l 
 
GIFT OF 
 Mrs. S. Einarsson 
 
THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 AND THE OLD JERUSALEM 
 
" 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 
 worship with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel 
 be the third with Egypt and ivith Assyria, a blessing 
 in the midst of the earth : for that the Lord of hosts 
 hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, 
 and Assyria the work of' my hands, and Israel mine 
 
 inheritance? 
 
 ISAIAH xix. 23-25. 
 
THE NEW J ERUSALEM 
 
 AND 
 
 THE OLD JERUSALEM 
 
 The Place and Service of the 
 Jewish Church among the 
 of Revelation 
 
 WITH OTHER ESSAYS' ,''', 
 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY 
 
 JAMES SPEIRS 
 
 36 BLOOMSBURV STREET, LONDON 
 
 1894 
 
\vs 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DEDICATION, . . . . . . ix 
 
 INTRODUCTION, .... xi 
 
 I. THE STRENGTH OF THE JEWS, . i 
 
 II. THE PATIENCE OF THE JEWS, . 4 
 
 III. THE JEWS AND THE OLD TESTAMENT,- : 5 
 
 IV. JUDAISM AND THE INCARNATION, . . 6 
 V. WHY THIS PLANET WAS THE ' PLACE OT 
 
 CHRIST'S REDEMPTIVE COMBATS, . . 8 
 
 VI. THE FIRST ADVENT, . . 9 
 
 VII. IMPLICIT ACCEPTANCE OF THE WORD DE- 
 MANDED, . . . . .11 
 VIII. FALSITIES CAST OUT AND TRUTHS IMPLANTED, 13 
 IX. THE VIRGIN MARY, . . . .14 
 X. THE MOTHER OF JESUS, . . .18 
 XI. MARY BECOMES A DIVINE SYMBOL AS JOHN 
 
 AND THE DISCIPLES WERE, . . 2O 
 
 XII. CHARACTER, NOT BLOOD-RELATIONSHIP, LIVES 
 
 AND CONSOCIATES AFTER DEATH, . .22 
 
 XIII. THE REPRESENTATION OF A CHURCH BY THE 
 
 JEWS, . . . .24 
 
 XIV. How A REPRESENTATIVE CAN ASCEND, . 27 
 XV. THE JEWISH CHARACTER WAS NOT ALTERED 
 
 BUT MADE REPRESENTATIVE, . .29 
 
 XV. SIGNS PRECEDING JUDAISM, . . -33 
 
 XVI. THE WORD VINDICATED, . . 38 
 
 XVII. HUMAN NATURE NEEDS A REVELATION, . 42 
 
 865102 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XVIII. THE THICK DARKNESS ABOUT GOD ON 
 
 MOUNT SINAI, . . . -44 
 
 XIX. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CORRESPONDENCE, 45 
 
 XX. JEWISH FREEDOM AND BONDAGE, . 48 
 
 XXI. SAUL AND SAMUEL, . . 51 
 
 XXII. IMPOSSIBILITIES WERE NOT ASKED OF THE 
 
 JEWS, . -55 
 
 XXIII. INERADICABLE POLYGAMY, JEWISH AND 
 
 MAHOMETAN, . . . -57 
 
 XXIV. THE JEWISH DRAMA BECAME MORE AND 
 
 ^MORE INEFFECTIVE, . . -59 
 
 , .XX VJ NW REVELATIONS, . . .61 
 
 'X)tVl'. JHC ^MEDIUMSHIP OF DAVID AND THE 
 \\ <"; Ui t4 /.\BRPHETS, . . . .62 
 
 XXVII. THE IMMANENCE OF JEHOVAH IN THE 
 
 MOSAIC DISPENSATION, . . 65 
 
 XXVIII. THE MESSIANIC PROMISES, . . 70 
 
 XXIX. THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM 
 
 CANAAN, . . . 76 
 
 XXX. A CHURCH MUST EXIST ON EARTH, . 79 
 
 XXXI. THE WORD, THE CONJOINING MEDIUM, . 82 
 
 XXXII. THE DIVINE VALUE OF THE LETTER, . 86 
 
 XXXIII. THE LORD'S PRAYER, . . .89 
 
 XXXIV. GOODNESS AND TRUTH ARE THE Two 
 
 SIDES OF THE WORD, . . .94 
 
 XXXV. THE KEEPING OF THE JEWS FULFILS 
 
 PROPHECY, . . . .96 
 
 XXXVI. THE FOOD OF THE JEWS DIVINELY OR- 
 DAINED AND LIMITED, . . 99 
 XXXVII. THE RESTORATION OF THE JEWS, . 103 
 XXXVIII. THE FUTURE OF THE JEWS, . . 105 
 XXXIX. INSTANCES OF CORRESPONDENCES, . no 
 XL. THE DIVINE NATURAL, . . .129 
 
CONTENTS. vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XLI. THE CANON OF THE WORD, . .141 
 
 XLII. THE FOUR GOSPELS, . . . 142 
 
 XLIII. MARY MAGDALENE, . . .169 
 
 XLIV. RESIST NOT THE EVIL ONE, . . 171 
 
 XLV. ESTIMATES OF THE BIBLE, . .176 
 
 XLVI. ETHNOLOGY, . . . .183 
 
 XLVII. ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE MONUMENTS, . 184 
 
 XLVIII. THE BODY OF MAN, . . .199 
 
 XLIX. THE WELLS OF ABRAHAM, . .211 
 
 L. PERSONAL IDENTITY, . . .228 
 
 LI. THE CHANCES AND LIKELIHOODS OF 
 
 SCIENCE, .... 233 
 
 LII. SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM, . .241 
 
 LIII. THE FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS BY 
 
 INSECTS, .... 246 
 
 LIV. DARWINISM CARRIED OUT, . . 253 
 
 LV. SUN WORSHIP, . . . . 257 
 
 LVI. THE HUMANE SUN, . . . 262 
 
 LVII. SPACES AND NUMBERS IN THE WORD, . 266 
 
 LVIII. THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND THE EARTHLY 
 
 BODY, ..... 269 
 
 LIX. A PIECE OF MORAL PHYSIOLOGY, . 274 
 
 LX. BREATH, . . . . .276 
 
 LXI. ASSYRIAN REASONINGS, . . -277 
 
 LXII. HEREDITIES, .... 282 
 
 LXIII. DREAMS AND VISIONS, . . . 286 
 
 LXIV. THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM, . .291 
 
 LXV. FUTURITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY, . 298 
 
 LXVI. BEGINNINGS, .... 300 
 
 LXVII. SPIRITUAL RULERS, . . . 304 
 
 LXVIII. GOLD AS SOCIAL SUBSTANCE, . . 305 
 
 LXIX. THE DIVINE CYCLE, . . . 307 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 To JAMES SPILLING, ESQ. 
 
 DEAR MR. SPILLING, 
 
 I desire to inscribe to you the following 
 pages because of the help and delight that I find in 
 your Works. Peaceful and astir with life, doctrinal and 
 not controversial, authoritative and humble, reverent and 
 witty, they are warm with interests which the world little 
 knows to exist in the opened Word of God. Your modest 
 narratives burn and shine with its spiritual fire. And as Sagas 
 of East Anglian Family Life they abound in touching episodes 
 of the love and brotherhood which make true homes. Those 
 who have lived with you AMID THE CORN and AMONG THE 
 FLOWERS see how heaven in these sanctuaries prepares its 
 transcendent and unspeakable dramas. In the lively pages 
 of ME AND MINE, you enter the human form and its ancient 
 realm by the Bible gate, and converse with its organs,, 
 seerwise, as their ministries are uplifted by Revelation : as 
 the Rev. John Worcester in his PHYSIOLOGICAL CORRES- 
 
x DEDICATION. 
 
 PONDENCES travels through the peoples of the same organs in 
 their provinces in the spiritual world. 
 
 In inaugurating so profoundly novel a literature adequate 
 to these times, you are carrying the bread of the New Reli- 
 gion to every land where the English Language is spoken. 
 And those who know you already will devoutly pray that 
 your office may be greater and greater, and extend your 
 genial hand to all the nations of the earth. With heartfelt 
 sympathy, yours, 
 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON. 
 
