may have a stand-point and a space on which to 
 play its own game. The New Jerusalem demands 
 the same thinof, for this reason amono^ the rest. But 
 also for another reason, that it descends from the 
 liberty of the New Heavens, though the very 
 balance of the spiritual world, and that a new liberty 
 of thinking and willing concerning divine things is 
 
 NEW CENTRES OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 411 
 
 its inmost postulate in human nature. Therefore it 
 prepares by all legislation for the advancing liberty 
 of individuals, and for the repression of license; it 
 prepares the kingdoms and commonwealths of the 
 world for their national securities of liberty; and 
 becyins to weave and organize the various nations 
 to«"ether, so that at last there shall be no outside 
 nations; but the family shall be included in one 
 bond, and Goths and Vandals and Huns in the 
 future be unfeared and unknown. The new mind, 
 the new libertj^, of this, is in all the parliaments and 
 politics of the earth. It is the area of a vast con- 
 sideration of divine things; of the Word of the Lord 
 in its new glory coming for the acceptance of the 
 nations. Nothing less than such fundamental prin- 
 ciples of liberty, and the divine right of the freedom 
 of conscience, can enable men, or nations, to bear the 
 stress of such an investigation as is now demanded 
 of their minds; nothing less than a co-equal toler- 
 ance founded in the bed of all states can in the 
 long run protect the recipients of the new truths 
 from their adversaries, to whose minds those truths 
 are intolerable, as light is intolerable to darkness. 
 
 In short, the new freedom, spiritual first, and 
 afterwards individual, and then social and political, 
 has for its contents a new revelation, which on the 
 floor of the highest rationality, and the best and 
 broadest common sense, stands within it, and where 
 it stands, and is received, creates a new mind, which 
 is the present centre of human weal. From this 
 centre, for the most part unconsciously, a steady 
 wave of private and public humanity presses up 
 against unrighteousness; a new fairness and honesty 
 are affirmed; the best interests of all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men are successfully pleaded; and a new 
 
412 
 
 NE W CENTRES OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 conscience overcomes old interests in reluctant 
 senates. Flexibility succeeds flexibility, and new 
 and greater views of truth and duty and work are 
 propounded and accepted. By these occurrences 
 also the new theology is established in action, and 
 insinuated into thought, long before its source is 
 seen ; and a way prepared for the acceptance of a 
 true knowledge of the Lord who is doing it all; for 
 learning who He is. By the same way, the old 
 theologies, which have no good influence on life, are 
 being quietly judged by events and advents of 
 virtue, which it is seen do not spring from them, and 
 do not belong to them, and thus a new conscience is 
 preparing in the practical world, by which they will 
 be detached and cast aside. And then the new 
 theology will enter openly and directly upon its 
 schoolmastership. That old theology, Protestant 
 and Catholic, atheistic, deistic, pantheistic, has 
 tolerated, or taken quietly, all the public and private 
 evils of the race : it has bade us look to a future 
 heaven, or to fate, for our remedy; and kept the 
 mind from its life, which consists in doing the whole 
 duty of man for the day. That was because it had 
 no practical work-day Lord and God. The new 
 theology reverses these things. Its tenet is, that as 
 is the man's God, so is the man, and so is the life, 
 and so is the combined action and society and future 
 of the aggregate men. Its God is the Lord, known 
 from the Word as Jesus Christ, known in heaven as 
 the Lord only. Its tenet also is that for conjunction 
 with Him, evils, whether private or public, are to 
 be shunned as sins against Him; whereby He is 
 loved, and is omnipresent in the guidance of that 
 mind; and that good, namely use, is to be done for 
 the sake of the neighbour, as from ourselves, thus in 
 
 THE GATES OF DEATH OPENED, 
 
 4T3 
 
 all the might of freewill, with the acknowledgment 
 afterwards that He is the Doer, and that it is all 
 done from Him, who holds the balances, and gives the 
 freewill momentaneously. The pressure of this tenet 
 is now upon every mind, to accept it practically, or 
 to deny it. Here then is a vested interest of 
 righteousness for individuals, parliaments, and 
 nations; and it may therefore well be said that a 
 new mind is placed in the centre of all churches, and 
 of all commonwealths. But first in the heads and 
 hearts of individual men and women. The interest 
 of this traverses other interests, judges them, is the 
 supreme builder, landholder, and property-holder; 
 confirms or abolishes institutions; admits or denies 
 rights; justifies executions or punishments; and 
 is love and wisdom at work preparing day by day for 
 a newer coming of the Lord. 
 
 CV. 
 
 THE GATES OF DEATH OPENED. 
 
 The great evils of the time, the stupendous private 
 and corporate greed, the marshalling of nations for 
 aggression, and the whole facility of war, the abyssal 
 declarations of the Papacy, the conceit of divine 
 privilege of Protestant clergy, the pleaded right of 
 science to do what it likes and nationally to teach 
 what it likes; the increasing public despotism of 
 medicine over the state and the people ; the huge pro- 
 cesses of law which pour floods out to carry away 
 justice, all these are but counter-attestations of the 
 abuse of the new freewill which has been given. 
 
414 
 
 THE GATES OF DEATH OPENED, 
 
 They are the criminals of long ages, with new 
 powers, in their last audacity doing the things 
 which bring down their judgment. But there is in 
 them all a new goad to do their work of perversions 
 in a short time, a new confusion, and a new rapidity 
 of decay. They rise up at their peril to confront a 
 new liberty and a new charity which discriminates 
 and arraigns them; and Parliament which used to 
 laugh at general evil as necessary evil, turns pale 
 and solemn as unwonted causes are forced upon it 
 with no escape from their discussion. The reason 
 is that the Lord, the Judge, though unseen, is in 
 the near backsrround: and the weak thinofs of the 
 world feel Him, and are inspired by a vital hope, 
 and assured from within, that the day has come when 
 they will confound the strong. Therefore the 
 appearance and organization of evil on a new scale 
 of magnitudes is to be expected out of the bosom of 
 the new freedom, and gives confirmation, but no dis- 
 couraofoment, to the man of the church. 
 
 The subject is so unexpected, yet so pressing, that 
 it may be permitted to recapitulate its heads. First, 
 there is a divine judgment on the departed men and 
 women of nearly eighteen centuries, and the removal 
 of the dense cloud of the influence of their societies 
 from the minds of the men and women on eartli. 
 Then there is a rehabilitation and reconstitution of 
 freewill. The Lord, through the new heavens formed 
 by Him into societies, and through the opened 
 Word, is no longer mediately, but directly above 
 this freewill, and maintains it; while by His divine 
 humanity He communicates with the rational mind 
 of man, opening it by truths as light opens the sight. 
 These centres thus constituted involve a revolution 
 in the spheres beneath them on this planet; a new 
 
 THE GATES OF DEATH OPENED, 
 
 415 
 
 polarity tending only to use, and the good of the 
 neighbour; to the passing away of old things, and 
 to all things becoming new. The light drives the 
 world onwards; those who see it only as light, are 
 compelled more or less to act upon it; those who see 
 and acknowledge the sun from which it radiates, are 
 helped to love the light, and under it to define their 
 course, and to do the day's work with joy. 
 
 These things cannot be seen without breaking up 
 the old notions of death. If men and women could 
 exhale in mortality, such views would be dreams. 
 But death is the garnering of the whole character 
 into a substantial spiritual body, and the commence- 
 ment of a new career of good, or evil, works. Death 
 is the beginning of placing the last generation of 
 minds in a world which is directly above this world ; 
 where they are influential, and would, as in the past, 
 be all-powerful, unless that upper plane or stratum 
 were continually cleared, to prevent the divine influx 
 new for every age, from being obstructed. Now, 
 humanly speaking, the last judgment introduced 
 this eartli to a capacity of commerce with the new 
 heavens. We may illustrate the effect by the inter- 
 course of nations; for instance, by the effects of the 
 commerce of the West with China and Japan. 
 From immemorial time those races had lain secluded 
 on their own level of states; and perhaps of late, 
 degradation, and some sense of it, had been heavy 
 upon them. In the meantime, new means of com- 
 munication had sprung up under the feet of the 
 West; and China and Japan are invaded by another 
 race with steamboats and ideas: invaded by an 
 influx of what they at first call " outer barbarians." 
 Hitherto they have hardly believed in the geogra- 
 phical existence of the countries from which the 
 
4i6 
 
 THE GATES OF DEATH OPENED. 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 417 
 
 foreigners come. And at first, no great change ap- 
 pears to have been wrought by the advent : China is 
 China still. And yet it requires no special prophecy of 
 the Western men to enable them to affirm of a cer- 
 tainty that China is changed from top to toe by the 
 first European staff that is planted on her ground; 
 that thenceforth her religions are merely administered 
 by her on proper sufferance for a time; that her moral 
 dealings are dominated by truths and command- 
 ments which will gradually be put in stricter force; 
 in short, that the new pressure to which she is sub- 
 jected, though uncomprehended by her, will steadily 
 revolutionize every heart and home in her dominions, 
 and with merciful delays of execution, become all- 
 powerful. Now the present world in its cherished 
 selfhood, its denials, and its ignorances, is a vast 
 China with relation to the new comers from the 
 spiritual world; who are as much better equipped 
 for a higher mission of peace on earth and goodwill 
 to men than the present inhabitants and ideas of the 
 earth, as the Europeans are more gifted for civilizing 
 missions than the once stagnant Chinese. But to 
 be assured of this, you must go to the only school of 
 spiritual geography, and be civil to "outer bar- 
 barians" who are angels in disguise; you must know 
 that death is a gate to another life ; that that life is 
 more real and exact than this; that it teems with all 
 human races, not a man, woman, or child left out; 
 and that its heavens, in which the Lord is the king, 
 are opened, have struck our shores, and are ever 
 desirous and capable of communicating by immediate 
 influx with the earth, and of realizing themselves, 
 and being realized here, through man's freewill, in 
 the crown of prophecy, which is the New Jerusalem 
 state. 
 
 OVI. 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 
 
 There is an organic reason for the rapidity with 
 which events succeed each other now compared to 
 the rate of march in former centuries. From the 
 time of the Lord till 1757, the region above the 
 earth, namely the world of spirits, into which those 
 who die enter first, was colonized by races in con- 
 tinual decline, and as explained before, the societies 
 they formed obstructed the light of heaven, and were 
 stable dominions, principalities and powers of the 
 selfhood, until they were arrested and stricken by 
 the last judgment. They were organized polities 
 and balances of the power of unrighteousness. After 
 the judgment order was re-established, in other 
 words, those populations were broken up, and formed 
 into new heavens and new hells. But the previous 
 fact had been, that all who could maintain external 
 appearances of good were allowed in their places in 
 the world of spirits, — in their imaginary heavens, — 
 for many centuries; some from the commencement 
 of the Christian era. The evils which they em- 
 bodied, the stoppage of righteousness, the establish- 
 ment of unrighteousness, the discouragement of 
 justice and good and true liberty, the extinction of 
 spiritual light, could and did last as long as these 
 populations lasted; and their pressure was upon the 
 subjacent earth. That pressure, and human censor- 
 ship of divine things, became more and more strin- 
 gent. These upper nations dictated terms to this 
 
 world, and were its popes and imperial "saviours of 
 
 2d 
 
 
4i8 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 
 
 society." But when they were displaced, and 
 human equilibrium restored, the lingering of persons 
 in the world of spirits was limited in its necessities 
 to their own private states; judgment of cases so to 
 speak became rapid; so that any single cause, 
 namely any man's life, rarely now occupies for its 
 complete exhibition more than thirty years, instead 
 of, as previously, in some cases seventeen centuries. 
 This means, that the declaration of men as interiorly 
 good or evil takes effect rapidly now, and their 
 places are allotted accordingly. It also implies that 
 the world of spirits is no longer a senile and aged 
 state full of the established and unwholesome past, 
 but is constantly full of young blood; constantly 
 cleared of passing materials; permeable to heaven 
 and hell in great rivers of life ; in streaming multi- 
 tudes of individuals. It means that its bands and 
 states and churches are completely traversed by the 
 one government of the Lord. Where before it was 
 a thick superposition of stratified ages, fifty-five 
 generations deep, it is now the thinnest of layers, 
 only in fact of the depth of one generation. The 
 people move through it like blood-globules in the 
 capillaries in single files, through great aflfectional 
 societies of similars, each through swift trial to 
 judgment. The motives that come from it are all 
 movable, upwards or downwards; there is no settled 
 empire or human polity in them; they emanate from 
 no thrones, or principalities, or historic spiritual 
 priesthoods, but from the single dead who contin- 
 ually stand before God with the Book of Life open 
 before them day by day. Spiritual dominion has 
 lost its crown in the spiritual world, and the indi- 
 vidual will is naked of artificial association. And 
 this is why new things come about so much more 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 419 
 
 easily. Instead of being in a chancery 1700 years 
 lono- in its pleas and plans and suits, and which 
 thinks to keep its causes for ever, that tribunal is 
 abolished, and the private man on his own responsi- 
 bility is his own chancellor, and his only question is, 
 and his only law. Is this thing good and true, or is 
 it not? and, Is this work righteous, or wicked? 
 The Word in its letter opened to its spirit, is the 
 new Law Book; the Lord in His Divine Humanity, 
 the Judge of the last appeal; and His face, the 
 approval. This is a mighty simplification of process, 
 and shortening of judgments; and portends a corre- 
 spondino- quickness for the better life and the worse 
 life here" on earth. It is the Word, ^^Behold I make 
 all things new." And all things are kept new, in 
 other w'^rds, quick and moving, by that Word m 
 
 continuity. 
 
 This drama of the race in both worlds, notwith- 
 standing its dimension, and that the major person is 
 invisible to tlie eyes of this earth, is yet exemplified 
 by much of which we have daily experience. For 
 instance, the governmental tyrannies which have 
 existed, and do exist, the usurpations of supreme 
 power in a nation, press upon the mind and will of 
 the people, and the common good is slow and perish- 
 ing as long as the tyranny lasts. The conscience of 
 the people has to pass through the tyranny before it 
 can get at the good. If the tyranny is overthrown, 
 and virtue is left in the masses, the true coinmon- 
 wealtli is quickened, and every man regains himself, 
 sits safe under his vine and fig-tree, and has a career 
 of his own. Here the tyranny, it may be the 
 inherited tyranny, of one generation, is parallel in 
 effect with the tyranny of seventeen centuries extant 
 over the heads of the race. To take another ex- 
 
420 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 
 
 ample, as between two neiglibouring nations. If the 
 one from past wars has the upper hand of the other, 
 invades it, and continually threatens to invade it, 
 the beaten nation lies in all its faculties at the mercy 
 of a foreign power, every household is trammelled 
 with fear and watching, and the progress of good is 
 hindered perpetually by alarm from without; the 
 nation and the individuals do not possess their 
 own soul. Though the hostile nation be invisible, 
 yet is its pressure felt in every cottage in the land, 
 and lethargy as from a death in the air oppresses the 
 general will. The good men and women in the 
 world of spirits before 1757 were such a nation, and 
 at last the earth, enslaved by the pressure, in its 
 most private freedom, its religious freedom, was 
 subjected and denationalized. 
 
 The conqueror came, and an age was born. Time 
 was re-born; for time as it unrolls from the Almighty, 
 is a river of new duties for every day, of new in- 
 sights, of new delights, and at the end of the day, of 
 new loves. The old time was not this, but became 
 more and more stale and selfish. Its years were 
 aged when they were born, and sunk into the livery 
 and imitation of the tyrannous past, which, however, 
 could it have been seen, was no other than an over- 
 bearing present dominion reaching down from the 
 spiritual world. Under explanation all this is 
 obvious enough, and is adduced again only to point 
 out that the philosophy of general history tallies with 
 the philosophy of Swedenborg, and that general 
 facts in the life of neighbouring nations are every- 
 where parallel with what he declares of the relations 
 between this world and the next. 
 
 There is one point not so obvious. How did the 
 Lord, when He trod the winepress alone, when He 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 421 
 
 beat down hell by daily victories over its tempta- 
 tions, thereby effect so great a victory, that heaven 
 and hell, the world of departed spirits, and the 
 future of this earth, were thereby reduced to a new 
 order, and are kept in that order? With us men, a 
 great'leader requires for any parallel achievement, a 
 great army, munitions of war, and a prolonged or 
 perpetual occupation of conquered states. He led 
 no army until after He had conquered, but His own 
 right hand and His holy arm got Him the victory, 
 and then, but not till then, the angels of heaven, and 
 man's restored freedom, became His army. In the 
 combat, however, He did not draw upon the finite 
 reserve, the ten legions of angels. The solution 
 centres in the position that He is the Lord. Every 
 evil which He conquered in His manhood, was 
 thereby reduced by a divine omnipotence to the 
 limits of the freewill of the person doing it, and the 
 sphere of that person was bounded off accordingly; 
 and by these boundaries,— this ''so far and no 
 farther,"— the Lord became by personal conflict and 
 triumph, omnipresent for good all through hell; in 
 fact. He redeemed hell from the power of growing 
 worse. But do not lose sight of the fact that this 
 was an act of the Godhead and not of the human 
 nature alone ; or you will be pursued by the poor 
 conception that a man like ourselves with no army 
 and no occupation has mystically overthrown and 
 keeps subject the infernal empires, which is plainly 
 
 an impossible event. 
 
 One would fain be helped to say more upon so 
 new and transcendent a topic, in order to brnig to all 
 minds the supreme importance of the true doctrme 
 of the Lord. What we are treating of is notlnng 
 less than the union of the offices of creation and re- 
 
422 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES. 
 
 demption. If the same one God effected both these 
 divine acts, then they flow together, and permeate 
 and pervade all creatures. In redeeming the crea- 
 tion, though the only visible phenomenon is a divine 
 private life, yet every line of substance and form is 
 necessarily traversed by the militant Jehovah, all 
 providence for suns and systems and individuals, for 
 temporal and eternal ends, takes a new front in His 
 warring humanity, and matter and spirit are re- 
 united in the hands of the great Restorer. It is the 
 Creator who is redeeming, and this amounts for all 
 purposes to new creation, nay, not only to new, but 
 to redeemed creation. The Lord has changed to His 
 world because it needed that He should do so, and 
 His chano^e makes it afresh. That is how He is 
 unalterable, that He is always ready to save. The 
 power involved is that of a Divine Natural Man. 
 Add this stipulation also to the former more abstract 
 conceptions of Creator and Kedeemer. What we 
 have then to admit is, 1. That in Jesus Christ the 
 Creator came upon the scene : this carried the new 
 eflect through the creation. 2. That He was present 
 as a man among men, divinely '' living down " their 
 evils. This when accomplished against all evil, gave 
 Him power up to the very gates of freewill, keeps the 
 individual man responsible for ever, and leaving 
 voluntary hell untouched, breaks the bands of cor- 
 ruption asunder. So, as the laws of nature are the 
 boundaries of this world. His divine human laws are 
 the boundaries of men and spirits; the kingdom of 
 artifice has passed away from the life beyond the 
 grave, and in all its perversions continually has 
 judgment here; and the velocity of this judgment 
 increases for each succeeding generation. 
 
 There is indeed some image and correlation of the 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE AGES, 4^3 
 
 Lord's effectual victories over all the hells, and of 
 their perpetual subjection to his conquests, in our 
 experience of the higher events of what is called the 
 battle of life. A personal evil tendency checked, 
 and continually fought against, loses its power of 
 attack, and is finally disarmed and vanquished. The 
 delights which it proffers are abhorred, and from the 
 contrary delights given and bred in the regenerating 
 man, senses which reach down to the frontier of the 
 will'of the evil, are produced, and instantly repulse 
 it from the mind into the body, and bind and subju- 
 gate it there. So too in the society. A good man 
 obtains a first triumph in some urgent cause agamst 
 a public wrong. He goes to prison rather than pay 
 an iniquitous fine, and his conscience, not his com- 
 fortable home, carries the day. He faces the wide 
 oppressor from a little cell, or from a treadmill. The 
 martyrdom, whatever it be, whether the jail or the 
 stake, inflames some mens hearts; from his freewill 
 opened to heaven, theirs is opened to heaven ; free- 
 will for good is then in question, and He, the 
 redeeming hero, the sustaining Lord, pours through 
 it. The evil cause is then in full revelation ; God is 
 in the foreground and defends the right; also a 
 human leader has come, the undebauched multitudes 
 own a new governor, and the old government is in 
 its doom. That man, having the Lord in him, not 
 otherwise, thenceforth reaches down into the body 
 and powers of his country; subdues their selfish 
 interests even though they are embattled in the 
 seven heads and ten horns of Parliament, and per- 
 petuates right against dispute, and against further 
 aggression. Thenceforth the wickedness is disbanded, 
 the collective man is freed from it unless total relapse 
 is proceeding, and it is left to individuals to practise 
 
424 
 
 FREEDOM AND FREEWILL. 
 
 FREEDOM AND FREEWILL, 
 
 425 
 
 the foul thing if they please, but to do it far from 
 public pretexts, in the nurseries and caverns of their 
 own selfhoods. These are analogies which come 
 indeed from the great Exemplar; and which may 
 tritely teach us that the Divine Man doing His work 
 against all evil, that is to say, redeeming, by His own 
 proper power, by His own right hand and His holy 
 arm, reaches down in both worlds wherever there is 
 a human heart, and would fain be omnipotent within 
 it, and is omnipotent around it. 
 
 CVII. 
 
 FREEDOM AND FREEWILL. 
 
 The freest governments can evidently receive and 
 apply these informations more readily than despotic 
 states, and hence the New Church has a mission of 
 freedom beyond the churches of the past. Internal 
 freedom, civil and religious freedom, medical and 
 legal freedom, social freedom, are essential to her 
 ultimate life ; so that the frontier of the individual 
 man shall be as large and secure as possible. All 
 these difficult things she will steadfastly plead until 
 they are obtained. The various professions espe- 
 cially will be her servants and not her masters, 
 although they have been hard masters to the old 
 societies; and in being ministers, not lords, they Avill 
 gain their freedom, and receive the influx of light 
 which belongs to each. Freedom has often been 
 based upon the rights of man, and supposed to be 
 compatible with merely material existence developed 
 into morals ; and to be a flower growing out of the 
 hard ground of necessity. But how matter can have 
 
 any rights without fighting for them, it is difficult to 
 say- in which case the resultant freedom is but the 
 rule' of the strong man until the stronger man comes. 
 This is not the freedom of the new dispensation. 
 That freedom is first the freewill continually given 
 from heaven; existing, and to be respected and 
 guided, from babyhood upwards. It is the right ot 
 man by the Lord; the perpetual creation and pre- 
 servation of the will. As families and states open 
 and improve, it comes forth successively, and consti- 
 tutes the rights of man among his kindred and 
 compeers, his rights of citizenship, and his fraternal 
 rights with all men whatever. Crime impairs it fvo 
 tmioM'^ does not remove it inwardly; the prisoner 
 has his freewill, and all his rights as a prisoner. 
 Thus the whole procession of liberties, and the out- 
 side fact of national freedom, are rivers which run 
 out of the affluents of individual freewills ; and 
 therefore the truths of the doctrine of freewill are 
 the witnesses and judges of the state of nations. 
 And each nation in its laws and ordinances, and m 
 the habits of society founding them and founded upon 
 them, shows its estimation and value of the indi- 
 vidual conscience, which stands with the freewill in 
 
 the centre. 
 
 Of course there are great circumstances which 
 seem to oppress for a time the national and indi- 
 vidual freewill, among the most obvious of which are 
 war and civil war. But if these are necessary and 
 good, as for the defence of nations and sacred rights 
 they may be, their reasonableness enables subjects 
 and citizens to will them freely, and then, if a nation 
 rises as one man against an aggressor, the military 
 state with its terrible harness becomes simply an 
 embattled freedom. It must however be looked to. 
 

 426 
 
 E C CLE SI AS TIC ISMS, 
 
 E CCLESIASTICISMS, 
 
 427 
 
 \ 
 
 that that state is not confirmed as a habit; but 
 that arms are gradually put aside when their work 
 is done. 
 
 CVIII. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISMS. 
 
 The present world is also cumbered with other 
 establishments, some of which require careful respect 
 because they have come down from the past, and 
 are like vessels with crews of living souls on board, 
 who would be wrecked if the planks beneath their 
 feet were taken away. England has a duty of caution 
 to such establishments. But she has also a steady 
 and inevitable policy of gradually closing her rela- 
 tions with them. Situated as they are now, they are 
 in the same position to the outlying life of the 
 people, that the gathered spirits of the departed 
 centuries occupied to the whole earth before the last 
 judgment; they stand more or less between tlie 
 nation and the light of heaven. They occupy an 
 imaginary upper region of privilege, conceit, immo- 
 bility, and pretended right of domination; they draw 
 wealth and make hierarchy where they ought to 
 make humility and teach righteous administration as 
 a divine thing to the rich and the powerful, and to 
 all people ; and to say the least they are out of the 
 best freewill and rationality of the country. They 
 are standing reasons for non-examination of the 
 highest subjects; and '^Behold I keep all things 
 old," is their chorus. New truth is despoiled of its 
 chance by their working; and has longer to wait 
 because of them. It may be said as a rule, that 
 
 churches and fixed institutions paid for maintaining 
 opinions, are a hardness and obstruction in a state; 
 they hinder its respiration and its functions, being 
 unable to expand with the general inspiration; they 
 call perpetual attention to themselves; and in short 
 they are religious, social, and political tumours, 
 which absorb useful lives, make the body politic 
 seem larger, but diminish its good temper, and im- 
 pair its efficiency for good, and its power of combat 
 against evil. To those who believe in a new dis- 
 pensation, it is obvious that state patronage of the 
 dispensation which has passed away, and bonuses of 
 millions of money for subscription to its articles, is 
 one of the worst laches against freewill, and against ^'a 
 clear stage and no favour," which can be perpetuated. 
 On the other hand no reasonable Christian wishes 
 to destroy any church, but rather desires to commit 
 churches to their own responsibility and their own 
 freedom and career, and to hand them out of govern- 
 ment to the management of those who belong to 
 them. If they believe they are the successors of 
 the Apostles, their establishment by the state is 
 not necessary to that belief; they can carry it in 
 their bosoms and into their churches wherever they 
 are, and no one will hinder their devotion. Least of 
 all will the New Church attempt to interfere with 
 it, excepting by the fair way of explaining its errors 
 in public. Swedenborg stated his expectation that 
 his doctrines would be preached through the churches. 
 This can hardly mean the churches as established by 
 law. In his day, dissent had not attained to its 
 present proportions. It was in the background, and 
 was not a prominent element in the country. He 
 mentions the spiritual conditions of various sects, the 
 Moravians, Quakers and the like, but he never 
 
428 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISMS, 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISMS. 
 
 429 
 
 charges their separation from the national churches 
 as a vice; or judges them on any grounds but their 
 own doctrines and practices. It is their allegiance 
 to heaven that he questions, not their allegiance to 
 Canterbury, Rome, or Geneva. His writings are 
 neutral on the question of church and dissent, and 
 only pointed against theological error and evil. The 
 inference may fairly be, that he expected the clergy 
 of all denominations, and through them the flocks, 
 to be gradually transformed in the light of the doc- 
 trines of the New Church. 
 
 This New Church has no hold upon apostolical 
 succession. If such a thing existed, and had been 
 valid, the end of the dispensation which it claimed as 
 its own, would consummate it, and put it aside. The 
 direct regency of the Lord would supersede the 
 stream of imposed hands in priesthoods. The gifts 
 of the Lord flow from Him as a source through what 
 channels he wills. Moreover, no succession bridges 
 over supersession; the first church is abolished as a 
 centre, and as a once divine ordination cannot pass 
 into the second church across the gulf of the last 
 judgment. Ecclesiastical foundations are not now 
 spoken of, but churches in the apocalyptic sense, as 
 carrying God's commission upon earth, and serving 
 as the basis of heaven in the world. Instead then 
 of imposition of hands from the Apostles, and 
 privileged sacerdotalism by succession, instead of an 
 apostolical aristocracy, which sits above the laical 
 human race, and in the mystical body of Christ, 
 there is for all whom it may concern, apostolicity of 
 function and office, an apostolicity derived from the 
 Lord, and flowing from His institution. It is, that 
 fit men however chosen, in ministering sacred offices, 
 are helped by Him, and may be inspired by Him, 
 
 for ministerial work. And as this is high work, and 
 visibly asks His influx, they are highly helped ac- 
 cording to the post. This is their specialty, their 
 prayer, and their expectation. But every man in 
 every other function is similarly helped according to 
 his function, be it mean, or be it noble. Tlie dress 
 and attitude of the use with the will in it, draw the 
 active function down from heaven. This distribution 
 of a gift for every office, and a divine aid for every 
 duty, amounts for those who accept it, to a general 
 inspiration of society in all its callings, and does not 
 stop, as hitherto supposed, with the infilling of the 
 Church of England : it irrigates the whole duty and 
 day of man from the Queen upon her throne to the 
 artisan and the cotter. 
 
 Nay more, as Swedenborg proclaims, every man 
 is a church in its least form; not by apostolical 
 succession, but by his created receptivity, and then 
 his reception of the Church above in his reading of 
 the Word and committing it to daily life. The 
 Lord is thus His own direct Apostle in giving him 
 his cure of his own soul; and by whatever is dis- 
 interestedly good in him, he is a priest from the 
 Lord. 
 
 The ^Miscussion," to use a medical phrase, of 
 these sacerdotal swellings and obstructions, is vital 
 for the spiritual need of the English people, and will 
 ensure a comparatively peaceful arena for the de- 
 scent and dissemination of new truth. But the 
 clearance which enables the nation to breathe freely 
 not only requires to be applied to the theological head, 
 but it must come lower down, and rid the body and 
 the members of the grievous weight of state-estab- 
 lished and state-privileged professions. This has been 
 said before, but it rises up in the subject with fresh 
 
^3o ECCLESIASTICISMS. 
 
 urgency. Here again there is no question of destroy- 
 ing anything, but the necessity is to commit every 
 catling to its own maintenance and responsibility, 
 not to^'privilege it, to pay in no way, direct or indirect, 
 for orthodoxy or belief in articles, and to let every 
 man practise without interference of law, leaving 
 his competency to be decided only by his employers, 
 and any harm he does to be answered before the 
 ordinary tribunals. The present writer has dealt 
 with this subject in a small treatise on a Free State 
 and Free Medicine, to which the reader is referred. 
 Since those pages were written, the centrahzation 
 and papacy of medicine has advanced further into 
 the state, and a virtual infallibility has been claimed 
 for its orthodoxies, which are carried forth into 
 terrible compulsory legislation. The evil power 
 that has been partially cast down from the clerical 
 plane, has fallen upon the lower level of the doctors, 
 and the earth is troubled with their use of it. But 
 besides this, the same judgment must pursue state- 
 patronage of corporations such as those which are 
 established for the advancement of science, because 
 in these days of free thought and expression, no 
 political state can tell how such bodies will use 
 their means, or be responsible for the purposes 
 they are secretly determined to carry out. Some 
 of them exist, judging by practice and fact, and the 
 stream of opinion which flows from their summits, 
 for the prime end of promulgating atheism, and 
 insinuating it deeply into education. The state 
 can take no present notice of this; any association 
 of scientific persons has full British right to be a 
 collective atheist. But what the state fairly must 
 do, is. to clear itself of responsibility; to let such 
 scientists, and all scientists, manage their own 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISMS, 
 
 431 
 
 house; and to send no national bread of support 
 to their assemblies. Above all to withhold its 
 hand from any ''endowment of research," which 
 may mean countless abominations. Dischartering 
 all round is one of the needs of a not distant future. 
 Full spiritual freedom, with its gifts, cannot exist in 
 the present compromise. It is not sufficient that 
 dissent is allowed to exist without fear of fine and 
 punishment; the Church must be disallowed of its 
 privileo-es. It is not sufficient that unorthodox 
 medicine be permitted in practice; orthodox medi- 
 cine must come to equality with it, and depend on 
 public opinion and liking, and not upon charters 
 and fines. Nor is it enough that all opinion, theo- 
 lof^ical and anti-theological, be allowed expression; 
 grants and subsidies to corporate bodies making 
 them part and parcel of the state, must be withheld, 
 and tumours of opinion be carefully detached and 
 separated from the national life. 
 
 This is a work of time, and of the surgery of 
 statesmanship. But it is coming. And while the 
 state has much to do in it, the country, which is the 
 patient, has its duties to itself. Especially so in 
 the matters of medical and of legal freedom. The 
 duty of those who perceive the new need, is to 
 separate themselves from the old way as wisely and 
 harmlessly as they can; to be ''the peculiar people" 
 on a widening scale ; and to band themselves 
 together in the name of their own proper freedom, — 
 say now, from physic and from law. They must 
 be above these bodies, and use them, but not, as 
 hitherto, be under them, and be made use of by them 
 as victims. We see only the beginning of this. 
 But as the New Church descends, numbers will 
 gradually abjure law, enter into societies calculated 
 
iM\ 
 
 IM] 
 
 «i 
 
 432 ECCLESIASTICISMS. 
 
 to dispense with it in matters of property; and as 
 honesty widens, the nation will respect simple words 
 and declarations, and parchment become exceptional 
 in the record of right. The greater application of 
 these things can come by no outward reform, but 
 from centres of righteous freewill slowly expanding, 
 and conquering the evils of society. 
 
 Those evils are mighty beyond what any un- 
 inspired man imagines; the whole head is sick, and 
 the whole heart is faint. Were death what it 
 seems the inheritance the dead have left in us, is 
 enormous in evil, and added to by the free deeds of 
 each succeeding generation. But as the apparent 
 dead are alive in the spiritual world, and the evil 
 kinf^doms of them influence all those who summon 
 them by corresponding evils of their own on eavtli, 
 so the diseases of society are founded in the deeper 
 diseases of the hells. It is well to know this, and 
 that the disorders of this world are only removable 
 by its rec^eneration. The writings of Swedenborg 
 embody luminous confirmations of what the spiritual 
 world is on the side of wickedness. Nothing so 
 terrible has been hitherto conceived by mankind. 
 Dante has visioned a general hell peopled by a few 
 leadino- vices not sounded to the bottom ; awtu 
 indeed' in its punishments; and he has fashioned 
 glooms and fires in its atheistical abyss ; types and 
 terrors of show, filled with divine vengeance. 13ut 
 Swedenborg in veritable explorations commissioned 
 for divine ends, has seen that self-love, and love ot 
 the world, comprise larger and deeper caverns ol 
 evil the inhabitants of which are as multitudinous 
 as the selfhood of this world is predominant in its 
 upper air His revelations of what embodied and 
 inworlded evil is, with no apparent imagmation. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISMS. 
 
