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as to its clearness. As the manna denotes, therefore, the good of truth, or those interior affections which are awakened and sustained by its teaching, so the white stone denotes truth as to its intellectual clearness and beauty; and both together the conjunction of these indispensable elements of the Christian life and character. Now it is by truth in its state of conjunction with goodness that the soul attains the new nature which distinguishes the children of God; and it is this nature which is denoted by the new name which no one could know but he who received it.

WEDLOCK.

As light and heat commingle--softly blending in each ray
To cheer and lighten pilgrims while they journey on life's way,
As truth and goodness mingle, and in acts unique combine,
So wedded souls in one harmonious life may brightly shine.

'Tis sweet to think how full of bliss true wedded souls must feel, In full communion sweet to live for one another's weal,

To help and guard each other till the storms of life be o'er,

And their rescued souls are anchor'd high on Heaven's eternal shore. J. A. T.

SWEDENBORG IN THE LAST JUDGMENT.

CHAPTER I.

"The Veil, His Flesh."-Particular judgments continual in the Church.— Swedenborg's announcement of 1750.-Man's first other-world state partakes of both heaven and hell.-Personal movement notional in the other life.—" Spiritual Diary" of the Spiritual Columbus.

AMONG the many New Church doctrines to be met with in the Pauline epistles, few are at once so significant, and yet withal so mysterious, as that wherein the early Jewish converts to Christianity are exhorted in the following words: "Having therefore, brethren, by the blood of Jesus, liberty of entrance into the Holies, which He consecrated for us as a new and living way, through the Veil (that is, His flesh), and having a Great Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart, in fulness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an

evil conscience" (Heb. x. 19-22). During some sixteen centuries the exact import of this passage was unseen by the Church, and yet, during all those years, Christianity existed, because of the very fact there stated. For connecting this passage with that other statement of Paul's, "In Him-CHRIST-dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; and ye are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. ii. 9),-connecting these passages, we find they involve the doctrine that Incarnate God, by glorifying His human while still retaining His identity, transcended all spatial limitations in virtue of putting off from Him every finiting medium, including nature, which in itself is dead; and that thus He presented Himself, thenceforth, a Divine Mediator for us as well as being ever the Primal Source of all good: Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The glorification having been plenary and of love, even to the ultimate of the infinite and unereate natural body, manhood in every degree of development could once more be raised into conscious conjunction with the Lord, through that "veil, His flesh." Perpetual pentecostal visitings became thenceforward possible for the new Christendom but, as history shews us, perpetual judgments became possible likewise.

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Individual conversion and regeneration; all social reforms; the enthusiasm of every orderly revival; the origination of all earnest religious sects; Wiclif-translations; Luther-controversies; the victory of right against might in every battle for principle, all these connect themselves with divine judgments upon what is of man alone; with new quickening in as far as they are of the Lord. Angelhood had received the good "through the veil, His flesh," and had transmitted the boon to man, the object of angelic care: truth from the same source had also been dispensed; it had been felt as a power rather than as an abstraction, and falsehood had shrunk at its approach.

Now, in as far as mercy is concerned, the Divine cause of benefaction in these things is readily acknowledged, and God is made the object of thanksgiving. Not so, however, when the effects of judgment alone are felt. Grief without resignation is much more frequent than the tears of trustful sorrow. Hence national or individual decay-a certain limit of degradation having been reached-would be immensely accelerated, did not new outpourings of divine life ensue to arrest spiritual decay. Such judgments, particular and societarian, have been common to early, medieval and modern Christianity; and, in some

instances, the commotion has embraced a whole continent, as in the Reformation movement. In others, there has been a lull as if of death, and only a few men of the herioc John Milton stamp could mark the mysterious stillness and not despair. But the Divine love never sleeps:

"Thou, O Spirit, prompt to save,

Wilt brood upon the shrouded grave

While wrapt in night Thy offspring sleeps;
As o'er her infant's midnight bed,

With bosomed breath and silent tread,

Her secret watch the mother keeps."

A ripening purpose at length unfolds itself; a Divine idea is again recognised at the bottom of appearances. Where the tide of religious life runs high and society stands earnest and expectant-then there is co-operation with Heaven; there is rapid social progress; the discovery of truth is frequent and literature ceases to be aspirationless and of the merely arithmetical understanding. If, on the other hand, the world becomes indifferent to religious things; invites not the Divine presence; keeps its gaze earthwards, then judgment vastates: spiritual stagnation ensnes; apathy breeds corruption, and this in turn, death. In the middle of the last century, the latter was mainly the case with Christendom.