 June 2, 1894. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE Christian world looks at the Old Bible through the 
 New Testament, and is increasingly unable to do justice to 
 the Jewish Dispensation as a Covenant of Jehovah with a 
 peculiar people. Our purpose in this book is to show that 
 both the Jewish and Christian Churches stand at this day 
 under the light of a higher Revelation, into which it is neces- 
 sary to enter, in order that the Word of God may be vindi- 
 cated, and be seen and rationally acknowledged to be such : 
 that both the Old and the New Testaments contain a divine 
 sense, the admission and comprehension of which gives the 
 Church of Christ a new understanding and a new life. Its 
 first epoch, founded upon the mission and forthgoing of 
 disciples and apostles, is terminated, and though there be no 
 apparent pause in history, its end has come. The epoch 
 which is its successor is founded upon an inward mission 
 from the natural to the spiritual man. Let us now consider 
 the evidences of the new divine beginning, and then of the 
 human end. 
 
 Nation rises against nation, and kingdom against kingdom 
 in the last days of the ^Eon or Church ; but this has been the 
 case along the line of history; so that, looking from the outside 
 or letter, we may say that the last days of the present epoch 
 began with its beginning, and are in consummation only now. 
 
xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Christ was born of a Jewess, and made His Humanity divine 
 by putting off His motherhood and putting on His Father- 
 hood. Christianity was born of Judaism, and could not 
 put the nature of the world's senility aside. 
 
 But now by miracle of judgment and providence a religion 
 is inaugurated which can be redeemed from its origin, and 
 the Lord, and not Judea, will be the Father of it, the Father 
 in the heavens. And its Church will not pass away. 
 
 We have dwelt in the following pages on the divine and 
 positive signs of the End, which are, first, the Second 
 Coming of the Lord, in a doctrinal revelation to the highest 
 reason of faith, and to the series of sciences internal in the 
 soul of man. This embraces a divine assurance from the 
 whole Word that He is God, and that whoso seeth, that is, 
 understandeth Him, seeth the Father, The second sign of 
 the End is, that the spiritual Word is now added to the 
 natural Word ; and the spiritual sense is again the Second 
 Advent. The clouds of heaven are opened, and the glory of 
 the Lord is revealed. The third sign is that the spiritual 
 world is made known to mankind : that the Last Judgment 
 on the first Christian Church has been witnessed and is 
 testified to ; that the first heaven and the first earth have 
 passed away, and their sea is no more : also that the first 
 resurrection has taken place, and the new heaven and the 
 new earth have been visioned from the Patmos of celestial 
 charity, by John, now Emanuel. A fourth sign of the End 
 is, that the veil of the mind's Old Temple is rent in twain 
 from the top to the bottom ; and that Freedom and Ration- 
 ality in quite new measure are given away by the Redeemer 
 to all mankind. He maketh His Sun, the Spiritual Sun, 
 whose heat is love, and its light wisdom, to shine upon all, 
 the evil as well as the good ; and faculties and powers unknown 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 come forth into day from the new liberty of will on the new 
 orb of intellect. These signs are mere powers until they are 
 housed in a New Church. Yet they are testimonies the like 
 of which no previous religion has had on the human side ; 
 for Christ is the Lord God Himself, and not a religion. 
 
 The negative testimonies to the consummation of the ^Eon 
 are manifold. The Church is in almost undisputed posses- 
 sion of the world, and the world is uninfluenced by it so that 
 the coming of the kingdom of God on earth is no aspiration 
 of ecclesiastics, though it lies concealed in the heart of lay 
 populations. The old theological ages might be geological 
 in length, and no clerical expectation would arise that human 
 nature can be changed or regenerated. The Atonement, 
 promising salvation on loose terms, is chargeable with this 
 breadth of death. 
 
 Note here that a single ruling falsity when a man persuades 
 himself that it is a truth, so hinders the intellectual sight in 
 that respect as to make revelation against the falsity impos- 
 sible. The victim to such confirmation is spiritually blind. 
 Such a falsity it is that Christ by the passion of the cross 
 paid the penalty of the world's sins to the Father ; and that 
 faith in this transaction alters the final divine judgment on 
 good and evil, right and wrong. A physical illustration of 
 this fact, that one obstinately false position destroys a realm 
 of truths, is furnished by those who still insist that the 
 earth is the centre of the solar system. For them astronomy 
 does not exist, excepting as so much raw sensuality. The 
 dogma of the Churches concerning the Cross has been attacked 
 from the side of irreligion ; and is easily convicted of 
 absurdity. The strong faith in it is the Red Dragon of the 
 Apocalypse. Swedenborg in his commission has conquered 
 this monster for us if we will, by revealing the true doctrine 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of the Incarnation, and teaching what it did for mankind, 
 and what it enables every religious man to do for himself. 
 
 But without characterizing false dogmas further one by one, 
 it may better be said broadly that the Old Christianity of the 
 Churches and Sects is worn out. Its past literature is a 
 dead sea, like that very sea that is no more. Full of excel- 
 lent writings by good Churchmen, it succumbs to the fate of 
 its time, and is in liquidation or consummation. The Human 
 Will and Intellect, bankrupt by the all-pervading Atonement, 
 in mercy will depart from its ways and thoughts, and must 
 live in new adventures. 
 
 For now, looking at the case in a secular way, everything 
 that literature and learning could do has been expended 
 upon the elements and materials of this same old Christianity. 
 No new lights come to it from age to age. Nothing new can 
 be written on the letter of Scripture, the only Scripture that 
 is believed in. No new statement of dogmas is to be 
 expected. Those of orthodoxy are clearly defined, and are 
 altered by no disputation. They are plainly the only flesh 
 and bone of the Church, but have no testimony in the Bible. 
 
 The .dissenting sects live in the same dogmas, only that 
 with them these are not endorsed in thirty-nine articles. For 
 that reason they are held more individually, and with some 
 choice as to those which each mind prefers. But Dissent has 
 nothing further to say about its creed, and cannot hope to 
 add fresh confirmations to the literature and preaching it has 
 already given forth. 
 
 The same may be said of Unitarianism. Its negative 
 attitude to the Deity of Christ, modified by some belief in 
 His Divinity, is a reasoned and settled produce of history, and 
 its career as a fixed creed is made. The religion of it is 
 good morality. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 Thus the religious bodies have said their say, and for 
 the most part abide in it. The place which the result 
 occupies in their several brains is definite, and the influence 
 established. 
 
 Among the orthodox, faith dominates reason, though not 
 averse to welcome reasonings or likelihoods in favour of its 
 dogmas. 
 
 There are, however, many protests against this core of 
 fixed opinions. There are latitudinarians who think for 
 themselves, and believe that their own minds are adequate 
 to discern what is necessary to the formation of true opinions. 
 Though they are free here, nothing original comes of it, and 
 nothing impartible. There are Theists to whom the same 
 remark applies. There are the people of the inner light 
 accredited with the Holy Spirit, but no outer light unknown 
 before comes of it. 
 
 There are the many-handed learned men who work at the 
 " higher criticism," and vivisect the Bible to find out how and 
 by whom it was made and put together. They establish for 
 themselves that it is a patchwork of great and little fragments 
 unscientifically pieced into one, and they are busy, and will 
 be busy, in fitting the parts and members of their puzzle by 
 another order into their proper places. Whatever novelty 
 they attain will belong to themselves, and excite little interest 
 in the minds of religious conservators. 
 
 Then there are the anti-supernaturalists, who love the 
 " grand old book," but see at a glance that it is spoilt by 
 myths, superstitions and fables ; by spiritual pretences and 
 delusions ; by visions, prophecies, and miracles. These 
 vitals they pluck out and cast away, to make the Bible toler- 
 able and reasonable. There is no new universal endowment 
 in casting out of the mind what your temperament dislikes. 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Absence of novelty is our salient point here ; though mere 
 novelty has no claims. Strictly speaking there is nothing 
 novel in religion from the first. From Adam to Swedenborg 
 dispensation after dispensation is nothing but love to God 
 and love to man proclaimed in each ^on with a different 
 fresh authority. But the novelty comes in where this awful 
 identity declares itself, and it is nothing less over the present 
 mankind than their new behaviour commanded for a new 
 heaven and a new earth. 
 