 433 
 
 exceed all imagination. The intentions of the 
 heart are carried out there, and bring their own 
 repression. It is the realm of consequences, and 
 of the permitted vengeance of man upon man by 
 spiritual closeness of retribution. Cruelty to others 
 is the method of the abysses, one under the other. 
 Nay, in the descriptions of Swedenborg, vivisection 
 of each other is a means of punishment, and per- 
 haps is their instrumentation of the love of truth, 
 and their organon for learning the neighbour's facts. 
 The like has been the case on earth in inquisitions 
 and in legal courts, and it cannot be surprising that 
 it exists where bad human natures have all the play 
 that is compatible with their consequences, and with 
 their check from others. It does exist, and is tem- 
 pered by angelic presences, and by the overruling 
 mercy of the Lord. It exists because freewill can- 
 not be broken. Because evil is loved supremely, 
 though its consequences are not loved. It exists 
 to the devastation, what Swedenborg calls the vas- 
 tation, of evil ; that at length it may be reduced to 
 passivity, and expect punishment as the certainty of 
 crime; that hell may be tamed and domesticated, 
 so far as its nature permits. 
 
 A corollary is that cruelty on earth, done under 
 any pretext, opens the unhappy abodes, and draws 
 forth their inhabitants; and very especially, cruelty 
 done in the name of the love of truth, for that pro- 
 fanes truth ; and cruelty done in the name of tlie love 
 of serving mankind, for that adulterates good. It 
 is better°to be cruel with no pretexts, than to defile 
 all holy virtue by claiming it as an ally of devilish 
 practice. 
 
 2e 
 
434 
 
 CRUELTIES, 
 
 CRUELTIES. 
 
 435 
 
 II 
 
 m 
 
 cix. 
 
 CRUELTIES. 
 
 This matter of cruelty, as a formula, is the begin- 
 ning and the end of the present treatise. And 
 indeed cruelty, disregard of the feelings and 
 fleshly heart of others, is one ultimate expression of 
 every sin and of every crime, and embraces cruelty 
 to one's own soul, and one's own future. Accord- 
 ingly the sphere of cruelty in its commoner forms 
 almost pervades human nature : men are born from 
 the past generations insentient to a great extent to 
 the pains of animals, and of other people. The boy 
 with insects and birds and bird's eggs, is not awaie 
 in what he inflicts that there is any life in the crea- 
 tures beyond the liveliness of his own amusement; 
 it is a revelation to many boys that a cockchafer on 
 a pin is not a pleasure to all concerned. He has to 
 be told what he is doing ; and gradually to learn 
 that his own laws of suffering are extensive, and 
 that he is not the only piece of quick flesh in the 
 universe. Boys' schools may be different now from 
 what they were in this writer's school days, when 
 dear John Charles Thorowgood was king, but it is 
 to be feared that few of them grapple at the founda- 
 tion with the universal tendency in the young mind to 
 experiment upon living creatures ; or teach as 
 severely as arithmetic is taught, that any wanton- 
 ness towards animals is a horrible thing. This 
 knowledge could easily be imparted, as it is 
 grievously required ; and the meanness, stupidity, 
 and nascent ferocity of all cruelty to what is alive, 
 
 become a canon of honour and tenderness in any 
 school whose master determined to carry out that 
 fundamental tone. If this were accomplished, and 
 the teaching seconded by parents and sisters in the 
 home, the school would furnish to the next generation 
 a race of young men who would bring a new con- 
 science into field sports; some now practised 
 would be allowed, and some disallowed ; and the 
 fairness of human nature to which common human- 
 ity is akin, would begin to be touched with a 
 religion reaching kindly down towards all living 
 creatures. Destruction of animals for sport and 
 skill would be questioned by the religious con- 
 science, which it seldom is in any pulpit yet, and 
 a new pity be born, always with rationality as its 
 guide; for destruction is a part of tenderness when 
 rightly viewed ; and the guarding of the sheepfold 
 involves the killing of the wolf But destruction 
 for the pleasure of it would not stand its ground. 
 And especially the raid of travellers upon the great 
 lives of the hippopotamus, the giraffb, the ostrich, 
 the elephant, and other such creatures, would be 
 forbidden, unless real reasons, and not wantonness, 
 prompted it ; forbidden as a brigandage of man 
 upon the domains of nature ; as an extermination of 
 the generous joys of lake and plain and forest ; as a 
 desolation of the world of forms, and an extinction 
 of most pregnant symbolic organism which exists 
 not without a divine reason in the balance of things. 
 Travels that recorded such doings, even if princes 
 did them, would be under the ban of public opinion ; 
 and a man who fired a reckless bullet at a hippo- 
 potamus which he could not use, or give any reason 
 but his own cruel liking for the death of, would be 
 placed in scale with him who should try his gun upon 
 
?i 1 
 
 w 
 
 436 
 
 CRUELTIES, 
 
 a Bushman or a Caffir. Sport and game of this 
 kind would be in the pillory, and descriptions and 
 engravings of them abominations to the home. 
 This will come to be the tone of British opinion: 
 no destruction for destruction's sake, or for mere 
 amusement's sake ; or for any but good reasons, 
 which are necessarily humane reasons. The begin- 
 ning of this must be in boys' schools. Hitherto, 
 from ancient history, cruelty unchallenged is read 
 in the daily lessons ; the antiquities of Rome feed 
 the mind out of the horrors of the Coliseum, so 
 delightful to the then state ; the Christian wave, 
 the New Church light, coming through the school- 
 master, must meet and confront the traditional 
 cruelty, and brand it as mean, foul, and bloody ; and 
 prepare the way for the man's sense of responsibility 
 to the gentle animals, and for his just treatment of 
 all life. Thus alone can this master-passion of 
 cruelty be stopped in its general uprising, and be 
 driven into shame. It is a great thing not to salve 
 over the '' damned spot ;" or to think that it will cure 
 itself as the boy becomes the man, and his home affec- 
 tions are born. It does not cure itself, but passes 
 into its collective form, and becomes respectable and 
 unassailable, first as rights of fun, then as rights 
 of sport, and last and worst as rights of science. 
 Parliaments laugh when humanity to animals is 
 under discussion; the nests of little birds are jokes 
 to legislators, who yet have comfortable nests of 
 their own, and are tender to every tendril of their 
 own hereditary selfhoods. The school training is 
 to blame for this. The first thing for the school- 
 
 • 
 
 master himself is, to know tliat human nature is 
 corrupt, and in its first dealings with others almost 
 universally cruel ; and that it needs to be taught 
 
 THE VASTATION OF EVIL. 
 
 437 
 
 the laws of kindness, which are divme truths, and 
 clearly do not come by inheritance of nature. 
 
 The whole matter, in the habits it has engendered 
 in society, requires wise and not merely sentimentel 
 treatment ; for at present it would be almost as difli- 
 cult to abolish the fox-hunter, or the hare-hunter, or 
 the otter-hunter, as to uproot the episcopacy ; so 
 deeply founded are these institutions m the com- 
 plicity of the country. Such social states depend 
 upon the hardness of the public conscience; and have 
 tended to brutalize all minds, being rankly carnal. 
 There is an irresistible pressure agamst them now. 
 New heavens and a new earth oppose them; an 
 elephant-hunt will one day be as intolerable to a 
 n-w Encrland, as a Eoman man-and-beast-fight, or 
 a Spanish bull-fight, is already horrible, and by no 
 pleading or pretext could be brought into an arena 
 in London. 
 
 ex. 
 
 THE VASTATION OF EVIL. 
 
 One of the evils engendered by cruelty is humani- 
 tarianism in a false sense. This is the doctrme of 
 the toleration and petting of evil as a means to the 
 cure of evil. Some minds draw no distmction be- 
 tween slaying a hippopotamus for sport, and kilhng 
 a mosquito, or a poisonous serpent, for safety. 
 Clearly the latter is a duty, though pain be inflicted, 
 and blood be shed in the doing of it. Therefore let 
 it be done quickly and kindly. Also clearly the 
 former is no duty but a crime. The state of mind 
 which confounds the two appears to regard pain as 
 
.i 
 
 I^H < 
 
 ; * 
 
 438 
 
 THE VA STATION OF EVIL. 
 
 the only evil, and bloodshed as equally sickenlno" 
 whether it is necessary or not. This soft-headed 
 soft-heartedness knocks at the door of Parliament 
 and clamours to be made effective by legislation. 
 The most atrocious criminals, a whole human degree 
 worse than ravening beasts (which indeed are never 
 bad, but only evil), are to have nothing done to 
 them to teach them that human skins have feeling's. 
 and are never to be put out of the world because 
 of the value of human life. It might rather be 
 thought that they should be expunged from hence, 
 because human life is valuable here, and devilish 
 life not valuable or tractable. 
 
 Swedenborg throws light upon these questions, 
 and his works in the future will be deeply consulted 
 in the framing of criminal legislation. The punish- 
 ments of the spiritual world are of two effects, 
 reformatory, where reformation is possible ; and 
 " vastative," devastating, where it is not. The first 
 consist of temptations, trials, victories ; long and 
 great sufferings under severe circumstances from 
 which escape is not given; apparent misfortunes 
 and losses of all life and goods; revelations of hell 
 within, and despairs : falling and rising states ; and 
 through all, the voluntary detachment of the man 
 from the evils of bis life and nature; until the 
 divine charity and wisdom of the Lord with the 
 man's freewill unimpaired dare admit him purged 
 and purified into heaven. The man's Lord's Prayer 
 can then be granted, " Lead us not into temptation, 
 but deliver us from evil." In former days this process, 
 as we have already seen, has required ages; but 
 since the last judgment it is quickened, and seldom 
 lasts more than thirty years of mundane time, or a 
 generation. The power of the Second Coming of 
 
 THE VASTATION OF EVIL. 
 
 439 
 
 the Divine Humanity in its omnipotence, compels 
 all minds to swifter issues of good and evil; a neces- 
 sity which finds its consequence and correlation m 
 the quick events of the present day. 
 
 The second set of effects wrought upon evil after 
 death, is wrought by evil itself, and means its final 
 triumphs over human faculties. These comprise 
 vastations, devastations; in their consequences, wast- 
 ings away. They are the gradual destructions ot 
 men as spiritual organisms, down to the level which 
 the evil has successfully invaded, and to which the 
 freewill has been voluntarily, by acts of life, extin- 
 guished All the great loves of the heart when 
 thus completely de-natured and perverted, become 
 subjects of the vastation; they are killed down, and 
 die out They are under " the second death, and 
 malignant spiritual diseases and insanities occupy 
 their places. Conjugial love, for instance, if wilful y 
 perverted and outraged in the man, is ultimately 
 destroyed, and through various stages of monstrous 
 lusts, each an organic form in the spiritual body, it 
 burns its loins away into final apathy and gloom. 
 So also the love of God and the neighbour, the love 
 of use, and in short, the affections which are human 
 life They are turned into hatreds opposite to the 
 first nature given, and then, according to their depth, 
 into deaths and extinctions. This takes place by 
 acts and efforts and habits of evil life, and by their 
 repression in their own hells. It is to be repeated 
 that these loves are true orgamsms, spiritual sub- 
 stances in forms, and not abstractions; they are 
 the spirit of the man, bodily, pressing, and capable 
 of pressure. The man that is left after the pressure, 
 is still a freewill ; he freely chooses to be what he is, 
 and calls round him the divine necessity of his state. 
 
440 
 
 THE VASTATION OF EVIL, 
 
 THE VASTATION OF EVIL, 
 
 441 
 
 to stay where he is. He cannot change because he 
 
 will not; because with constant will he kills the 
 
 faculty of change. So he is the permanent form of 
 
 his own evil. By the suicide of the affections, the 
 
 intellect is vastated also, and crass stupidity to 
 
 truths, and immersion in the falsities which favour 
 
 the evil state, result. Evil arts and cunning are 
 
 left, and cruelty and craft is the path of life. The 
 
 effect in both cases, the evil and the good, is as of a 
 
 trial and judgment always proceeding, with sentence 
 
 on lives proclaimed by facts. In the evil, all that 
 
 seemed good outwardly, is in mercy taken away, and 
 
 profanation and torture as far as possible are avoided; 
 
 the infernal man is not rent between good and evil, 
 
 but is simplified into his mere selfhood; yet also 
 
 maintained against further degradation and vastation 
 
 by punishment and fear. From the good, their evils 
 
 which were outward, are gradually removed, and 
 
 they become of one piece, good from the Lord, who 
 
 then founds heaven upon them and in them. In 
 
 both cases appearances are put aside, and reality is 
 
 reached; and the man is, not as he was to society, 
 
 but as he w^as and is to God; a heaven in the least 
 
 form, or a hell in the least form. 
 
 These revelations concerning the state of all the 
 men and women who have passed out of the natural 
 world into the spiritual, are distant from the present 
 world by the mixture of good and evil here ; by the 
 shows and appearances of mankind in order that evil 
 may wear the garments of good and enjoy its estate ; 
 by the force and necessity of respectability as the 
 proprietor of advantage. And yet the facts now 
 revealed are correlate with all justice, and with the 
 conservation of love, wisdom, truth and intelligence. 
 For the best aim of society is that innocent weakness 
 
 be upheld and strengthened with redeemmg power, 
 and cleared of the external blemishes on its mward 
 purity And also that wickedness be unmasked, 
 and its deeds whether of business or crime, done 
 from the heart, be stripped bare of pretexts and 
 convicted, named, and legally and socially judged, 
 and the person put into his consequences. This the 
 spiritual world accomplishes by the divine law of 
 correspondences. The brain and heart and face and 
 hands and body and garments are there re-made out 
 of the evil loves which are left as dregs, or out of the 
 good affections which the Lord forms and fills m the 
 
 angels. , 
 
 Although however the case is purposely obscured 
 
 in society ,''it is written out in one set of facts which 
 correspond to the triumph of good, or of evil; 
 namely, in the history of diseases. These naturally 
 tend to cure, or to the putting aside of disordered 
 states and obstructions, and to purification and re- 
 covery ; or else to the victory of the disease over the 
 life, and the extinction of the body. Now heaven 
 is recovery under the Great Physician, and health 
 from His holiness received ; and hell is the second 
 death, namely, of all that is good and true in the 
 spiritual organism. And there is here a perfect cor- 
 relation of these final states, through the constant 
 vicissitude and play of disease and health, life and 
 death, in the natural organism. 
 
 There is one exception to the partition between 
 good and evil efi*ected in men after death ; namely, 
 in the case of hypocrites, who have mingled good 
 and evil in themselves inextricably. Theirs is the 
 continual rending and tearing, bodily tearing, of 
 intimate opposed forces, and of intimate spiritual 
 destruction to the affections. They are not men, 
 
442 PHYSIOLOGY ON GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 says Swedenborg, but become flitting fantasies of 
 men, no human substance remaining, but its flutter- 
 ing rags and tatters. They are the final battlefields 
 of good and evil, which mutually tear them to pieces 
 and leave them as shadows. ' 
 
 CXI. 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY ON GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 Nor must it be omitted that the physiology of 
 health is in thorough correlation with the facts here 
 brought to light concerning the organic process 
 which occurs with men and women in the otlier life. 
 Only the scale is mighty and composite, not in- 
 dividual. In the first case, that of the single human 
 body, the life is maintained by continual eliminations 
 and purifications. Tlie particles of the blood and 
 the cells of every tissue, the organic " leasts " of 
 every organ, are continually cleared of decayed and 
 eflTete material, which is conveyed by appointed 
 channels out of the system. Great organs, of selec- 
 tion, of judgment, of sentence, and of execution, 
 through which all the fluids, old and new, pass, have 
 central places in the economy. The liver, the 
 kidneys, the skin and the lungs, also the whole tract 
 of the intestines, occur at once as constituting these 
 benches of fleshly judgment. Upon the complete 
 justice of their work depends the health of the body. 
 They separate the old elements from the new, and 
 the good from the bad. 
 
 It has often been declared above, that the spiritual 
 man inhabits the human body because he cor- 
 responds to it. There is therefore a spiritual 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY ON GOOD AND EVIL. 443 
 
 organism in the individual, and liver, kidneys, skin, 
 luntrs and intestines occur again in that organism, 
 these being the forms of spiritual affections and 
 minds • and the complete embrace of them into one 
 form of use is the spiritual body. The same elimma- 
 tions and purifications go on in this body, but each 
 in a spiritual degree ; good and evil in their ineffable 
 variety of detail, being the substances worked upon 
 by the forms now under question. 
 
 But more than this, as organs are grouped in the 
 individual man, so individual men themselves are 
 mnima, leasts, in humanity ; and in the spiritual 
 world they are organized into societies, each whereot 
 is a greater man, an organic unit in the body to 
 which he belongs. The human body is the ultimate 
 seal towards which all the order flows, and m which 
 it closes, and where it is visibly represented. Thus 
 there are the men of the kidneys, the men of the 
 liver, also of the lungs, the skin, the intestines ; and 
 so forth. So heaven is the most perfect form of 
 man ; the organization of all the forms of good and 
 truth, of angelic love and wisdom, into a greatest 
 Man, a Maximus Homo. This must not be under- 
 stood as a colossal carnal figure, or as a form visible 
 to any angelic sense ; it is the oneness of the salva- 
 tion of humanity in the embrace and governance of 
 the Divine Humanity, apprehensible and credible by 
 spiritual and then rational thought, but seen only by 
 the Lord. Swedenborg sometimes was allowed to 
 see a society as one man, but none but the Divme 
 Man can see man in his oneness. 
 
 As heaven is by spiritual organism one man, so 
 hell, by inverse organism, is one monster. Mean- 
 while, every man and woman who dies, feeds the 
 spiritual world with his own proper character, just 
 
444 PHYSIOLOGY ON GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 as a particle of food, good or bad, feeds or nourishes 
 the body. From the moment of resurrection, wliich 
 begins at death, he is launched in the lymphatic 
 system of the grand man, and passes into its outer 
 organism in the world of spirits, the intermediate 
 state, where preparation for admission to heaven, or 
 to hell, is urgent. He is then in the circulation 
 though not in the substance of the Maximus Homo, 
 The vessels of this circulation are limitaneous organic 
 events of trial of character, great moving afFections, 
 which invite, or which chase, him on. He does over 
 again the deeds done in the body. He enters the 
 veins of the spiritual Whole with all his heart in his 
 career, steering through his midways, self-guided, or 
 heaven-guided. In the course of his circulations, 
 his life's love, which is the blood of his blood, 
 declares itself, and loosens from it what is adven- 
 titious and apparent; and the great eliminant organs, 
 themselves societies of men and women, lay hold of 
 him, and separate his character from his circum- 
 stances. This is not done without spiritual surgery; 
 for all is terribly coherent in the spiritual organism. 
 In the evil, it is dire punishment, yet no arbitrary 
 sentence of God, but organic necessity of association. 
 A man must be prepared for being at one with his 
 fellows whether they are good or evil. And he is 
 prepared by the modification of his very organism, 
 until it becomes consistently man-like, or monstrous; 
 and this is then completed for the wicked by the 
 eliminant spirits, that is to say, men and women, who 
 drive him to his finality, and through the meshes of 
 their organic laws, excrete him. So that here there 
 is a perfect parallelism for the scientific anatomical 
 mind, between the treatment of the blood which is 
 the life here, and of the love which is the life and 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY ON GOOD AND EVIL, 445 
 
 the man both here and in the spiritual world. The 
 communis sensus between the two cases is correspon- 
 dent and unexceptionable. ^ .. 1 . 
 We see from this illustration what a disk ot 
 imacrery of truth is presented in the world by the 
 anatouiical and physiological sciences as they relate 
 to the body of man; for heaven and hell are written 
 out in diacrrams upon them; and the processes of the 
 body point exactly with tiny fingers to the immense 
 processions and final states of the soul. We also see 
 the importance of guarding these sacred sciences 
 from the chaos of protoplasm, which has no specula- 
 tion in its eyeless sockets; and keeping them to 
 organic forms and orders, because these, and not 
 their material elements, involve the truths which 
 represent human life. Each organ is a word, and 
 to break into it beyond its ordered boundaries, is to 
 kill the face, and quench the voice, with which it 
 
 expresses a soul. 
 
 A further truth comes out in the correspondence 
 of bodily nutrition and excretion. In the organs 
 morbid materials are separated with violence and 
 pain. For instance, acrid and bad bile causes great 
 suffering as it passes through the judgment and 
 execution of the liver, and is rejected into the 
 intestines. But healthy bile flows in the pleasure 
 and harmony of the system. The body labours with 
 the one, and feels release with the other. So it is 
 with the rending of evil persons from their tem- 
 porary associations in the other life; it is pain and 
 rejection. But with the regenerate, all is conserved, 
 and led back into occupations of use. But ^jijjher 
 the excretion of individuals begins in tlie middle ot 
 circumstances in which they seem to be safely 
 housed in the social body; just as impure fluids. 
 
446 PUNISHMENTS AND EXECUTIONERS, 
 
 though in the depths of the organs, are really out of 
 the true pale of the natural body. For a particle of 
 bad bile, once laid hold of by the liver, is in custody, 
 and out of society. Nay, in the blood, long before 
 the liver seizes, it is in surveillance and custody, 
 and segregated from the general ends of life. All 
 such things, though unconsciously, are on the open 
 way to the last portal, guarded as they go down. 
 And so it is with evil men and women themselves 
 hereafter; they think they are passing by their own 
 way to the heart of life, but are being led by ways 
 they know not of, into the draught. 
 
 CXII. 
 
 PUNISHMENTS AND EXECUTIONERS. 
 
 One more attestation may be adduced of the truth 
 of these revelations brought to us by Swedenborg; 
 the voice of the conscience sitting over against the 
 heart proclaims that they are intimately true in the 
 present life. The consciousness of men is intel- 
 lectually in correlation with them. For as life pro- 
 ceeds, each individual becomes more and more him- 
 self; tlie forms of his inward personality are more 
 pronounced, and his character stands out clearer 
 from externals and pretences. If he is an evil man, 
 the society environs him, and stops him of crimes, 
 yet lie does evil within large limits, and writes down 
 his quality on the world in signs that are legible to 
 his fellow-men. These signs are not crimes here, 
 because the law allows them. But he knows what 
 he is, and in his heart, and its imaginations, he 
 shapes for himself a final body of purposes which 
 
 PUNISHMENTS AND EXECUTIONERS 447 
 
 only wait to be carried out as opportunity occurs. 
 Now take away social restraint, and emancipate the 
 old spirit into its full career, and all that Sweden- 
 borg has depicted follows bodily of necessity. The 
 ruin of appearances, and vastation from without 
 inwards, are effected. The ends which the man pro- 
 poses dominate, and constitute his spiritual organi- 
 zation, and they destroy his affections and under- 
 standing, and re-create him into a mere selfhood. 
 At times when he is opposed, his countenance is his 
 passions. He still has abilities for carrying out 
 destruction; but no faculties that are not contradic- 
 tory to the Lord's intentions; none that do not 
 destroy the man s human form. 
 
 Seeing the persistence of evil in the will, and 
 that wisdom must calculate upon that persistence ; 
 that it exists in the hells from the first fall of man- 
 kind, and has an evil cosmos for its universe; that 
 there are lakes and mountains and seas and 
 gehennas of mere violence and evil, it is clear that 
 ideas of progress which leave out this fact tend to 
 superficial treatment of disordered and chaotic 
 human nature. The cure of the thing is impossible, 
 or mighty hell would not be its lazar-house. The 
 constant battle against it in ourselves and our 
 societies, and the wise treatment of it, are the only 
 reasonable courses. Now, it is because Swedenborg 
 alone of men has brought its problem fully under 
 the eye, that his works will in time exert a com- 
 manding power over criminal legislation. They are 
 indeed "the only works which give in rational con- 
 nected series of truths the great spiritual laws which 
 reign inside morals, and make them profoundly moral 
 or immoral. They shew what can be expected, and 
 what cannot be expected, of the human race. Also 
 
448 PUNISHMENTS AND EXECUTIONERS. 
 
 what is curable, and what is incurable; and therefore 
 where compulsion builds the walls of hell, and wliere 
 safe emancipation opens the gates of heaven. This 
 being so, it is obvious tliat the descent of the New 
 Church to the earth will not be attended by the 
 unmerciful mercies to criminals which are miraofes 
 of humanity to some legislators of this time. Cor- 
 poral punishment is therefore not likely to be per- 
 manently abolished by the senates of the future; 
 but rather to be extended; in certain cases, even to 
 the extent of vastation; for this earth itself will 
 gradually become more approximated to the spiritual 
 world above it; and involve swifter passages of good 
 and evil, and the likeness of more final states. Nor 
 is it likely that capital punishment can involve any 
 real inhumanity, or dis-naturing of good men, when 
 it is known that the removal into one low er state 
 under another, thus second deaths, is the very peo- 
 pling of the hells. In many cases it is the best solu- 
 tion of the problem for the society as well as for the 
 criminal ; it clears the world for good, and commits 
 the wicked to complete management. And as for 
 bodily punishments, the spiritual laws appear to 
 prescribe nothing else; for every outrage done 
 above, every selfish cruelty to others, every violation, 
 alters the body of the doer, and devastates it, and a 
 precisely mulcted organization is worn in conse- 
 quence. Also in regard to actual stripes, and penal 
 disciplines of many kinds recorded by Swedenborg, 
 he has shown that there are commissioned executors 
 of these grievous things; and cleared away the com- 
 mon thought that the offices of punishment degrade 
 and embrute those whose business it is to fulfil them. 
 The gentle feeling that this is the case proceeds 
 from allowable ignorance of the nature and per- 
 
 PUNISHMENTS AND EXECUTIONERS. 449 
 • . n.P of evil which is such that at length nothing 
 but penal c p ^^^^ legislators will do 
 
 "f Wudv SwedenboWs revelations about the 
 S t torn tbe flnal faofs »Mch illu,tn.te all th, 
 S -executi disciplines however ternble canno 
 ! themselves be evil in the executioners. If it 
 Unoulae the heart of the judge on the bench 
 nfringe his real loving-kindness to sentence a 
 prisoner to the lash, it cannot degrade or injure the 
 Clei' to administer it. It is social surgery with its 
 Tn duty, responsibility, skill; and bemg a use, it is 
 nltin tlf nature of things that it sha 1 not summon 
 th practitioner to do it well. If he is a good man 
 Sels no enmity to his wretched patient, though 
 ' :tot feel pit J at the time but afterwards, a„d 
 he has in every stroke a prevailing sense of service 
 and use. And when he is at home, his office ask^ 
 
 him his own deserts; and ^^-^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
 his knees to pray that mercy and pity may be m 
 
 the spirit of his work. 
 
 These considerations have political sigmficance at 
 present • for it is a fact that some nations ^dnch 
 
 r littl'e for human life, nations where inhumamty to 
 animals and scientific violation are at their worst>t 
 go, out of spurious compassion, and national, mumc^ 
 pal and domestic complicity w,th cnme, the rnost 
 atrocious criminals; and thus make Pf -?«'*; *^^^^^ 
 and murder into regular calhngs and P-fe^ -J' 
 and constitute the robber and assassm into the task- 
 master over industry and the W^f ^ P^ P^e 
 prietors. For instance, in Italy and Sicdy, there 
 is not truth, goodness, skill or humanity enough to 
 exterminate brigandage; though it exists on such a 
 scale, that this could easily be done by the army 
 
450 
 
 SLOW RECEPTION OF TRUTH, 
 
 followed by military judges, and compelling the 
 whole population to desist; and the resulting exe- 
 cutions for a year or two would be a noble spoil of 
 most legitimate war; because they would purge the 
 land of murderers, and set peace and industry and 
 common honesty in their rightful places. But in 
 such countries nothing is admitted or known of the 
 nature of spiritual evil, the population being im- 
 mersed in it; no heart-combat against it takes place; 
 league and compromise are sought out of sheer 
 cowardice; the tiger is fed with daily sheep to keep 
 down his hunger; and the population of tigers is 
 stimulated, and grows in the dens of the evil moun- 
 tains. It will be different when it is acknowledofed, 
 from the experience offered in the New Church, that 
 while reformation is the universal end of punisli- 
 ment, the extermination of persistent evil is itself a 
 means to all cure that is possible, and the only 
 means to put final wickedness into the divine fitness 
 of things. 
 
 CXIII. 
 
 SLOW RECEPTION OP TRUTH. 
 
 Is it not well that men should know these things, 
 because we live in their pressure now, and pass 
 bodily into them when we die ? Whatever is not 
 coincident with them is the doctrinated opinions and 
 articles of frail mortals uninspired by the upper 
 seats of truth. 
 
 The acknowledgment of such principles blessedly 
 merciful to good, and terribly merciful to evil, is not 
 to be expected to take place quickly in the world, 
 
 SLOW RECEPTION OF TR UTH. 4S i 
 
 although indeed it lies under their power when God 
 lases and they are ready to be converted mto 
 forces as the Divine Providence through mans free- 
 ill Dermits But their march upon churches and 
 lo ieties, though steady, and audible to an ear on 
 the proper ground, will be a gradual, time- long and 
 vorld-bng work. Swedenborg foresaw th.s but 
 could give no date for the public acceptance of the 
 truths of the New Jerusalem. No angel could tell 
 him, or unseal the future. Only that a new spirit 
 was poured forth over men and events, which would 
 not chano-e external things visibly, but would oper- 
 ate over and through them, and that the opened 
 heavens from the Word would descend and represent 
 themselves upon earth, would stir combat from the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil, and would finally 
 prevail It is reported that a curious person asked 
 him how many receivers of his doctrines there 
 were at that time; to which he answered, 'About 
 twelve in this world, and about the same number in 
 the world of spirits." {N. B. The world of spirits 
 is the created plane into which nearly all men and 
 women pass when they die, and is the place ot 
 putting off external states, and preparing for heaven, 
 or for hell ) If the anecdote is correct, as it may 
 be, it illustrates the continuity of human nature, 
 and shows how small a change in essentials mere 
 death effects; that it gives no new fundamental 
 knowledge of God or the truths of God;_ no fresh 
 light of doctrines; no fresh proofs of spirituality; 
 no certitude of immortality; nor any revelation ot the 
 principles of the spiritual world. All these can be 
 acquired here, or can be neglected and denied. 
 And as in the latter case they recede here mto the 
 darkness of the mind when the freewill opposes 
 
452 
 
 RESPECT OF MAN. 
 
 RESPECT OF MAN, 
 
 453 
 
 them, and shuts the rational understanding ao-ainst 
 them, so they go away more thoroughly into bodily 
 mental absence, that is, into spiritual absence, in the 
 other life, when the ruling love bids them depart 
 from beyond its frontiers in the man. Therefore 
 seeing what men are now, let no heart be disap- 
 pointed if the great wave of the New Jerusalem 
 seems long in breaking on its own shores of power ; 
 if it is apparently an unconverted force. It is suffi- 
 cient to recognize it, and to know that it comes on. 
 Multitude and rank of disciples cannot add to, 
 or detract from, the truth and intimate pressure of 
 the divine mathesis. 
 
 CXIV. 
 
 RESPECT OF MAN. 
 
 Meantime the new freedom of thinking and 
 willing first declared by Swedenborg, is recogniz- 
 able on every liand, and notably so in the spirit 
 of emancipation which shows itself in the bosom of 
 every calling and profession under the sun, the 
 reaction against which is the compact professional 
 tyranny and centralization attempted to be fastened 
 and confirmed by governmental means. The des- 
 potism is awake as well as the liberty, and the 
 girding for battle against all people s light and 
 private independence is going on. As the New 
 Church advances through truthful lives, the esj^vit de 
 corps, the old horny clique conscience, will begin to 
 be cast in mighty scalings, in many repeals ; the 
 world will be covered with abjurations ; and fresh 
 and tenderer perception of truth and use will be 
 
 uncovered, and lead to free and moveable instead 
 of fixed associations; so that men however banded 
 together by brotherly thoughts, will no longer be 
 medical, or legal, or clerical serfs, but mentally will 
 become individuals. Being nearer to heaven, they 
 will be above their own professions and assembhes 
 and enrich the bodies to which they belong, instead 
 of being, as now, stunted by them. In short, as the 
 life and love of the higher world come lower down, 
 the enslavement of minds and souls and bodies, 
 which is in the fashion of this world, will pass away, 
 and the singleness of genius, high and low, humble 
 and great, will take its place. The new freedom ot 
 thinking and willing is already attested by the 
 beginning of these changes in human societies. 
 And hence, broadcast in our islands, the old pro- 
 fessional man is dying, and the individual man is 
 
 re-born. „ , . , . , 
 
 Tocrether with the restoration of the private mmd 
 and man to his judgment and his freedom, the 
 respect of man for man, humanity m a high sense, 
 advances also, and the world is filled with a new 
 fairness and dignity of intercourse. The meanest can 
 appeal with fresh force to acknowledged right, and 
 the battle of an advancing society is fought against 
 the old enemies, privilege and domination not trom 
 rivalries and expediency of leaders, not from party 
 watchwords, but from principles of honest right. 
 This wave, or better, this influx of personal rights 
 flows down yet further, and commands a just and 
 generous treatment of the external world as our 
 possession, and especially of all its living creatures. 
 It is given for our tender care, and herem hes our 
 education for the next and higher life. Whence does 
 this tenderness and new conscience come i A. 
 