It was then-in the year 1750-that a strange quarto pamphlet appeared in London. It contained a number of so-called "heavenly secrets" connected with the 17th chapter of Genesis, and also a curious supplement treating of a "last judgment." No author's name was given, but there were a few who knew that the work was by a learned foreigner, Swedenborg, and that it formed a portion of the second volume of his Arcana Coelestia. The printer, John Lewis, had issued a prospectus, in which he assured the public that Swedenborg, in this work, had struck out a new path through the deep abyss of biblical disquisition; while leaving all the commentators and expositors to stand on their own footing unmeddled with, "the Author," said he, "has a depth, which, if once fathomed (and it is not unfathomable) will yield the noblest repast to a pious mind. But if any one imagines that I say this to puff a book, in the sale of which my interest is so nearly concerned, any gentleman is welcome to peruse it at my shop, and to purchase it or not, as his own judgment shall direct him." He further informs us that the first volume cost Swedenborg £200 for publication; that he had also advanced £200 more for

printing this second volume, and had given orders that all the money that should arise in the sale of this large work should be given towards the charge of the propagation of the Gospel. "He is so far" said Lewis, "from desiring to make a gain of his labours, that he will not receive one farthing back of the £400 he has expended; and for that reason his works will come exceedingly cheap to the public." Happy missionary, undreaming of "terms before going out!"

When this pamphlet appeared, other missionaries were out: men dowered with the faculty for earnest work. The consequence had been the inauguration of a great revival movement in certain parts of Great Britain. George Whitfield and Ralph Erskine had for some time wrought zealously in opposition, and this year met each other for the last time. John Wesley and an earnest band of helpers had also been doing well. Lady Huntingdon had succeeded in carrying some faint echoes of the new tidings into the very court of royalty itself. Whitfield had become her chaplain two years before, and such leaders of thought as Hume, Chesterfield, and Bolingbroke, were at times to be now found among his hearers.

Into this religious commotion, as yet resting localized upon a few spots only, of a body elsewhere unsensible to aught higher than corporeal things, Swedenborg sought in his usual quiet way to introduce the light of spiritual truth, and show men what that new power was which now foreshadowed a last judgment, and a consequent new dispensation. He besought those in the love of the neighbour from love to the Lord to enter now intellectually into the things of faith, assuring them that by such marriage union of heart and mind, the Word might be spiritually understood, angelic consociation become possible, and the New Jerusalem realised upon earth. It was a call to confidence, to reflexion, to spontaneousness. The sound fell almost unnoticed amid the thought-paralyzing din of revivalism's "turn-orburn" terrorism. For men were working by the intimidations of fear rather than by the attractiveness of good: their earnestness was intense but unreasoning: it discoursed little of that "perfect love which casteth out fear." The object of men's worship appeared to. them as a divided Godhead, thus aspiration was baffled and reason deceived. The Icelander tells us he sometimes sees nine suns at once in the winter sky, but that altogether they yield not so much warmth. as the one true sun of summer, which one, indeed, the wintry oppos ing media thus distort into a multiplied, deceiving appearance.

Swedenborg, without any attempt at persuasion, otherwise than by

truth's own native force, told in this pamphlet, that the world of spirits had at length become full of evil genii and wicked spirits, principally from Christendom; that hate, revenge, cruelties, obscenities, and fraudulent deceits chiefly prevailed amongst them; that this was the case not only with the outer sphere of that world, but also, in part, with the interior sphere, which had now become the haunt of rascaldom to such a degree that persons just entering that world were straightway beset and infested-nay, what was still worse,-the very spirits who were consociated with man in our own world, were also influenced to such an extent that the free determination and stability of human society itself had become affected for the worse. Civilization was endangered, and when evil thus preponderates over the good, the last time of the Church is near. Equilibrium had to be restored by the rejection of intruders and the reception of others not yet within. Every good flowing from the Lord through Heaven into the world of spirits was there, he tells us, instantly changed into the evil, the obscene, the profane. Christendom could but receive as the spirit-world transmitted; thus with the one as with the other, the true was turned into the false; mutual love into hatred; sincerity into hypocrisy. He showed that many so-called Christian spirits had fallen into a sensuality of thought, crass as that of the olden Jews; they argued about the twelve thrones of Israel just as did the unenlightened sons of Zebedee: while, worse still, Cagliostrianism had now gained such an ascendency, that hypocrites at times succeeded in insinuating themselves into the nearest celestial societies (A. C. 2121-2132).

Diseased society tends to this and is made worse and worse by it. The solidarity of human life in all worlds, spiritual and natural, is a reality, because of that sphere of Divine good which infils the universal heaven, and even extends itself into hell (A. C. 10,188). What is it then which gives the world of spirits its peculiar character?

The planes of those mental states

When a man knows that the kingdom of heaven or of hell is within him, he has little difficulty in realizing to himself the fact that his place in heaven or in hell must be determined by his mental states, for these are the forms of his love. are as little in this world as man's physical frame is in the spiritual world. Thus, in an age of religious indifference resting not upon absolute denial, but rather upon sheer lethargy of soul, heart-heedlessness as to Divine things, irrational and thence stupifying creedism— what a shapeless mass of mixed motives, indeterminate half-wants and half-aims, go towards the composition of a man's inner nature! To

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