 Now where the same dry dead study in Church and Church, 
 in Sect and Sect, in Freethinking and Criticism, in Theism 
 and Atheism, leaves everything the same at the end of the 
 day's work, the question we respectfully put to the several 
 bodies and individuals mentioned, with exception of the 
 Atheists, but most especially to our own National Church, is, 
 how religious vitality can be kept when this fatiguing want of 
 results is so manifest, and when no hope is shown anywhere 
 of spiritual refreshment ? Being under Christ, we are tinder 
 the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Way in Him involves 
 progress of our will to walk in it, willing the walk day by 
 day ; truth from Him is divine original guidance into newness 
 of heart ; life is action such as cannot be anticipated or 
 dreamed of, in careers which He alone opens in the genius 
 of the day's works. 
 
 There is none of this progress in the Church, and owing 
 to its dogma of salvation by faith alone, there is no felt need 
 of change of heart. Human nature is unregenerate, and is 
 not summoned by the Church to confess to any need of re- 
 generation, which is the only new thing that can come to man. 
 
 The Church is busied in its rituals as the Jews were in 
 theirs, but without the Jewish authority. It sends missions 
 to the ends of the earth, dogmatic missions to races incap- 
 
INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 able of dogmas. Its good work prints Bibles in all languages, 
 which will be stores for a future time. But its own mind 
 is such that it cannot open these Scriptures. So here its 
 way comes literally to an end. 
 
 The Church is a useful almoner to the poor and needy, 
 a minister to the sick ; and benignantly associated with birth 
 and death and wedlock. I reverence it as a visible testi- 
 mony of this nation to Christ's religion, and as the keeper of 
 great traditions. But what it lacks is religious movement, as 
 totally distinct from social movement. The one is inward, 
 the other is outward. The letter of the Word now pleaded 
 as the Word of God cannot furnish religious movement. The 
 Word must descend from heaven into the mind to give new 
 conditions to human nature ; and the Word in heaven is the 
 Word which alone can come down from heaven. It is the 
 Sun of Life. The natural sense of itself is the same every 
 day, with outward variation according to the state of the 
 reader. But, unless through knowledge, it never reaches the 
 spiritual degree. The spiritual sense, when it is attained in 
 a clean life, is never the same ; but each text fills the reverent 
 mind, and communicates, as we now know by revelation, 
 with heaven after heaven, with one spiritual society and with 
 another. And the more societies it communicates with, the 
 more ample are the descending love and wisdom that dissi- 
 pate the letter, and stand as the Word freshly spoken through 
 the heavens by the Lord. 
 
 In talking of Newness, my dear Vicar, this is what I am 
 aiming at. It seems that with such a fountain of living 
 waters, the better side of the world would be gained to your 
 ecclesia. If, as I believe, you, and other large bodies, 
 according to the rule of bonus textuarius bonus theologus, 
 have said and done all that is possible about the letter, what 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 remains is that you walk to Emmaus with Him who opens 
 eyes to understand the Scripture, whether in Moses, the 
 Prophets, or the Psalms; and that you also continue the Way, 
 Truth and Life, through His Commissioner, Swedenhorg, in 
 an onward course through the Four Gospels and the Apoca- 
 lypse. It is not an easy course for an Old Churchman ; but 
 it is better than undeserved sleep. Like the Master, you 
 must go down into Egypt, but with the young child in you, 
 and remain there with him until your ruling Herod is no more. 
 
 In their present case, religious bodies are, in any higher 
 sense than takes note of useful mundane institutions, mainly 
 dull and uninteresting. We appreciate the good they do in 
 parishing and public service, but when they stand by death- 
 beds and graves, and we would fain have light from them 
 about the life after death, and the reception of the parting 
 soul, then they are identified with the dead body, and human 
 interest is affronted. They are a case of what Professor 
 Sayce calls the 'single instance' ; for the Letter of the Word 
 is such. Without the spirit it is dead and undivine, an un- 
 checked lower house voting heresies. And the spirit of man 
 sleeps in it as in the grave. The Church herself puts in the 
 earth or dust that stops up the Wells of the Waters of Abraham. 
 Ashes to ashes express sadly the dogma of dead resurrection. 
 
 It will be allowed by all public men, and eagerly endorsed 
 by all private, that the first duty of prophets, teachers, 
 churches, is to gain the ears of flocks by awakening interest 
 in the subjects of discourse, and by making even rituals living; 
 and this can only be done by the wallet of priest and 
 preacher containing things new and old ; the new being 
 apparent, and giving young life to the old. And for clergy 
 themselves, the new doctrinal and then spiritual life per- 
 petually imparted to them first, is the most important of all, 
 
INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 inasmuch as it eliminates monotony from their laborious lives, 
 and makes every reading of the Word affecting from the 
 inner love and light in it. The clergy are also companion 
 friends to the tenderest affections of home. Every christening 
 is a new Name in it. Every marriage is an aspiration to 
 the marriage in heaven, where the bride and bridegroom of 
 this altar are " no more twain but one flesh." Every good 
 deathbed and funeral day is a declaration through sacred 
 sorrow of a present or future heaven. 
 
 Throughout life, the whole mind of the laity has to be 
 touched by the clergy with spiritual fire from the living Word : 
 and truth must be insisted upon as truth only when it is 
 applied to life and obeyed in conduct, or in other profound 
 words, made good. That is the conjunction of truth with 
 good in the character, and this conjunction is in each 
 instance a piece of regeneration. To have done what you 
 know you ought in the sight of God is the plain English of it. 
 
 It is easy to foresee immeasurable results from Archbishops, 
 Bishops, Priests and Deacons devout to the living Word, and 
 expounding it to willing Congregations ; and Congregations 
 in plenty would be willing enough. For the transmutation 
 of the letter of the Word into the spirit is a perpetual miracle ; 
 a supernatural delight to heart and mind. The letter must 
 die before the change can take place. At its deathbed you 
 stand and watch its complete resurrection. And the form of 
 the spirit was inconceivable before it was revealed to you. 
 Here is perpetual newness indeed. The life after death is 
 suggestively opened in every verse. 
 
 But now let me chronicle another negative testimony to the 
 End of the ^Eon. Science is dead in it. It is spacious as 
 astronomy can make it, and timelong as the avenues of 
 history. It is active and aspiring, and aims to school both 
 
xx INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the world and the Church. But it is now mere Matter, and 
 the froward newspapers and records of that potentate. God 
 has disappeared out of it, and science has no conscience. 
 The living God inhabits the living mind : the dead mind is 
 the mind self-moved, as it were in the Lucretian right lines 
 of its own wilful atoms. The drifts of such death are 
 vivacious and masterful. 
 
 But how should science recognize God ? How can it do 
 this ? Rather, how can it help doing it so ? Things were 
 not always thus, but the night of science has come on by 
 degrees, and we are in its midnight now. The highest 
 ground for science is man : he is its " proper study " : and 
 therefore it cannot pass over or escape the Human Form. 
 But this form contains the mind organic within it, the spirit 
 of the mind which is the man ; and the immortal soul. If 
 no God is discerned here, science about the body is dead, 
 and function is without a purpose. Science is then the 
 negation of everything but its own self-love and self-glorifica- 
 tion. A sign of the end. 
 
 There is however a positive sign answering to this nega- 
 tive, and again confirming the End of the ^Eon. The 
 Human Form is the rock on which the New Dispensation 
 stands. It is a divine form, and our personality is in the 
 image and likeness of God. How then should it be possible 
 to banish Him from proper science when every fact and fibre 
 in the creation of man tells of Him. This line of things 
 has been abundantly treated of in the following pages. 
 
 And if Man, the Human Form, has God in a manner 
 visible in him, every other form in nature, suns and systems, 
 night and day, and all that is, lives and moves on our planet, 
 is known only through this human form, its twain eyes, 
 and double senses. It is part and property of these ministers. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxi 
 
 Thus it is an appanage to a true theology, an image-and- 
 likeness theology down to the very sand, and is a permitted 
 science about God. And it is studied not only at the peril of 
 science, but to its destruction, if God be left out. For every- 
 thing streams from Him, represents and corresponds to Him.. 
 And in it His divine form and our human form can meet and 
 commune for our deepest knowledge. That is why Anatomy 
 and Physiology as speaking hieroglyphs will become texts, 
 to future generations in the New Jerusalem. 
 