454 
 
 RESPECT OF MAN. 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 455 
 
 naturalistic writer of leaders In a journal to-day 
 (July 15) traces it to the French Revolution. It is 
 due to the descent of the New Jerusalem. The 
 French Revolution itself was among the first fruits 
 on the evil side, of that descent. After the last 
 judgment, the Lord opened His hand, and gave new 
 liberty to mankind. With mighty emancipations He 
 gave it to all. Evil put in its claim for its share, and 
 burst its bounds in taking it. But this evil, these 
 hells opened in man, and communicating with their 
 abysses, gave no self-respect to the people, but infla- 
 tion of wickedness, and assuredly no mutual respect 
 of man for man. Massacre, fusillade, and guillotine 
 were the outcome, not rights of individuals. De- 
 struction all over the civilized world was the growth 
 of the French Revolution. Along with it, em- 
 battled silently and invisibly right over against it, 
 was the new influx of the opened heavens, which full 
 of redeemed humanity, had humanity to give away 
 to the world ; but the revolution itself was the mere 
 permitted rulming forth of the opened hells. It 
 took its watchwords, its liberty, equality and fra- 
 ternity, from the skies, and its motives and deeds 
 from the fiends. It has therefore no correlation but 
 that of plenary opposition with any of the good wliich 
 has slowly and peacefully unfolded since ; and is to 
 be regarded only as the allowed plea and grant of 
 infernal liberty for a time on earth. And all the 
 principles that flow from that Revolution in France, 
 and that still dominate her, however decorated with 
 humane formulas, are volcanic streams from beneath, 
 spiritual sulphur, and desolation of human lava. 
 Let us then refuse to regard the French cataclysm as 
 in any sense a probable or possible origin of whatever 
 is truly human in modern life ; we must go upwards 
 
 ,nd not downwards for that ; and in fact go back 
 rtbe greater event of the Last Judgment, to a 
 Lored communion with God and heaven, and to 
 he descent and revelation of the New Church, 
 organically and most really permeatmg human mmds. 
 Here note what science comes to m its attempt to 
 «nlain the birth of new infancy and innocence not 
 upon the only plain fact of good fathers and pure 
 mothers, but upon the hypothesis that the babes are 
 Cbbles picked by the tongs of material selection 
 Ithe burning pitch-pots of manifest French hdls^ 
 It is a part of the current theory of fire mists the 
 " nebular hypothesis," godless mists of protoplasm 
 producing at last happy homes, with love, and 
 
 ^ ■ ^r, +>ipir seats Such monstrosities 
 
 conscience, on their seats. oui.u 
 
 of atheistical fiction are often given out as Daily 
 News to the people. But they can be confronted ; 
 because a true and exact knowledge of the causation 
 of modem improvement, and also of modern de- 
 terioration, is at hand ; and the adequacy of the 
 cause is attested by the double events. New good 
 comes from a new gift of the Lord; and new evil 
 from the new liberty granted to wicked men m com- 
 munication with the hells. Every combat of to-day 
 is illuminated by these principles ; the good and 
 evil in it are dissevered; and each is assigned to its 
 respective factor, and arrayed scientifically under its 
 proper chief. 
 
 cxv. 
 
 man's place in nature. 
 
 Man's -place in nature means his supremacy a^ a 
 spiritual being, and the heart and conscience which 
 
456 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 give him royal duties and priestly functions in and 
 over the external world. The details of his place 
 are all these duties and offices interpreted by wisdom 
 from experience. He is the minister and interpreter 
 of nature, because he is its tenant under God, bound 
 to cultivate and improve his estate, and to render 
 exact account of his possession when he quits it. 
 His improvement of it is his case for a new lease in 
 the spiritual world. 
 
 " The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." 
 Let us see, without going higher than nature, what 
 that fulness means. 
 
 As basement to all higher uses, we have the 
 mineral kingdom, the great globe of the earth, terra 
 firma. This is for man to stand erect upon, and be 
 a man in the first faith that life is solid, and has to 
 deal all through with enduring realities. Inevitable 
 respect for nature is the fruit. On this material 
 basis the arts of life are founded, and deal with its 
 substances, and endure because of them. So houses 
 are not shadows, but men may make them into last- 
 ing homes. 
 
 The vegetable kingdom by divine impregnation 
 for use' sake bom of the mineral, and representing 
 it piece for piece so far as it is evolved, furnishes the 
 first wild ground, and softens its features; makes 
 the mineral into tender soil ; carries up the earth 
 into the air, and produces climates adequate to 
 earthbom creatures; modifies the sweeping opera- 
 tions of nature, winds and rains, and makes them 
 safe and gentle ; gives shelter to life ; beauty instead 
 of baldness to the land; and fruits for bodily 
 sustenance. It inculcates the freshness of delight as 
 an end in nature, and is the appointed curtain and 
 wonder-scenery of all romances from childhood 
 
 MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 457 
 
 nwards Gardens, fields and woods, and grand 
 r^Isand the general green earth, with mom.tam 
 IdnTss here and thefe, are a part of the natural 
 "tness " belonging to the Lord, mentioned by the 
 P ! mTst Any great volcanic eruption which lays 
 r^ttcts -d!r ashes, as in poor Iceland, or any 
 Sation which washes away soil and inhabitants, 
 r„d rives its way to the stony beds underneath 
 eating bareness, is an emptying of nature, and 
 mirs out her oil and wine on the ground. 
 P^ animal kingdom in the sea and on the land is 
 the third part of the same fulness. To taith a 
 „rcessary part ; for there seems to be no element of 
 ZZl or th; water, and no growth of any c hmate 
 %. does not sustain all pos^ble pop-lation « 
 appropriate living creatures. They are the first 
 Sis of the planet, and hold their lives by stnc 
 correspondence with their places and countries. The 
 whale in the sea, and the sparrow on the ho-etoP 
 answer to their elements and homes. They were 
 bom there, and they breed and bequeath as of rigM. 
 Take them away, kill the little birds and eat them 
 as they do in France, destroy the whale or the seal 
 unduly, and the fulness of the earth is destroyed by 
 the loss of natural religion in man. 
 
 The supreme kingdom of nature is mankind 
 supreme, because man is designed to be a spiritual 
 being in nature. To him it is given, where he is 
 wise! to fill and to guard all the lower fulness. He 
 has to bring faith and love, and by degrees light, to 
 bear upon his mission. At first he ignorant y cuts 
 down forests because they are of no account ; and 
 thus exposes the land to floods and swamps, or 
 diverts the clouds which love trees, diminishes rain 
 and begins the formation of deserts. When he 
 
458 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 459 
 
 learns by the consequences what he has been doino* 
 and takes to replanting, he is still so foolish with the 
 amusements of the moment, that he goes on repeat- 
 ing with the animal fulness, the destructive process 
 which has marred the vegetable. For he does not 
 believe that the animals of nature, excepting where 
 they can be fleeced, skinned and eaten, or bestridden, 
 are of any practical account. 
 
 But are they then of no value in the construction 
 of the world, and the plenum of things. It is a 
 difficult subject, because it is a case of influx and in- 
 fluence, and not mainly of modification of soil, of 
 carpeting, shelter and sustenance of superior tribes. 
 But analogy, which is nature's path of positions, her 
 organic ratiocination, proclaims that what the mineral 
 plane does most grossly, and the vegetable plane 
 finely, yet visibly, animal lives must also do, if 
 invisibly, towards the working fulness of the earth. 
 For, where not interfered with, they are co-extensive 
 with both the other planes. They are superposed 
 batteries in that pile of which man is the summit. 
 In the flesh-eating ages mankind rests upon them, as 
 they rest upon the vegetable, and as the vegetable 
 reposes upon the ground. Is it then rational to 
 suppose that the native animals of any given country, 
 are not centres of specific influence, which feeds 
 itself upon the two lower kingdoms, and then 
 radiates back through climates, and gives them a 
 quality of its own, without which fulness would 
 be lost ? 
 
 Every feeling of childhood goes with this de- 
 duction; all the delight simple people feel in 
 witnessing the ways of animals; our human love oi 
 animals proclaims it; a nature without bird, beast, 
 fish and insect would be void; the woods would be 
 
 empty houses; and the gardens be sad without birds 
 and butterflies. These are strong mstmcts. ihe 
 passion of the hunter testifies to an active search tor 
 creatures which must be had to complete his want, 
 be they dead or alive. In brief, man's mmd, for 
 good or for evil, cannot do without animals. 
 
 As we have observed, the scale in them ascends 
 beyond the visible sphere: we cannot see their in- 
 fluence. But so time was, and not long ago, when 
 electricity, magnetism, and other influxes, were un- 
 recoo-nized, though plain now; we know that we are 
 in an organized ocean of them that we cannot perceive 
 with the senses. And so time may come, when 
 animal influxes into nature, and what their currents 
 of life do, may be brought within just scientific ken. 
 In the meantime that they are sympathetic cor- 
 respondential centres in the organization of things, 
 is a dutiful belief. And if it had no justification 
 beyond producing the child, universal rational 
 humanity to animals, it might stand and wait with 
 patience for other proofs. 
 
 Two deductions are allowable here. 1. ine 
 harmless native animals of a country are not waifs 
 and strays, but a solid constituent of that geography; 
 and ought to be preserved by the common law of 
 mankind. Hunt them to eat them if you will; but 
 let the hunting be a matter of business, not of sport; 
 at the highest, for a brief time, a chevalresque 
 branch of butchering. Slay the noxious ones; do it 
 with a will and enjoy doing it; but m a military 
 way, like a skilful executioner; again, not for sport. 
 Kill the idea of sport in your mind where kilhng 
 life is your occupation. You will get conscientious 
 pleasure out of the act when the idea of use abohshes 
 that of sport. But it should be done under national, 
 
460 
 
 MAlSrS PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 MANS PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 461 
 
 and in time, under international sanction. And 
 this should be guided by the belief that harmless 
 wild animals have a function in nature, and that to 
 extirpate any species wantonly, is to empty a climate 
 of a specific essence and radiating power; to cut a 
 nerve with a tract of organs beneath it; to break a 
 jewel in the coronet of nature placed by the Lord 
 upon her head. 
 
 What was said before about the affections (see $ 
 Jxxv.) applies here; the animals are affections or 
 arteries of nature, and should be kept open and 
 flowing for the maintenance of her general life. 
 
 2. For the sake of this use, many animals de- 
 structive to crops, and yet not deadly enemies to 
 man, ought rather to be limited within certain 
 fields, than reckoned as game, and destroyed. The 
 elephant and the hippopotamus are cases in point, 
 especially the latter, which most needs the plea. His 
 large negro unwieldiness pleads pitifully against the 
 bullets of the English sportsman; that form must 
 have been created for something better than to be 
 shot; and there is lake and swamp enough for his 
 occupation without his trenching on the ground of 
 the planter. The practical point is, never to destroy 
 such a creature without a necessity of preservation 
 of crops, or of boat bottoms; never to make travels 
 amusing by careless murders of these aborigines. A 
 new conscience, happily arising everywhere, begins to 
 seize this point, to forbid the deed, and ban its books. 
 
 Moreover it must not be taken for granted that 
 animals now regarded as wild and undomesticable, 
 are so finally. Animals notably answer to the 
 ferocity, or the loving-kindness of man. There 
 was an instance of this in the gardens of the Luxem- 
 bourg, where a man was surrounded by crowds 01 
 
 small birds, settling on him, feeding from his hands 
 or catching his crumbs in the air. He did not 
 smell of gun, but of cake. The human race, 
 especially the travelling English race, smell, on the 
 other hand, of destruction; and any animal appear- 
 ing that completes and beautifies the scene, is 
 abolished as a life, and beomes an item in a sports- 
 man's bag. This must be taken into account, and 
 iudcred as a whole, in estimating the domesticability 
 of Tnimal tribes, and in squaring the reasons for its 
 present narrow limits. The character of mankind, 
 worse in show and history than that of all noxious 
 and malignant beasts put together, is the house 
 which animal nature has been asked to enter by 
 domestication. Is it likely that the zebra and 
 qua<Tga, being of independent and haughty turn, 
 should be won in by our human treatment of the 
 ass« Or that the lion should lie down with the 
 lamb when the lamb is led through ignominy to 
 perpetual slaughter, and at this day to scientific 
 violation? Fiendhood cannot tame anything, be- 
 cause it cannot tame itself But angelhood, which 
 is true humanity bom of the Divine Humanity, has 
 a different chance. Through it the Lord is His own 
 Orpheus. It will approach the animal heart by a 
 secret way, by a religion of courage, and subdue 
 creatures which at present are not evil but savage 
 tribes. It will extirpate evil beasts and insects, and 
 clear climates of their reflex action, by a skill and 
 promptness of its own. The good animals will know 
 their masters, as we have sometimes seen m history 
 already. And so there is a time coming m New 
 Church landlordship, when the tribes of nature will 
 be under man to subdue them; when the smell ot 
 violation has ceased to be remembered in the upper 
 
462 
 
 MAJSrS PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 air; and when the true animal ''fulness" will be a 
 common plane of joy and completeness in the climates. 
 The converse of this is brought out strongly in the 
 records of violational scientism. Animals from the 
 top to the bottom of the scale are of quick percep- 
 tion of the character of those about them; the 
 spirited horse knows a brave horseman presently, 
 and resents having a coward on his back ; the big 
 savage dog feels the courage of an unblenching eye 
 and invading foot, and capitulates into tameness. 
 Domestic animals know cruel men, and shun them. 
 They sense the prevailing tone of societies, and slink 
 about in cruel cities. The sympathetic nerves of 
 nature are indicated and shown in function here. 
 So if a man better than men, and braver, comes, 
 extension of friendship into the animal world is 
 inevitable ; and as the man rises in the human 
 image, nothing living that is not evil and malignant 
 can resist his advancing function of rule, and so far 
 as it is necessary, of domestication. But at present 
 the animal creation feels the stupidity of the human 
 heart, and the lion will no more have man on his 
 back through respect and loyalty, than Bucephalus 
 will be a stool for a coward. How should animal 
 loyalty have been called forth, when sportsmen, and 
 such like carnal outsides, are all the creatures know 
 of God's image? How should it appear when 
 creation, groaning and travailing, smells \k\Qi hand 
 of paid violationists and poUutionists representing 
 the privy council of the most enlightened govern- 
 ment upon earth? While fiendish fingers are at 
 work, no real experiment of the brotherhood of 
 animals is possible to be thought of ; because there 
 is no godlike but only a devilish relation between 
 men and the beasts. 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 463 
 
 In the meantime, in an evil age, conserve as much 
 as you can with all possible conscience; waste no 
 beasts, great or small; destroy no species; have 
 faith in the rights and functions of harmless life ; 
 and enact and embody for the animal kingdom a 
 magna charta of humanity and religious love all 
 over the planet. 
 
 You will meet these forms again when you die, 
 for the spiritual world contains them. Not a species 
 but is known there, beautiful in the heavens, baleful 
 in the hells, and like our animals on earth in the 
 entrance world called "the world of spirits." They 
 are, as was said above, embodiments and corre- 
 spondences of human affections and thoughts, good 
 and evil, which instantaneously produce them. They 
 are organic words of God, signifying justice and in- 
 justice. They gather up powers, and represent 
 them, and distribute them into lower planes of 
 creation. Lions evolve from the courage of angelic 
 truth, and lion landscapes beside lions. Animate 
 creatures are therefore the nerve centres and systems 
 of a universal divine influx, radiations of the all- 
 sympathetic Word ; and the heavens can no more be 
 without their forms than can the earth. This is 
 shown with much detail in the writings of Sweden- 
 borg. 
 
 Organic Remorses. — It is on this ground of cor- 
 respondence that every man carries his own animals, 
 and his treatment of them, from his deathbed into 
 his judgment ; that judgment being a process of 
 life. He stocks the farm of his immortalitv with 
 their grateful and innocent, or their retributive 
 forms ; and is gathered round, or pursued, accord- 
 ingly. The serpents of the hells are the sensual 
 loves of hellish men externized ; their bites are the 
 
464 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 selfhood in its life. They are true organizations, 
 logical worms that never die. It can also be de- 
 monstrated to the psychological mind that the 
 devastation caused in men themselves by evil deeds 
 done to others, follows structural lines of law. But 
 to see this a man must believe in an immortal soul. 
 Let the demonstration be tried, — thus. Every man 
 has a sensibility whereby he appreciates in his 
 degree any living creature that comes before him. 
 This is the first ground of interest, pity, kindness 
 and help for inferior creatures. It is also the first 
 perceptive ground of dislike and loathing of ugly 
 and hostile animals. In each case it is a feeler of 
 external good and evil. It communicates with all 
 the rest of the man ; and goes up into love on the 
 one hand, and down into just aversion on the other. 
 Humane tenderness toward a good animal life, and 
 against an evil animal life, is the sensibility on its 
 inward side. All such sensibilities are a part of the 
 organs of delight in the man ; a part of the ground 
 of his happiness. But he brings them into his 
 torture-house, disregards their bleedings, stills their 
 voices, and finally their cries, and kills them one by 
 one. Their early horrors become the commonplaces 
 of his life. It is then as if he used his naked heart 
 or bared brain to work with, instead of his feet and 
 fingers, taking opiates of present excitement to 
 deaden the conscience and still the pain, and to 
 delude him with the belief that because he feels 
 nothing, he is doing himself no harm. In all this 
 he associates with his fellows, perhaps with a large 
 professional party, and the comfort of community of 
 crime further permits self-violation, and destroys 
 him. Deeper organisms of pity made pitiless are 
 reached. The internal hell he has created, and 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 465 
 
 which by common law longs to extend and destroy 
 further, has next to be limited from his remaining 
 affections, that it may be absent as a rule of flesh 
 from his bed and his nursery. This is a physiological 
 necessity, and a strong barrier and diaphragm of 
 manners, what are called morals, must be set up, in 
 order that he may be a good father, a good husband, 
 and a good citizen. He is walled in, and has a torture- 
 room of one part of his affections in the middle of 
 his character. This he carries with him into the 
 second life. The violations in himself there re- 
 produce by an organic memory which is his book of 
 life, every act which caused them ; and this con- 
 tinually ; until the delight of the evil becomes pain 
 and loathing, and the death of its faculty ensues. 
 This is seen in small beginnings every day ; destruc- 
 tion of faculties and potencies by sins here ; satiety ; 
 loss of hope; loathing of nature and life; and 
 idiocy, or fury, for an end. But as man is the sub- 
 ject, and regeneration alone secures him, we must 
 carry over the consequences into an immeasurable 
 development of self-destruction, with an immortal 
 life for its subject. This follows from any organic 
 good affection deliberately crushed in the character ; 
 most of all when high and holy motives are made 
 pretexts for the act. The doom of such things not 
 repented of, would appear, on physiological grounds, 
 to be devastation of sense, sensibility, and cognizance 
 of the existence of others ; apathy and inaction ; and 
 final solitude of selfhood. Man and beast and bird 
 and insect far away : ne quidem musca. An im- 
 penetrable loneliness, to which the revelation of a fly 
 or a beetle is impossible. The Lord unable to be 
 merciful to the man except by permitting his most 
 special devastation. This final state still tendino- 
 
 2g "" 
 
466 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 lii 
 
 to enlargement when wicked men on earth open a 
 communication with it, is the protomorph and cell- 
 germ of the cruel atheism which now corrupts the 
 sciences. 
 
 Speculative the argument may look; and be de- 
 rided by those whom it most concerns, but any wise 
 statesman may be appealed to whether or not it has 
 a practical bearing upon the question of humanity, 
 meaning thereby the just and godly treatment of all 
 life. And any churchman may be trusted to decide 
 whether these thinofs, in their breach and their 
 observance, do not fairly submit themselves under 
 the words, '' The earth is the Lord s, and the ful- 
 ness thereof." 
 
 That such considerations also concern the well- 
 being and harmony of the planet we live upon, has 
 been forcing itself upon the attention of physical 
 inquirers, of proprietors, and of lovers of nature. In 
 that remarkable book, The Earth as modified by 
 Human Action, by George P. Marsh, New York, 
 1874, the subject is presented in great detail of 
 facts, and from the side of the order and use of the 
 various planes of nature in the conservation of the 
 whole. He deals with the material problem; but 
 his facts and deductions are strictly correlated with 
 the spiritual planes ; and serve as a basis to the 
 views presented above ; of which indeed his work 
 contains many glimpses. 
 
 The fact appears to be, that materially and 
 organically, nature is created and conserved in and 
 by planes of pressure. It is a balance of classes with 
 natural class rights one above another. The whole 
 is given into the hands of man, to superintend this 
 natural order, and to be of wise spiritual weight at 
 the top of it. This is a divine law of gravitation 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 467 
 
 needful over the whole world. History shows, 
 however, that the vices and sensuality of man, his 
 greediness and love of destroying, the love of himself 
 in his own generation, and his disregard of posterity, 
 and all the stupidity which comes of selfishness, 
 have inflicted upon the earth disasters almost irre- 
 mediable, or recoverable only by the combined 
 regeneration of the race. And science evinces that 
 these disasters are written out upon the face of the 
 planet; so that the word of Genesis is true to-day, 
 '' Cursed is the ground for thy sake." 
 
 The reader may hardly be prepared for such a 
 conclusion; but it is verified on a large scale. 
 Thus : the insects of a country, say Scandinavia, 
 form a plane of destructive life which preys upon 
 forest trees, and also upon man, beast, birds, and 
 fishes. Of themselves, they press upon the wood- 
 land, and tend to devastate it. The birds of the 
 country keep them in check, being the ordered 
 stratum of life above them. These birds migrate in 
 the winter, and are killed in millions in the South 
 of Europe. Those that return are insuflScient to 
 hold the insect world in due subjection, and it 
 revolts and rises into their place. Then the low 
 minute population has the upper hand, and the 
 leafless forests die. Their place is afterwards a 
 house of sand, and the rains come and wash away 
 the soil. There are many other illustrations of this, 
 showing the balance of nature by the pressure of the 
 higher life upon the increase and insurgency of the 
 lower ; showing in short that nature is representa- 
 tively a spiritual hierarchy reaching from the inmost 
 faculties of man to the dust under his feet. 
 
 The way in which his good or evil extends into 
 the world is this. The large species of animals 
 
 t? 
 
 <^ 
 
468 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 469 
 
 and vegetables are almost individually within his 
 grasp. By his powerful arts he can kill all the 
 whales, walruses, seals, sharks, penguins, etc., 
 etc., in the seas ; and he can cut down the forests; 
 and living for self, and for one generation alone, 
 his natural tendency is to use up the earth in his 
 own lifetime. The consequence comes that the 
 lower creatures, no longer mowed down by the 
 higher, usurp their plane ; and if this went on, men 
 and insects would be at last the tenants of the 
 earth ; and the middle class, of non-domesticated 
 animals, would disappear. Thus man, selfishly grasp- 
 ing the greater dominion committed to his paternal 
 care, really has the power of deranging the whole of 
 the kingdoms of nature, and of communizing the 
 planet, so that his own lowest faculties, and the 
 lowest forms of natural life, shall conjointly reign 
 supreme. It is a question, if this were consum- 
 mated, how long the domesticated animals could 
 survive into the insect-human reign ; for the earth 
 would be its fungus, pierced and poisoned by its 
 stings, and sprouting constantly like atheism from 
 below. 
 
 The atmosphere supplies an analogue of these 
 orders of nature, and of the consequences of vio- 
 lating them. Its volume presses universally with a 
 weight equal to so many pounds on the square inch. 
 By this pressure it seconds attraction, and binds 
 every organism to the dimensions of the breadth of 
 its use. It keeps the blood in the heart of every 
 living creature. Take it away from man for 
 instance, and he would be a swollen carcase in a few 
 minutes ; his fluids would have rushed out from 
 their centres to supply the vacuum. Take away 
 the pressure of the air from nature, and the escape of 
 
 inside waters and gases would convulse the planet 
 with general earthquakes, and make it red-hot 
 externally with interior collisions. Correlated 
 events happen though spread over ages, when the 
 higher pressures of nature, namely of ordained class 
 upon the class beneath it, are removed whether 
 partially, or wholly. The highest ordained pressure 
 of all is man's spiritual action, of conservation, and 
 management as God's tenant ; so many pounds of 
 wisdom and its loving statesmanship to the square 
 inch all over the earth. The rest follows from this; 
 for the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and 
 with them air, water and electricity, heat and light, 
 are sufficient balances already where they are not 
 overthrown : they only require to receive the true 
 weight of man at the top, and to be submitted afresh 
 throughout to his conscientious endowments and 
 their cultivating modifications. 
 
 It does seem strano^e at first that man with his 
 small stature can thus modify the great globe, and 
 all that inhabits it. But the human body and the 
 human mind supply correspondences which illuminate 
 the problem. The body in infancy is slowly taken 
 possession of by the senses, and the brain slowly 
 peopled with thoughts and reasons. And when the 
 man is mature, and self-possessed, it is only his head 
 and his muscles and his skin, his hands and feet, 
 that are given- into his conscious keeping. He can- 
 not manipulate his heart, lungs or liver, or his brain, 
 or even discern them except by accident, or infer- 
 ence. He cannot think in them, or control their 
 purposes, by his direct volitions. Yet the power 
 of his influence for good or evil, for weal or woe, 
 reaches to the most secret parts of his organism. 
 By his habits and by his passions, by evil meat and 
 
 i 
 
470 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 drink alone, to go no further, he can disease and 
 destroy parts of which he is totally unconscious 
 until they fall into pain. By the work of his little 
 mind he can destroy his large, invisible, involuntary, 
 unconscious body. So now by the w^ork and 
 habits of his societies, which are the conscious part 
 of nature, he can destroy the unconscious parts, 
 which are the animal, vegetable, and climatic 
 organism of the whole planet. 
 
 The mind presents plain analogies of the same 
 thing. A man can destroy his own soul though it 
 is far from his knowledge as the ends of the earth, 
 and the more he destroys it, the farther it is away. 
 The conscious part of the mind itself, that is to say, 
 of the organic substantial inner man, is like a per- 
 petual moving point of thought and will in which 
 reflection scarcely apprehends size, and the uncon- 
 scious, unrevealed part is comparatively immeasur- 
 able in endurance and capacity; and yet momen- 
 taneous good or evil actions modify and ultimately 
 give their own shape to the whole. They deter- 
 mine that vast world of the future, the inner man. 
 If the highest reasons, that is to say, if religion, 
 press upon the middle plane, and both upon the 
 lower plane; if the planes are in order, the man 
 governs in faculties far beyond his ken, and he is made 
 ruler over many things to which his natural mind 
 does not reach. His good affections, his domesti- 
 cated animals, flourish and increase, and his wild 
 affections know his predominance, and come to him 
 to receive his name, to be his subjects, and to live 
 on his properties. If the lower reasons prevail, all 
 the planes of his mind are gradually destroyed, ex- 
 cepting the lowest; and the small sensual having no 
 consciousness of the vast spiritual, yet has extin- 
 
 471 
 
 guished it. Just so the destruction of the ends and 
 loops of nature which man holds in his hands, really 
 involves the desolation of the surfaces of the earth. 
 Thus nature too, like the body, and like the soul, is 
 worked by blessed, or by direful correspondences. 
 
 Let it not, however, be supposed that there is 
 danger now of the ultimate ruin of the earth by the 
 misdeeds of mankind. For since the Last tfudg- 
 ment that danger is overpast, because man has 
 received a new career from the gift of his Redeemer, 
 who now holds the balance of the natural world. 
 But what has been done of ruin and destruction up 
 to this time, is a physical proof of the necessity of a 
 divine intervention to take the old curse from the 
 faces of the ground. Accordingly, a new national 
 and international conscience is born; a new religious 
 love of nature, a new respect for her order and 
 forms; responsibility to posterity in the estates of 
 the sea and the land; and humane statesmanship of 
 the public petitioning hard parliament to be em- 
 bodied into laws. And on the other hand, greed 
 and cruelty are stricken and hiding themselves, and 
 the first of these lusts is forced into the pleas of 
 false freedom, and the second into the more pro- 
 fane '^rights" of false and evil science. It may then 
 be predicted that the earth which is the Lord's, and 
 the fulness thereof, will henceforth be cleared of 
 these adversaries, and in time demonstrate redemp- 
 tion geographically by the superposition of the new 
 Jerusalem four-square in every detail throughout 
 her renovated climates. 
 
 It comes into view here, that science will one day 
 help to confirm the text of Genesis, "God saw all 
 that He had made, and behold it was very good." 
 At present the proof of this is not obvious to man- 
 
 ) 
 
472 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE. 
 
 kind. Much on the land and in the sea is not very 
 good ; and perturbation itself on a large scale is an 
 accepted part of the order of nature. Earthquake, 
 cyclone, pestilence and all kinds of plague and ruin 
 have established cycles in the course of things. 
 And our laws call them acts of God. Yet it is a 
 fact that human nature, to speak physiologically, is 
 the organ which secretes them. We have already 
 seen, on the natural side, that man, to a great 
 extent, holds the climates in his hand; that his sins, 
 of omission and commission, overthrow the just 
 planes of nature, and distort their rightful pressures 
 into chaos; that the lower explodes into the higher 
 whenever the higher is weakened by human inter- 
 ference. And it is demonstrated by the greatest 
 effects on the earth s surface, that when the royalty 
 of nature goes wrong, her vast dominion falls into 
 confusion. For the lord of the house secretes and 
 determines the house. If you consult Marsh above 
 cited, you will see that man, not God, is the agent 
 of huge catastroplies which are charged to the 
 account of the Almighty. But when we turn from 
 Marsh to Swedenborg, with whom Marsh on his 
 own plane coheres, there is more to be said about 
 the total human determination of nature. For 
 nature and the spiritual world are in a large sense 
 soul and body. And man, the end and purpose of 
 all things, occurs over again in the spiritual world, 
 with all his pressures for good and evil. He exists 
 there in great hells, inevitably influential upon 
 climates; influential by men here that correspond 
 to and open those hells, and bring their influx into 
 the world. Such men, from this background, secrete 
 the beginnings of natural calamities and catastrophes, 
 as serpents secrete poison. They make the natural 
 
 MANS PL A CE IN NA TURE. 473 
 
 forms and moulds into which the ruin runs; and are 
 the germs, in character, of evil organizations, and of 
 cosmical destructions. When science has completed 
 her natural survey, of what visible man has done to 
 telluric nature, which there is no gainsaying,— and it 
 accounts for a large share of deserts, inundations 
 and plagues,— she has- yet to turn to the darker 
 hemisphere, to show that act of God is unpleadable 
 for the cosmical catastrophes which appear to the 
 sensual mind to be far from human causation : she 
 has to show that here also man is the insect of the 
 universal gall. 
 
 We now go further, and striking the centre de- 
 clare, that theological falses flowing out of tlie evils 
 of the heart, determine largely the condition of the 
 planet; that the selfhood seizing the world as the 
 property of single lifetimes, makes desolation of the 
 fields; that the floating of religion into the air, 
 and away from the life of faithful good works, 
 neglects the devastated ground, and justifies devas- 
 tation as the order of nature; and that justification 
 by^ faith alone, or the world-wide separation of 
 religion from business, is the bed of the tzetze, the 
 vaccination, and the crocodile, the aunt of atheism, 
 and the mother of Sahara. This is according to the 
 principles of physiological life. It is universal cor- 
 
 respondential organization, secretion, and circula- 
 tion. 
 
 It is also evolution, and evolution out of sub- 
 stances from which reason, experience and science 
 show that there is everything to unroll. Evolution 
 from God, from heart, from mind, from architectonic 
 ends, from individuality, from freewill, from com- 
 bined society, from empire, from righteousness, and 
 from wickedness. It confronts materialistic evolu- 
 
 i[ 
 
474 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 tion, and pours protoplasm into the abyss; account- 
 ing for both the hypothesis and the protoplasm. If 
 it were itself hypothesis instead of virtue, it yet has 
 all life and consciousness at its back, all rationality 
 with its imagination; and must beat in pieces the 
 material enemy reposing upon the unknown. More- 
 over, this doctrine of spiritual evolution leads 
 directly to the renovation of things through lives 
 addicted to good works; to justification by the 
 shunning of evils as sins against the Lord, and doing 
 good with all our might, acknowledging afterwards 
 that it is His might; which course can ultimately 
 repair the waste places, yoke the winds to the sea- 
 worthy ships, and make the wilderness blossom as 
 the rose. 
 
 The human mind is so sunk in matter, space, 
 time, property, and self, that it ignores its own 
 existence as a causa causans in the world; and by 
 correlation ignores the influx of life as a governing 
 end in the order of nature. It admits hydrostatic 
 pressure as a force; but does not rise towards the 
 perception of zoostatic pressure; still less, of anthro- 
 postatic and pneumostatic planes of power. This 
 comes of the historical fact that ^^where there is 
 no vision the people perish." Vision here means 
 spiritual vision, or intellectual vision from spiritual. 
 Where this is absent, as it is in the old church and 
 the old anti-church, all but material nature is in 
 little pieces which, however neatly they fit, do not 
 join or communicate with each other; and science 
 plays with them as children with a puzzle. No 
 influence of the higher upon the lower is known; no 
 influx of the higher into the lower. There is no 
 solidarity, no organization of things. It is not 
 known that all men are created to form one 
 
 MANS PLA CE IN NA TURE. 475 
 
 humanity, one greatest man which is the race in 
 the heavens. That this is human because God the 
 creator is a Divine Man. That man comes of Man 
 from the beginning, and that the Divine Man 
 has appeared in birth and history, to attest His own 
 order, to establish it for ever, and to claim His own 
 people. That His pressure descends through His 
 ends, which are men and women, and constitutes all 
 planes and pressures from above downwards; and 
 that theostatic pressure is the creation and redemp- 
 tion of all things. That this descends from man 
 mto planes of animals, domesticated and domestic- 
 able; and constitutes zoostatics, which can be seen 
 spiritually as a science, and loved as one of the 
 humanities. That being creative, not imitative, it 
 rejects the part of apishness to the circumferences, 
 and builds no stone of its temples out of mockery. 
 That lower down it constitutes correspondential 
 phytostatics, or pressure of vegetable life, grasping 
 matter close with prolonged human fingers in the 
 trees, and forbanning materialism from the very 
 stones. That from gravitation, or mineral pressure, 
 as the last tube of the Archimedean screw, it pours 
 nature upwards again, through the same series of 
 now ascending forms, to the Divine Human vein 
 and heart in the heavens. This can be seen only by 
 that vision without which the people perish. It has 
 been given for the first time through opening of the 
 spiritual senses in the case of Swedenborg. And 
 with the vision is again a practical purpose and 
 command to replenish the earth and to subdue 
 it. And with the command is a steady fire of 
 a new will to carry on untired the purposes of 
 the daily work, great and small, from age to age. 
 And from and with this fire, ardent, gentle and 
 
476 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 humane, there is a new intellect and illuminated 
 reason in the vision, which accepts the hope of 
 a complete restoration, and sees glimpses of the way 
 to it; and believes pre-eminently in God's gifts, and 
 that skill and science and healing come not from 
 self but from on high. The vision, like all the 
 greater and influential vision recorded in history, 
 and appertaining to seers, prophets and founders, 
 nay, like the sight of Him who was not commanded 
 by the Father, but came down from the Father, 
 and is the Father, has its own enthusiasm; but this 
 is clear and rationated, not fitful and expiring; the 
 enthusiasm of a human firmament, kindling eyes at 
 its stars, and pressing on steadily in regenerating 
 mmds with a divine gravitation. It presses that 
 nothing is impossible with God, and nothing is im- 
 possible with man when God is with him. Where- 
 ever good works stop, (call them miracles if you 
 like,) it is that God, though omnipresent, is not con- 
 joined with the man who seeks to do the works; the 
 selfhood is between the source and the stream. 
 
 One difficulty of seeing these things, and of 
 accepting the vision that can see them, lies in 
 wrong conceptions of nature, which, coming from 
 the heart, reign in the lower or scientific mind. It 
 is conceived that nature is a congeries of absolute 
 atoms which have existed from eternity, and which 
 are impregnable beings. They have no doors above, 
 but are resi stent to the idea of God. They open 
 from below, and by inward propulsion of force 
 arrange themselves into nature and her kingdoms. 
 In short, they are so many infinitesimal atheists and 
 selfhoods which work and theorize themselves into 
 worlds. They are atheomorphs, because they are 
 figments and imps of the atheistical selfhood, full of 
 
 HANTS PLACE IN NATURE, 477 
 
 hatred of the Almighty. Yet such atoms have no 
 existence m things, but only in minds; physical 
 science knows them not; and can have no theory or 
 hypothesis of any other atoms than such as are the 
 first of any series of formations, and which are 
 limited to their own substances, and for ought that 
 can be divined, may be broken up, and reveal them- 
 selves as the ends of a more inward series of forms. 
 So far as atoms exist, they are prepared bricks of 
 an architectonic creation. And their properties 
 flow by a divine influx into their forms. And 
 again, for another set of fallacies which blind the 
 naturalist, he poses the infinity of space, the infinity 
 and eternity of the world. As observed before, this 
 is neither physics nor metaphysics. There is no 
 such infinity, and no such eternity. It is atheism 
 over again; human mind and human matter voting 
 their elements to be all in all, and divine. Nature 
 on the contrary is finite and temporal in all its parts, 
 limited and walled in by the larger thing which 
 contains it, viz., by the spiritual world, ''it is a 
 round vessel held in the Lord's hand. Because of 
 this, nature is capable of receiving force and trans- 
 mitting it; the ball and sphere of it is resisting and 
 elastic; it can receive what Swedenborg calls con- 
 tremiscentice, i.e. sympathetic tremulations, and con- 
 vey them from end to end of its extense. Were 
 nature infinite, dissolution of all movement would 
 take place from want of walls. It is the finiteness 
 of nature in the whole and in every part, the formal 
 existence, that constitutes it a total, and a series of 
 receptive forms according to which every life and 
 function moves and flows, propagates and per- 
 petuates itself. And atheism, without a God to 
 begin from, in postulating an infinite world. 
 
478 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 
 
 would miss out the functional world. The concep- 
 tions to which this gives rise ignore, inter alia, all 
 action of higher upon lower planes. 
 
 But now if the higher does open into the lower 
 plane, the effect may be illustrated and gathered 
 from the kingdoms. For example, the world beino- 
 a vessel and a 'plenum with an almighty will at its 
 sides, pressure of lives, plant life, animal life, human 
 life, must act upon its auras according to the altitude 
 of the superincumbent life ; just as water hydrosta- 
 tically and correspondentially acts in confined tubes 
 upon volumes of its own in every direction ; just as 
 the hydraulic press acts. Only that each creature is 
 its own tube and its own reservoir in its action upon 
 the whole. An animal is therefore a column of 
 forceful life, which is love, which is living fire, a 
 column opening down into the great sphere of the 
 world; and giving it a pressure, a prodigious 
 pressure, to which nature is a stranger apart from 
 life. The mere existence as well as the office of the 
 animal life does this. Great '' motions of consent " 
 sympathetic reflex actions and reactions, ensue from 
 the vast columnar structure and pressure of kingdom 
 upon kingdom, of man upon the rest, and of the 
 spiritual world upon the whole. The lower kingdom 
 contributes diabolostatics to the round vessel, and 
 indents it with temporary evil. Therefore the world 
 is no chaos without conlBnes, but a tense drum of 
 good or evil music ; and having incalculable forces 
 opening down into it, and being bound at the two 
 sides, of space and time, it has latent within it the 
 throes of every life, vibrating from wall to wall. 
 None but the Lord's hand can hold in such added 
 forces, of which the powers of dead nature are the 
 mere pots and recipients. As Babbage has foreseen, 
 
 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE, 479 
 
 nature is a brain and memory and reo-ister of all 
 vibrations from the beginning, which beginning is 
 the Divine Love and Wisdom. But it is more 
 than a register; it is nervous and muscular with 
 life, and where its heart is stricken, it is explosive 
 as dynamite ; for a terrible correspondence of con- 
 science lies in it. It is also an analogue and cor- 
 relate of freewill throughout, in that all its parts are 
 individual, and the pressure and influx of the whole 
 is so far taken off them, that they exist on their own 
 centres for themselves ; and are themselves against 
 surrounding forces. Herein lies one physicaUruth 
 of the Lord's incarnation, in that by His victories 
 over hell and spiritual death, He penetrated space 
 and time and their contents, as well as personality, 
 and holds nature to new limits, which are those of 
 redemption, and which are filled by His Word 
 opened down into all things, so that the light of 
 righteousness is now sevenfold, as the light of seven 
 days ; and a new infinitude of love pulses upon 
 nature which her bare creation could never sustain. 
 What is the good of these views of nature ; and 
 why are they better than materialism ? They are 
 good as the theory of gravitation is good, because 
 they go with light through all things, and are the 
 truth of them. They are good, because they begin 
 from God and end in God. They are good because 
 they lead to industrious reverence for the uses of the 
 world. They confine the selfhood to the Lords 
 prayer, — to asking only for its daily bread. 
 
48o 
 
 THE HELLS. 
 
 CXVI. 
 
 THE HELLS. 
 
 Many gentle persons are strongly averse to believe 
 in evil, its permanence, punishment, and consumma- 
 tion ; and to such readers, what is said of the hells 
 in these pages will be especially repugnant because 
 of its substantive character. We would appeal to 
 these minds by some considerations. 1. The senti- 
 ment that evil is an evanescent covering over 
 good, finds no justification in the present world, 
 where good is never a development from evil, but a 
 conflict with it, and a conquest over it. Experience 
 denies that evil is on the surface, and good beneath 
 it, in society. The good that arrives comes from 
 without, from teaching out of the Word, from better 
 men and women pressing by example, precept, and 
 punishment, upon those who are willing to repent, 
 and be reformed. Good, through truth first, is on 
 the surface, and the evil deeply within. 2. Evil 
 itself, in men s minds, has no intention of beino- a 
 shadow, but perpetuates itself by acts of will, keep- 
 ing up appearances as a platform for its larger exer- 
 cise. 3. The sentiment that all but the ugly surface 
 is ''very good," coexists with the denial of freewill as 
 the centre of character. Where the position of free- 
 will is not maintained, no rational truth about the 
 future of mankind can be discerned : the mind will 
 always be fluctuating, and agitated, about the origin 
 and gravity of evil. It will tend to fall out of the 
 treatment of cases, and into sentimental states. 
 4. Sentimentality has the eflfect of cruelty where 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 481 
 
 evil must be met, and the bystander is incapacitated 
 for stern help when need requires it. 5. The palsy 
 of the truths of freewill in the mind shakes the 
 human character to its centre; and carried out 
 would devastate mankind more than hell can 
 devastate. It would be annihilation, which evil 
 abominates; execution beyond capital punishment: 
 for when a head is cut off there is a second head 
 under it, but were freewill gone, the man is blown 
 away. 6. Without a universe divinely built for the 
 reception of evil, a prison-house equal to its whole 
 emergency, the confusion of this temporary state, 
 the life on earth, would be perpetuated above on a 
 scale of inconceivable magnitude; all the deliberate 
 wicked men who have ever existed would be at 
 large, and heaven and its security be impossible; for 
 history, and revelation, show that these men are not 
 reformable. No breach of mercy were so great as 
 this, even to those for whom the sentimental mercy 
 is intended. 7. By bonds the evil are prevented 
 from getting worse. 8. The hells in their kingdoms 
 and circumstances exactly correspond to the men 
 who inhabit them; these go to their last abodes on 
 the feet of their freedom; and their minds are con- 
 served by being shut away from the light and love 
 of heaven which would destroy them. The man 
 that will have no god, is shut from the torture of 
 divine influx in a cavern-worship of self, which 
 defends his state, and is the architecture of his 
 falsity. The love of self, the love of the world, the 
 love of sensuality, the love of dominion, call upon 
 their own rocks to cover them, and the ordered 
 rocks, the lies made of human granite, do cover 
 them, and prevent their lives from being constantly 
 infringed and broken up by the truth. This is 
 
 2 II 
 
482 
 
 THE HELLS. 
 
 a needful perfect separation of evil from good; a 
 divine respect for freedom in those who abuse it. 
 9. There are no arbitrary punishments ; no fire and 
 brimstone without that is not first fire and brimstone 
 within. The Lord never punishes, but the evil 
 punishes itself by sinking into its own correspon- 
 dential place, and being confined to its selfhood. 
 Similarly, the laws of order punish no one, but the 
 breach of these laws enters penalty, and cuts the 
 criminal. Here however, in the case of the divine 
 preparedness for evil, the laws are organic sub- 
 stances, like the laws of nature; so that you cannot 
 violate your heart by sin, and have your heart 
 whole afterwards; for the heart is a divine form, and 
 when it is strained against God, it loses its shape and 
 make. By continuation, the body goes with the 
 heart. By further continuation, the lower world, 
 and a fitting society, close in around the character. 
 In this way the hells are simply infernal indi- 
 vidualities allowed as far as possible to be com- 
 plete. 10. Whenever earnest desire to emerge 
 from the hells exists, the prayer to do so is 
 granted. Swedenborg has details on this subject, 
 and we appeal to him, for there is no other source 
 of the knowledge. By temporary quiescence of 
 the life s love, which is the man's ruling character, 
 he may be admitted into heaven although he 
 is a denizen of hell. He can stay there so long as 
 his interiors are not active. But when they are 
 roused into life, he casts himself down most volun- 
 tarily into his real place. The reason is, that the 
 light of heaven is divine truth, and devils can 
 understand this so long as they have any selfish 
 motive for understanding it ; they can comprehend 
 it with sharp intelligence. By this understanding 
 
 THE HELLS. 
 
 483 
 
 they can be lifted out of the hells. But they cannot 
 hold the understanding, because it conflicts with 
 their substance. The divine truth in heaven is 
 always united with divine good, and cannot admit of 
 union with the motives of the selfhood. Con- 
 sequently, when an evil spirit is surrounded by the 
 light of righteousness, it discloses and convicts him, 
 it anatomizes him in the springs and pulses of his 
 life, and stops at the fountain-head the thoughts he 
 is breathing forth ; the atmosphere of the angelic 
 society suflfocates him ; the light destroys his sense ; 
 he writhes with a torture that searches him through- 
 out, and appears to himself in the monstrosity of 
 his own evil. The revelation is intolerable. Then 
 the organic life of the spiritual world draws him to 
 his own abode, where he looks fair to himself and 
 his fellows, and perhaps regards any traces of his 
 experience as an ugly dream, the fruit of material 
 unhealth. Such is the mercy of the hells. The 
 gentle people who deny them, would torment 
 wickedness, which is not always active, with search- 
 ing torments greater than the worm that never dies 
 and the fire that is not quenched. 
 
 In the separations of society on earth we see an 
 image of these things. Crime never associates long 
 with innocence when it can escape away. Atheism 
 never communes with Christianity, but they mutually 
 shun each other. They shun, because they are 
 destructive of each other's lives. Now if in this 
 world that were the case which is a universal of the 
 spiritual world ; if all thought and afifection were 
 sensibly communicated on the atmospheres, so that 
 each man on his chair were in inmost blazon to his 
 fellows, and their hearts to each other were visible 
 acts of gesture, and every plan revealed, aversion 
 
484 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 and separation would proceed at a rapid rate; 
 iudo-ment of the state of others would be in- 
 stantaneous ; men would fall plumb down m estnna- 
 tion, and friendly gatherings like graves give up 
 their motives; and new societies would be volun- 
 tarily formed of those whose lives agree m honesty 
 or dishonesty, in community of kindness or m 
 acknowledged bonds of common schemmg which has 
 union outside and hatred within. For such a con- 
 tingency the Dean of Westminster would urge no 
 toleration, but instantaneous separation ; the common 
 peace of Westminster would prescribe it. ihese 
 terrible events closely underlie us ; aud are the rule 
 of the spiritual world, and our lot when we die. 
 And inasmuch as that world is now opened down 
 into society, they will come here more and more, 
 and re-organize society, and re-embody it, and em- 
 battle it into two great camps, of good and evil. 
 External "friendship of society" will gradually 
 perish from this pressure ; new bonds will alone 
 give friendship ; and the conditions of the heavens 
 and the hells be organically, with increase as time 
 passes on, enacted as laws of human nature, and final 
 states upon earth. The hells here however will 
 always deny that they are hells, as indeed they do 
 now, and declare that they are heavens. And the 
 war of each army for its own children will be 
 incessant ; and attest by its permanence the divine 
 mercy of freedom, and the everlasting foundations of 
 
 the hells. 
 
 Before Swedenborg wrote, this problem of Univer- 
 sahsm, on which we here impinge, had not the 
 magnitude or gravity which belongs to it now. For 
 in the first place, the spiritual hfe as conceived by 
 men, was a small and vague thing with neither 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 485 
 
 body, parts, or passions : all souls with no extension 
 could go into nutshells of conceit ; and so it was 
 that the gentle mind dealt with them according to 
 its desires, put them into little imaginary heavens, 
 and toyed with their progress as a thing easily 
 conceded and which manages itself But now the 
 problem is larger : a universe to which nature is but 
 a vanishing and re-appearing point, is plainly re- 
 vealed ; it is steadfast where suns and systems 
 waver; and self-evident where nature is obscure; 
 and it is peopled by all the men and women and 
 children from all the natural worlds since space and 
 time were born. Since refers here to no time, but 
 to precedent divine love and wisdom; and so it 
 may be said of the spiritual universe that before any 
 Adam was, it is. This is a prodigy of heavenly 
 kingdoms and of hellish empires; and kindly fancy 
 has nothing to say to such awful realms. You may 
 speculate if you will that Germany will disband her 
 armies, and her lion and lamb lie down together. 
 But heaven and hell, already standing armies here, 
 are mao-nitudes which revelation, not humanitarian 
 speculation, can reach. 
 
 But observe, the problem is only of the greatness 
 of good, and the greatness of evil, and their un- 
 alterable opposition. 
 
 On another side nearer to us the problem is im- 
 mense. For revelation reveals good and reveals 
 evil where they were not expected: they are the 
 only substances of which it is the organon. It has 
 revealed them from the beginning; and the Bible is 
 nothing else than the divine light shining on them 
 and at them. But this light has been so obscured, 
 that its judgments on the acts of life, and on the 
 thoughts and desires of every hour in every man, 
 
486 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 have been made to mean judgment of creeds, and to 
 import salvation by creeds in an unknown future 
 state. Hence good and evil have fallen out of 
 churches, and pursued their way in the kindness, or 
 cunning, of the natural man. But through Sweden- 
 borg the cloud is lifted, and the divine light shines 
 down again, this time with rational force, and with 
 the sevenfoldness of the Divine Humanity, upon 
 human character as its special mission. And the 
 consequence is that the motives of men, left out 
 hitherto, are the first tops on which it impinges; the 
 ruling love being the life, the whole mountain chain 
 of the man. Hence in estimating heaven and hell, 
 the regard is taken away from a multitude of godly 
 church-going figures for the one, and a smaller band 
 of criminals and blasphemers for the other; and is 
 fixed instead upon the general assize of humanity. 
 We are all walking by voluntary steps to the one or 
 the other; the divine net which fishes for men, 
 catches the whole race now on earth for separation 
 and partition. It is not the breakers of law only, 
 the thieves and murderers and violaters, who are 
 included in the meshes of the hells, but all the 
 selfish loves together which act intelligently here 
 without any breach of the law of the land. The 
 foundation of things in the heart apportions the 
 future in the spiritual life. And therefore the mass 
 of evil men and women to be dealt with is not pro- 
 portionally represented in the criminal classes, or in 
 those who outlie the pews of churches, but com- 
 prises all to whom voluntarily the divine order of 
 heaven is impossible; all those whose greeds and 
 practices would break it up; all who therefore must 
 be separated ; and have a place provided for them m 
 order that they may exist. Granting that such a 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 487 
 
 leaven of evil exists, and no great uninspired man 
 who has sounded human nature deeply has done other 
 than affirm it, the provision, the corresponding jail, 
 must be immense; and be less to be dealt with by 
 universalism than the petty prisons of this world, 
 with which however it is totally unable to cope, but 
 has to abandon them to the police. 
 
 Moreover — 11. The hells are not hells to those 
 who are in them, just as evils are not evils, and 
 falses are not falses; they are the delights of evil 
 permitted and carried out so far as is compatible 
 with infernal order; evil living under its own 
 despotisms, but congenial to those who are in it, and 
 mitigated by unsuspected angelic ministrations. 
 The pains of hell are the pressures of evil against 
 evil; selfishness restrained by surrounding selfish- 
 ness. But the revelation of hell from the heavenly 
 point of view, depicts hell not as it is to its in- 
 habitants. It is a land of hard work, and of vile 
 uses; but where these are done, no torment accrues 
 from them; but coarse food and congenial society 
 are given. In short it is a universal treatment of 
 evil under divine superintendence, and in a fitting 
 world, — not jail only, such as our justice aims at upon 
 earth. In this world the prison is in the midst of 
 the orderly population, the term of imprisonment is 
 not truly but arbitrarily apportioned, the treatment 
 is not special, reformability is not ascertained, and a 
 penal colony corresponding organically to all wicked- 
 ness in detail, is not possible. With these limita- 
 tions, however, human justice aims at the same 
 institution for crime which Swedenborg has ex- 
 hibited as of final divine appointment for the 
 mightier problem not of crime, but of evil. 
 
 12. The hells are also the theatres of colossal de- 
 
488 
 
 THE HELLS, 
 
 RE-LNCARNA TION, 
 
 489 
 
 lusions, and their sciences have the power, by abuse 
 of correspondences, in short, by magical arts, of 
 producing appearances of magnificence, and social 
 show, and especially of rendering the inhabitants 
 seemly to each other, and capacitating them for 
 mutual association. The appearances can last so 
 long as order is kept, and intimate evil does not 
 burlt forth and destroy decoration. But provided 
 always that not a ray of the light of heaven enters, 
 for this reduces to reality, and the men and women 
 to monstrous forms. It is further to be noted, that 
 hell is only a place of punishment in that crime 
 itself is punished. Evil is kept, and crime punished. 
 No man is punished after death for the crimes done 
 on earth; but the pursuing vengeance of evil is, that 
 it does over again what it has committed once, and 
 runs into punishment by fresh excess. Short of 
 crime, and under the necessity of daily bread, evil 
 has its own freedom; when crime is committed, in 
 hell, as on earth, the criminal is reduced and 
 punished. It does not seem that there is anything 
 here, that the most humane governments do not 
 already admit as the highest aim of human justice; 
 only that universal evil is housed in a compulsory 
 cosmos, not merely in a prison; and is separated from, 
 and balanced against, good, by divine justice and 
 mercy. And that stript of its delusions, the estate 
 is lean and barren, just like the interior mind of 
 wickedness here on earth. Indeed, all these things 
 are true of infernal states of mind in whatever world 
 the person is living. 
 
 And now in whatever direction we turn, whether 
 to the wilfulness of wickedness, to the immensity of 
 the spiritual life, to the multitudes of its inhabitants 
 on both hands, or to the necessity of separating 
 
 them in order that heavenly peace may be on one 
 side, and some quiescence of proprietorship on the 
 other, — we find that the hells, like just imprison- 
 ment and punishment here, are foundations without 
 which the divine mercy could not hold its way. 
 The hells however can and will be more subdued, 
 as heaven becomes stronger and locks them closer 
 against act, and as they find less basis in society 
 upon earth, and fewer wicked men here to be their 
 game and incentive, and to draw them forth. 
 
 CXVII. 
 
 RE-INCARNATION. 
 
 A word may here be said, also from Swedenborg, 
 concerning the universal effort of the hells to break 
 forth, and to devastate the life of man on earth. This 
 is a scriptural position, as shown in the phrase that 
 the enemy of mankind goes about like a roaring 
 lion seeking whom he may devour. It inheres in 
 the nature of evil. But Swedenborg has brought 
 the fact into correspondence with common rational 
 thought. The men in the hells have lost such a 
 world of appearances, and are so reduced to their 
 own dimensions; in quitting nature and the natural 
 body they have put off* such fatness and put on such 
 leanness ; in being separated from the good and the 
 true they have lost such keen incentives to life; as 
 atheists they miss so much the lust of their pro- 
 paganda; and as selfish they lose such golden oppor- 
 tunity of preying upon the innocent and the simple; 
 that it follows of necessity that they burn to emerge, 
 and to be again in their former haunts. Like dens 
 
490 
 
 RE-INCARNA TION. 
 
 RE-INCARNA TION, 
 
 491 
 
 *\\ 
 
 of robbers now in a country where no travellers will 
 come, they tend by the gravity of their lust to the 
 former highroads. In a word, the nisus of the hells 
 is directed towards the natural world. The pre- 
 valent desire may be summed up in one word, — 
 re-incarnation. If their soothsayers prophesy to 
 them that in future states a time of happiness will 
 come, the end of prophecy is, re-incarnation. The 
 '' comparative mythologies " of the abyss must end 
 in avatars of their people into nature again. It 
 stands to reason. And Scripture, especially the 
 Apocalypse, is full of attestations of the desire of 
 the hells to burst their boundaries, and pour their 
 lava of lusts upon the earth. If this is an inevitable 
 design in the empire of evil, it is represented in a 
 false faith ; and this faith has come upon earth in a 
 formal doctrine of re-incarnation preached by many 
 spirits to men. The re-incarnation has sometimes 
 come subjectively by demoniacal possession; but 
 the more complete doctrine at present is, that it is 
 effected by a second birth. The spiritual world 
 itself is virtually denied in this, save as a room for a 
 man to turn fairly round in, and come back again as 
 a little child. So that past generations of imperfect, 
 or of evil men and women reappear in the innocent 
 aliases of infants in our nurseries. And up and down 
 like buckets on a wheel they go continually, from 
 sinner to his spirit, and from thence to a new-looking 
 baby; and then through a new lifetime; and another 
 death and another birth. Here the hells lay hold 
 on the form of innocence, infancy, as their device 
 for getting back to earth. The doctrine is diabol- 
 ically true, and that is all that need be said of it. 
 The existence of the hells, and their attempt to 
 ascend, rationally account for it. A bloody infant 
 
 came up out of the witches' cauldron in Macbeth ; a 
 representative of violated innocence projected from 
 infernal lusts. So also Swedenborg mentions an 
 infernal society which sent forth as an emissary the 
 apparition of such an infant. And as surely as vice 
 wears virtue for a cloak, and violation puts on 
 benevolent smiles, so surely will all the hells desire 
 to wear infancy for their garb, in other words, desire 
 to be born again in their own way, or to be re- 
 incarnated. 
 
 In this sense, no man has ever been incarnated, 
 much less re-incarnated : Incarnation belongs to 
 the Lord alone. No man as a conscious soul has 
 ever pre-existed to his body. His spirit awaits 
 him when he dies, to be of quality as his life has 
 been: but it has not been spiritually extant above 
 his flesh in this world, and entered it as a body, as 
 Jehovah was above the human nature, and plenarily 
 entered it. In the finite man, new germs of 
 faculties have been given in conception and birth, 
 and from within, on prepared organisms, by spirit- 
 ual influx meeting the world of sense, have been 
 developed into a mind which becomes an image of 
 a spiritual mind forming within ; and in this way 
 a new special man is built up from above and 
 from below, and traverses a new career and iden- 
 tity, and becomes a new character determinant of 
 a future. When death takes place, the scaflblding 
 is taken from this, and the spirit which has received 
 form and capacity from it becomes the conscious 
 man in a second life. This spirit-man is a powerful 
 personality for good or for evil, and his adoption 
 into sonship and angelhood by the Lord, or his 
 reduction into the form of his own selfhood, are 
 then effected as final states. Especially in the 
 
^ 9 2 EE-INCARNA TION, 
 
 latter case, the characteristic form resists change, 
 and cannot be born again, either by regeneration, 
 or by the mode suggested by Nicodemus, of enter- 
 ino" again into the mother s womb. The reduction 
 oi such a mind, itself the savourless salt of de- 
 struction, into its seeds and protomorphs, would 
 destroy its essentials, and its infusion into natural 
 seed, were that possible, would burn up generation 
 in a furnace of evil fire. Nero, not as a heredi- 
 tary tendency, but as a personal possession in the 
 seed, is impossible : especially since there is no part 
 of Nero that has not had a full chance of regen- 
 eration ; no other side to Nero which is not Nero : 
 for he has fully murdered his infancy, and can be 
 
 an infant no more. 
 
 This doctrine, of re-incarnation, has no support 
 in any field of knowledge ; it shows no way of ful- 
 filment ; nor has any root but the desire of the 
 worst estate to possess the best ; it is a form of 
 infernal lusts, and revolts the human race like the 
 first rumour of a bodily invasion from below. It 
 is as false as it is evil, teaching that little children 
 are old sinners under the mask of childhood, and 
 that their angels do not behold the face of the 
 Lord. This of its deeper grounds. Among the 
 minds here which are fascinated by the doctrme, 
 and connect it with the more innocent mythus of 
 metempsychosis, it is a baseless imagination if not a 
 spiritual disease, and ministers confusion to the 
 heart upon the main subjects of affection and hope 
 
 for the future. 
 
 The doctrine of a second personal appearance ot 
 the Lord on earth, derived as it is from the letter 
 of Scripture not spiritually understood, has some 
 relation to this doctrine of the re-incarnation of men 
 
 RE-INCARNA TION. 
 
 493 
 
 in second mortal bodies. His second coming is not 
 indeed supposed to take place by birth again, but it 
 is a personal natural advent, and under a finite form. 
 The same impossibility occurs here as in the former 
 case, but aggravated. The reason why no man 
 once born here can enter nature a second time, is, 
 that he is too large for nature : flesh and blood can 
 hold a mind, and suffer spiritual influences, but they 
 cannot hold a spirit. The reason why the Lord 
 comes by no second personal coming is, that since 
 His conquest over all the hells, and over all the 
 heavens, He is clothed with the spiritual sun, in 
 the midst of which His Divine Manhood lives, 
 and were He to descend thus, even were it but a 
 little descent, He would burn up creation with His 
 ardours. His distance is the exact mathematics of 
 His mercy. His person is mighty beyond uni- 
 verses, and can be seen on no planet by the natural 
 eye. Moreover, He can come by the impartation of 
 a new divine truth which is Himself, and by which 
 He touches all minds ; He can come, and has 
 come, to the prepared rational mind of a man, from 
 which His open and guiding light will extend, 
 until it fills the world with its glory. This is a 
 second coming in divine wisdom from divine love, 
 oppugnant as a doctrine to a second coming of a 
 divine material form : it is a second cominof as the 
 teacher of all things, even sciences ; as the one 
 educator of freemen. 
 
494 
 
 THE CONDEMNED SERMON 
 
 CXVIII. 
 
 THE CONDEMNED SERMON. 
 
 An outcome of the true doctrine of the hells, sup- 
 ported as it is now by experimental knowledge, is a 
 new practical administration of the church at the 
 deathbeds of notorious evil livers. Hitherto the 
 church has ministered religious flattery to the last 
 hours of such people; and preached peace where 
 there is no peace. For repentance is impossible 
 in the face of the king of terrors, and especially 
 in full view of the executioner. The man-spirit, once 
 beyond death, and raised up into a new existence, 
 returns to his former life in hours, or days, as the 
 case may be. Under such circumstances, the " lay- 
 ing hold of Christ" by faith is a delusion, and the 
 confidence of forgiveness and acceptance which 
 follows it is an opiate, not a hope, or a new life. But 
 nevertheless the church has a duty to perform which 
 at present is unfulfilled. The church has to tell the 
 truth, and give it to the dying man to carry with him 
 into his second life. If he is reformable, it will work 
 there, and begin his defences against the hells which 
 will claim him. That truth is, that as soon as his 
 resurrection is effected, the impetus of his past life, 
 and the force of his acquired character, will drive 
 him on to repeat the deeds done in the body; in 
 short, to continue his life; and that he must be 
 aware and ware of this, and act upon it, if he would 
 escape from his own hell. That he can look to the 
 Lord after resistance to the temptations that will 
 assail him, but not before. That opportunity will be 
 
 THE CONDEMNED SERMON 
 
 495 
 
 given him to reform if he desire it; but that oppor- 
 tunity is not given on earth any longer; because the 
 circumstances now are of compulsion, and oppor- 
 tunity of reform is of freewill; and that all he can 
 do of religious act at present is, to acknowledge his 
 sin and the damnation of it ; not impiously adding 
 to it by endorsing momentaneous faith without life 
 as justifying in the sight of God. Moreover, in the 
 case of criminals, complete confession is setting the 
 house in order; the restitution that the heart can 
 make to an outraged society. But hope founded 
 upon repentance now must be put aside by the 
 church for the man as an aggravation of crime and a 
 mockery of penitence. Mercy is nearest when it is 
 least plucked at by red hands. The cries of the lost 
 reach the great ear when the psalms and hymns of 
 human doctrine and confidence are dispersed. In 
 the New Church therefore the deathbed priest, and 
 the '' condemned sermon," will tell the truths of the 
 other life to the departing soul, and to the criminal 
 about to die ; the chloroform of false religions and 
 all other cliloroform, will cease to be administered in 
 the solemn hour; these being the old cup of comfort 
 with which evil treats itself, not the means with 
 w^hich a true church can treat it; and the man will be 
 invited to prepare for nakedness before his God, and 
 for final truth to his country; and be taught that he 
 will stand on a fresh ground soon, and fight the 
 battle of his own life, and carry forward the same 
 conditions which are those of reprobation, or of sal- 
 vation, here. The last hours are therefore filled, but 
 with new confessions, and new instructions ; and 
 where there is not avowed impenitence, the church 
 has still a right, in the light of her truths, to bid 
 Godspeed to the departing sinner. 
 
496 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL DO NOT MIX, 
 
 For all practical purposes, we are going into a 
 harder and sterner world than the past has been; 
 in the past, evil has been hard, and good has been 
 soft ; in the battle between the two, these conditions 
 can now be reversed; and while love and charity 
 will have a new tenderness to their own children 
 and objects, their great executive functions will be 
 carried forward by edges of truth which will search, 
 judge, and prevail. 
 
 CXIX. 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL DO NOT MIX. 
 
 As dealing here with a group of doctrines affecting 
 the belief in our future life, we cannot avoid 
 noticing the remarkable thesis, that in the long 
 run, owing to the fact of universal redemption, 
 internal evil or selfishness will be absorbed, so that 
 though permanent and unsubdued in the will, it will 
 work towards good by a perfect perception of policy; 
 wicked men will do good from selfish motives; 
 and the perfect gentleman in this wise associate on 
 terms of finished conduct with the angel of heaven. 
 This view leaves out the searching light of divine 
 truth in heaven, as first shining upon motives, 
 which are the values known there. It destroys the 
 conception of heaven as the reign of truth. It 
 ignores the deeper experience of this world, where 
 the genuine good man and the most politic rogue 
 never sit for many years in the same assembly 
 without mutual appreciation and aversion. It 
 leaves out completely Swedenborg s unique experi- 
 ence of the life after death, and uses redemption to 
 
 GOOD AND EVIL DO NOT MIX, 497 
 
 expunge regeneration. It is a talula rasa of good 
 and evil with no new players introduced, and leaves 
 the world of practice empty. The writer, so far as 
 he has understood the view, is unable to see that it 
 is any part of the secret of Swedenborg, whose 
 whole open mystery, declared in his plain works, is, 
 that the way to heaven lies in shunning evils as 
 sins against the Lord, and afterwards in doing the 
 good work of the daily life; which separates heaven 
 from hell by a divine barrier of principle in the 
 man and in the race; and leaves the two states 
 antagonistic. 
 
 The opposite doctrine, that because men are 
 redeemed they are emancipated from the limits of 
 good and evil, seems to make spiritual hypocrisy 
 into a permanent root of true candour, unconvict- 
 able by divine light itself; unless indeed we admit 
 in the supposed case a latent motive of good at the 
 core, which destroys the hypothesis. Swedenborg s 
 doctrine, and experience, of Vastations, already 
 dwelt upon, are his answer to the view that evil can 
 keep up appearances in the other life, and run an 
 equal friendly race with good : he shows that 
 motives of self-preservation do not keep selfishness 
 straight; that as the drunkard is not kept from his 
 vice by the destruction of life, property, pleasure 
 and hope that comes upon him, so evil men after 
 death are not made beautiful and obedient by the 
 strongest motives to be so; but that they persist 
 until they are burnt out, and can do no more evil. 
 They are then available for some low uses, and to 
 the measure of these they are still men, because 
 freewill, the everlasting chooser of good and evil, 
 still subsists. This is a simple statement of 
 Swedenborg's doctrine, and it is only by brushing 
 
498 THE ANNIHILATION-THEORY OF EVIL, 
 
 aside as of no importance, or as of ephemeral truth, all 
 his statement of the spiritual world, that the other 
 view comes to hearing. 
 
 cxx. 
 
 THE ANNIHILATION-THEORY OF EVIL. 
 
 Yet one other guess claims the theological ear, and 
 like the last it is not an experimental doctrine, but 
 is founded upon a reverent interpretation of the 
 letter of Scripture, and particularly upon the phrase, 
 the second death, as pertaining to the wicked. 
 This guess is that the wicked actually die out, evil 
 having thus no true existence. It is humanely 
 meant, but after all it is terrible, a kind of divine 
 suicide. For it forgets the true ground of immor- 
 tality, which is freewill, and can give little reason 
 for a man's enduring life that does not apply also to 
 animals. The reason of hell is the immortality of 
 hell : that reason is that men freely will hell. No 
 man is there without intensely willing it. He does 
 not wish limitation and pain, but he does will 
 and delight in evil. That always means that he 
 can come out of hell, but will not. And that means 
 that the Lord is present in his inmost, keeping up 
 his freewill, and therefore his life. And in the 
 dregs and ashes of himself, that divine presence 
 sustains him in being. If he is a suicide in heart, 
 his will to suicide is supreme; and this means that 
 he is potently alive to killing a present state, but 
 by no inclusion that he climbs behind his living 
 freewill, and has any desire to kill himself. His 
 freewill feels its invulnerable life when he strikes his 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX. 
 