 In concluding we may hope and pray that the early miracles 
 of conversion may be repeated in all our Churches and 
 Chapels for the high truths now revealed by the Lord, the 
 Redeemer. The troublous times assist the humiliation which 
 is necessary to this end. For religion cannot die without 
 leaving a gap which is instantly filled in a world of wilful 
 pressures. The bodily love of dominion in politics, the 
 prince now of the powers of the air, enters the vacant space. 
 In its unclean heat Church and Dissent alike lose their best 
 characteristics, and hate each other, and this is mutual des- 
 truction. To keep the higher plane undestroyed, let them 
 apply themselves mutually to the spiritual sense of the 
 Word. This English nation of which Swedenborg speaks as 
 being of different genius from the other nations in Europe, 
 and also as being in the centre of all Christians, can be inter- 
 ested by its betters in the openings and progressions of 
 truth now afforded ; especially as one characteristic of our 
 nation, which accounts for its state is, that we are easily 
 guided by those above us in name and station, and follow 
 their lead. How easily then might our blind eyes be opened 
 by clergy and ministers who themselves have made humble 
 submission to spiritual truth, and who openly consent to be 
 taught by the Lord Jesus. 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 One passage respecting our people seems to have lessons 
 for godly Conservatism at the present hour. 
 
 " The best of the English nation are in the centre of all 
 Christians, because they have interior intellectual light. 
 This comes from their freedom of thinking, and of speaking 
 and writing. The light, however, is not of itself active, but 
 becomes so from others, especially from men of reputation 
 and authority among them. When these men say anything 
 or when anything they approve of is read, that light shines 
 forth ; but rarely before. On this account they have 
 leading men set over them in the spiritual world, and priests 
 renowned for learning and ability are given them, to whose 
 commands and admonitions from this their peculiar nature 
 they listen and obey " (True Christian Religion, n. 807). 
 
 It may indeed be too late to save the Church from politi- 
 cal extinction. But her very distress then will be a divine 
 agent for what is to come, for resurrection and recovery. 
 For when she is in the doctrines called the Holy City, public 
 excitement will crouch before her, and the crusade in each 
 man and woman against the interior evils and vices of life 
 will settle, almost offhand, problems that have no solution now. 
 With no loss of population, another race of people will be 
 here. Wisdom and its will shall be born again. In short, 
 heaven is to begin on earth ; and the Church, instead of being 
 reformed by Convocations, is to be regenerated in its indi- 
 vidual members, and to be the mistress and inspiration of 
 all sciences, a blessing in the midst of the land. 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury in his praiseworthy zeal for 
 our Church expressed the opinion some days since that 
 "geniuses " should be enlisted in its service ; and he named 
 Peter, Paul and Gregory as examples of the persons required, 
 men of great and good rule. Of Peter we have experi- 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxiii 
 
 ence in the canonical books of the New Testament. With 
 these, Paul in his time was unacquainted. Dogmatically he 
 comes between Christ and the divine inspiration of the Four 
 Gospels and the Apocalypse, in which the Word is completed. 
 He sowed the seed of the atonement in the earliest mind of 
 Christianity ; gave forth his Apostleship as coming directly 
 from Jesus Christ and from God the Father ; and his dog- 
 mas as 'the gospel of Christ.' Of this he says, 'though 
 we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto 
 you than that which we have preached, let him be accursed. 
 For I neither received it of man, nor was I taught, but by 
 the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galat. i.). Except Peter and 
 James, he saw none of the Lord's Apostles. His inner 
 light seems identical with that of the Quakers. The Four 
 Gospels enable us to compare his theological system with 
 the revealed Word. Both Peter and Paul as personal 
 ideals and natural powers are worn out. John is he 
 who is to remain till Christ comes again. John of the 
 Apocalypse, who lay on his Lord's breast, and who is now 
 representatively in the letter of the Word the Son of Mary. 
 John represents salvation by good works, by a renewed life. 
 This life, and these works, are the Lord's giving and doing, 
 and we are His agents in reception and in deed. This is 
 the sole end and outcome of every true Church. 
 
 Whatever judgment we have passed here on learned critics 
 and theologians has no application to humble Christians, 
 and to the simple in faith. These pious Bible readers 
 receive their love of religion from heaven, and their cate- 
 chisms from the tradition of their forefathers. They are 
 founded in the good of the Word, and not intellectually 
 confirmed in current dogmas. So they belong to the souls 
 under the altar, that is, under divine protection, and they 
 
xxiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 wait to be taken into the upper light when their time comes, 
 for they are little children still, even though now in old 
 age. 
 
 For continuing the line of thought in this book, I recom- 
 mend the particular works of Swedenborg mentioned through- 
 out : also Doughty's Parable of Creation ; a clear exposition 
 of the first Chapters of Genesis : the books mentioned in my 
 Dedication : and especially to Churchmen, the works of the 
 Rev. Augustus Clissold, Paul and David, The Consummation 
 of the Age, Sancta Coena, The Divine Order of the Universe, 
 and Illustrations of the End of the Church. To those who 
 are advanced in the knowledge of the doctrines, Swedenborg 
 and the Doctrines of the New Church, by the late Rev. R. L. 
 Tafel ; a veritable mountain of light : and lastly, to all 
 who wish on easy terms to see what the Writings are, The 
 Swedenborg Concordance by the Rev. John Faulkner Potts; 
 a digest which I apprehend has no parallel, in six quarto 
 volumes, of which three are completed. All these works 
 can be supplied by my Publisher. 
 
THE NEW JERUSALEM ; 
 AND THE OLD JERUSALEM: 
 
 I.THE STRENGTH OF THE JEWS. 
 
 IN a speculative material age with many obdurate elements 
 to take account of, the Jew is a problem which interests our 
 societies from his relation to money, and through that 
 indispensable substance, to private property and its rights, 
 and to the power which the genius for amassing gold, and 
 guarding it, confers upon this exceptional race. His faculty 
 of absorbing and retaining wealth in rich and poor lands 
 alike, and, in the highest instances, of touching and stimu- 
 lating the financial affairs of states, and controlling great 
 undertakings of war and peace, is the feature by which the 
 Jew is principally known in so-called Christian Nations. It 
 is not an ideal but a real feature. It offends the dema- 
 gogue' and the Socialist in Western Countries, and the 
 Capitalist, professional man and common proprietor in 
 Russia, where also ecclesiastical rancour is awakened by the 
 worldly success and ubiquity hitherto of these inconvertible 
 primeval Antichrists. The question comes from many 
 quarters, What shall be done with the Jew? From the 
 curious and interested mind, What is the Future of the Jew ? 
 From the religionist mind, Has theology anything new to say 
 to him ? May we clear the ground for some approximate 
 answers ! 
 
 Secularly the Jews have a long future before them. They 
 understand the natural mind of man, the proprium or 
 selfhood as affecting property, better than any other race, 
 
 A 
 
2 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 and as usual their knowledge is power. They can attain 
 relative affluence in the midst of poverty, and increase 
 and multiply under the heel of persecution. They 
 are turned ' r ctut of one kingdom after another, out of 
 England' ixr the past, and now out of Russia, but the race 
 , ,,. bears local translation from Abraham downwards. Having 
 ; ,'<'; h/o'w Trio. .cVurkfy'of their own, they cannot be expatriated. 
 The Jew is not extinct or absorbed by the foreigner, but is 
 still in land after land the evident, and so far as human 
 nature permits, the complacent Jew. The Babylonish 
 captivity left the Jewish captives unaltered ; they absorbed 
 from the nations, and annexed their mentality, as they do 
 from the English to-day, but were not absorbed by them. 
 Many of them also enjoyed Mesopotamia, and settled there 
 for good. 
 
 Antisemitism is a creed with a propagandism in France 
 as well as in Germany. Mons. Edouard Drumont ordains 
 the proximate fate of the Jews in a few lines. " Anti- 
 semitism," says he, " has the advantage of not disturbing 
 anybody. When the question is ripe, it will triumph 
 without interrupting the circulation of the omnibuses. 
 When the moment shall have come, when the officer with 
 the resolution and good sense necessary for the work shall 
 be found, then Antisemitism, which for some years will have 
 educated public opinion, will have need of nothing more 
 than one battalion of foot, and one company of well-chosen 
 cavalry, to conduct the grand offenders to Mazas. All the 
 world will then say, * This has been talked about too long. 
 It was due now to come to pass.' " 
 
 We ask here whether the love of acquiring wealth and 
 keeping it, and making power out of it, is not innate in 
 nearly every man, and whether anything short of altering 
 or curing that love and will, can allow the conditions 
 marked when and then in the last paragraph, to be easily 
 realized without disturbing anybody? The passion is so 
 hugely visible an object, so dominant and general in all 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 3 
 
 Christian lands, and in all classes, that to compass its 
 extinction offhand, M. Drumont must rather be written 
 Antihuman than Antisemite. It would take a jail as big as 
 Paris to house the money-lust of Paris. However, he 
 names Rothschild as the Capital to be attacked, perhaps 
 thinking that if the fountain of evil is found in the Jew, 
 and its gush stopped, the inundation will be at an end. 
 