 499 
 
 heart, and destroys the fleshy vesture of the day. 
 Now the doctrine we are considering lets freewill 
 slip out of its basket, as it is very apt to slip from 
 theological minds, and losing the ground of immor- 
 tality, it seeks to enact mercy by proclaiming the 
 cessation of that which cannot cease. The doctrine 
 of Vastation occurs again here : evil reduced finally 
 to its least compass and smallest powers of aggres- 
 sion : oblivion of faculties destroyed by misuse; 
 regret and remorse gone; capacity of suffering 
 greatly extinct; but freewill left; as it were a 
 second childhood of evil of which we know nothing 
 but by hints, excepting that it does not outlie the 
 providence of the Lord. 
 
 CXXI. 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX. 
 
 Because the theological ages are commencing 
 upon earth, and will take possession of the mind, and 
 supersede the reign of scholastic dogmas which has 
 preceded, many substantial subjects connected with 
 divinity are appearing upon the field of thought, 
 and must exercise faculty to follow and understand 
 them. The subject of Influx is one of these, and 
 of great importance, because it reaches upwards 
 into the religious life where the Holy Spirit is 
 the giver ; into all faith in God the Creator as the 
 conserver of the universe by His perpetual active 
 presence as Re-creator ; and into the Word made 
 flesh as the light and life of men, and the Sun of 
 the new dispensation : and furthermore, the doc- 
 trine of Influx reaches down into the sciences of the 
 
500 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX, 
 
 natural world, where influx from above is the vital 
 principle in all living subjects; the propagative effort 
 in all growth; and cohesion, property and pressure in 
 the mineral and planetary worlds ; acting through 
 universal atmospheres which engird and consociate 
 the whole. 
 
 The heads of the subject are plain ; and, so to 
 speak, matters of dutiful belief; that God is present 
 by His Spirit universally; is the end of ends, and 
 the cause of causes ; and by real efflux makes all 
 things not from nothing but from Himself; and 
 by real influx into the things made, sustains and 
 moves them. This is enough for simple faith. 
 But more can be known now; and intelligent study, 
 guided by the doctrinal light sent through Sweden- 
 borg, will educate the mind dwelling upon these 
 and similar high subjects. 
 
 The influx of life into the human form takes 
 place through planes of discrete degrees ; through 
 steps of structure severed from each other in form, 
 function, and nomenclature. Beofinninor at the con- 
 scious end, love, — which is the life of the man, of 
 which will is the determination, and freewill the 
 point of personality, — receives in that central heart of 
 freedom the influx from God, which is the life of its 
 life. This is the first structural plane of conscious- 
 ness superposed upon all the rest. The next plane 
 is wisdom ; the shape and form and make of love, 
 and the substantial proposition of its ends. It is a 
 heavenly form, but love is all in all in it, consubstan- 
 tial and constructural with it, or it would not be 
 wise for that love. The next plane, the next 
 organism, is intelligence, and reason is to intelli- 
 gence as freewill is to love, a balance in its midst, 
 where it weighs its perceptions in the scales of 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX, 
 
 501 
 
 perceived truth. In this intellect, wisdom must be 
 all in all, or it will not be intelligent and provisional 
 for the true ends in view. The fourth plane is 
 science, where love, wisdom, and intelligent reason, 
 enter the body of things and affairs, and by know- 
 ledge govern them, not for the moment, but for the 
 behoof of the man. All the former planes must 
 co-exist and be all in all in science, or it is science 
 for no human purpose, and ransacks the world for 
 temporary ends with a wandering eye. The human 
 body repeats in similar degrees the conscious degrees 
 of the mind. The brain and nervous system are 
 the ends, the heart and bloodvessels and viscera 
 are the means, and the whole muscular and com- 
 pacted frame is the result ; three planes containing 
 many sub-planes ; and in which the law is creative; 
 and the higher plane all in all in the second; and 
 with the second, all in all in the third. 
 
 As Swedenborg says, these planes, especially in 
 the mind and the spirit, do not communicate by con- 
 tinuity, but by correspondences. That is to say, 
 the organic plane called love, does not so flow into its 
 form, wisdom, as to bare and uncover itself there, 
 and enact a tesselation and dovetailing with wisdom 
 as with an equal substance and an equal fibre ; but 
 by a new form superinduced, it clothes itself, and so 
 clothed, is wisdom. And so wisdom never bares 
 itself in the fabric of intelligence; but wisdom 
 evolves intelligence as another new form, and puts 
 it on as its organ of exterior scope. The like holds 
 of the other planes; they are severed from each 
 other by difference of determination, and cannot 
 look back to see unclothed the plane above which is 
 their soul, and their all in all. And so also the 
 case is with the spiritual and the natural worlds. 
 
502 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX, 
 
 The natural world is the efflux and clothing of the 
 spiritual ; the spiritual world is the only body- 
 within the vestments of time and space ; but none 
 of that body here is bare of the vestments ; they 
 are discreted or severed from it by being vestments 
 not substances ; they are not continuous with it by 
 any perception, or otherwise than by that produc- 
 tiveness or influx by which the spiritual realm is all 
 in all. 
 
 This argument is undertaken to illustrate what 
 Swedenborg says, that the lower planes communi- 
 cate with the higher, not by continuity, but by 
 correspondence, and to put aside one fallacy which 
 may possibly have a place in many minds. The 
 phrase, '^ communication by correspondence," may 
 perhaps be taken to mean, that the effect of the 
 higher upon the lower realm is brought about by a 
 kind of spark, and that the nexus implied is a thin 
 stream : also that the lower is separated from the 
 higher as the successive plates of a battery may 
 be separated. The author has laboured under 
 these difficulties himself, and would fain see beyond 
 them, and help other minds. One key to the 
 subject appears to lie, in holding to the principle, 
 that the higher plane is all in all in the lower; not 
 distant from it, but its very substance; yet dis- 
 creted from it in office and function in order that 
 the lower plane may have its own existence and uses. 
 Intellectually this presents thought in every case 
 with a new sphere, and sensually the image is pro- 
 duced in the mind of successive planes or firmaments 
 of substance and power. Yet the sensual image 
 must not be fixed as a truth, but be entered by the 
 acknowledgment that the higher plane is present 
 in its breadth through the whole complex of the 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX. 
 
 503 
 
 lower. The absence of continuity is therefore not 
 produced by a chasm between the two, nor the 
 influx by any mere spark or flash; but a new point 
 of departure, and a newness of result, from the 
 origination of new form, is that which constitutes 
 the gulf ; and the influx is as broad and solid as the 
 being which is its subject. 
 
 Therefore influx is the whole organism in fluxion, 
 and such parts of it as can be imparted, coming 
 down into the terms and limits of the next lower 
 plane through appointed channels of service. For 
 this end, there must also in every case be not only 
 channels through which the substance flows, but 
 also a point and chamber where that substance 
 changes its form, and takes on the lineaments of the 
 new sphere or service into which it enters. Herein 
 lies the break of continuity: the new presence is 
 now clothed with another body, ix, form, has put 
 on other eyes, and cannot look back to the realm 
 out of which it has been born. It is so to speak 
 incarnated away from it. And the intellectual 
 mind following the descent, cannot look back to 
 the parent plane above ; for the stream of influx 
 cannot be inverted, and no study can traverse 
 any lines of inversion to meet it, or otherwise than 
 to miss it. 
 
 Thinking out the subject further, the break of 
 continuity does not imply that there is not a real 
 stream from the higher to the lower plane or organ- 
 ism, for this were to deny the influx; but does imply 
 that the stream has a new name from a new form 
 and function and sphere, and at the threshold of this 
 has lost its old attributes. The new attributes are 
 to the new sphere what the former attributes were, 
 and still are, to the sphere above it. In this, the 
 
504 
 
 DIVINE INFLUX. 
 
 two spheres are equated ; and in this equation, they 
 correspond. We may again recur to the examples 
 of divine fire or love, and natural fire or heat. The 
 one at its limit passes into the other, loses the 
 spiritual, and takes on the natural form; but were 
 the upper current, of the divine love, subtracted, the 
 heat of nature would be no longer supplied. Coming 
 then to the upper limit of nature, to her first formal 
 recipiency, the jlammantia mcenia mundiy the love- 
 fire still rolls on, unobstructed, and is converted and 
 gathered into the solar heats. 
 
 These remarks are made, to assert the reality of 
 influx, its breadth, and substantiality, and thus to 
 rescue and separate the idea of correspondency from 
 the Leibnitzian imamnation of Pre-established 
 Harmony, according to which the several planes are 
 puppets moving consentaneously on the string of a 
 common law: whereas they are analogous to person- 
 alities one within the other, and serving each other 
 independently in different spheres, but all taking life 
 and substance from the first, and gradually convert- 
 ible to it. We therefore see that the nexus between 
 God and the soul is of the whole breadth and being 
 of the soul; a word of organic substance; and that 
 God is infinitely more than can be imparted : that 
 the soul is actively connected with the body by its 
 whole breadth and being; and also is indefinitely 
 broader than this connexion; and that the spirit is 
 likewise thus in its connexion with the conscious 
 mind. That the higher rolls into and through the 
 lower with broad everlasting circulations. And 
 furthermore, that while divine and spiritual influx 
 are absolute, physical influx, and physical under- 
 standing of influx, are impossible, because the deter- 
 mination is valvular and moves the other way; 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM AS CAPACITY, 
 
 505 
 
 because smallness has overtaken each lower plane; 
 because its will, however ambitious, is turned out- 
 ward ; and because it aims only to touch by points ; 
 whereas real influx rolls on by great necks and 
 trunks of power and life, and by these alone the 
 descending universe stands solid and columnar as 
 the throne and footstool of the Almighty. 
 
 To conclude for practice, the divine influx is like 
 the act of a great prince to a poor and unworthy 
 attendant, a man of proved incapacity to control 
 himself, or to handle without harm the bread and 
 wine of more than one meal at a time. In that case 
 the communicated good has no relation to the 
 princely means, but solely to the princely wisdom ; 
 it is bare sustenance that is given. Yet the 
 whole breadth of the man's need is considered 
 therein; and the gift will visibly broaden as the 
 reception is deserved; so that what now drips in 
 drops will run like a river when regeneration is 
 complete. The rule is that the influx is as broad as 
 the virtue of the man into which it flows; and sus- 
 tains his real life thereby. 
 
 CXXII. 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM AS CAPACITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Man, the minister and interpreter of the Lord, is 
 the minister and interpreter of existence in propor- 
 tion to the truth of his mental form, and the good- 
 ness of the ends which he carries out in its intel- 
 lectual exercise. The transmission of the Word to 
 men through human instrumentality, through pro- 
 phets and inspired penmen, and the communication 
 of spiritual life to appointed teachers when required, 
 
1 
 
 5o6 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM AS 
 
 CAPACITY OF KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 attests the higher ministry here asserted, without 
 which indeed a written Word and a perpetually 
 opened revelation would be impossible. This 
 depends upon an overruling of the human form for 
 divine purposes; and this in its turn implies that the 
 human form is capable of bearing the stress and 
 carrying out the purpose of such supernal com- 
 munications. 
 
 Capacity for all knowledge that is needful for 
 mankind in any state now or to come, is written 
 down in this fact, and comes out of its accomplish- 
 ment. There is nothing necessary to our being that 
 cannot be revealed, and in its measure rationally 
 revealed; the human form from the soul to the 
 body, and from the spirit through the mind to the 
 senses, under divine guidance, is an organ sufficient 
 for such enlightenment. As a quadrant or a sextant 
 m the hands of a man for showing height and place 
 without material span and measurement, so is a 
 human form in the hands of God for showing to the 
 man himself, and to mankind, the truths and condi- 
 tions of depths beyond sense, and of worlds beyond 
 the faculties of nature. 
 
 But then for ultimate knowledge of this kind, the 
 knowing apparatus must be the human form, and no 
 other. Every man is in the human form in one 
 sense so long as he lives in this world; it is as 
 a visible fact compulsory for all. But within, it is 
 twofold; an internal human form of bettering facul- 
 ties striving to come down into daily life, and 
 an internal form of passionate selfhood doing battle 
 with the former, and aiming to fill the man with its 
 own lines of organization. If this triumphs, the 
 human form is subverted, and a monstrous face, 
 brain and person, are immediately behind the skin 
 
 507 
 
 and appearance, and under the cloak of the 
 visible frame. To this person, revelation of high 
 knowledge, and acquisition of true knowledge, are 
 impossible, save by hearing, on second hand motives, 
 and by ways that are false in the conception, and 
 fallacy in the working. The human form adequate 
 to anything beyond corporeal and sensual science, is 
 out of such a person; and if he reveals something 
 ultimately, it is the doctrines, pretexts and persua- 
 sions of the abyss. To recur to an old example, the 
 devil-form of cruelty, bent in earnest love of truth 
 into the violation trough, elicits only devil's facts, of 
 which there is a universe to be known. 
 
 The true human form does however reveal. For 
 it is the finite end of creation, and sums up this 
 world in its convolutions; and is open to the spiritual 
 world. It is eminently partible in obeisance to divine 
 purposes; and admits of separation into lower and 
 higher states and organisms; its willing will is to be 
 taken to pieces as an instrument, and used by a 
 hand above the selfhood, without fear or resistance; 
 and thus to be brought to bear upon plane after 
 plane of objects; to perceive new degrees; and to 
 enter worlds of perception beyond natural light. Its 
 last eye being single, or in the human form, the whole 
 body is full of light. This form is the new organon of 
 the sciences; the New Jerusalem organon of them all. 
 
 The separations here spoken of are twofold. First, 
 the severance of the man from sensual thought, and 
 its incessant questionings against higher perceptions ; 
 and his admission within the lines of new intuitive 
 sense. This involves a flexibility of the whole 
 mind; capability of giving up old ways of thought; 
 the sufferance of an inward revolution in the govern- 
 ment of the natural faculties; preparation by prayer 
 
 %) 
 
 » ' 
 
 !• 
 
5o8 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM AS 
 
 CAPACITY OF KNO WLEDGE. 
 
 ii; 
 
 for influx; and the ascription of penetration and suc- 
 cessful insight to i\\Q Father of lights. Each 
 intuition thus gained is a separation from the rule of 
 the outward world, and a reversal of its appearances; 
 in short, detailed entry, truth by truth, into a new 
 world in nature, on which a new practical man is to 
 stand supreme. 
 
 The second set of separations is more organic, and 
 not of the intellect prominently or only. It consists 
 in the displacement of organic planes of power, and 
 in laying them by for a time so that they are no 
 longer employed upon objects. In this way, the 
 natural senses, and the natural body, can become 
 quiescent as in sleep, and an interior man usually 
 adjoined and determined to them, be emancipated 
 and dis-anchored, and be set over against his own 
 proper objects with new senses and determinations. 
 He then sees the special world to which he is opened, 
 or, as the saying is, enjoys open vision. And what- 
 ever outward planes or world-lenses are taken off, the 
 human form above them sees the state that transcends 
 their perceptions and desires. And according to the 
 enfranchisement, the people of that plane are seen 
 and the man is among them with all his '^ body, parts 
 and passions " in their degree. This is not a natural 
 process; yet it is according to, and correlated with, 
 the lines of nature; and is attested throughout con' 
 sciousness in the movements of thought, which are 
 heralds of, and preparations for, the movements of 
 men in all their worlds. 
 
 The natural man, of himself, resists these separa- 
 tions with all his might, and especially the cardinal 
 instance of them which occurs in the death of the 
 body; and he would live for ever here. He has his 
 faculties connected together by selfish bands of fear, 
 
 509 
 
 and feels safest and most coherent when his blood is 
 thickest and he is most ^' conglutinated." His 
 tendency is to a ''simplism" that does not belong to 
 the human form. This is his device to know no- 
 thing beyond matter, space, and time. And yet 
 death will take him to pieces, and lay his natural 
 mind upon its oblivious shelf 
 
 Two instances, which will serve for many, show 
 how the human form in a spiritual man is made use 
 of for revelation of what it is necessary to know. 
 They are cardinal facts from Swedenborgs case. 
 1. As a prepared man, with an organism willing to 
 the use, he underwent the process of the dying, his 
 spirit was demonstratively separated from his natural 
 body, and raised into the spiritual world; he watched 
 the process, and saw the serving angels at his head 
 and at his feet, and "heard their cogitative speech;" 
 and he felt and knew that the power which sensibly 
 drew him from the intricacies of his mortal body was 
 divine, and that resurrection is no natural process, 
 but from the attraction of the Lord alone. This is 
 described in detail in his Arcana Ccelestia, n. 168- 
 189. Because he was a man, this could happen to 
 him; but also because there was a divine use in- 
 volved; viz., to teach men of the very facts of death 
 where knowledge otherwise ceases, and where fear 
 and falsity often begin; to make all who have to die 
 participant in the merciful knowledge that death is 
 but an appearance, and instant resurrection the 
 reality which it hides; which, as knowledge, can be 
 given in no other way. Therefore the human form, 
 which in its outer degree is the subject of death in 
 all of us, in that man was put through the process, 
 and the knowledge of it was thus communicated to 
 mankind. 
 
5IO 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM AS 
 
 CAPACITY OF KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 511 
 
 2. By the same human form, and its unalterable 
 capacity of change, Svvedenborg was enabled to be 
 present in the heavens and in the hells, and to brino- 
 information about them both. This was also effected 
 by divine means; by the quiescence of the natural 
 faculties, and thereby, and thereafter, by the open- 
 ing of interior planes and states. In the spiritual 
 world, similarity of state produces presence; and 
 with the concurrent life and motives of the man, in- 
 tercourse as in the natural world. These "high 
 capacious powers folded up" in others, were un- 
 folded in this instance, and hence the experiences of 
 Swedenborg are due to the capacities of the human 
 form for knowledge and reality, made actual under a 
 divine hand. 
 
 It is not needful to say more on this topic, but 
 these instances, never contradicted, demonstrate that 
 there is no realm from the knowledge of which the 
 true man is shut off when it will do him any good to 
 know it; and that his human form is itself the oro-an 
 through which it can be known. And to compfete 
 the coherence of the instrument, his intellect is in 
 the human form, and thus is levelled at the entire 
 universe of objects, all of which involve divine intel- 
 lections. 
 
 And as, when God pleases, man can traverse the 
 spiritual world for informations of use, so also under 
 instruction he can penetrate the secrets of his own 
 body, stand under the arch of the temple of its 
 organization, and see the soul which inspires its ends, 
 and the reasons of the lines which convey them. The 
 separation needful here now and for the coming time, 
 is from the lusts of science, from its selfishness and 
 pride, from its infidelity, and its violations. Ardent 
 desire to know apart from these things is of God, 
 
 and will be an eye deeply inward upon a body full 
 of lisfht, and the orenius of the human form itself will 
 receive and impart the truths in question. It is 
 hard to think that when selfish power which seems 
 so very powerful is put aside, the real power will be 
 given; for self-willed study to the natural scientist 
 seems all and in all. Yet there is a prophecy that 
 such is the fact, as follows : '' For thus saith the 
 Lord unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and 
 choose the things that please me, and take hold of 
 my covenant; even unto them will I give in mine 
 house and within my walls a place and a name better 
 than of sons and of daughters : I will give them an 
 everlasting name, that shall not be cut off" (Isaiah 
 Ivi. 4, 5). This signifies that a self-enforced absti- 
 nence from any strong natural lust, although it takes 
 away the path of the lust, and all the knowledge of 
 the path, and seems to render the mind impotent 
 and barren, yet is blest with an entry into the Divine 
 Sonship and counsels, is safe in the divine truth, and 
 is essentially fruitful in the knowledge of what is 
 good and true; the lines whereof such a eunuch, such 
 a virtue, perceives with no break or faltering of 
 faculties, but with advancing regeneration, out of the 
 Word, through the works ; the first self-denial, the 
 eunuch, being the Lord's organ in the man, and 
 united with the Creator and the eternal. The appli- 
 cation here is for the promise that the meek shall 
 inherit the earth ; that the gentle conscience is the 
 key to the truths of the natural world. 
 
 The separation and experimentation here are the 
 opposite of the violational methods in vogue among 
 the scientists : they are the subjugation of sensuality, 
 whereas violationism is the triumph of sensuality, and 
 its murderous intent and presence inside other living 
 
 
 [ 
 
 'V 
 
512 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM, ETC, 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 m 
 
 beings; they stand as self-denials before problems 
 until the appointed time of knowledge and insight 
 comes. Gentleness and love of the one kindred blood 
 of which all the families of the earth are made, is 
 the tracking power that perceives their innermost 
 scientific truths. And then for the greater organic 
 realm of spiritual intromissions, the means, thouo-h 
 fearful, are gentle as sleep, and only require com- 
 plete trust in the divine preparer : indeed sleep is an 
 image of them; for they involve the passivity of the 
 natural man, who cannot at first hand know these 
 things, and then the detachment of the spiritual 
 human form which can know them. They involve 
 in fact vivi-severance of the man from himself ; and 
 bring the certainty of a reunion afterwards; and also 
 of the greater and ever-completing unity of the sub- 
 ject who can thus yield himself up a living sacrifice 
 on the altar of the divine experiment. 
 
 These facts underlie all powerful work of imagina- 
 tion and all art-representation in this world. When 
 a Shakespeare is present with most bodily genius in 
 distant ages and countries, and as, for instance, in 
 ''Antony and Cleopatra," becomes a crystal-life 
 dramatically populous for an epoch, his very flaws 
 the prisms of men and things : when an Elizabeth 
 Thompson, like a modern Valkyria, weaves the web 
 and woof of a battle, moves unperceived in its vol- 
 cano, draws its lines of passions and ministers its 
 deaths; when the maiden stands, as no captain can 
 stand, ''where the war-flags wade in the waging 
 hosts,"— the mind sees at once that there is a faculty 
 at work that beggars the senses ; that comprehends 
 the vitals of things without breaking their surfaces; 
 a faculty that puts Warwickshire and London and 
 spaces and times aside, and goes direct to the heart 
 
 of events with no players or maidens hand, but 
 with a real presence descended from the immortal 
 life. For in the spiritual world, love and thought, 
 and the imagination born of their union, cleave the 
 appearances of space, and are present where they 
 strongly will. All such cases as these, and all acute 
 perceptions, and realizations of such perceptions in 
 words, arts, machineries, or acts, belong to the vivi- 
 severances of the human form, and to the power of 
 the detached and emancipated parts to live for a time 
 in their own sphere and its intelligence. What is 
 called genius is no other than this; and a main 
 characteristic of it is, that it does not permanently 
 inhabit the private man who seems to own it, but 
 burns and shines under the provident eye of God, as 
 his occasional minister and interpreter to the age. 
 
 The human lens and light, w^hich is the human 
 form, is fourfold in use and power beyond the senses. 
 It can know God and see Him when it is pure in 
 heart. It can know the universe of nature, all opa- 
 city notwithstanding. It can know what is in men. 
 It can explore the spiritual world. All this on the 
 side of truth, whose first aspect is knowledge. Man, 
 by the divine assistance, can be separated from him- 
 self, and find his true sanity and its penetration 
 above himself. 
 
 CXXIII. 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE. 
 
 It must strike some readers that the Word of God 
 is expressly silent concerning many details in the 
 pages of this book, and that any narrative of the 
 
 2 K 
 
 )■' ■» 
 
 * 
 
 I ■ 
 
 ♦ • 
 
SH 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE. 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 spiritual world, and any particulars about another 
 life, are supplements to the Christian Eevelation, 
 and not an integral part of it. Especially it may be 
 argued that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has 
 said little about such things, and that therefore it is 
 not important to know them. 
 
 Time fails here to answer these reverent objec- 
 tions in detail, though they deserve a most respect- 
 ful answer. But the general reply is, that though the 
 letter of the Word appears to be reticent on these 
 subjects, the spiritual sense, when opened, is seen 
 to enter into them. The inmost sense treats of the 
 Lord alone, and the glorification of His Humanity. 
 The internal senses treat of the heavens, and of 
 all heavenly principles which lead thither. The 
 letter is '^the clouds of heaven" in which these 
 things come to men. And a prepared man, an 
 illuminated reason, instructed in the internal senses, 
 and intromitted into their worlds, expounds that 
 the Word, so far from beinor silent concernino- the 
 immortal state, is replete with its conditions, its 
 philosophy, its principles and doctrines, in every 
 inspired line: shows where it is, how it is, and what 
 it is. 
 
 One thing is seldom thought of in regard to the 
 Word; that it differs from other books as its 
 Author differs from men. For the most part all 
 words and sentences are of the depth of those who 
 utter them. Two and two make four, is a sentence 
 different in compass in the mouths of a rustic and a 
 mathematician : in the one case it is applied to 
 apples or to pence, or to daily objects exclusively; 
 in the other case it stands related to all problems 
 of numbers, though capable of limit to the use of 
 addition here also. The rule applied onwards 
 
 515 
 
 suggests that meaning comes in as the wise man 
 comes on; so that at last the commonest phrases 
 may be inspired with a great life which does not 
 appear on the surface. And if it were certain of 
 any form of words that God had spoken it, then it 
 were equally certain, against appearance of its 
 simplicity, which might be accounted for by our 
 need of hearing, that its contents are infinite and 
 eternal, are God Himself, serviceable to the human 
 being, but beyond his gauge at last. For example, 
 in the Lord's Prayer, when we say, ^^ Father of us. 
 Who art in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name," we 
 have been taught a form by the Lord for addressing 
 Himself; for He is our Father, firstly and especially 
 in His Divine Humanity. But ''Father of us" 
 implies that He, the Divine Good, is only the 
 Author of all that is good in us, and not of our- 
 selves otherwise. And ''of us" implies every 
 relation of our lives as descending from this source. 
 It also means that He is no private father of a 
 private family only, but of all mankind, for there is 
 no limiting " us " to a less sense than all of us. It 
 means every being for good, and prays for no ex- 
 ceptions ; and thus extends to heaven and its 
 societies. "Who art in the heavens," signifies the 
 divine personality as the ground of the heavens; 
 and implies that man knows by conscience and 
 influx into it what heaven is when he chooses; for 
 the Lord appeals to known terms, and this phrase 
 signifies that the principles of heaven are plain 
 enough to man. '^ Hallowed be Thy name," prays 
 that Jesus Christ, the Divine Humanity, the name 
 of God, also the whole face of the Word, may be 
 intimately acknowledged to be holy, and that thus 
 His infinite light may strike our minds, and His 
 
5i6 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 kingdom come. These openings of such a prayer 
 could have no existence within it if it were spoken 
 by one man to another; if a good child addressed 
 his own father in the same words, they would be 
 limited by his father; whereas, coming from God, 
 and going up to God, they are unlimited as God. 
 
 Swedenborg says of this prayer that it fills the 
 heavens, and cannot be exhausted to eternity. How 
 should it, when '' Father of us," spoken by the Lord, 
 means a different face of mercy and love from one 
 state to another for all mankind for ever. 
 
 So also " I am," spoken by a man, involves the 
 man's dimension; but "I am," spoken by the Lord, 
 contains the movement and doctrine of the Godhead. 
 
 Now the entire Word is thus divinely circum- 
 stanced, because it is spoken out of a spiritual sense, 
 which descends by gradations of light from the 
 highest. 
 
 And a reason of the present remarks is, to recur 
 again to the attitude of the sciences of men to the 
 Word, and of the Word to the sciences. 
 ^ It seems as if the writer, with slender justifica- 
 tion from Scripture, has laid great stress upon the 
 bearing that the present prosecution of the sciences 
 exerts upon private and public life, upon the common 
 weal and the religious weal. It seems as if Scrip- 
 ture touches science only inferentially, and clergy 
 are content to leave things as they are if science 
 can be held back from attacking faith. But our 
 case is different. For the internal of the Word 
 contains a complete history, from the beginning, of 
 the insurrection and assault of the sciences upon the 
 religious life ; a record and monument for ever of 
 their redemption; and of their committal to free- 
 will afterwards, to serve the salvation, or minister 
 
 5^7 
 
 the perdition, of the private man according to his 
 choice. 
 
 Egypt, — again remember the name, — stands in 
 the Word for science in its whole significance. If 
 this be so, then the Word is not silent, but vocal 
 from Genesis to Revelation on the subject of science. 
 The necessity to go down into Egypt for corn, 
 administered by an Israelite who was Lord of 
 Egypt; the multiplication of the children of Israel 
 in Egypt ; the detailed plagues on Egypt before 
 Pharaoh would allow the Israelites to depart; the 
 severe distance for the self-willed children of 
 Jehovah from Egypt to Canaan; the guiding God 
 who was needful in the intervening wilderness; — if 
 these are details of the relations of the human mind 
 to the kingdom of the sciences past and present, 
 then is the Word full indeed upon the subjects 
 which have occupied us in these pages. Further- 
 more, the prophets are continually concerned about 
 the same Egypt, when yet the geographical Egypt 
 is but a name and a tradition to the Jews. The 
 inspiration of Isaiah and Jeremiah is full of Egypt, 
 its present sin and doom, and the future salvation 
 and glory of its state. The Lord also Himself went 
 down into Egypt, and the prophecy was fulfilled, 
 Out of Egypt have I called my son. And in the 
 Apocalypse occurs the phrase, shining with a 
 terrible light on the deeds of the present hour, 
 ^' That city which spiritually is called Sodom and 
 Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified;" and 
 which is a clear prophecy that the present violators 
 were to come and are provided for; and that they 
 would be conjoined with science as Sodom is here 
 conjoined with Egypt. 
 
 In order to show the broad front which the Word 
 
 I* 
 
5i3 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE. 
 
 presents to human sciences, and how revelation 
 in the interests of man penetrates the Egyptian 
 darkness, the nineteenth chapter of Isaiah is here 
 transcribed : — 
 
 " The burden of Egypt. Behold, the Lord rideth 
 upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt : and 
 the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, 
 and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it. 
 "And I will set the Egyptians against the 
 Egyptians : and they shall fight every one against 
 his brother, and every one against his neighbour; 
 city against city, and kingdom against kingdom. 
 
 " And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst 
 thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: 
 and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, 
 and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the 
 wizards. 
 
 " And the Egyptians will I give over into the 
 hand of a cruel lord ; and a fierce king shall rule 
 over them, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts. 
 ^ " And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the 
 river shall be wasted and dried up. 
 
 '' And they shall turn the rivers far away ; and 
 the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried 
 up : the reeds and flags shall wither. 
 
 " The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of 
 the brooks, and everything sown by the brooks, 
 shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. 
 
 '' The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that 
 cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they 
 that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. 
 
 '^Moreover they that work in fine flax,°and they 
 that weave networks, shall be confounded. 
 
 "And they shall be broken in the purposes 
 thereof, all that make sluices and ponds for fisli. 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 519 
 
 " Surely the princes of Zoan are fools, the counsel 
 of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become 
 brutish : how say ye unto Pharaoh, I am the son 
 of the wise, the son of ancient kings ? 
 
 " Where are they ? where are thy wise men ? 
 and let them tell thee now, and let them know what 
 the Lord of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt. 
 
 " The princes of Zoan are become fools, the 
 princes of Noph are deceived ; they have also 
 seduced Egypt, even they that are the stay of the 
 
 tribes thereof. 
 
 " The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the 
 midst thereof ; and they have caused Egypt to err 
 in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth 
 in his vomit. 
 
 "Neither shall there be any work for Egypt, 
 which the head or tail, branch or rush, may do. 
 
 "In that day shall Egypt be like unto women ; 
 and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shak- 
 ing of the hand of the Lord of hosts, which he 
 shaketh over it. 
 
 '' And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto 
 Eoypt ; every one that maketh mention thereof 
 shall be afraid in himself, because of the counsel 
 of the Lord of hosts, which He hath determined 
 
 against it. 
 
 "In that day shall five cities in the land of 
 Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to 
 the Lord of hosts : one shall be called, The city of 
 destruction. 
 
 " In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord 
 in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at 
 the border thereof to the Lord. 
 
 '' And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto 
 the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt : for they 
 
520 
 
 2 HE GREAT WHITE 7 HE ONE. 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE, 
 
 521 
 
 shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, 
 and He shall send them a Saviour, and a great one! 
 and He shall deliver them. 
 
 *'And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and 
 the Egyptian shall know the Lord in that day, and 
 shall do sacrifice and oblation ; yea, they shall vow 
 a vow unto the Lord, and perform it. 
 
 '' And the Lord shall smite Egypt : He shall 
 smite and heal it; and they shall return even to 
 the Lord, and He shall be entreated of them, and 
 shall heal them. 
 
 '' In that day shall there be a highway out of 
 Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into 
 Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the 
 Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. 
 
 '' In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt 
 and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of 
 the land. 
 
 '' Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, 
 Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work 
 of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance." 
 
 The occasion does not allow of a detailed exposition 
 of the spiritual sense; but the reader who bears in 
 mind that the condemned Egypt signifies human 
 science as a will and way of the selfhood, determined 
 to know by studious egotism what can only be 
 known by revelation from God, and to act perversely 
 upon the ground of a world of accursed knowledges, 
 will see the heads of the divine accusation against 
 such science; and indeed these have been explained 
 somewhat in the previous pages. It is suflBcient to 
 say that the imagery of this chapter,— the idolatry, 
 the strife, the disorder and the insurrection, the 
 superstition and necromancy, the tyranny and fierce- 
 ness, the loss of waters and the drought of rivers, 
 
 the withering of the reeds, the failure of fish; the 
 drunkenness of spirit, and the defect of service, the 
 terror of Egypt before Judah, — consists in cor- 
 respondences which pertain to Egypt alone, and 
 which, rightly understood, make clear induction of 
 the fact that the Egypt here mentioned is no other 
 than science on its evil side. It was no geographical 
 Egypt which was thus singled for judgment, but an 
 Egypt which pursues every church and every man; 
 and which especially in these later ages aims to 
 supplant the eternal by the temporal, and to use the 
 creation itself as a service against the Creator. 
 
 Enough has now been said to indicate that the 
 Word, so far from being empty or voiceless on the 
 subject of science, is full of that subject from the be- 
 ginning of Genesis, where a false and forbidden way 
 of knowing, marked the entry of the first recorded 
 lust into the human soul, and the desire to be as 
 gods was the primary motive. This desire to be as 
 gods underlies violationism now, and animates pro- 
 toplasm; and therefore here, in the earliest record of 
 revelation, a clean prophecy is extant of the aims of 
 scientists at the present day. 
 
 In a word, where the spiritual sense is not opened, 
 and the Scripture not understood, the Sodom and 
 Egypt of scientism is a prince and a potentate, unre- 
 buked, and heir-apparent to the throne of the world; 
 but when the cloud of the letter is dissolved, the 
 same Sodom and Egypt is the eldest malefactor in 
 his last arrest, and standing anatomized, without a 
 pretext, before the great white throne. 
 