 Supposing nominal capital, gold and representative paper 
 abolished, and stomachs not abolished, bread and cheese 
 will then be capital surviving, and will be a circulating 
 medium. And thinking now again mainly of the Jews, their 
 unimprisoned masses, more self-denying than the under- 
 valuers and destroyers of property, will store their provender 
 in their pockets, and have in Ghetto the biggest platefuls at 
 last, and so will have something to sell. Of course service 
 to the commune must be in the conditions of this barter, 
 for barter would begin presently. Let it be equal all round. 
 Still unless you can alter man's push, strength will help 
 itself to more than weakness, cunning to more than stupidity, 
 and audacity to more than timidity, and man will get more 
 than woman. So hereditary sleight of mind and hand, 
 ingrained love of possession and hoarding, the genius which 
 an inveterate will, corporate and individual, means in worldly 
 things, are a worm that never dies, and a fire that is not 
 quenched. Property, most private, is its intimate and 
 omnipotent god. On its own ground nothing is successful 
 against it. Least of all, that unbred and bodiless thing, 
 dogmatic Equality, not extant for many minutes even in 
 chaotic revolution. The Jewish Will, a real naughty Old 
 Testament from Abraham to Rothschild, upheaving moun- 
 tains of inequality, is sleepless and practical in working ; as 
 it was before Abraham was thought of. 
 
 But if you could destroy, and then by social legislation 
 prohibit, private property, where would the Jew be then? 
 Would he not be checkmated ? Well, no experiment has 
 shown that success in that plan means in the long run 
 
4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 anything else than the lower nomad state ; Mesopotamia is 
 covered with the ruins of public and private property, and 
 shows the tombs of Nineveh and Babylon. Yet, Semites 
 continue to wander there, and are not communists. And 
 however low or brute the state, if Jews were surviving, they 
 would still be usurers of the most convenient goods, if not 
 of money ; in which case, gold, which no antisemitism 
 supposes to be annihilated or irrecoverable, gold, the top- 
 most representative of accumulation or private property, 
 would always be within hail, and Saviours of Society, Caesars 
 great or small, would be at hand to put their image and 
 superscription upon it. 
 
 The Jewish race itself is now as remarkable for in- 
 equality as other races ; it is also distinguished by a wide 
 family charity, which embraces the whole people, and 
 makes the inequality exemplary to other societies. Though 
 it consists of the very rich and the very poor, the disgrace of 
 want is not evident in the Jews as in the Christians. So 
 the inequality is a way to racial permanence, by perpetuat- 
 ing a great community throughout its ramifications. Perhaps 
 the tradition of the distribution of land among the tribes, 
 and of its recovery to its first owners at certain intervals, 
 may still influence the Jewish character. 
 
 ILTHE PATIENCE OF THE JE WS. 
 
 Not reckoning time, but state of man, human character, 
 there is no future for the Jews, but an immanent mono- 
 tonous present. A present, however, not of ennui, but 
 outwardly various. They have no Way before them, and do 
 not want one. Christ was proffered to them as the Way, 
 the Truth, and the Life. They rejected Him in favour of 
 the Messiah of the letter of the Word, who was to make 
 them the ruling nation for all time. Against this interpreta- 
 tion, flattering to their self-love, and corrigible by no spiritual 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 5 
 
 insight, demonstration and History, and the woes and catas- 
 trophes of ages, are ineffectual. For the Jews are the Jews. 
 Is this heroism, or is it something more mysterious ? This 
 hardness which makes a despised and at present a cowering 
 race into the enduring anvil of the wrath of ages ? 
 
 They had indeed temptation to a future almost after their 
 own heart, but refused the way of it when it was offered. 
 Mahometanism, in its early times, cast longing eyes upon 
 the Jews, as wholesale possible converts. It held before 
 them a prospect of in part fulfilling their own views of 
 prophecy, of dominating the world under the Crescent, and 
 of triumphing by some concessions to Christ at the expense 
 of the Cross. Mahomet and his Successors would furnish 
 temporal rulers in whom the victorious Israelites should 
 believe. The Messiah would be an open promise dilated 
 with hope, or Mahomet himself might in time be accepted 
 as the crown of prophecy. A more absolute monotheism 
 than the Jews liked was given in the Koran : Allah was not 
 one of the Gods of the nations as Jehovah was for the Jews, 
 but was God alone. Notwithstanding this drawback, if 
 only mundane causes had been at work, a Mahometan Juda- 
 ism might have been contracted. Islam without the Jews 
 threatened Southern Europe from east to west, and like the 
 Jews of the letter, intended universal dominion. It seemed 
 from the Mahometan side as if a compromise could be made 
 between the forecast of old Judaism, and the realization so 
 nearly the same of young Mahometanism. See Gibbon in his 
 record of Mahomet. There was, however, apart from the 
 Jewish character, another cause at work, as we shall see 
 presently, which overruled the issue. 
 
 III. THE JEWS AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 The Antisemites in France, the "Jew Haters " in Germany, 
 and in general those who write and think about the modern 
 
6 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Jew in his social and political relations, take no notice of 
 his lineage from the Old Testament. They may justify 
 themselves in this, if they choose to consider him as a fact 
 of the day, this child of three thousand years. Those who 
 disbelieve in the Word of God and the direct dealing of 
 Jehovah with the Jews, ignore what is generally called the 
 Jewish Church as furnishing the true light on the Jewish 
 nature and character, and on the Use which he serves. 
 But apart from the Jewish Dispensation taken in full faith 
 into the account, the Jew cannot be understood. Apart 
 from this preliminary fact of facts, the Divine Providence in 
 its series of revelations from Adam to Noah, from Noah to 
 Abraham, and from Abraham to Christ, cannot be rationally 
 seen. The Mosaic dispensation was the end and remainder 
 of what could be and exist before Christ came into the 
 world. The Jew, up to this point, was the final instrument 
 in the hand of Jehovah. 
 
 The legend of the Wandering Jew, if applied to the whole 
 Jewish race since Christ, and seen spiritually, with the few 
 details which it gives and the suggestions which it leaves, 
 furnishes a true account of all we have to say concerning 
 the Fate of the Jews. Wandering, dispersion, preservation 
 until Christ's second coming, are foretold in it. After this, 
 will the Wandering Jew disappear ? The Second Coming 
 has indeed taken place in the revelation of the spiritual 
 sense of the Word, and of Christ the Lord therein as one 
 God in one Person. But the New Church in which this 
 Advent will be received and acknowledged, is yet in its 
 Infancy. On this account the Jew is still here for important 
 Ends, of which we treat in the sequel. 
 
 IV. JUDAISM AND THE INCARNATION. 
 
 In the dealing of Jehovah with the Jews, two ends were 
 successively accomplished: i. The Jewish Church wa 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 7 
 
 established ; and 2, the Incarnation was prepared. For the 
 first purpose Jehovah laid hold of the Jewish nature, and 
 with it commanded an external ecclesiasticism. Its self-love 
 was the fundamental selfhood of that ^Eon, and had nothing 
 below it. In other words, the Jews were the worst race on 
 earth ; a religiosity was offered them ; and more readily than 
 any other nation they laid the flattering unction to their 
 souls that they were the best race on earth, and the chosen 
 of Jehovah. So outward holiness clave to them by delusion 
 of their own corrupt nature. The necessity of them in this 
 regard was made Divine use of, without violating their 
 free-will ; it was of the Rock of Ages ; and was the Jewish 
 Dispensation. 
 
 For the second purpose, an added ^Eon of iniquity was 
 stored away, and, at the end, the race, more evil by the 
 heredity of thousands of years, was again laid hold of by the 
 mercy of Jehovah, the worst humanity being utterly indis- 
 pensable here. The Lord Jesus Christ must come into the 
 world ; must be born. He came to redeem mankind from 
 below upwards ; and He could effect this only by coming 
 through birth into Evil's own chief country and capital. 
 So He was born from Jehovah God as His Father by the 
 conception of a Jewish Virgin. Therefore she had in her 
 the heredity or transmitted nature of the most sinful race 
 then extant. Redemption, reaching in the fulness of time 
 to the deepest recesses of finite man, and in the spiritual 
 world to the abyss of the hells, depended upon Christ's 
 taking upon Himself a worst human nature which could be 
 tempted by the Devil and Satan ; that is to say, by the 
 entire abyss. In vanquishing the empires of the Pit, He 
 brought the Godhead into His natural humanity, as man in 
 conquering his temptations to evil brings his religious con- 
 science into his lower nature, and by his resistance makes 
 conscience good there, and so far, by enduring to the end, 
 regenerates his mind. Jesus Christ, by a process which our 
 regeneration illustrates for us, made His Humanity divine ; 
 
8 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 namely by leading a divine life in it. And now we actually 
 see and know God as God-Man in Him. This is the 
 Incarnation, in which the Eternal Word, the divine truth, 
 became flesh, that is, became a divine natural human heart, 
 and a Divine Natural Man. Before this, Jehovah was 
 present to the race as God-Angel through the heavens. 
 In and after the Incarnation, He was in His own acquired 
 person an Infinite and Omniscient natural man, historically 
 memorable in the Gospels : visible, apprehensible, and 
 loveable to all who keep His Commandments, and acknow- 
 ledge Him as the source of all our virtue in doing so. 
 
 K WHY THIS PLANET WAS THE PLACE OF 
 CHRIST S REDEMPTIVE COMBATS. 
 
 The same reason for which Christ took upon Him a 
 representative form of the worst natural humanity in the 
 Jews, namely that He might redeem us from the power of 
 hell, and in the end save to the uttermost, caused Him 
 also as the Creator and God of all universes to make this 
 planet earth the theatre of His incarnation. For this earth 
 is to the immense system of worlds what the Jews were to 
 the nations and peoples of the earth; it is the worst of 
 worlds. Nothing short of conquering the worst, and by 
 resisting its temptations and allurements, subjugating it, 
 and so rendering it powerless to destroy man without his 
 own complicity, could be a divine Victory over Hell and 
 Death. Respecting the truths in this paragraph, see 
 Swedenborg's Earths in the Universe. He informs us that 
 intelligence of the Incarnation which took place on our 
 earth, was and is propagated by our inhabitants after death, 
 consequently in the spiritual world, to all the planets of all 
 the systems, and is thus known as Redemption and means 
 of salvation to all universes. In the meantime, and always 
 from creation, a divine influx gave to all mankind wherever 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 9 
 
 born, an innate knowledge of God as a Divine Man. The 
 Gospel therefore now is written for the entire universe. From 
 not knowing this fact, eminent men have rejected Christianity 
 as being a tiny local system. Redemption is, however, co- 
 extensive with creation, and the publication of it co-extensive. 
 The reader is recommended to peruse The Divine Order of 
 the Universe as interpreted by Emanuel Swedenborg, with 
 especial relation to Modern Astronomy, by the Rev. Augustus 
 Clissold.* 
 
 VI. THE FIRST AD VENT. 
 
 Between the beginning and end of the Mosaic Dispensa- 
 tion, which was a state of perpetual decline towards evil, 
 the deaths into the spiritual world had peopled its regions 
 nearest to the earth with multitudes of evil spirits, who, 
 when the Lord was born, were in dense masses between man 
 and heaven, and of an influence so potent as to make 
 allurements to wickedness irresistible, and to threaten Free 
 Will with extinction. Such companionship has evil with 
 evil here and hereafter. The pressure on personality was 
 so overpowering that mankind was becoming a victim to 
 demoniacal possession. These seductions, temptations, 
 allurements, the Lord in His tempted Humanity confronted, 
 beat them back, and trod them under His Divine feet ; that 
 is to say, under the new nature or natural which came 
 down through the combats from the indwelling Divinity. 
 This effected a Judgment in the spiritual world, and re- 
 moved the obstructing sphere between heaven and man. 
 It made new heavens and new hells, as Assizes on earth 
 should make new security for order, and new imprisonment 
 for disorder. Thus, by limiting the powers of evil to what 
 sane mankind can resist if they choose, the Lord gave back 
 Freewill to the race, emancipating it from Legion, and 
 made man again one person under one God. 
 * London : Longman & Co., 1877. 
 
io THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 This can be plainly understood by whoever studies it. 
 There is nothing difficult about it, and nothing mysteri- 
 ous if you have full faith in an infinite Divine Man. 
 And if you also know, which you easily may, that the 
 heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately 
 wicked. A divine life led on earth makes a divine natural 
 man, as a natural life so led makes a natural man, a sensual 
 life a sensual man, and a spiritual life a spiritual man. To 
 lead a divine life is impossible to a finite soul which comes 
 from the seed of other men. The soul for this supreme 
 experience must be God Himself, Deity Himself: the Seed, 
 Divine Truth. " The Lord descended as the Divine Truth 
 in Heaven." Divine Truth teaches what shall be divinely 
 done. The field of personal evil is the place and plane of 
 operation. This for the Soul ; now for the body. The 
 body must be conceived by a Mother who brings sinful 
 humanity into the field of the battle. The Way is vastness 
 of temptation for the one only surviving Man ; namely, the 
 Divine Man; temptation from the World, from the Uni- 
 versal Hells ; and from the Universal Heavens : for the 
 heavens are not pure in the sight of the Lord ; and Sweden- 
 borg by divine instruction tells that the Lord's inmost and 
 most subtle temptations were from the angelic heaven. See 
 the Arcana Ccelestia, n. 4295. The passage says : " In order 
 that the Lord might restore the universal heaven to celestial 
 order, he even admitted into himself temptations from the 
 angels, who, in so far as they were in their own proprium 
 or selfhood, in so far were not in good and truth." 
 
 Think then of resistance to temptation in the supreme 
 cases and meanings as the Redemption of the Whole World 
 by the Lord in His veriest real presence, making His 
 humanity divine. The subjugation of the then overruling 
 hells gave back to mankind the personal freedom of the 
 Will which they had lost ; and when the new freedom is 
 used to resist temptation to evil as the Lord in His in- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. n 
 
 firm humanity resisted, then redemption finds its appointed 
 end in salvation, or admission to heaven after death. 
 
 Whoever has resisted any evil delights to which he is- 
 prone, and fought against them, and persevered in resistance 
 until they are no longer delightful but hateful, has in him 
 the faculty of understanding from some experience how the 
 better mind can come down into the seductive sensual, and 
 become a new birth in it, exterminating the evil into circum- 
 ferences at length beyond danger of recall. By this process 
 the Lord wrought, and made faculty after faculty divine. 
 He put on at length the Divine Sensual. He abolished in 
 Himself the weight of the corporeal, and Death naturally 
 disappeared, divinely-naturally, before Him. 
 
 Jesus was of Jewish race by Mary, and He longed to 
 gather that race into His fold. He says of Jerusalem, " How 
 often would I have gathered thy children together, even as 
 a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
 not" (Matthew xxiii. 37). The Jews who rejected Him have 
 now no part in His genealogy. He exterminated whatever 
 was derived from the Virgin Mother; nay, He put 
 off the heredity of the human race in his Resurrection and 
 Glorification. He was not only no Jew, but no finite man 
 in His ascension and union with Jehovah the Father, but 
 one God in one adorable Person; practically adorable 
 because comprehensible. His life on earth gave the human 
 race for all worlds a finited image of Him, while the Word, 
 which is the divine truth, gives the doctrinal verity of the 
 Infinite Father indwelling in this approachable Son. So in 
 His alone wisdom and mercy we can know Him as Friend 
 and Brother, and adore Him as our one only God. 
 