 Note here, before the war begins, how great the 
 motives of violationism are to elude this jurisdiction, 
 and therefore to deny the spiritual sense of the Holy 
 Word. 
 
 V 
 
 V, 
 
522 
 
 THE GREAT WHITE THRONE. 
 
 Ought not statesmen to study these things? Is 
 it well that such clear forecasts of the effects of 
 atheized science should exist in the world, and be 
 appointed to be read in churches, and that those 
 who have nations to govern should take no heed of 
 the course into which they are drifting from per- 
 mitted organized egotism, and permitted abomina- 
 tion? Is it fair that the plagues of science should 
 be written down in the Word, and that governments, 
 afraid of its ambition and malignity, should summon 
 it unpolitically into the state, and there enthrone it 
 above public order, and expose the people to the 
 fierce heat of its motives from below? In the Word 
 it is the ally of all the lusts of man, and the ad- 
 vocate and handmaid of their persuasions; there is 
 no scruple in it, for nothing is holy to it; and shall 
 the modern state, whose constitutive point is personal 
 liberty open to heaven, be invaded by this Sodom 
 and Egypt, against the broadest lessons of the spirit 
 in the Word ? 
 
 But then the statesman, for this mission, of keeping 
 these things in their proper places, must admit and 
 study the spiritual sense; or the Word has no voice 
 for him. And here we see what a practical matter 
 the spiritual sense is; that it is no ingenious machine 
 of correspondences; but a divine declaration of duties 
 from beginning to end; prescribing to the individual 
 man what to do for the just limits and boundaries 
 of his own mind and his own humility; and to the 
 prime minister a policy of independent righteousness, 
 which shall keep special knowledge pure, which shall 
 make it inoffensive and useful, which shall not in- 
 stal it where wisdom and its charity alone should sit, 
 but summon it from service, and release it to service, 
 and teach it by every commanding hint that it is 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 ""&. 
 
 523 
 
 never in power, but in consultation provisionally from 
 moment to moment, for the glory of God alone, and 
 for the good of man's estate. 
 
 CXXIV. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH AND OF SOCIETY. 
 
 One thing more requires to be said of Swedenborg 
 in concluding this case, which is intended chiefly for 
 the humane portion of the scientist public. He was 
 no inaugurator of a new external order in Church or 
 State : no revolutionary hand, either religious or 
 political; but a rational teacher, commissioned and 
 privileged as such, for all whom by their own choice 
 it may concern. He was not like other founders, 
 the starting-point of a new mystical light which in- 
 fected followers, and culminated in a sect. A sect 
 has indeed been built upon his doctrines, as must be 
 the case in countries where the making of new 
 sects is a habit; but his books outlie ecclesiasticisms 
 as fairly as the books of Newton or Laplace. He is 
 a schoolmaster, where all churches may learn things 
 new and old, and apply them to reform, regeneration, 
 and newness of life, becoming new churches in the 
 process. Hence, an instantaneous New Church 
 is as impossible as an instantaneous mathematics, or 
 chemistry, or geology. Nay, more impossible, be- 
 cause these walks are of the head; but in the true 
 church the slow conversion of the motives of the 
 natural heart into the motives of the spiritual heart, 
 by obedience yielded to divine truths taught from 
 without, is the slow, difficult, painful, and ever in- 
 creasing operation. Hence Swedenborg personally 
 
524 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 AND OF SOCIETY, 
 
 525 
 
 had no expectation that his doctrines would rapidly 
 overspread, still less command, the church and the 
 world. He went on with joy of industry, but left 
 the times and places where the light would be re- 
 ceived as matters with which he could have no 
 concern. So far from being an impatient or a 
 fanatic, he deposited his books as the carboniferous 
 era deposited its carbon, or as the great forests laid 
 down under other strata; and only knew with 
 certainty that there was heat and light for the 
 homes of men and women, for churches and states, 
 whenever the grounds were fairly opened which 
 those deposits underlie. 
 
 We may repeat what he says on this subject in his 
 Last Judgment y n. 74 : — ''I have had various converse 
 with the angels, concerning the state of the church 
 hereafter. They said, that things to come they 
 know not, for that the knowledge of things to come 
 belongs to the Lord alone, but that they do know 
 that the slavery and captivity in which the man of 
 the church was formerly, is removed, and that now, 
 from restored liberty, he can better perceive interior 
 truths, if he wills to perceive them, and thus be made 
 more internal, if he wills it; but that still they have 
 slender hope of the men of the Christian church, but 
 much of some nation far distant from the Christian 
 world; and therefore removed from infesters; which 
 nation is such, that it is capable of receiving spiritual 
 light, and of being made a celestial-spiritual man : 
 and they said, that at' this day interior divine 
 truths are revealed in that nation, and are also 
 received in spiritual faith, that is, in life and in 
 heart, and that it worships the Lord." 
 
 Of this extract it may be observed that the 
 African race in Africa, the negro race, is the one 
 
 ^ alluded to as the subject of an interior revelation, 
 and as being removed from the infestation of the 
 Christian world. This was of spiritual knowledge, 
 and how far it will be attested by geographical 
 explanation time will show; but Swedenborg found 
 in the life after death how much more readily the 
 negro races receive divine truth in heart and life 
 and simple obedience, than the learned of Christen- 
 dom and the congregations which they lead. 
 Throughout his works great importance is attached 
 to the negro, and this at a time when no special 
 attention had been called to the Black question, and 
 before the Anti-slavery movement was born. It is 
 remarkable that he singled out this race as the most 
 capable of receiving the truths of love of any exist- 
 ing on the planet. This plea for the negro capacity 
 has been followed by events. The hearts of the best 
 men and women have heard the black man's cry, and 
 feelinof that 'Hhe little ones" w^ere in danofer, ad- 
 vanced nations have been summoned for Christ where 
 Greek philosophy was indifferent, and would leave 
 the slave a slave. Nay, one of the great wars of 
 the world has been waged in order that the poor 
 African should be brought as a citizen into full free- 
 will. And at present he is the pivot of two con- 
 tinents, Africa and America; and Livingstone has 
 sought out and loved and died for a people that 
 Swedenborg was the first to rescue, by potent words 
 that still sound on, from the false darkness of this 
 world s shame. 
 
 There is yet one other forecast in Swedenborg; 
 far it seems from being realized, and it concerns 
 France. In his Apocalypse Revealed^ n. 740-743, 
 he speaks of " the noble French nation," and argues 
 from the spiritual sense of the Apocalypse, chapter 
 
 i 
 
 If 
 
526 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 xvii. 12-14, where these words occur: — "And the 
 ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have 
 received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as 
 kings one hour with the beast. These have one 
 mind, and they will give their strength and power 
 unto the beast. These shall fight with the Lamb, 
 and the Lamb shall overcome them : for he is Lord 
 of lords, and King of kings; and they that are with 
 Him are called, and chosen, and faithful." The inter- 
 pretation itself should be carefully studied, for it is 
 of course not obvious on the surface; it imports that 
 France will receive in her life the light of the New 
 Jerusalem, and especially the doctrine of the Divine 
 Humanity. But what we are chiefly concerned 
 with here is the fact that Swedenborg, who mentions 
 no other nationality in his evolution of the spiritual 
 sense, which is "abstracted from time, space, matter, 
 and person," here directly alludes to the French 
 nation. Now we may take the African to be the 
 residual infancy of the heart of the race; the French 
 to be the limit of its corrupt civilization. The hand 
 of God on both is portended; in the one case, by 
 orderly emancipation of all kinds; in the other, by 
 the breaking up, through revolution and war and 
 anarchy, of the fabric of national and individual 
 lusts. And besides her general revolution, which 
 soon followed upon Swedenborg's words, there is this 
 answer to his forecast from France herself, that out 
 of her abyss, and through her agony, when the hells 
 were visibly opened in her midst, there sounded 
 formulas of brotherhood and right such as no other 
 nation in modern times has uttered or conceived. 
 Where is the English or the German or the Russian 
 or the American word of fire, to compare with 
 "liberty, equality, and fraternity," were these placed 
 
 AND OF SOCIETY, 
 
 527 
 
 on their divine ground, and derived from the Lord, 
 the Creator and Redeemer, as their source. That 
 the words are there, in France, is much; she would 
 be poor indeed without them; they are no hypocrisy, 
 but a cry to heaven. They are her natural basis for 
 a new order of life. 
 
 It is not uncommon for these great watchwords, 
 springing apparently from the fervid genius of 
 revolution, when the old selfishness is in abeyance 
 for a moment, to be given by the angel of the future 
 in the last hours of breaking states and dyino* 
 churches ; and they serve not only as the torches of 
 nations through their gloom, but as future vessels 
 into which divine life may be poured. The Lord in 
 His Divine Humanity may take the sacrament with 
 France out of them at last; for they are golden 
 vessels, and their patterns are in heaven. 
 
 So, too, in our natural need, while Swedenborg is 
 unaccepted, and the national life has sunk into 
 parliament, one great man among us, Thomas 
 Carlyle, has put in burning propositions the doc- 
 trines of use, and good works, and righteousness, of 
 veracity, or the truth of good, as the sole substance 
 of the lives of men and nations; and herein, so far as 
 practice goes, he has laid a basis for the universal 
 church wherever his works are read. From lack of 
 the higher communication, he has failed indeed to 
 consecrate his standards; failed to derive these 
 virtues by acknowledgment from their only source; 
 but still the watchwords are given; and in them he 
 has brought divine formulas to his nation and his 
 age, and measurably prepared its wilderness for the 
 New Jerusalem. 
 
 The mere appearance of such works and words is 
 a sign of the cataclysm which is comino^ upon 
 
528 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH 
 
 society; the deep sleep of parliament, drugged with 
 '^interests/' is a countersign. In all, a New Church 
 is portended. The essence of that church lies in the 
 conjunction of charity and faith. Charity is the 
 universal life of good, its diligent fulness in the day's 
 work ; faith is the clear intelligent owning of it to 
 the Lord. These two in one, in act, are the plan of 
 salvation. 
 
 PAET lY. 
 
 A NEW AGE. 
 
 cxxv. 
 
 CHARITY. 
 
 It is a powerful religious position that charity does 
 not consist in almsgiving, but in each man and 
 woman shunning evils as sins against the Lord, 
 and doing the duties of his or her calling, sincerely, 
 justly, and faithfully. In this way charity does 
 consist in filling the day with good works; and this 
 great Christian virtue is rescued from the shadow 
 of patronage on the one hand, and from hanging in 
 the air of sentiment on the other. For with respect 
 to the latter case, Paul's definition of charity has no 
 determination downwards to the uses of this world; 
 it is the spirit of kindness expended in the upper 
 regions of character and conduct, and not coming as 
 lord and master into the bosoms and businesses of 
 mankind. Here Swedenborg departs from the 
 Pauline theology, with which indeed his works are 
 for the most part not co-ordinate, while on the other 
 hand they are rational streams from the mounts of 
 the Gospels and the Apocalypse. 
 
 2l 
 
530 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 531 
 
 "When we consider the matter closely, the charity 
 that consists in doing the duties of one's calling in the 
 world, sincerely, justly, and faithfully, leaves nothing 
 outside it in the way of good works. It implies 
 that every one has a calling, and banishes idleness 
 and indulgence from the road of life; it enforces 
 skill, diligence, industry, rapidity, calmness, to the 
 uttermost. It is a perpetual incentive to a loving 
 and wise conscientiousness in all our relations; and 
 preaches '' do unto others as ye would that others 
 should do unto you," as the religion of business. If 
 you would like your work done well by others, do 
 well, as they would like, your work for them. This 
 exacts the perfection of labour from all men for all 
 men. It is organific for society, and disciplines 
 every person for his best service in his place. 
 
 One of its designations is its great capacity of 
 taking trouble for others; so that instead of merely 
 suffering long and being kind, it works hard, and is 
 helpful. Thomas Carlyle has said that genius is no 
 other than a great capacity for taking trouble; and 
 here, in mutual good service, charity caps genius, 
 and is itself the genius of the practical life. 
 
 This charity leaves out no almsgiving, provided 
 the almsgiving is a real part of the day's work; not 
 a mere impulse; but a work, from a settled purpose, 
 going wisely and prudently forth to its object. Yet 
 almsgiving in itself is no sufficient work for a day, 
 unless the hours be afterwards filled with its ad- 
 ministration. The ^gg to be hatched for use must 
 not be dropped in the ^and, and be left to be 
 developed by the heat of the general sun, or by the 
 sentiment of the public mind ; crocodiles and snakes 
 thus commit their eggs ; but the hen sits until the 
 chickens are hatched, and then keeps in their midst. 
 
 The wealth that charity has inherited, or has ac- 
 quired by diligence in business, by trade, profession, 
 handiwork, literature, or merchandise, is of two parts, 
 — 1. What the man wants for the sustenance and 
 maintenance of his house; 2. The overplus of this 
 on which charity again has to work both mentally 
 and administratively. In this division lies a set of 
 problems for future society. 
 
 The present faith of mankind is, that wealth be- 
 longs to the possessor in such a sense that he has 
 full right to spend it all upon himself. If he has a 
 thousand a year he has this right, and if he has half 
 a million a year he has this right still. Only in the 
 latter event he will be largely solicited by '^ charities," 
 and be expected to build churches and endow wings 
 of hospitals. This claim upon him is no religious but 
 a social claim ; it knocks at no door that opens to 
 his whole conscience, but appeals to him to fill his 
 respectable position according to his great estate as 
 a humane man of society. 
 
 Among things to come is an answer to the 
 question, What is the calling of wealth, and of great 
 wealth, in the commonwealth? Wealth here is 
 neither a doctor, nor a lawyer, nor a clergyman, 
 nor a soldier, nor a tradesman, nor a writer. It is 
 a totally indeterminate calling; an unconstituted 
 profession. Its determination is the point to be 
 settled. 
 
 It is a dukedom; a chieftainship. Being a duke- 
 dom, it has a principality attaclied to it. Its 
 revenues belong there. What is that principality? 
 It can be no other than a subjacent society. There 
 never yet was a real dukedom that did not consist 
 of other men; the real dukedom of Cornwall con- 
 sists of all the men and women of Cornwall. The 
 
 I 
 
53^ 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 533 
 
 subjacency is the ignorance, lowness, want, foulness 
 of habitation, inferiority of manners, morals and 
 education, in the principality. Especially in so far 
 as these things are not the fruit of present personal 
 vice; that is, in so far as they have descended from 
 the past, and are its woeful legacy; for of the wrecks 
 of vice now the State takes cognizance in workhouses 
 and prisons; it is the compulsory duke of rogues 
 and paupers. But these are not under the dukedom 
 of wealth, and need not come before its immediate 
 administration. For even in its highest positions it 
 is and should remain an abiding property and a 
 personal power, and the duke's freewill, and the free- 
 will of his people, are essential to it. 
 
 The position is incontestable that no man requires 
 great wealth for himself; even no king requires it; 
 but his state and function must be supported by 
 other men, and some wealth passes well and to the 
 purpose that way. It is equally certain that a 
 spendthrift can waste more than he has, whatever 
 the amount. But as the wise man does not need 
 the wealth, and it is useless to him, it belono-s to 
 Use, and the problem is to find out the use in every 
 special case. 
 
 If this view be true for the future, it is clear that 
 wealth must descend from the upper ranks, and by 
 wise administration begin at the bottom for the 
 redemption of the honest and hardworking lower 
 classes. At any given time, a certain amount of 
 this redemption can be effected. For instance, by the 
 year 1886, the steady enginery of wealth, diverted 
 from luxury, vanity, self-seeking with the people, and 
 personal indulgence, and held to that charity which 
 is bound to urgent business, and believeth all things, 
 and knows no impossibilities, or improbabilities,— 
 
 would clear London of back slums, and base the 
 virtues and industries of all its good people upon 
 decent homes. The revenue accruing from these 
 would reascend to the private dukes, and increase 
 the riches of their dominions. And then a further 
 redemption would already stand clear before them; 
 and claim the coming down of the wealth again from 
 the upper hands. 
 ^ When this process is begun on a religious prin- 
 ciple, as the main part of the daily labour of dukes, 
 casual charity may cease, its necessity supplanted 
 by an organic rational charity to be ingrained in 
 the course of generations in the nature of industrial 
 society. At present, the communications of the 
 charity which lies in almsgiving, are leakages of 
 wealth, benevolent flashes of gifts incommensurate 
 both with the breadth of the wealth, and with the 
 breadth of the want underneath it; whereas rational 
 charity, or the administration of the revenue of the 
 dukedom apart from the private purse of the duke, 
 involves that the whole surplus income shall roll 
 through the just wants of the people, that is, 
 through the population of the dukedom; that the 
 influx and circulation of the wealth shall be exactly 
 as its span of power. 
 
 Some consequences follow from this new relation 
 of dukedoms; which, improbable though it seems, 
 is as sure to be established, and to grow, as it is 
 sure that nominal Christianity will reign over every 
 continent, and that Mahometanism and other re- 
 ligious forms will be subservient and decline. 
 
 If the basis of society in the building of dwellings 
 were worthy of human beings, the home would keep 
 within it that sickness and calamity which are now 
 taken away into public buildings because the private 
 
 I 
 
534 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 rooms are too bad to house them. This state of 
 things does not occur with the sick and afflicted of 
 the favoured classes; and as habitations are im- 
 proved, and as wealth is greater, and better 
 administered, it will not be necessary for the 
 industrious poor, or be submitted to by them. 
 In this way hospitals, which are guest-houses in 
 defect of homes, will cease; and honest sickness lie 
 on its own bed, and ask alms of no man. Establish- , 
 ments at various distances in towns for the service 
 of accidents rest on a different foundation; and so 
 does insanity, which belongs, as we have seen be- 
 fore, to the care of the State, whenever the insane 
 person requires to be sequestrated. 
 
 If the charity in contradistinction to the alms- 
 giving of the future were only to yield sickness its 
 own home, and to manage that men shall die 
 decently in their own beds, the boon would be 
 sweet. The hospital exists against all the claims of 
 sickness, and makes each man suffer and die in a 
 large party naturally unsympathizing by reason of 
 the loneness of all sufferinof. 
 
 Decentralization is preached also. For what we 
 treat of is religion over wealth, and wealth, not over 
 want, but over honest need ; and each fortune will 
 in time be administered by its own duke, though in 
 consentaneous action with other dukes. The force 
 as charity will be centrifugal, and centripetal only 
 as business, ix., as the return of capital invested in 
 redeeming the bases of the natural life. It will 
 have no officialism and no compulsion with it, any 
 more than a Peabody lodging-house requires; only 
 stewards for public order, and the conservation of 
 property. But no connection with titular magnates, 
 or with the privy council. It will not minister to 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 535 
 
 power, but give power away by increasing the in- 
 dependence and solvency and physique of the lower 
 classes. Yet it will create administrators who are 
 trusted by the people, and who may be of use in 
 the State. 
 
 The State however will be to some extent ab- 
 sorbed by the reign of private leaders or dukes, 
 whose rule will not be otherwise governmental than 
 that they are masters in business and Use. The 
 charity which lies in the administration of wealth, 
 for those whose legitimate day's work that adminis- 
 tration is, and the charity which lies in doing the 
 duties of your calling whatever that may be, will 
 together constitute the human mind and body of 
 the country; and first municipal and then general 
 government be outside of it and subordinate to it; 
 so that a revolution will have occurred, and the in- 
 dividual man with God above him throughout 
 society will be the centre of influence and influx, 
 and of order; and the State, the inexpeasive police 
 of these. Use and its delight, not show and its 
 amusement, will be in the spirit of the whole. 
 
 These are fair conclusions from Swedenborgs 
 position, that charity does not consist in almsgiving, 
 but in first shunning evils as sins against the Lord, 
 and then in doing the duties of your calling sin- 
 cerely, justly, and faithfully. They point to wealth 
 now and here, because wealth is enormous ; and by no 
 way conceivable but a new administration of it can 
 natural society be redeemed from below upwards. 
 Of course redemption in the proper sense is of the 
 Lord; but so is the redemption we here intend; 
 and which consists in the righting of society so far 
 as the whole means in it at any given time allow, 
 Here are no questions of political economy ; but 
 
536 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 CHARITY, 
 
 4 
 
 of the divine duties of wealth, and of its administra- 
 tion on remunerative principles, which in the long 
 run are necessary to the new state. If the way of 
 remuneration be not immediate, wealth is the one 
 thing that can wait; and provided the principles of 
 its application be sound, an advancing society is 
 certain to repay outlays with increasing interest; 
 wealth at both ends is the assurance of such a 
 future. 
 
 It may be objected that these are practical aifairs, 
 and belong to the present business men, and that 
 they settle themselves by financial considerations; 
 that helping society does not pay sufficient interest 
 to carry wealth into investment in that direction; 
 and that therefore it is dangerous to recommend 
 unremunerative schemes on a large scale. This is 
 granted; and all we at present demand is the re- 
 cognition that the duties of superfluous income 
 beyond what the man and the family need for 
 liouse and station, and for security, are to the 
 society from which the wealth comes. Among those 
 duties is the conservation of the property itself; the 
 care that it be not given away, in which case it 
 would decay into alms; but that it reproduce and 
 increase itself, so as to make the dukedom of the 
 possessor and administrator permanent and extend- 
 ing. This is the spirit of charity. And with 
 regard to its outgoings and investments, since the 
 recovery of society is the aim, there is no need to 
 forestal what they will be; for that belongs to great 
 and good business men to find out; only we may 
 rest assured that the mechanism of wealth that is to 
 raise the human family into greater decorum of 
 home and habitation, is not more easy than the 
 discovery of material enginery, nor more to be laid 
 
 537 
 
 out in great plans beforehand than railways and 
 telegraphs and post-offices and the like, which are 
 suggested to men in the course of years, and improved, 
 corrected and founded afresh from time to time. 
 The first main point is that the spirit of dutiful 
 charity shall descend, and begin to work : that the 
 whole firmament of wealth shall be bowed down to 
 those who require its voluminous influx. 
 
 This is the opposite of communism, which would 
 divide all property, and give it away. For the 
 charity we indicate gathers up everything, and makes 
 society into its seedfield and harvest, restoring the 
 crop to the proprietor every quarter day. It is his 
 to administer; and his Christian conscience in his 
 dukedom, and the example of other like dukes 
 around him, is his only compelling power. 
 
 Here we recognize man s place in society, corres- 
 ponding to man's place in nature. The higher plane 
 is founded upon the lower ; creates it ; governs it ; 
 endows it ; washes its feet ; and makes the artisan's 
 life, though humble yet homely, and co-decent with 
 the duke's. — In recapitulation, charity consists in 
 ceasing to do evil, because it is hateful to the Lord, 
 in every calling, and in doing sincerely, justly and 
 faithfully in the same; this is helping the human 
 race. Therefore in the administration of acquired 
 wealth for deserving objects ; that is, for all who 
 help themselves, and who are the industrious and 
 solvent community. Also in occasional almsgiving 
 as a part of that administration. In this nation it 
 also consists very mainly in cultivating political 
 wisdom, and superintending the outgoings of the 
 State, now amounting to seventy-eight millions 
 a year, all expended in keeping up the status quo. 
 
538 
 
 LOVE AND IMMORTAZny, 
 
 LOVE AND LMMORTALITY. 
 
 539 
 
 CXXVI. 
 
 LOVE AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 Human affections are re-born when they are 
 assured of a future hfe and an immortal freehold ; 
 they are under regeneration when they even aspire 
 to a perpetual estate. The New Church, which has 
 open experimental knowledge that character survives 
 death, pours heavenly fire into the vessels of the 
 natural heart when these are willing to receive it. 
 There is not a love that man has but must be totally 
 changed by a firm reasonable faith that it has an 
 endless career before it ; and that the further stages 
 of that career are consequences of the fidelity of the 
 earlier stages. A man will work at his affections, 
 to improve them, if he knows that they are his 
 affections forever, in a very different sense to his 
 occupation with them if they are held as temporary 
 things or tenements, and if he is to quit them at 
 death. And if he has only a vague faith that it 
 will be all right, and that he will be faithful as if his 
 immortahty were certain, his hypothetical action 
 cannot be the same as the action from a recognized 
 certainty. Hence the knowledge of the immortality 
 of love now given to mankind, is a new and immortal 
 nervous system in every virtue ; and those who have 
 it, and live from it, are more alive in their private 
 and public determinations than other men can be. 
 
 There is no need to carry this argument far, or to 
 illustrate it by other than a few common examples. 
 The assurance of immortality, the definite knowledge 
 of it, enters friendship in all its wide relations ; and 
 
 is like a sweet conscience in them all, making them 
 worthy and warm. So far as the friendship is true, 
 it founds something that cannot pass away : meet- 
 ings on a common ground whenever the heart 
 requires them. The friends may be in distant 
 spheres, to speak reverently in distant heavens, and 
 their forms unknown to each other for the most 
 part ; but a basis of recognition has been founded on 
 earth, and they can be known to each other in that 
 when the. desire arises, simply on the principle that 
 friendship is immortal, and the divine constitution 
 of the spiritual world endorses its desires. 
 
 So also as love is permanent, and the sexes un- 
 dying, the accurate knowledge of this enters the 
 greatest affection of nature, and feeds it with con- 
 stancy ; and with hope, courage and joy. Whatever 
 is true gold in it here, is committed to rational faith, 
 and purified for an immortal continuance : whatever 
 is provisional, is faithfully kept, and ministers its 
 best of service on the journey of life. In all cases 
 it is a sacred trust, because it is of the life of life. 
 Containing these grounds, conjugial love must be 
 absolutely different from that love which contains 
 only the body and the flesh : for it lives in the 
 spiritual body which has every part transcendently 
 in it; and does not ascend from below, but descends 
 from' above with its fulness and its power into the 
 mortal pair ; being humanly and extremely organic, 
 but organic from heaven. 
 
 And likewise the love of country, patriotism, is 
 aggrandized and fired whenever a man believes the 
 fact, that his country is permanent, and its good 
 given to his heart for ever. Swedenborg says, 
 *' Those who love their country in the world, when 
 they die, love heaven, which is then their country." 
 
i 
 
 540 
 
 LOVE AND IMMORTALITY, 
 
 THE SEXES, 
 
 This IS the immortality of patriotism. And this 
 faith, poured into the patriot hearts of this world, 
 gives an immortal interest to the native land, as the 
 nursery of good men and women for ever. Such 
 patriotism must be different from that which has no 
 faith in an upper England reaching even into the 
 heavens ; the England of the graves of our ancestors, 
 venerable and sacred to us though it be, is a meaner 
 country than the England here and hereafter of our 
 spirits ; the land of past history and dying genera- 
 tions is altogether unlike the fatheriand of a 
 perpetual present, into which birth for ever comes, 
 but from which death is banished by the clear 
 penetration of rational religious sight. 
 
 In one more illustration, the relations of parents 
 and children, family love, are new for the New 
 Church, because children can now be taught what- 
 ever is needful of life and death ; things hitherto 
 concealed ; they can know that life is definitely con- 
 tinued, and that in every duty and lesson they are 
 being prepared not only for an earthly but also for a 
 heavenly home. This can now be done without 
 parrying the searching questions of the child's heart 
 He can learn that if he dies, he will grow up under 
 angehc tutorship in the spiritual worid, and know 
 no Father but God. That children who die grow 
 up to an immortal youth ; that good old men who 
 die, grow back to the same youth ; and that heaven 
 IS unfading youth, because true love and life are 
 m the freshness of the Lord's eternal morning 
 Children can also learn early that earthly parents 
 are provisional ministers for them, and that the 
 Lord IS the parent even here ; and independence be 
 thus founded early in loving obedience. Education 
 on these pnnciples is totally different to the rearing 
 
 541 
 
 of children either where there is no religious know- 
 ledge in the parents, or where the knowledge is 
 vague, and the grave blocks the way and dims the 
 sight of the little enquirer. 
 
 The principles of materialism, and the falses and 
 ignorance of the old religion, confound the human 
 affections, cut off their spiritual heads, and leave 
 only their natural heads extant ; truncating marriage 
 and infancy especially: the new revelation opens 
 life, and the friendship and love and youth and 
 patriotism of the heavens descend into its relations, 
 reconstitute them, and furnish the beginnings of a 
 new and imperishable age. 
 
 CXXVII. 
 
 THE SEXES. 
 
 Swedenborg has written a book on Conjugial 
 Love which for some time to come will furnish 
 anxious ground for those who receive his commis- 
 sion, and easy points of superficial attack to those 
 who impugn it. In the first place, he has elevated 
 the subject as no other writer has done, showing 
 that conjugial love descends from the Lord through 
 the heavens, where it subsists in everlasting fervour 
 and purity, its births there being inward additions 
 of good in the heart and truth in the mind, whereby 
 heaven is internally prolific of life, and advancing in 
 power. From thence this love descends to men and 
 women on earth, and where it is received, it is a pure 
 affection, pure to its very end and resting place in 
 the body ; pure, but full ; and coming from above, 
 charged with every immortal motive ; altogether 
 
542 
 
 THE SEXES, 
 
 different from any animals love, which is single to 
 this world, and born through the senses from with- 
 out. No writer has stated this before ; none could 
 state it ; because it is an experimental rational 
 revelation from heaven, where conjugial love is 
 fundamental. 
 
 Below this serenity of doctrine and experience, 
 lies the whole realm of corrupt loves and disorderly 
 relations upon earth. Swedenborg has trodden 
 here also ; and while denouncing adultery of purpose 
 as among grievous sins which shut heaven against 
 the doer, he has drawn up a scale of incompatibilities 
 under the influence of which it is impossible for the 
 married to live together with any prospect of love, 
 or of peace ; incompatibilities by which marriage, or 
 the union of two persons in one, is practically voided. 
 In the direction of separations, he has done nothing 
 more than give sanction to all the causes which 
 make conjunction impossible ; whereas our divorce 
 courts at present entertain those only which are 
 crimes against the person, or nullities of the person, 
 and which are the gravest demonstrations of incom- 
 patibility. And therefore it may be said that he 
 has but preceded the law of England, which has 
 constituted the present divorce courts since he wrote, 
 and which is gradually and inevitably advancing 
 upon the path which he has marked out. 
 
 But again, all real causes of separation acting on 
 men and women, constituted as they are by the 
 Creator mentally and organically, are also, he de- 
 clares, "legitimate, just and conscientious causes of 
 concubinage ;" that is, where marriage cannot be 
 entered again by the separated parties; and this 
 cannot be in the Christian religion on any mere 
 ground of incompatibility, but only in the case of 
 
 THE SEXES. 
 
 543 
 
 adultery. Here he outgoes the work of English 
 law ; which may sanction the separation ; but has 
 at present nothing to say to the life of the parties 
 afterwards in regard to unions which cannot amount 
 to marriage, and which the present law practically 
 creates, and ignores. 
 
 Every one knows that these unions are numerous ; 
 and also that they are often disgraceful. But 
 Swedenborg does not let the matter rest here ; but 
 has stated that where such unions exist, they must 
 be separated from conjugial love ; that a double 
 cohabitation is damnable ; and he has uttered the 
 note of their regeneration, in the principle, that if 
 they are faithfully kept to, conjugial love may be 
 preserved in them and by them; and that if it 
 manifestly springs up in their path, the pair are 
 bound to marry if opportunity occurs. 
 
 The subject is a difficult one, because prejudice 
 and attack are sure to come of it ; but it must be 
 considered; and it presses at this moment upon 
 every civilized nation. And just because the prin- 
 ciple adduced above is not accepted, all relations but 
 that of marriage are trodden into one common mire 
 of disrespect, and the Government tends to hand 
 them to its direful sexual police, and to feed its 
 soldiers with their offal. And on the other hand, for 
 want of practical light on these questions, the noble 
 agitation which is now going on against State-prosti- 
 tution, lacks basis and power, and wastes indignation 
 in collateral sentiments and moral apothegms, instead 
 of recognizing the whole case, and pleading it sub- 
 stantially before the Church and the public. 
 
 To the New Church the writer would say, this 
 Conjugial Love is a pure book, tending to good every 
 way ; harmonious with the Word of God ; rescuing 
 
544 
 
 THE SEXES, 
 
 THE SEXES. 
 
 545 
 
 I? 
 
 i\ 
 I 
 
 the dearest of all the affections from carnality and 
 decay; and based in its lower parts, which it in- 
 evitably has, on the present necessities of human 
 beings, which it is useless to ignore, and impossible 
 to deny; and into which necessities it introduces 
 the germs of potent principles of good which will 
 lead to their provisional regeneration, and to the 
 ultimate cure of the state which produced them. 
 This book was first translated by the Rev. Mr. 
 Clowes, one of the purest of men. To opponents 
 the writer would say, read the book carefully ; put 
 fanaticism aside, and grapple with the subject 
 practically; and see if you can supply any other 
 social solution of these questions than that which 
 Swedenborg sanctions and proposes, and for which 
 the honest mind of the world will devoutly thank 
 him in time. 
 
 There is one principle recognized by Swedenborg, 
 and often forgotten in these questions ; namely, the 
 passivity of woman as a determinant power. It is 
 her very nature, and all her mighty influence lies 
 that way. Thereby, what she will not do, she forces 
 man to do for her : e.g., she will not court, or pro- 
 pose marriage ; and therefore man must do both. 
 Carry this forward into her whole character and 
 relations, and it is seen at once that male initiation 
 does not mean male tyranny, even in such matters 
 as separation and divorce : it is simply male neces- 
 sity ; in order that woman may be emancipated into 
 her own passive, reactive, attractive, and thus com- 
 manding life. The thing to be altered is, the 
 addition of the State to this passivity, making it 
 compulsory ; in which case opposition and repulsion 
 come, and the quality is healthily passive and reactive 
 no longer. Let male law be lifted oiff, as a burden and 
 
 a shame, and woman be left to her proper self- 
 determination ; to be as much like a man, or as 
 little like a man, as she pleases ; to vote, propose 
 marriage, administer property, and the like ; and 
 her quality will right itself, because her experi- 
 mental instruction about her place can then begin. 
 
 Hence if a scale of causes of separation be given 
 on the male side, it inevitably applies also to woman 
 on her side, — the pressure of the State being taken 
 off* : and if her greater constancy and adhesiveness 
 forbid her to plead the causes as the man will do, 
 that force will go into the balance, and modify the 
 apparent liberty of the man ; so as to produce a 
 result of consent and even-handed justice in the 
 domestic tribunal. In other words, the woman 
 will have her way in it all co-ordinately with the 
 man. 
 