 VII. IMPLICIT ACCEPTANCE OF THE WORD 
 DEMANDED. 
 
 This Revelation most literally taken and gathered from 
 the whole letter of the Word, the written Logos, is a sun and 
 
12 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 a shield to future Epochs or ^Eons. It is simply the body 
 of the letter accepted utterly, whether its stated facts jar with 
 our denominational minds, or not, and a revealed soul of 
 truth and love from Christ Himself informing and glorifying 
 it. If you do not agree to this, you discard the letter, and 
 make it fraudulent : if you strike out what you do not like, 
 for instance, the supernatural, from the narrative, you claim 
 a right of intellect which puts yourself in question. The 
 whole Word together is supernatural, and miracle is its 
 means. Accept it if you will with no ecclesiastical glosses 
 or words of Councils. The spiritual sense revealed by 
 the Lord through a man, in no way enslaves you in Verba 
 Magistri) or as imprisoned in Swedenborg in the way in 
 which the orthodox are imprisoned in the dogmas of the old 
 churches. It is indeed learnt from Swedenborg and 
 stored in the rational mind ; but it reveals itself to the 
 reverent reader from that stem in wonderful clusters on the 
 vine of life, and in harvests of fruit on the Mount of Olives. 
 The language of Correspondence in which the Word is 
 written is given to us by the same good Servant as in a 
 dictionary. We refer to the dictionary to read the language 
 when we require its aid. But the dictionary is not our 
 Master or our Aristotle, but the Lord is our Master, and 
 teaches us daily proficiency as we read His Word. As well 
 be charged with undue minority under Rawlinson or Norris, 
 Champollion or Sayce, in studying Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform, 
 or Accadian, because we make use of their knowledge to 
 continue our own, as with abolishing our minds in favour of 
 the dicta of Swedenborg. The dogmas of the old Church 
 which have no spiritual life or sense in them are indeed in- 
 fringements of the rule, " Call no man your Father upon the 
 earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven. Neither 
 be ye called Masters, for one is your Master, even the 
 Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your 
 Servant." Swedenborg, Emanuel, prepared to reveal the 
 spiritual sense, as the greatest among us is our servant, and 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 13 
 
 while dogmas close the Word and imprison us, the true 
 doctrines which he has brought make us free. 
 
 VIIL FALSITIES CAST OUT AND TRUTHS 
 IMPLANTED. 
 
 In the Revelation here made we have a divine Trinity in 
 Unity, One God and Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 These are the divine love, the divine wisdom, and the divine 
 providence, all in the 'person of Christ. The three 
 Gods of Christendom vanish as polytheism from a New 
 Church and a true Christian Religion. The Atonement 
 disappears with the Tripersonality in the identity of the Son 
 and the Father. The cross disappears as payment for the 
 sins of the world : but it is seen in our intellectual sky as the 
 last temptation and the crowning victory over the hells ; the 
 "// is finished" of a Life of Divine Victories. Justification 
 by Faith vanishes before Christ to whom Judgment belongs ; 
 for by fulfilling the Word He became Divine Justice; and 
 He exacts life according to His Commandments, and admits 
 no justification for man ; but demands repentance, and a 
 new life according to it, and then grants remission of sins. 
 If we consider the dogma of three Persons, or three Gods, 
 it is remarkable how their attributes are apportioned. The 
 Father represents wrath implacable save by a divineand infinite 
 sacrifice for human and finite sin : whereas Christ says, the 
 Father Himself loveth you. Christ on the other hand is put 
 as the God of soft mercy, whereas He Himself says, The 
 Father has committed all judgment to the Son. With re- 
 gard to the Holy Spirit, the sphere of Christ, the Gospel 
 says "/? was not yet ', because Christ was not yet glorified." The 
 Spirit of God in the Old Testament is the divine spiritual 
 sphere proceeding from Jehovah through the heavens. The 
 Holy Spirit is the divine natural sphere pervading the true 
 Church wherever it is, and is the Paraclete or Comforter pro- 
 
i 4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 ceeding from the divine humanity. It had no existence until 
 Christ's Coming ; nor actually till His Glorification. 
 
 The spiritual sense of the Word within the Letter contains, 
 or rather consists in, the true doctrines here shadowed forth, 
 contains them in infinite detail and expansion ; for indeed 
 they are virtue and they are heaven. That sense may also 
 be called scientifically the theory of the Letter. In another 
 statement it is the Second Coming of Christ in which He 
 comes as the One only God and Lord. It heralds the 
 Second Coming of mankind when from age to age they 
 come as individuals, as Sons of God in Regeneration. Such 
 considerations grow in the mind when the climate of the 
 Divine Overshadowing and the maternal Conception is 
 around us. 
 
 ' IX. THE VIRGIN MARY. 
 
 In continuation of the same thoughts, we may ask our- 
 selves how the Incarnation took place in the worst nation on 
 our planet, that Christ by nativity might be exposed to all the 
 assaults and contagions of evil in order to conquer them, and 
 yet that He was born of Blessed Mary. Was she then vile 
 in this sinful race ? The question was crucial to Pius IX., 
 and caused him to decree the immaculate conception of the 
 Virgin, who according to Roman Catholic and also Anglican 
 Theogony is the Mother of God. The Infallibility of His 
 Holiness was at the same Council placed on the like certainty 
 with the immaculateness of Mary. He admitted the depra- 
 vity of the Jewish nature in thus breaking with it. But he 
 made the Incarnation of none effect in decreeing that Christ 
 did not take upon Himself our infirm Humanity. The good 
 Pius IX. has the credit of seeing that some explanation was 
 needed, and he, being self-made infallible, could vote one. 
 Stet pro ratione voluntas is a gagging power. To the 
 Romanist, even to Cardinal Newman, nothing more can 
 be said. But Protestantism has made thinking allowable, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 15 
 
 and made truth ashamed of being decreed. The bringing 
 the Word out of its sepulchre was the chief use of the Refor- 
 mation, and supplied the opportunity for a new foundation 
 of heavenly doctrine. What then might be an alternative 
 thought with regard to the Virgin ? I write in all humility 
 here, for I cannot quote literal authority, but draw conclu- 
 sions as inferences from admitted verities. For convenience, 
 however, I put the case so far as I see it positively. 
 
 Now the alternative is that Blessed Mary was not the 
 worst but the divinely accommodate correspondent best of 
 the Jewish nation. Pius IX. might have been satisfied with 
 this if he had read the divine letter as the Word in supreme 
 authority over every Church. This fitness of Mary meets 
 the case of Jehovah assuming through her a Humanity open 
 to the temptations of all the hells, of all the earths, and of 
 all the heavens. Had she been immaculate, she had been 
 a fourth person in the Christian Mythology, in fact, a God- 
 dess, and could have conceived no son with an infirm 
 humanity to be tempted. Had she been among the vilest 
 of her race, her progeny of the body could have furnished no 
 plane for deep temptations. A debased humanity could not 
 be mother to one who was to be tempted by the most superb 
 ecclesiastical and imperial ambitions, who was offered when 
 the Devil transported Him to the pinnacle of the Temple, 
 the Popedom of the future Church ; and from the top of an 
 exceeding high mountain to which Satan raised Him, the 
 sovereignty and glory of the kingdoms of the world. A self- 
 love supreme must have been innate in the material heredity 
 which could be exposed to such temptations. Think also 
 of his Fast of Forty Days in the Wilderness. Nothing of this 
 openness to evil spirits appeared in Mary. She knew nothing 
 of His Temptations, and was not capable of them. Whatever 
 we read of her reveals a character beautiful in natural love. 
 Humility under divine Proposition and condescension, faith 
 in its Angelic Annunciation, obedience to the motherhood 
 of her future Redeemer, heart-service to Him from the 
 
16 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 manger to the cross, and one of the first to be told of His 
 Resurrection. We may well say in our human parlance 
 that Mary was an immaculate mother. But the Jewish 
 nature was in her, and to be revealed by the future Event, by 
 the Birth of Christ, and His exposure to the Devil and Satan. 
 We know by common experience, and by striking instances 
 in history, what powers and great qualities men owe to good 
 and true mothers who have to our eyes none of the charac- 
 teristics of such greatness. The ground does not know what 
 the seed will grow to. And almost all greatness is susceptible 
 of abuse and temptation and heavy fall until regeneration 
 surpasses it. So the letter shows, and we accept verbally, 
 literally, implicitly, that the Lord inherited the greatest 
 Jewish qualities from Blessed Mary, and that they were all 
 of them when first given, untried, unregenerate ; as inherited 
 qualities, genius, talents, ambitions, loves, hopes, aspirations, 
 likes and dislikes, are in every man. 
 