 To recapitulate. All causes of separation at a 
 certain age are inevitably causes either of concu- 
 binage, or of prostitution. The British Government, 
 for the army and navy, adjudges them to be causes 
 of prostitution, and provides accordingly. Sweden- 
 borg accepts the fact of concubinage, not making it, 
 but finding it ; and places within it and above it a 
 reliofious conscience drivinof it marriaf^e-ward, and 
 heaven-ward. This is a solution worthy of the 
 church. The noble men and women who are 
 engaged upon the question should read his work 
 on Conjugial Love. At present they ** go to battle, 
 not to war." It will help them to the greater issue 
 where victory for purity may be gained, and after- 
 wards be secure. 
 
 \ 
 
 2 M 
 
540 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION. 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION. 
 
 S47 
 
 CXXVIII. 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION. 
 
 "The king can do no wrong" is a maxim that 
 cannot be held if the constitution of the kingdom 
 is to derive its sanction from a spiritual source. No 
 person in the realm can be so mulcted of faculty as 
 not to be able to do right and wrong. There is 
 no sane man or woman to wliom the position of a 
 figmentary absence of freewill is not unjust. There 
 is no function, public or private, menial or royal, 
 that does not involve the possibility of filling it 
 well, or amiss ; and taking the personal respon- 
 sibility. 
 
 The truths of position are great truths, because 
 they are with the beginnings of all consequences ; 
 and their consequences are mighty, and unexpected. 
 Thoughtless people are not aware of their existence. 
 The maxim that " the king can do no wrong " is a 
 first-class falsity of position. 
 
 It has been adopted to court ease and to save 
 contest, and to make one person into a fixed and 
 safe centre for the whole people ; to eliminate 
 the necessity of judging, condemning, and supersed- 
 ing in royal cases. It would answer none of these 
 ends if any great stress came. Nor if a powerful 
 and active genius were on the throne, could any 
 human force, still less a confessed figment, keep him 
 out of the arena of determined right and wrong. 
 He would be his own prime minister, at first 
 powerfully ; and afterwards easily, by the acclaim 
 of lord mayors and of a willing people. 
 
 But the evil lies the other way ; and it empties 
 the first position and the most fortunate benevolence 
 in the land of individuality and freedom. This is 
 an injustice to the royal person, and to the throne 
 itself; it would be alike injustice if the unmanmng 
 were done on a republican president. 1. It injures 
 the character of the person who wears the crown^ 
 2 It destroys his capacity for active good ; and 
 makes him into an automatic and uninteresting 
 benefactor. 3. It destroys the initiative of good 
 which belongs to the highest position, and which 
 would otherwise have the aspirations and genius ot 
 the position on its side. 4. It makes the sovereign 
 into an anomaly ; and takes away from him capacity 
 of full association with any other human being 
 outside the anomalous family. In this way the 
 position hurts the fountain of friendship and inter- 
 course in the country. 5. It despoils the springs 
 of honour, for a soldier who can never be in battle, 
 can give no true orders away. 6. It demands 
 acquiescence from the king in all that he sees to be 
 mean in the minister and the estates, and forces 
 him to endorse without public remonstrance the 
 continuance of evils which he perceives. It ousts 
 the force of reform from the highest seat in the land. 
 7 It walks the king about as a marsupial person 
 in the pouch of the minister, who may perhaps 
 represent nothing better than the temporary mean- 
 ness of his country. 8. If the nation is a whole, 
 this position in the long run will impair its individu- 
 alitv will make expediency more common than 
 neces'sary; will radiate indifference from the court 
 downwards ; will make religious convictions in the 
 highest rank impossible of free expression and 
 indeed of formation ; and give a preponderance to 
 
 '' I 
 
 m 
 
548 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION, 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION, 
 
 549 
 
 dogmas on which the succession depends ; a succes- 
 sion of royal puppets. Two conclusions are meant 
 to be drawn. 1. The carrying out of this figment 
 in the present facts of royalty, deprives the nation of 
 the will of its sovereign, and the sovereign of the 
 nation as his field ; and tlie country lacks a part of 
 its wits when one of its first initiatives is in leading 
 strings ; and moreover the true loyalty is absent, 
 because it can only come forth from subjects to a 
 person in the struggle, not in the easy-chair, of that 
 exalted life. 2. The figment cannot last; and 
 it were well if Parliament, which finds time to 
 bestow on such things, would allow men and 
 women to sit unpossessed upon the throne of the 
 realm ; and to take the consequences of their own 
 acts. 
 
 The French nation has an organic percipiency of 
 the facts though not of the truths of position, and that 
 has made them so often uneasily change forms in the 
 vain hope of getting rid of the necessity of regenera- 
 tion. We as a nation are deficient in this perception, 
 and accept compromises and small expedients as 
 substitutes for its exactions. 
 
 The functions of the sovereign require to be 
 discovered by experiment ^ and time, for under the 
 paralyzing dogma that ''the king can do no wrong," 
 they are non-extant, and unknown ; but this does 
 not concern the present argument, which simply 
 contends that the king can do both right and wrong, 
 and be responsible for both ; but does not attempt 
 to foretell the details of royal duties. The duties 
 will expand as the freewill is felt, and recognized- 
 But a small instance may be given in reo*ard to 
 private royal disbursements; an instance of 
 great pregnancy, and capable of much extension. 
 
 We will take the fact of royal almsgiving ; and say 
 that the sovereign has right and duty to give to no 
 hospital in which, or by the officers of which, viola- 
 tionism is carried on: that thus he has a right 
 to be a lather to the humanity of his country ; and 
 to be the guardian and sanctuary of its animal 
 life ; to set his face, and write his protest, agamst 
 elephant shooting all through his dominions ; and 
 to supervize every sport by the force of his declared 
 opinions; marking with royal displeasure misde- 
 meanants against the laws of common kmdness. 
 Further that he has a right, as head of the church 
 to summon his bishops, priests and deacons, and 
 his ministers of all denominations, into session 
 ao-ainst these things, and to preside wherever he 
 pleases in any such convocation ; no prime minister 
 hindering. This one instance will show how Her 
 Majesty^ functions may extend; and how her 
 life curtailed and ceremonial now, may grow m 
 substance and in power, until she is no anomaly or 
 ministerial automaton, but the third estate of the 
 realm ; or the first estate as the case may be. ^ 
 
 For' lack of such interesting functions, the highest 
 place in the land is insipid in its acts and conse- 
 quences ; and appeals slenderly to the hearts of men ; 
 whereas the royalty of England, through the 
 regeneration of its person, ought clearly to mark 
 an'd abet the advancing providence of heaven, and 
 to encourage national enthusiasm for its pleas. 
 
 This means that the sovereign, as head of the 
 State, shall not cease to be the active and inde- 
 pendent citizen of the New Jerusalem, with functions 
 of freewill and freedom ; her prerogatives advancing 
 as the nation advances. 
 
 The present position is a kind of Grand Llamaism, 
 
 i 
 
 ul 
 
550 
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION, 
 
 DUCAL SAMARAS, 
 
 551 
 
 and it is a point of influence that has many- 
 co-ordinates, producing by reflex action far and wide 
 a languor and palsy in the country. Connected 
 with it, and keeping it up, is the relation of the 
 nation to Parliament, the nation being a perpetual 
 minor of whom Parliament is the chancery and the 
 trustee. This state is increasing yearly, and Parlia- 
 ment is choked by the magnitude of the trustee- 
 ship. The nation also like the queen can do no 
 wrong if it only submits quietly to Parliament. 
 The cure for this is in local parliaments, in inde- 
 pendent federated municipalities, which will do 
 local work; in short, in home rule in all matters 
 that belong to home and locality. 
 
 The effect will be, to settle all great questions in 
 portions of the country, and gradually to win over 
 the whole land to the right side, producing 
 exemplars to be followed ; and working by safe 
 small social experimentation. This will develop the 
 mind of the country, where the general Parliament 
 stifles it. And if by the localization certain evils 
 and their abettors are driven out of some districts, 
 and into others, those evils will thus be concentrated, 
 their resorts be known, and public opinion will get 
 at them, as a policeman's lantern at a man in a 
 corner. If the vivisectors for instance were driven 
 over the borders of municipality after municipality, 
 by a constant pursuance of laws, tlie places rid of 
 them would be purified, and they would soon quit 
 the land for Paris or Florence. 
 
 CXXTX. 
 
 DUCAL SAHARAS. 
 
 The spiritual and invisible influences which cor- 
 respond to deserts and produce them in nature, find 
 their gross counterparts in the social world, m the 
 effects produced by the unchecked greed of the great 
 proprietors of the country. Districts are laid waste 
 of inhabitants, and deprived of cultivation, in order 
 to breed grouse and other game for the purposes ot 
 lordship and its amusement. Human oases m such 
 tracts are as far as possible destroyed. This is a 
 creation of political and social saharas. Nor are the 
 dukes, the duces whether titular or not, content 
 with open deserts, but the great free moorlands of 
 England are becoming walled deserts, with man-traps 
 and sprino--guns threatened over against strong iron 
 gates. The notion of property is strained to the 
 utmost, and selfishness pleads ^' thine and mine to 
 the fact of desolation. This may be noticed in Derby- 
 shire at the gates of Chatsworth, where two great 
 leaders lead thus by their educational example. Ihe 
 isolated moorlands are become the visible mountains 
 of the ducal selfhoods. In the meantime, great 
 towns are in the neighbourhood; great grimy 
 towns; and their populations are forbidden to 
 wander over the kidnapped hills. It would be 
 more ducal if the people of those towns were sum- 
 moned forth on their holidays by the dukes to enjoy 
 the heather and the breezes, to plant forests, and as 
 rural industrial armies to execute whatever schemes 
 of cultivation are for the good of the whole country. 
 
 i 
 
55^ 
 
 DUCAL SA HARAS. 
 
 The law of common kindness would prescribe that 
 all uncultivated lands, and especially hills and 
 mountains, should be held for the people as one con- 
 tinuous footpath. The absence of any church 
 which is not in complicity with the love of self and 
 the love of the world, is proclaimed by the main- 
 tenance and extension of such appropriations of 
 nature as these, by the eviction of the nation with- 
 out remonstrance from its own places of health; for 
 if a great clergy such as we possess protested 
 against these things in the name of common 
 righteousness for three months, there is no force 
 which could withstand their voice. But the behef 
 m justification by faith alone carries away the force 
 and lessons of the Divine Word into ecclesias- 
 tical compliances, and leaves the natural man to do 
 what he likes with his own. The result is desola- 
 tion; and the church, by spiritual defect, presides 
 over the wilderness, and is the gamekeeper of 
 gamekeepers. A church, with such subjects, would 
 wall in the sky for privileged people, if such a thing 
 were possible; nay, does wall it in to a serious 
 extent in large towns. It never tells proprietors 
 that the light and air and ground of the world are 
 the Lords; that they are for administration; first 
 as Godwealth, second as commonwealth, as private 
 wealth, last. ^^ Woe unto them that join house to 
 house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, 
 that they may be placed alone in the midst of the 
 earth!" (Isa. v. 8). Now let the reader bear in 
 mind that these things are natural correspondences 
 in a visible realm of human action, of greater 
 cosmical effects produced by the spiritual world, and 
 specifically by the hells, which with all their selfhood, 
 all their neglect of good and greed of evil act down 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS. 553 
 
 into the plane of nature, and striking it, in their 
 arrest of force, produce by correlation deserts on 
 earth, saharas, with their poisonous and destructive 
 inhabitants. 
 
 cxxx. 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS. 
 
 The New Jerusalem now, and for some time to 
 come, will be eminently a political state ; pleading 
 o-reat reforms, and abnegation of false claims ot 
 property, in no case on the ground of radicalism, or 
 of the rights of man ; but on the ground of righteous- 
 ness, th^e rights of God. This can be effected, if 
 its faithful clergy will, purely by appeals to the 
 private religious conscience; and public agitation ot 
 dangerous questions, and excitement, may be thus 
 forestopped to a considerable extent. But the 
 pulpit, and the ministrations of all clergy worthy of 
 the name, must and will become the chief agent of 
 social and political regeneration. For this reason, 
 that the shunning of evils as sins against the Lord, 
 and doing the good things opposite to those evils, is 
 the descent of the New Jerusalem, and is the con- 
 stitution of the New Church, and is the soul and 
 life of her clergy, whether they be laymen, or 
 ecclesiastics. No lower body preaches or enforces 
 righteousness ; though compromise, policy and ex- 
 pediency, will still have their advocates, and attest 
 and educate till the higher standard is admitted. It 
 is therefore greatly to be desired that the New 
 Church in all its ministries (and every member of it 
 will ultimately be a priest) should diligently apply 
 itself to every important question of the time, and m 
 
554 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS, 
 
 no case stand apart from the world's arena after the 
 manner of justification by faith alone ; but come 
 right down to the main study of what is righteous in 
 each relation. This it alone can do, because it alone 
 receives the Word of the one Lord as applicable to 
 the guidance of the natural life, and as of supreme 
 weight in the regeneration of the natural man ; 
 heaven, by reformations of character, gradually 
 produced on the ground of earth, being the sure and 
 only way to heaven above. Our age is full of proofs 
 that these reformations, always individual in their 
 origin, are widely social, and are political and inter- 
 national, in their extensions; that social, political 
 and national reform reacts upon individual ; and that 
 standing always on the ground of civil and religious 
 liberty, public right, traced to and from the Lord of 
 all, loyalty to Him in Himself and in every man, is 
 in all its departments the daily and hourly business 
 of the Lord's New Church. Man has to regenerate 
 the world, not only from its mental atheisms, cruelties 
 and indecencies, but from its disease, pauperism and 
 crime; from its imprisonment in greed and ambition ; 
 and from the pestilences and wildernesses of its 
 ground. None of this will be done for him that can 
 be done by him ; for the Lord, by redemption, has 
 only given him freewill again, through which free- 
 will the Lord acts ; but the man is the agent of all 
 regeneration, private and public. And the New 
 Church is the supreme voice of this regeneration in 
 the world. 
 
 It is not to be denied that all churches preach 
 this in so far as they insist upon a good life; nor 
 that it is cardinally insisted upon by many ministers 
 of religion. But it comes through them apart from 
 their creed, and is not preached as a means of salva- 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS, 555 
 
 tlon ; it is a good thing to be done, but not the 
 essential thing. In the New Church the life is all ; 
 the faithful, honest and sincere performance of the 
 duties of the day's work ; the One Divine Human 
 Lord, through the man's freewill in action, does that 
 day's work,Vdges how it is done, and apportions 
 its perfection ; and by the application of His Word, 
 continually strives with man to regenerate the work, 
 filling it more and more with unselfish uses to the 
 neighbour. The true happiness of life is given away 
 under these exact conditions. No previous church 
 has assumed this dominance ; indeed, the churches, 
 in formal articles, give up the theatre of daily life 
 as a hopeless chaos where the man of sin divides 
 empire with conscience. The New Church is bound 
 to hold to the contrary aspiration ; and to demand 
 progressive righteousness of public and private life. 
 Because the Lord, no tripersonal being doubtfully 
 good in attributes, and no unknown being, but once 
 our brother, Jesus Christ, commands this allegiance 
 of life, fortune, and work ; because the Word com- 
 mands it ; because it regenerates man, and society, 
 in the doing ; administers power and property for 
 the Lord; and rehabilitates the individual, the 
 ground on which he stands, and the states and 
 nations of the earth. 
 
 This radiant position, this sun of good works, 
 opened down upon us now for more than a century, 
 has penetrated the social world far beyond the New 
 Church ; it is the descent of the New Jerusalem of 
 which no man is conscious save after the lapse of 
 time, and by the accumulation of results. But there 
 it is ; and the new humanity which is in the world, 
 and which is constrained to recognize the kingdom of 
 love and use as essential, despite the effort of 
 
556 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS, 
 
 justification by faith alone, proceeds purely from the 
 Divine Humanity, which was the triumph in the 
 Lord Jesus Christ over all practical evil, and which 
 is the sun and source of the new dispensation. 
 
 It is difficult to state these things, as it is difficult 
 to see the apple of the eye, or the creative power 
 imparted by the divine mercy to the creature. 
 But we may know simply that a true doctrine of 
 God given by Him through the "Word, and then 
 opened to mens plain understanding in the com- 
 missioned pages of Swedenborg, brings a God to 
 bear upon our affections quite different to the unin- 
 telligible or vague beings who have hitherto usurped 
 that name in the human mind. The divine human 
 God known as our Father and Friend, the workim^ 
 God, whose works are first creation, and then 
 
 redemption,— those divine and infinite industries, 
 
 must inhabit the human intellect with a diflferent 
 pressure to that exercised by the arbitrary idols of 
 the Catholic and Protestant churches. And when 
 the question is as to our conversion into the image 
 and likeness of the supreme, a diflferent model is held 
 up to us as worshippers of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 alone, to the prototype oflTered by the trinitarian and 
 unitarian theology. And when the further question 
 about any action is, Would God like this? the 
 answer can come full and direct to every man's busi- 
 ness and bosom, when the Lord Jesus is asked ; 
 whereas when a trinity of persons is asked, you are 
 in a theological circumlocution office, which refers 
 you to clergy, who send you away from business to 
 church, and from practical administration of affairs 
 for God, to justification by faith embodied in false 
 creeds and articles. And even the unitarian aspira- 
 tion after supreme justice, excellently human in 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS. 557 
 
 itself, only lands you in your own best common 
 sense, unhelped of revelation, and leaves you to be 
 your own model, or at best to take the model of 
 Jesus the man, not the model and opened pressure 
 of Christ the Lord. 
 
 Now, if a new face of God is given, and that face 
 turned full upon the natural man; if He Himself is a 
 divine man, in whom perfection of justice and polity 
 is summed up ; if His coming was to make men like- 
 nesses of Himself; if He administered the divine 
 fortune of His omnipotence by spending it to redeem 
 the world, it follows that the church which receives 
 and represents Him, and to which He is present 
 accordingly, has the regeneration of the natural man 
 in its commission; or again in other words, is an 
 individual, a social, a political, a national, and an 
 international church. 
 
 It must not however be supposed that the busi- 
 ness of that churcli lies in the domain of party con- 
 flicts ; or that it will add itself to conservatism or 
 liberalism as the churches of the past have done to 
 their own injury. It will be a voice for righteous- 
 ness and love, an influential voice, but not a speaker, 
 as a church, upon hustings or in parliaments. Its 
 practical nature lies in its limits within motives, 
 tendencies, and the good affections of human use as 
 a ground of outward action. In keeping these limits 
 it escapes Utopian schemes, and as a city set upon a 
 hill, dwells above conflict, at the same time that it 
 urges incessant experiment for good. Whatever the 
 question in the nation's hand may be, it urges right- 
 eousness and unselfishness as the beginning, the 
 means and the test of the solution. It follows in the 
 wake of Him who says, '' Behold, I make all things 
 new;" and the initiative it employs is, What the 
 
558 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS, 
 
 divine man will adjudge in the case if we can hear 
 His voice personally. No matter how dull the 
 country, or how dark the parliament, this new direc- 
 tion of influx is pressed upon it, almost as an inward 
 dictate, and awaits God s time to become a force, and 
 by the conversion of chosen men, to be converted 
 into living streams of power and irresistible leader- 
 ships. 
 
 But why, it may again be asked, cannot this in- 
 fluence proceed from the Old Catholic and Protestant 
 churches? In the first place, it has not proceeded 
 from them; but the separation of the church from 
 the world, of ecclesiasticism from progress, and of 
 current religious dogma from the necessities of life, 
 becomes daily more apparent. The best men do 
 their natural days' work without ever thinking of 
 the church, or being helped by it. But the true 
 reason why this influx does not come from the old 
 theology, lies in the fact that the current scheme ol 
 salvation leaves out the purification of the natural 
 man, because it does not look to the Lord, but to 
 mythical beings beside him. The Lord on earth was 
 a working man, and made His humanity divine: the 
 Lord as a model accepted, flows into us with this 
 precise force, and tends to make all who receive Him, 
 working men and women in the likeness of Himself ; 
 men and women working personally to regenerate 
 their own human nature, with the knowledo^e and 
 faith from Him that this can be done, and must be 
 done. There is no position like this in the old 
 world, — the immanence of Christ upon business, 
 polity, wealth, power, the whole affections of the race. 
 Of course Christians tend to do good because God 
 loves it, and to shun evil because He abhors it ; but 
 the idea of God is so imperfect and unreal, that His 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER POLITICS, 559- 
 
 love and His abhorrence are both of them contra- 
 dictory and confused; and the plan of salvation 
 without the perfection and success of good works, 
 destroys the necessity of good in the natural man, by 
 finding a substitute for it in the death of Christ. 
 Now He died to make natural good completely pos- 
 sible, as it is absolutely necessary, for all men. And 
 the New Church has a perfect rational doctrine which 
 shows how this was effected. 
 
 If we recollect that first principles govern all 
 thino-s, that every position assumed has after it a fate 
 of consequences, it will be obvious that the position 
 of a divine humanity inaugurates a New Church, 
 and afterwards a new society. Let it further be 
 remembered that the inmost ideas which any mind 
 assumes govern all that is outside them, and tend to 
 modify in their own sense every circumstance that 
 touches them; and that when those inmost ideas 
 are high and noble, say rather revealed and divine, 
 they tend to regenerate the whole man beneath them. 
 Also that the idea of God is the ideal of the human 
 mind, and that the whole character- flows invisibly 
 but surely from that which the man worships. If 
 we sufficiently cherish these mental facts it will be 
 evident, and can be held as such against all antag- 
 onism, that the belief in Christ as the One God to 
 be followed, places Him in the way of doing with 
 the whole race of man that which He did with His 
 assumed human nature on earth, namely, of filling 
 it with His divinity, so that He shall be answered 
 in the regeneration, and then in the salvation of His 
 creatures. 
 
 I 
 
56o THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS, 
 
 CXXXI. 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS. 
 
 Hence the New Church is not an ascetic church, 
 and does not permit the theological suicide of the 
 natural mind as a means of escape from painful pre- 
 sent duty, and painful resistance to evil, to spiritual 
 salvation. On the contrary, it is a churcli of combat, 
 and enjoins the complete, and finally happy subjuo-a- 
 tion, of tlie body, parts and passions, of the unabol- 
 ished natural man. The spiritual experience of 
 Swedenborg, impossible of contradiction, attests that 
 the whole of the aifections, and specially the life's 
 love of which they are the cohorts, are necessities of 
 our being, and are immortal in their inward forms. 
 We carry them over with us after death; or rather 
 they correspond accurately to greater and more 
 powerful loves within us, which carry on our per- 
 sonal natures and characters acquired on earth, into 
 a world adequate, nay, created for their play. There 
 is therefore no such thing as getting rid of the pas- 
 sions in the natural climax of life here, which makes 
 them immortal ; and the only alternative is, to sub- 
 due them here in the highest name, and to render 
 them harmless fires under rulinor faculties above 
 them; fires needful for the daily and hourly heat of 
 the outer man who subsists bodily in both Avorlds. 
 Christ came to subdue the infernal influx under which 
 before His day the passions, perverted to long evil, 
 were swollen into monsters too big and too strong for 
 man. Since He came, and now especially since His 
 second Advent, the affections and the passions are 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS 561 
 
 again brought within human control : possession has 
 ceased, and the will is freed; and with this, a new 
 responsibility of self-regeneration, in which the Lord 
 is always acknowledged, and afterwards known as 
 the sole agent, presses upon the race, and demands 
 incessant acts of combat against natural evils, in 
 order that the body of the affections may be rescued 
 to the true life of love. 
 
 Here again is the necessity for Christ, the one 
 Lord. As man is not changed by death, he must 
 be changed by Life itself, or he will remain pre- 
 dominantly natural, and unregenerated. The influx 
 by which this change is wrought through acts of 
 freewill, comes from a divine human being who in 
 His assumed nature has experienced and supremely 
 undero-one the change, and whose face as a Father 
 and Friend, and whose voice from His own Word, is 
 visible, and audible, to the struggling combatant 
 man, with a divinely regulated influence towards 
 victory, and regeneration. This pressure in the 
 mind, unlike that of the three persons in the old 
 Trinity, descends into the abysses of nature, to 
 triumph and to save; proclaims that victory even 
 unto death must be done and had, and that ascent 
 comes afterwards ; and that it is an ascent then of 
 the whole nature, senses, passions, and affections ; 
 whereas the usual scheme of salvation does not 
 permit descent at all; it denies the incarnation of 
 the spiritual man ; and ascends with the sinful crea- 
 ture to an invisible and unapproachable God, whose 
 action is arbitrary, and His influx has no sympathy 
 in human experience. It voids the Lord and Friend 
 of Life for a scheme of scholasticism. And it causes 
 men to believe that all that they know of themselves, 
 all the pleasures they take in their own characters and 
 
 2 N 
 
562 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS. 
 
 hearts, can be put aside, and still something remain 
 to be saved by a grace in which both reason and 
 mercy are uncertain. 
 
 It need hardly be said that the New Church 
 doctrine, that the immortality of man is the immor- 
 tality of all his faculties, senses and desires, in 
 corresponding forms, the alteration only rendering 
 the man adequate to the new world he has entered, 
 is* itself a powerful motive to control every faculty 
 in the interest of virtue and wisdom. Also to revise 
 all habits in which character fixes itself with power- 
 ful direction. Because after death change is more 
 difficult ; and greed, and lusts, and love of power, 
 and idleness and self-indulgence, come then not only 
 into their triumph over the man, but into their 
 judgment in the man ; and compel his discipline and 
 his lot. And the question is, What is the best way 
 to efiect these reforms? It cannot be done from 
 self, for selfishness, self-preservation against self- 
 abnegation, in one form or another, is the ancestor 
 or parent of all the lusts of man ; it can only be done 
 by a greater than self, by one out of self, by one who 
 is unselfish. No such one is known in history, or 
 science, or speculation, save alone the Lord Christ, 
 and He is only so known to those who acknowledge 
 His Divinity, and worship Him. 
 
 The New Church, neither Stoic, nor Epicurean, 
 but administrative for divine order, makes amends 
 against the philosophers to human nature. There is 
 no affection, passion, or sense, in its purity, which it 
 can dispense with in the building of its temple, that 
 is to say, in the New Jerusalem. There is nothing 
 despicable in the first springs of human action. The 
 love of wealth, which with iron hand of contract 
 gripes the present world into poverty, is a heavenly 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS. 563 
 
 affection when regenerated, and through its admin- 
 istrations of use will pour the affluence of the 
 almighty. Take it away, and the commerce of the 
 skies would cease. The love of power, which at 
 present crushes the subject world into weakness, is 
 a supremely heavenly love in the ambition to have 
 power to use it for the Lord ; and if it were re- 
 moved, all conscious divine order, depending upon 
 governance, and all beginnings of new order beyond 
 the present vision and range of angels and men, all 
 leadership, and with it all delightful and yet awful 
 sense of the divine government, must come to an 
 end. Mediocrity mean beyond the name would 
 creep over the human race, if ambition for good, 
 and love of power for good, were subtracted from 
 the factors of society either in this world, or the 
 next. So too the love of pleasure in its manifold 
 natures. If it were taken away from one outgoing 
 avenue of sense or feeling, or desire, the current 
 momentaneous motive of life would stop, and the 
 wheels of action be without notice to the man. 
 Even pain preaches this, for it is a motive to ease, 
 and ease moves onward to activity through delight. 
 The sense of pleasure is therefore' an ultimate gift 
 which leads all life outwards and downwards to its 
 proper issues, provided the summum bonum opens 
 down into it, regenerates it, and claims it for its 
 own. The conjugial sense, the delights of love and 
 wedlock, of union with another being fitted by 
 creation to your own being, as it is one of the main 
 stabilities and sources of the race of man, so it is a 
 fundamental and everlasting fact in the outgoings of 
 the New Jerusalem, and like all that is real, subsists 
 in the spiritual world with a plenitude of love, 
 fitness, enjoyment, and completion of character and 
 
564 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS. 
 
 godliness, beyond what is possible in the world of 
 nature. In the bridal of the Lord with the human 
 race, that is to say, in the New Jerusalem, all true 
 bridals receive their consummation, and have become 
 eternal in the heavens. 
 
 Yet has the scepticism of mankind not been 
 without a justification both on the negative side, and 
 the positive. As we have said before in almost the 
 same words, there is no God like that which the 
 atheists deny ; there is no Lord like Him whom the 
 current Christian beliefs affirm. There is no anima 
 mundi of space, and no arbitrary master or fatal 
 force over the universe. There is no spiritual world 
 such as philosophy hitherto affirms or denies; no 
 abstraction serving for such a world : and no space 
 holding one. There is no worldly love of power in 
 the higher life, but a heavenly love of power. Nay, 
 there are no natural faculties after death ending in 
 the realms of space and time, but spiritual faculties 
 corresponding, which end in substantial and endur- 
 ing realms of states. There is no earthly love of 
 wealth in the heavens, yet an indispensable grand 
 economy and love of property as a form for the 
 purpose of serving others. The love of that service 
 determines the fortune and administers it, and is 
 the gold in the gold. There is no natural love of 
 pleasures of sense in the houses and gardens and 
 scenes and persons of the magnificent spiritual 
 world, but a love and delight in the inner per- 
 sonality of these things, in what they are and mean 
 in the Lord. And there is no sexual love proceed- 
 ing from without to within in the life above ; there 
 are no marriages in heaven from outward grounds ; 
 say rather, they do not marry and are not given in 
 marriage, but are as the angels in heaven. That is 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER THE PASSIONS. 565 
 
 to say, being fully men and women, they are angels 
 or *' sent " to each other in the divine order, and in 
 no less a bond; their marriages are not made by 
 themselves, or their societies ; in other words again, 
 they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but 
 are as the angels. The denial of the old positions, if 
 it had a good motive, is pretty exactly true ; those 
 things only which are not have been denied ; and as 
 the realities which they covered could not be re- 
 vealed hitherto, the tide of negation seems to have 
 swept away the higher spheres. But now these are 
 given in rational laws and statements for w^hat they 
 are; they cannot be denied; they cannot be in- 
 volved in matter, space and time; atheism, ma- 
 terialism, and sensual Christianism, become more 
 and more remote from them, and more fatuous in 
 combating them ; and it will at last be found that 
 they occupy with no rival claimant the whole 
 domain of the inner religious man, and of the out- 
 ward scientific man so far as he is not voluntarily 
 closed against interior things. 
 
 This plain revelation of the higher world given 
 in Swedenborg, opens its polity, ordinances and 
 practices upon the lower natural world which we 
 men and women inhabit here; if we may use the 
 language of the day, it brings us in communication 
 with the public opinion of the heavens. And thus 
 it judges our earthly doings, private and public, by 
 the now known, yea, well known ways of doing 
 things there, where righteousness is the rule. This 
 has been assured from the beginning, in the Word 
 of God, which confronts the world with an all- 
 perfect judgment and justice. But the Word has 
 been buried in churches false to their mission; and 
 it has become necessary in the divine providence to 
 
566 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER PROPERTY. 
 
 open its deeper light, and also to exhibit the divine 
 society which subsists within its sphere in the 
 heavenly kingdom. That new information now 
 knocks with a continual personal presence, even the 
 Lord's, upon the thick doors of legislation and habit, 
 and seeks admission to modify the private life, the 
 home, the citizen, and the State. The ground on 
 which it stands outside every door and habit, is first 
 freewill, and then civil and religious liberty. It 
 pleads as a free voice to be listened to by those who 
 will. It addresses itself to each department of life. 
 It is political to politics, social to society, new 
 steward and administrator to fortune, privilege of 
 duty to privilege of rank, guardian of real and 
 loosener of false marriage, corrector of power, and 
 permanent inheritor in inheritance. The reader 
 sees that the New Church, entrusted with the code 
 and manners, the realized and acted wisdom and 
 love of the higher country where the Lord is the 
 known and acknowledged ruler, must be in con- 
 tinual pleading with the present state, and have its 
 breast close up to every law that passes in the 
 government, and judge it for good or for evil from 
 the highest ground. 
 
 CXXXII. 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER PROPERTY, 
 
 Take for instance the question of inheritance of 
 property. It has grown up as it stands from im- 
 memorial usages, and one great greed or another, of 
 power and wealth combined, has embodied itself in 
 legislation, and worldly privilege been added to 
 
 THE NEW CHURCH OVER PROPERTY. 567 
 
 material desire :— lordship, estate, family, primo- 
 geniture, mystical position in society ; the right in a 
 large sense to do what you like with your own. 
 Finally, the right to legislate in the open sense of 
 interests which are lusts. Or the inheritance on 
 the other side, in the smaller fortunes perhaps, 
 proceeds on the principle of free lust from the 
 beginning ; you may do anything with your money 
 by arbitrary act; and justice and injustice do not 
 apply to the administration of what belongs only to 
 yourself. You may marry a second wife, and leave 
 an ample fortune away from sick and helpless 
 daughters by a first wife, to a cuckoo family which 
 also does what it likes with its own. Or you may 
 leave daughters a poor life interest, and cause their 
 dole to revert at their death to wealthy male relatives 
 who accept the wrong : depriving the daughters of 
 fair administration, and of all will at death. These 
 are but two legal and permissible cruel evils : there 
 are as many genera and species of them as there are 
 men, families, and social states. Now the point is, 
 that the Catholic and Protestant churches may go on 
 in ceremonial splendour and social preponderance for 
 thousands of years, but they will never assail any 
 one of these barbarities so long as the perpetrators 
 duly go to church. They only take note of legal 
 crimes, because they have no communication with 
 heaven, but are limited and imprisoned within exist- 
 ing society. On the other hand, the New Church, 
 by its commission, if not by powerful practice 
 hitherto, takes note of wickedness as crime, whether 
 the wickedness is legalized and institutionalized, or 
 no. And hence, in this matter of inheritance of 
 property, its influence and its voice must and will be 
 heard, apportioning the transmission of property m 
 
568 THE NEW CHURCH OVER PROPERTY, 
 
 some cases to the laws of heaven, and in cases like 
 those mentioned above, to the works and ways of 
 darkness. 
 
 Here it must be said also that the heavenly in- 
 fluence of the New Church is exerted only according 
 to practical need. For example, the present existence 
 of property may be a fact which will pass away in a 
 higher state. Transmission of fortunes in families 
 likewise may be a transitory need, to give place to 
 other and more spiritual administration by and by. 
 Mine and thine may be but convulsive graspings of 
 a timid natural man who will be regenerated into a 
 more open hand. But in the ^meantime the New 
 Church is educative, as well as a proposer of practical 
 things ; and it takes things as they are, and demands 
 that they submit themselves to justice as it is to be 
 understood in each case. By this means, justice 
 gets at things, and will gradually work them right. 
 For example, no human being dare say that there is 
 justice for that case in the children of a second 
 marriage turning out into poverty the children of the 
 first : it is flagrant and disgraceful wrong, whatever 
 ultimate views of property may be taken : the men 
 that do it consciously, however rich and respectable 
 it makes them, are scoundrels on the way to demons. 
 But be it well observed, that though this evil is 
 against the dictates of common justice and kindness, 
 the New Church is the only one which can denounce 
 it as a sin contrary to the salvation of the per- 
 petrators, without shunning which the way to 
 heaven is closed. Other churches tolerate such 
 things, and lead men to Christ by faith alone, not by 
 that life in which He lives in the man, and saves 
 him. The New Church is revealed in order to 
 oppose these and other practical evils, as making 
 
 SUMMARY. 
 
 569 
 
 salvation unattainable. It is clear that there is a 
 new power toward regeneration in this light of 
 opened heaven, and the open Word, with new doc- 
 trines of righteousness, turned down upon the natural 
 man, and replenishing his ordinary sense of justice 
 with its mortal reproof and its immortal fire. 
 
 The mathematicians know, and the subtle scientists 
 know, and every bowman and marksman knows, 
 that any new direction of line, or force, any higher 
 source of it, any new related position, modifies the 
 arrow of consequences that comes forth. Calculate 
 therefore the issue to come from heaven and the 
 Word opened, the one divine man revealed in 
 righteousness as Eedeemer ; regeneration from evil 
 by each man himself the sole way of life ; and salva- 
 tion the divine gift afterwards. The question is, 
 Are these new forces ; and are they good and true ? 
 If they are, the world and what is within it is their 
 inheritance, and they will have it. 
 
 CXXXIII. 
 
 SUMMARY. 
 
 Again remember, however, in estimating the 
 problem, that these are forces, not words or subjects 
 of thought ; and that as the upper physical world, the 
 sun and its sphere, and the atmospheres, press upon 
 the lower physical world, so do the bowed and opened 
 heavens press upon human society now, and press 
 with definite ministries of good in the hands of 
 appointed ministers. A new personal world from 
 above, in the name of the personal Lord, addresses 
 us categorically, and summons us to righteousness. 
 
570 
 
 SUMMARY, 
 
 The New Church then, descending organically and 
 architectonically from the Lord, descending into 
 human minds by evolution of great ideas from the 
 spiritual and celestial Word, descending by nearness 
 of the personal heavens to the personal earth, de- 
 scending by waves of thought, and great inventions 
 of art and science, by added liberties of action which 
 increase freewill in all men, — this New Church in 
 its influence is not only a social and political church, 
 but the only such church upon earth. As gravita- 
 tion in its theory and grasp masters the physical 
 world which belongs to it, so the known laws of 
 heaven and of hell stand over humanity, and refer 
 to themselves its phenomena. They stand over 
 ecclesiasticism, and judge its frivolity, and its alie- 
 nation from natural and from heavenly life, and from 
 the life of life, which is love. They stand over the 
 law's delay, and though prescribing no details of 
 reform, nor teaching any man or senate his own 
 business, they insist upon those whom it concerns 
 reforming straightway the fountains and streams of 
 justice and judgment in the land, that God's truth 
 may run in them. They stand over medicine and 
 other professions, and protest against the despotism 
 of their guilds, and the closedness of their corpora- 
 tions against heaven. They stand over the lusts 
 and conceits, and the armies, of glorious nations. 
 They stand over the lust of science and the volup- 
 tuousness of art. They stand over the poetry which 
 sings when the world is burning. They protest 
 against these things, and demand their abatement 
 under heaven. On the other hand they foster w^hat- 
 ever is good and true and oppressed, and bring it 
 forth, and plant it in a new garden. For these 
 revealed laws, attested by all the consciousness of 
 
 SUMMARY. 
 
 571 
 
 right, and the history of consequences, are a new 
 and warm climate wherein trees that only bore 
 leaves hitherto, now can bear blossoms, and yield 
 fruit, and perpetuate their kind, and fill the earth ; 
 these trees are perceptions of right and conscience 
 long unnoticed, but ever freshly insinuated out of 
 heaven, and longing for incarnation in practical 
 
 good. 
 
 This New Church therefore is the Holy Catholic 
 and Apostolic Church universal ; and it consists on 
 each given day of all men, women and children in 
 the world who acknowledge and love the Lord in 
 His Person and in the Word, and are shunning evils 
 of life, private on the smallest scale, and public on 
 the greatest scale, as sins against Him ; and doing 
 the works of their calling actively, industriously, 
 honestly, and lovingly, with all their might, howso- 
 ever little or great, howsoever sick or well, that 
 might may be ; intimately owning afterwards that 
 it is all done from Him and belongs to Him. This 
 is Swedenborgs statement and business-account of 
 the descent of the new Jerusalem. It is plain good 
 sense, the lesson of the Word, the miracle of miracles, 
 and excludes human parentage. And this in its 
 constant practical w^orking is the new and everlast- 
 ing age. 
 
PAET y. 
 
 SUPPLEMENT. 
 
 CXXXIV. 
 
 THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON VIVISECTION. 
 
 The Report of the Commission, as exhibited iii its 
 Summary, justifies the case against violationism 
 which has been brought forward in this book. It 
 diminishes the pretexts for these practices until 
 their points are invisible to human common sense ; 
 and piles up the record of misdeeds until they 
 efface thought and feeling, after defying anticipation. 
 It shows that violationism is now an accepted part 
 not only of a medical and surgical, but of a 
 philosophical education ; and that a laboratory, a 
 misozoic chamber against living creatures, is an 
 appendage to the library and the study table of 
 English gentlemen. It marks the entrance of 
 '' Sodom and Egypt " into the corridor of English 
 schools, through scientific treatises which have the 
 thing within them. It demonstrates the invasion 
 of England by the worst forms of continental 
 abomination, and that this invasion increases year 
 by year. 
 
 THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON VIVISECTION 573 
 
 It does more than this. It tells all the world 
 that violationism has entered into the State, and is 
 endowed in and by the Privy Council, an annual 
 grant of £2000 being made for scientific '' investi- 
 gations in aid of medicine," including experiments 
 on living animals. These experiments, performed 
 by a foreigner, have been so heinous, that they 
 have received the stigma of the House of Lords, 
 where the avowed sentiments of the doer have been 
 pronounced " execrable." The medical department 
 of the Privy Council, the body from which issues 
 the vaccination dogma made into a fiat by Parlia- 
 ment, sends forth this new and kindred evil ; and is, 
 in material fact, on scientific pretences, the general 
 pollutional department of the State. 
 
 The whole country, so far as it is represented in 
 Parliament, is hereby responsible for acts which 
 make atrocious pollutionism as much a part of 
 England, as church, monarchy, and education are 
 
 parts. 
 
 This is what is called. Endowment of Research. 
 The writer beseeches his countrymen to watch this 
 serpent, and guard the vitals of the nation from its 
 way. It creeps into power by stealthy accessions, 
 the stair being laid down in the existing machinery 
 of the State. Its acts are condoned beforehand 
 by its position. To-day it is a new field of dis- 
 covery reported. To-morrow it is a society of 
 savans. The third day one of them is an oflBcial 
 with a secret laboratory at his back. The fourth 
 day he is in relations with the most noble, the Privy 
 Council, and the fifth day he is of it and in it. The 
 sixth day he sits upon the medical throne, and 
 does what he likes, and can do no wrong. And 
 the seventh day he rests from personal labours, and 
 
i. 
 
 574 TIl£ ROYAL COMMISSION ON VIVISECTION. 
 
 hands all disobedient subjects, men and women, to 
 the civil power which is his slave. This epitomizes 
 what has happened in the vaccination laws, and is 
 the forecast of much else that will happen unless 
 electoral England steadily opposes its breast to all 
 '' endowment of research." 
 
 Research there has been, and will be in plenty, 
 and the good part of it needs no endowment but that 
 of the scientific ardour and industry of the private 
 man, and the voluntary formation of societies which 
 from the ground of public service, and by virtuous 
 means, crave support from the people at large, and 
 get it. The one great endowment needed at 
 present, and which cannot be had while scientism 
 is in the State, is the existence and pressure of law, 
 penal law, which is as necessary for societies as for 
 individuals, and without which life, property and 
 decency cannot be preserved in any case. Science, 
 as a life, a property, and a decency, will flourish 
 when it is hedged in by this common beneficent 
 safeguard. The object is, to drive villains and 
 marauders away from science. And as property is 
 protected from thieves by penal laws, so by its own 
 penal laws research must be protected from infamy. 
 Property in its decorum is really created in one 
 sense by penal laws ; and science must be similarly 
 created. " Non minus jucundi sunt ii dies quibus 
 conservamur quam ii quibus nascimur,'' 
 
 This Royal Commission also marks the com- 
 mencement of the usual second week of despotism 
 after the first already epitomized. It sprang from 
 the public horror aroused by violationism. It would 
 flatter the horror. For this purpose it endorses in a 
 modified sense the dogmas and pleas of the violation- 
 ists, and recommends Parliament to bring the whole 
 
 THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON VIVISECTION 575 
 
 matter under State control. It does not recommend 
 that it be cast out as an accursed thing, but licensed; 
 and thus exist not only under the sanction of the 
 Privy Council, but issue from Parliament as the 
 law of the land. This is the last stage of con- 
 firmed violationism ; the thin end of its whole 
 wedge in the heart of our mother, England. True, 
 it is to be restricted, but allowed. And it is to be 
 watched by a paid officialism which will be de- 
 bauched by its sights and sounds. 
 
 This fixes the evil for a time. It has gone 
 through all the processes of confirmation, and its 
 abettors can declare that every reason for presently 
 reopening it, is at an end. Parliament is weary of 
 it ; and it may require years of agitation, in fact, 
 now, does require the education and arousing of the 
 whole mind of the country, before humane repeal 
 of statutes can purge the gentle weal. Ah ! why 
 should not Parliaments save themselves the burden 
 of legislating against the doubts of good and true 
 
 men ? 
 
 Now, beware, dear motherland, of the " endow- 
 ment of research." 
 
 Suggestions for a Bill for punishiiig the violation 
 af animal life ivhen undertaken for alleged purposes 
 of acquiring hnoivledge, or promoting good. 
 
 It is suggested that no addition be made to exist- 
 ing legislation, excepting to lay down a scale of 
 penalties rising in proportion to the grievousness of 
 the offence, and that after conviction, offenders shall 
 be struck out of the constituency of the country. 
 
 That the common laws against cruelty shall be 
 enforced equally, with no heed to the pleading 
 of motives for cruelty; and that common juries 
 shall decide the case. 
 
 • < 
 
576 THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON VIVISECTION 
 
 That informers shall be invited by sufficient 
 rewards, if necessaiy, by high rewards. The cost to 
 the country will be small, because the system of 
 violation will not outlast more than a few convic- 
 tions. That purveyors of animals, hospital servants, 
 laboratory servants, and the like, shall be criminally 
 indictable if they are accomplices in such practices 
 without giving information to the police. 
 
 That right of search in hospitals, laboratories, and 
 private houses, shall be provided in any case where 
 suspicion exists. 
 
 That books detailinor and teachinof violational 
 experiments shall be suppressed, and burnt publicly, 
 and their future publication be forbidden under 
 penalties ; also books of travel and adventure de- 
 tailing, and figuring, cruelties of sport. 
 
 That common juries shall settle the question of the 
 justification, or guilt, of each violational experiment; 
 whereby the public conscience will gradually build 
 up precedents for a general law against cruelty in 
 the country. 
 
 That legalizing, or as it is called, restricting, 
 the violation of life, shall be avoided ; that salaried 
 inspectors, who would be a permanent charge for 
 continued evil, and a body created for depravity, be 
 not appointed ; but that their place be supplied by 
 informers stimulated by adequate rewards. 
 
 That institutions, hospitals, and the like, shall be 
 dealt with by compound penalties for cruelty prac- 
 tised within their walls ; and be liable, in each case, 
 to keep an informer for three years, to be reckoned 
 on the staff. 
 
 Remark — No trumpey cases will be included in 
 condemnation by these common tribunals of the 
 courts, but only cruelty. The cruel costermono-er 
 
 DESTRUCTION OF REASON. 
 
 577 
 
 and the cruel scientist will be equal, and there will 
 be one law against inhumanity for the rich and the 
 poor ; one law with a scale of penalties, rising for all 
 dire cruelty into corporal punishments. 
 
 Violationism in Great Britain will be put an end 
 to in a twelvemonth by a simple Bill carrying the 
 above conditions. 
 
 cxxxv. 
 
 DESTRUCTION OF REASON. 
 
 The destruction of the mind as a power of reason 
 is a characteristic effect of the violationists. For, in 
 plea for the greatest atrocities, they allege the 
 most childish reasons. Eed-handed ApoUyons first, 
 they put on the face and garb of " little children " 
 immediately afterwards : slipping away from the 
 indignant world's police in swaddling clothes. It is 
 a memorable chapter of psychology, and to be care- 
 fully studied. 
 
 Particulars may be given thus far without out- 
 raging decency. Animals are violated, and then 
 confined in close vessels for days afterwards. Reason, 
 
 to demonstrate the effects of close confinement. 
 
 Animals are starved to death. Reason,— to show 
 how long they will live without food. Animals are 
 slowly baked to death. Reason,— io show what 
 heat will bake them to death. Dogs having puppies 
 are cut up alive, and their puppies are then brought 
 to them. Reason,— io prove the endurance of 
 motherly love. The deeds and reasons can be 
 extended indefinitely; they go together quite through 
 
 violationism ; and are its will and intellect. 
 
 20 
 
578 
 
 DESTRUCTION OF REASON. 
 
 / 
 
 DESTR UCTION OF REASON 
 
 579 
 
 Now here, in these reasons, we have an example 
 of the quality of lusts and persuasions, and of the 
 destruction of the human being by them. No mind 
 is not traversed by idiocy that has one such reason 
 in it; for reason is a faculty commensurate with 
 importance in things, and here is a gulf of incon- 
 ceivable triviality in its very heart. But these are 
 the reasons of red hands caught in the act. A 
 recent writer says that they ^' paralyze indignation." 
 It is an important remark ; and the fact worth 
 religious investigation. As you read on in such 
 statements, the mind loses its upright and down- 
 right position, nothing is right or wrong; the 
 smallest excuse justifies everything : deicide would 
 be right if it would make a man a baronet. Now 
 many a pointed pretext that comes to a man s mind 
 is not a seed, but a stab. Swedenborg reports that 
 the men in the deepest hells, by injecting their 
 persuasions, have this power of paralyzing and 
 destroying the faculties; and that therefore, to 
 guard the human race, these spirits are separated, 
 and dwell under their own ''misty rocks." Their 
 power lies in assaulting reason, and througJi reason, 
 wisdom and love, by infernal loves, the smallness of 
 whose intellect forced home is like the point of a 
 dagger; so sharp as to be invisible, but with the 
 bold arm and naked stroke of determined evil behind 
 it. In such case if once you entertain the proffered 
 reason, instead of casting out reason and sin 
 together, the mind is a fool straightway, and as 
 with the mentally destroyed violationists them- 
 selves, you are landed in an inquest in which the 
 entire realm of right and wrong is in royal com- 
 mission. The good and truth of a man are done for, 
 then. 
 
 This state has overtaken churches as collective 
 bodies : they are shaking palsies before public evil. 
 Confronted by manifest heinous wickedness, when 
 you ask your clerical brother, himself a virtuous 
 man, and an earnest worker for good in the church- 
 sense, why the Church does not intervene, and by its 
 clear voice put down violationism and its kindred in 
 a month, — which it could do, — he tells you that 
 diversity of opinion prevails, and that eminent 
 witnesses come close to the ear of Church and State, 
 and speak with authority in favour of the practices ; 
 and that he does not know what to think, or do. 
 Here the Church is traversed by the world, the flesh 
 and the devil. Its plea is that it has no command- 
 ing intuitions of what is good and true in its own 
 heart ; no Sinai in its borders ; that it has to learn 
 what is sin, and what is not sin, at second hand, from 
 specialists and scientists. Such a church has no 
 defending reasons for the faith of love that should be 
 in it ; it is at the mercy of the hells, and cannot do 
 battle with their influx ; it is hustled about among 
 the trivialities which are their pretexts for wrong. 
 
 This subject is deep and pressing. The reader is 
 especially invited to study the effect of pretexts for 
 plain wrong on the human reason. The sin and its 
 reason together are a kind of chemical, what is 
 called an '' unstable compound ; " and taken into the 
 mind on the mild side of the pretext, the formula 
 then breaks up internally, and the evil is left to 
 explode and destroy in the faculties. This is of the 
 nature of lust itself, the smallness of whose pretexts, 
 pushed by its whole body from behind, gains it 
 easier admission ; the defences of the honest person 
 being paralyzed by its audacity, which carries the 
 full influx of its dynamite hell. 
 
 I 
 
S8o 
 
 UNALTERABLE BY PR A YER. 
 
 CXXXVI. 
 
 UNALTERABLE BY PRAYER. 
 
 The following account of a scientific god, " unalter- 
 able by prayer," and probably "the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and for ever," occurs in the " Eeport of the 
 Royal Commission on Vivisection." The animals 
 mentioned were being starved to death to find out 
 the truths of starvation. Dr. "Walker says, " I used 
 to dine very often with a lecturer on physiology, and 
 one night I found that I could not enjoy either my 
 cigar or my dinner, because the day before we had 
 g'one through the ' laboratory,' and I could not get 
 rid of the imploring look of the dogs which hoped 
 for some food every time that they saw a human 
 being, of the patient suffering of the fowls, and of 
 the desperate eflforts made by some rabbits to allay 
 the pangs of hunger with anything to engage the 
 digestion; and it appeared to me that my friend was 
 indifferent. He had been a vivisector some years; I 
 was a beginner" (4908). 
 
 CXXXVI I. 
 
 THE CATECHISM OF THE GALLOWS. 
 
 There is a passage in S^mund's Edda which bears 
 upon the relation of outward crime to the state and 
 constitution of the world. Odin is represented as con- 
 sulting dead bodies which hang upon the gallows. 
 The extract from Hdvamdl, the " Verse of the High 
 One," can hardly be read by the Christian believer 
 
 THE CATECHISM OF THE GALLOWS. 581 
 
 without a thought arising that the Lord's passion is 
 intended. At the same time, as it is one of 0dm s 
 methods of experience to divine a posteriori from the 
 ends of crime, we see that the circulation of evil 
 through the body of society is involved; for every 
 gallows man is an outward spot and visible symptom 
 of the condition of human nature; and Odin descend- 
 ing to him, and becoming his catechist, is a psycho- 
 logical necessity of knowing the truth. 
 
 The hanging malefactor read backwards and m- 
 wards, signffies coi^p d'itat and saviourship of society 
 in emperors, inquisition and compulsory savmg ot 
 souls by fire and rack in churches, blood revels m 
 democracies, rights of violation in science, rights of 
 wrong in property and testaments; and rights ot 
 lusts in all men. These institutes, however, are so 
 clothed with purple, and lawn, and ermine, and 
 laurels, that they are invisible in the crime-series : 
 the devil has successfully juggled in them; and the 
 felon, swinging on high, is the little terminal drop of 
 gout which is visible, and which, to Odin, sigmfies 
 them all. The grandeurs of evil do not look like the 
 felon now, but they are him at last. 
 
 The following contains the passage from Edda :— 
 « O^inn was called Hanga-guS and Hanga-drottmn 
 (from Hangi, a body hanging on the gallows), the 
 god and lord of gallows men,-gallows birds. It 
 is thus explained in the Ynglinga Saga of Heims- 
 kringla, chapt. 7th. ' Sometimes OSinn called up 
 dead men out of the earth, or placed himself beneath 
 the gallows men ; therefore he was called the lord ot 
 ghosts, or of gallows men.' From the context it 
 may be seen that his purpose was to seek mysterious 
 knowledge from them. 
 
 "According to the first stanza of the 'Runatals 
 
 / 
 
S82 THE CATECHISM OF THE GALLOWS. 
 
 Mttr OSins ' in H^vamdl, 6Sinn was also himself 
 the gallows man — 
 
 Veit ek at ek hekk, 
 
 vindga meiSi a, 
 
 ni3etr allar nfu, 
 
 geiri undaSr, 
 
 ok gefinn OSni, 
 
 sjilfr sjd.lfum mer, 
 
 ^ J'eim meiSi, 
 
 er manngi veit, 
 
 hvers liann af rotum renn, 
 
 I know that I hung 
 on a wind-beaten tree 
 nine whole nights, 
 wounded with a spear 
 and given to 6Sinn, 
 myself to myself, 
 on that tree 
 that no man knoweth 
 from what roots it ran. 
 
 " Some have taken this stanza as a symbol corres- 
 ponding to the crucifixion of the Lord. However 
 that may be, I cannot help thinking that the mean- 
 ing IS somewhat to this effect, that OSiim by com- 
 plete self-sacrifice, by giving up self entirely, is 
 enabled to penetrate into the innermost recesses 
 of creation, and to draw hidden wisdom thence 
 Ihe tree referred to, is undoubtedly the world-tree 
 Yggdrasill, which derives its name from this very 
 tradition (Yggr = OSinn; drasill = horse: OSinn's 
 horse, i.e. the tree on which OSinn rides). This 
 tree was by ancient Northmen looked upon as a 
 symbol of nature, the extent and ramifications of 
 which are beyond human ken. Therefore, ' No man 
 knoweth from what roots it ran'" (J6n A. Hjaltalin). 
 iVb^e.— Yggr is a name of Odin derived from 
 terror, caution, shuddering, akin to the English 
 interjection. Ugh ! Odin's castle or horg is Hlid- 
 SKJALF ; the shaking or quivering portal ; the gate 
 of vibration. He inhabits a sensitiveness interior to 
 things ; resides in the sun of vibrations or trembles, 
 and cons the universe thereby ; and is in the focus 
 of apperception of good and evil. Yggdrasill is 
 
 THE CATECHISM OF THE GALLOWS. 583 
 
 the horse of vibration, upon the back or practical 
 understanding of which the infinite mtelligence 
 rides. This is the sensory side of Yggr. On the 
 motory side, Odin, Yggr, the perceiver of the 
 tremors which in the inmost brain stand for all 
 thino-s, is the cause and issuer of vibrations, terrors 
 from" this point of view : Odin as will-force being 
 teTTiUlis, tremendous. A middle or mediative posi- 
 tion is necessary. And to capacitate him for know- 
 ing and penetrating the evil universe of men, to the 
 makino- of which he is alien, he hangs on their 
 gallowl, and takes, or senses, all evil whatever of 
 which the gallows is the end; in short penetrates 
 universal hell ; and by self-imposed degradation fills 
 the outward or human Odin with obedience to, and 
 perception from, the inmost or divine Odin ^ 
 
 We are here again reminded of Swedenborgs 
 definition of the soulin the cortical substances of the 
 brain ; it is constituted, he says, by the divine hand, 
 "in the representation of the universe, in the 
 intuition of ends, in the beginning of determina- 
 tions • " it is a man with corresponding senses and 
 muscles that lives as its own special form m the 
 palace of vibration. 
 
 Gentle reader, try to perceive here. Observe the 
 constant import of the doctrine of the assumption ot 
 forms, and the number of points which are co- 
 ordinates of this doctrine. Odin is upon the gallows 
 nine nights,-the text says, " all nine nights, - 
 because in Edda there are nine worlds^and nine 
 trees in the world-tree, Yggdrasill. Hereby he 
 assumes the form, and therefore takes on him the 
 state, of the evil in all those worlds ; receives it by 
 temptation or induction, because he is already m its 
 form ; its vibrations reach him as a divine human 
 
 
 ( 
 
S84 THE CATECHISM OF THE GALLOWS. 
 
 knower, balancer, and determiner ; and afterwards 
 not merely as a god, but as a man, he judges what 
 IS in men. *' 
 
 Practical parallels.—This nation, so far as there 
 IS good m It, IS now voluntarily hanging on the 
 gallows of violationism, vaccinationism, and other 
 great evils of the time of which it is forced to be 
 the representative and the judge: and only by its 
 cruel crucifixion knows their agonies for what they 
 are, and afterwards has capacity of victory over 
 them. No good Lord Shaftesbury can divine these 
 things, for they are out of his very nature, unless he 
 mounts their cross, and freely submits, as he does 
 submit, to be tortured by them. 
 
 In short, it is become a rational rule, that for 
 carrying any great cause, the assumption of an evil 
 humanity, that is, of a flesh that does not belong to 
 him, must be undertaken by the reformer, in order 
 that he may enter its sphere thoroughly; and there 
 know, fight, and conquer, 
 
 Moral—It is indispensable to the scientific man 
 to live m the centre of vibrations, and to have their 
 porches for his senses ; to receive and to hear, and 
 worthily to listen, to messages from all things, and 
 dwelling with God in prayer, to transmit motives 
 ot good to all things. Science and physiology are 
 impossible, if there is no responsive tenderness in 
 the man,— if the heart is a stone, and the brain a 
 seit-made fungus. 
 
 This Eddaic Word, like many of the dark sayings 
 of the Northern Mythology, has therefore a physio- 
 logical, social, and spiritual scope. But it can be 
 read only by the light of the revealed spiritual sense 
 ^,i ^ o^*'*'"^ ^°^ Christian Scriptures, as un- 
 folded by Swedenborg. The learned co-ordinate of 
 
 il 
 
 -X 
 
 i 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE, 585 
 
 protoplasm called ''Comparative Mythology," has 
 no hold in these depths, but empties their values on 
 the common ground of materialism, where they 
 rank as the curiosities of the world's childhood. 
 There is no standard of comparison or point of 
 departure in this science, but it is a wheel that rolls 
 round in useless analogies. And its radical object 
 seems to be, to level down the Word of the Lord to 
 the brutish things of heathenism, and to make a 
 pantheon in which learning is the principal divinity. 
 
 CXXXVIII. 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE. 
 
 The greater evil is cruelty, the lesser evil is pain, 
 and there can be dire cruelty where there is no pam.^ 
 The end of repression is not " the economy of pain," 
 but the casting out of cruelty. 
 
 In the contest between the violationists and the 
 conscience of the country, the issue is raised, that 
 dissecting and injuring living animals is not cruel if 
 no pain is inflicted ; that is to say, if chloroform 
 is employed, and if life is put an end to before 
 feeling returns. This position leads strictly to the 
 violation of the human race. Its truth is here 
 denied. The infliction of pain does not of itself 
 constitute cruelty ; pain is no siimmum malum; it 
 is often necessary, beneficial, and merciful. Execu- 
 tive justice is attended with pain, both in anticipa- 
 tion, and in fact; and surgery in like manner 
 always involves pain. There is no cruelty in the 
 hand that inflicts the pain, provided it must be 
 undergone, because the law and motive of human 
 
 * 
 
 4 
 
586 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE. 
 
 service inspire and govern the hand. The motive 
 of good is clear and direct, and the patient willino-. 
 The case is altered if violence be inflicted for specu- 
 lative reasons, for a pretended remote good, and 
 without the consent of the sufferers. Cruelty is 
 there made out, and if useful information comes of 
 it, that by no means justifies the cruelty ; and does 
 not show that the same or better facts could not be 
 elicited by lawful ways, especially if the evil ways 
 were resolutely forbidden : it establishes no right to 
 the facts. This has been dwelt upon at length in 
 the foregoing pages ; but the report of the Eoyal 
 Commission reopens it here. 
 
 Extinction of pain and of all feeling in the 
 victims, not only fails to abolish cruelty, but 
 gives it a new depth and extension, and drugs the 
 opposing conscience. In the first place the "^viola- 
 tion extinguishes lives that need not be extin- 
 guished, or if the creatures must be killed, a momen- 
 taneous death effects that end. The next matter is, 
 that the violationists, voluntarily, at no man s solici- 
 tation, for no direct good, with pretexts only, 
 accustom themselves to the most horrible sights, to 
 all that betokens intimate agony of nature, and feed 
 their minds upon it as a daily food. They become 
 so inured to every form of violation of life, that the 
 addition of sensation to that life makes no difference 
 in their proceedings. They did these things before 
 chloroform existed, and would do them again if 
 anaesthetics were a lost art. Violationism is not 
 less but more a vampire because with skilful beat- 
 ing wings it intoxicates the life which it despoils. 
 And in the circulation of evils and falses it here puts 
 itself upon the rail of all crimes against the human 
 race. The seducer and violator who effects his pur- 
 
 i 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE. 587 
 
 pose upon his victim under stupefaction, and then 
 murders her in its dire sleep, is not excused by the 
 plea of her insensibility and her murder, although 
 these have taken away from the person all conscious- 
 ness of pain and injury. The offence is aggravated 
 by both operations. The reason is that the viola- 
 tion, the drugging, and the murder, are all real ; 
 first for the dead ; second for the violationist ; and 
 third for society, which is violated thrice in the pro- 
 cess. And if all the human race were automatons 
 excepting one scientific man, and he by special reve- 
 lation from his selfhood knew such to be the fact, and 
 if he cut up his pseudo fellow-creatures to peruse 
 their insides, he would be a demon from his own 
 delights of sight and sound and touch, though pain 
 were unknown in the universe ; because to feed on 
 the forms of pain artificially engendered, is mentally 
 devilish, and also has the substance of pain in its lust. 
 This subject, namely, the nature of cruelty, and 
 its co-ordination with all forms of disrespect, inde- 
 cency, violation, and abomination, was until lately 
 an easy matter to understand ; but the vampire 
 schools of philosophy and practice have so confused 
 it, that a plain man, even a churchman, hardly 
 knows now what cruelty means. A gallows - 
 catechism is needed to bring back the subject to its 
 rights. And this will show, that the violation of 
 the forms of life, as forms, is heinous wickedness. 
 That it destroys human society, which from the 
 basis is founded upon forms. That desecration of 
 living forms touches every breach of nature and love. 
 That'^it is inhabited by the spirits of destruction, 
 and especially by destruction of the image of God 
 in man. This is attested in human life by analogous 
 examples, in which the pain of the subject mal- 
 
588 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE, 
 
 treated has nothing to do with the case : it is the 
 mind of the destroyer which is alone in question. 
 A man desecrates a church, tears or abuses a Bible, 
 dishonours the form of a departed wife, defiles the 
 name of a dead friend, mocks an infant's voice; 
 profanes childhood by turning its wonderland into 
 ridicule, or breaks the purpose and mind of litera- 
 ture into idle words for a pastime ; these are his 
 victims ; but they are beyond his immediate power 
 to pain ; and yet he pollutes, defiles, violates, and 
 IS cruel ; because in each case the form is sacred, and 
 carries the heart and virtue of a life in it. And so 
 he who violates forms dear to life, and dear to the 
 best honours of society, violates substances, and 
 descends the stair which leads by steps with many 
 names from common cruelty to abomination. And 
 because forms as forms are of the heart of the world, 
 and in their places collectively are the creation, so 
 the ApoUyon and abominator of forms is in very 
 definition a miscreant ; and if he acts on a law, he is 
 a miscreant of intellect ; and if he is restricted and 
 licensed by Parliament, he is a miscreant of institu- 
 tion in a government-factory of miscreants. 
 
 Violations of form torture society, which is a sign 
 of their intimate wrong. There are at this moment 
 m England myriads of men and women whose nights 
 and days are embittered by the cruelties of the 
 scientists ; no anaesthetic plea can calm them ; from 
 the royal lady downward they are wakeful under the 
 horror. The abominators of form are therefore 
 social torturers on a large scale ; just as the vacci- 
 nationist government profoundly tortures all fathers 
 and mothers who disapprove of vaccination, but are 
 forced to submit to it ;— tortures both their affections 
 and their consciences. In this fact, as on a broad 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE, 589 
 
 canvas illuminated by healthy natural affection, you 
 read the nature of the deeds that are done on uncon- 
 scious infants and insentient beasts. 
 
 Do not quail here before any sneers at good affec- 
 tions as the most powerful of arguments. Some men 
 try to resolve the affections into silliness of softness, 
 and to transact an existence without them ; whereas 
 they are the full beating arteries of love hard with 
 the blood of life, and running with the true genius of 
 
 legislation. 
 
 It may here be remarked, that all animals stand 
 under Christ's shield of protection from cruelty : a 
 humane man will no more torture a rattlesnake or a 
 scorpion or a rat than a horse or a cow or an elephant; 
 the evil, being in the man, the quality would be the 
 same : right of extinction has in no case any com- 
 merce with right of torture. A scorpion as a form of 
 life is sacred, — against violation or torture : as an 
 evil beast it is amenable to instantaneous execution. 
 These are clear principles, — if the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment could understand them. 
 
 In finally quitting this subject, and praying for 
 militant light on it, the reader is invited to re- 
 member, that form is the vessel which contains the 
 lives and represents the truths of the creation ; that 
 it is the substance and fact of intellect ; and that 
 through memory it is the image and likeness that 
 affecti'on places for every creature in the mental 
 chambers. To see the import of this, form must be 
 studied in the light of the Doctrine of Corres- 
 pondences as given from Swedenborg in these pages ; 
 a doctrine and a consideration omitted at present 
 from the physiological mind. It will be found that 
 this doctrine is again a practical one ; nay, is a con- 
 science-policeman in its power of arresting profaners 
 
590 THE SACREDNESS OF FORMS OF LIFE. 
 and violators who say they are doing no harm 
 because they have drugged their victims The 
 torturers of lambs are torturers of innocence, because 
 of what they do to the/om. The torturers of any 
 form of life torture the life. In this they are not 
 only abommators of form, but haters of nature ; and 
 the violationist school is misozoic, life-hating • in 
 contmuation of that which it also is, mimnthrolic or 
 an enemy of mankind. ' 
 
 Can the gentle reader expect grapes from these 
 thorns, and figs from these thistles : sciences of heal- 
 mg, understanding of man and nature, wisdom for 
 the private home and the body of society, welling 
 from these springs? Then is the sun of human lovf 
 sackcloth b ack as hair," and to be taken no account 
 ot in the day s works of men. 
 
 Finally, for any Christians who have been thouffht- 
 kss partakers in the abominations and atheilmS 
 mentioned m this book, the time for sharp separation 
 from these things has come ; Judgment in events is 
 about to commence ; and men will know henceforth 
 and are bound to know, that the Forms of Life are 
 the seals of the whole creation ; and that those who 
 ot settled purpose, on pretences, break them open to 
 enjoy hidden mysteries, are violators not only of the 
 works but of the Word of the Almighty 
 
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