 And to speak now psychologically, inasmuch as conception 
 on the Mother's part is called forth by seed from the Father, 
 and inasmuch as the Father chose Mary ; and also as the 
 Divine Truth as the body of the Lord Who is Heaven 
 descended into Mary, so the nature of the Child born must 
 have been stupendous in faculties ; in fact equal and able to 
 be co-extensive, and ultimately in conflict, with all created 
 mind, in the ancient Churches and in the Jewish Church, in 
 the heavens over them and in the hells underneath them. 
 There was, however, no evil in any of these merely natural 
 faculties, for evil comes from prostituting the faculties by the 
 abuse of free-will. Still they were of Jewish nature, with its 
 tendencies to evil, but which like every nature is at first 
 neutral before will has wrought in it. But in the Lord the 
 mother faculties remained sinless, because He resisted all 
 temptations to sin, and glorifying His natural faculties 
 thereby, put on the Divine in them. The vast faculties 
 inherited, and the tendencies to evil, are the openness of 
 Jesus Christ to temptation ; and at the same time suggest, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 17 
 
 that the consummate flower and pearl of Jewish womanhood 
 was the medium of the appearance of the world's Redeemer 
 in the world. 
 
 The Devil here always means the lusts of evil in their 
 entirety, and Satan the loves of falsity. These collectively 
 and organically are two mighty empires : they are hell. 
 Foot to foot they are antipodean, opposite to the grand 
 humanity, which being inspired with goodness and truth is 
 the kingdom of heaven. So both the Devil and Satan are 
 personal ; being monstrous though still human forms and 
 organizations of all the bad men and women who have lived 
 on earth since the beginning of creation. These belong, 
 spirit to spirit, by affinity, to our evil tendencies, and are 
 continually near our natures ; and in the degree that we will 
 and do the evil which is in us, and which corresponds to 
 one or many of them, they conjoin with us in most particular 
 league, and add us to their company. After this, no justi- 
 fication by faith condones our sin, but only repentance, 
 resisting the sin thenceforth, and continuing through life to 
 resist it, and so casting out our devils and satans : the end 
 of which when the life ends is regeneration and Salvation ; 
 as was said before. 
 
 Mary's nature is the supreme case of what the Word 
 calls REMAINS. When races are dying out spiritually, the 
 poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger 
 and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, 
 the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness* 
 sake, are bespoken from the Mount in the last days of an Old 
 Church and the first days of a New Church. They are the 
 humble and the simple, and are waiting and willing for they 
 know not what, but for the Lord to come and help them. 
 In their troubled lowliness a new Revelation can be made to 
 them, and the race of man be thus perpetuated. These 
 Remains, needy and naked, contain the old heredity still, 
 but the Lord's gift of virtue with it ; a fortune of natural 
 good counterpoising the ancestral nature ; making infancy 
 
1 8 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 what it is, and simplicity what it is ; and reigning while these 
 states last ; afterwards vanishing, but stored away for 
 moments of awakened conscience, " Like wine put by at 
 birth for days of age." 
 
 X.THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 
 
 Without impiety if without strict authority, we may 
 indulge the personal mind in dwelling a little longer on 
 this Jewess who has been the delight in good ages 
 of the earlier Church. We read in the Word that 
 she was espoused to Joseph, but before they came 
 together she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. 
 That the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, 
 saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee 
 Mary thy wife : for that which is conceived in her is of the 
 Holy Spirit. That Joseph being raised from sleep did as the 
 Angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his 
 wife. And knew her not till she had brought forth her first- 
 born son ; and he called His name JESUS. That when Mary 
 came to Elizabeth the wife of Zacharias, Elizabeth was filled 
 with the Holy Spirit, and lifted up her voice with a loud 
 cry and said, Blessed thou among women, and blessed the 
 fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the 
 Mother of my Lord should come unto me ? For behold 
 when the voice of thy salutation came into mine ears, the 
 babe leaped in my womb for joy. Elizabeth had conceived 
 in her old age ; and when they called her son, Zacharias, 
 after the name of his Father, she said, Not so, but he shall 
 be called John. Of Zacharias and Elizabeth it is said 
 that they were both righteous before God, walking in all the 
 commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. 
 Perhaps they were also Remains of the ancient church in 
 the Jewish, and they were a blameless Jewish pair. And 
 here we may recall the beginning of the ancient Church by 
 which the race of man was preserved in that day: And 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 19 
 
 Noah, who was a righteous man, perfect in his generations ; 
 Noah who walked with God. We also think of Sarah 
 ninety years old, and of Abraham a hundred, and of the 
 coincidence that Abraham, the Father of the faithful, could 
 not believe that Sara could bring him Isaac ; and that 
 Zacharias, wanting evidence, and cross-questioning the 
 Angel who is then declared as Gabriel, as to how he should 
 know that his wife stricken in years should bring him John, 
 because he believed not, had for evidence that he should be 
 dumb and not able to speak until the birth of his son. 
 Mary also, as in her own right, seeing she knew not a man, 
 asked Gabriel how her conception could be? And the 
 angel satisfied her enquiry : and she said, Behold the hand- 
 maid of the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy Word. 
 Then she said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, my spirit 
 hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded 
 the low estate of His handmaiden : for behold from hence- 
 forth all generations shall call me blessed. In her faith she 
 carried to her Lord His promise of presence which He made 
 to Abraham and to a thousand generations. All this con- 
 firms the great inheritance which the Lord condescended to 
 assume in the infirm maternal humanity, which is thus 
 attested by the Word. In the ordinary sense the Virgin 
 Mary ceases after the first conception, but in that conception 
 there is a divine declaration of her Virginity. After Jesus 
 came into His own country and taught them in their 
 synagogues, they were astonished and said, Whence hath 
 this man this wisdom and these powers ? Is not this the 
 carpenter's son ? Is not his mother called Mary ? And his 
 brothers, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas ? And 
 his sisters, are they not all with us ? It is clear then from 
 personal testimony in the Word that Mary after her declared 
 virginity was the wife of Joseph and the mother of Joseph's 
 numerous children. Also that all generations shall call her 
 blessed, as she, inspired, herself said ; and that she is blessed 
 among women, as inspired Elizabeth said. But the phrase 
 
20 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 Blessed Virgin, has no Scripture for it. Holy Virgin cannot 
 be thought of in any Church where the Word lies open. 
 God alone is holy. Virgin may however be used of Mary 
 in another sense sanctioned by the divine letter. We meet 
 this in the Apocalypse : " These are they which were not 
 defiled with women ; for they are virgins. These are they 
 which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth," xiv. 4. 
 Swedenborg also instructs us that "Virgin denotes the 
 Kingdom of the Lord, and the church properly celestial ; 
 also the spiritual church ; and that the members are called 
 Virgins from conjugial love, thus from innocence." (Arcana 
 Ccelestia^ n. 3081). 
 
 XL MARY BECOMES A DIVINE SYMBOL AS 
 JOHN AND THE DISCIPLES WERE. 
 
 " When Jesus on the cross saw His mother, and the disciple 
 standing by, whom Jesus loved, He said unto His mother, 
 Woman, behold thy son ! Then saith He to the disciple, 
 Behold thy mother ! and from that hour that disciple took 
 her unto his own." Mary here in the divine letter, in its 
 correspondential symbolism, is lifted above our humanity; 
 but for us natural men and women she is for these moments 
 the most pathetic of human souls : no other situation has 
 approached it; she loses her Lord as a Son not by His 
 death only, but by His recognized divinity, and she has a 
 son given to her by her Lord, another son when the first 
 must disown her. But we may not weep, for she had an 
 infinite Redeemer and Comforter : but let us follow the 
 Correspondence which she also is. May we conjecture that 
 not as a Jewish representation, which was merely external 
 without an internal, and ritual without an understanding of 
 it, she truly and worthily personifies and so signifies and 
 represents the great Jewish beginning of the Christian 
 Church. John in the spiritual sense signifies what has been 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 21 
 
 revealed by the Lord through heaven to those who from 
 charity and its faith are in the good of life. Each disciple 
 represented a quality or characteristic of the Church : the 
 twelve its whole spirit, soul, will and understanding. John 
 who lay on the Lord's breast, represents good works which 
 are the good of life bonum vita. Peter denotes faith, 
 James charity, and John the good of charity, or charity 
 active in life. Mary, therefore, instead of being the mother 
 of God, is, not was, representatively the Mother of the 
 embryo Church before it was a Church, as Noah representa- 
 tively is the beginning of the Ancient Church but not 
 the Ancient Church itself. Here we no longer dwell on 
 the Mary of the letter, the BLESSED MARY for every 
 good man and woman who can read the Bible. The 
 Lord was no longer the Son of that Mary. He had 
 rejected the human derived from her, and had put off the 
 old garment of the Jewish nature. Thenceforth, and even 
 before by divine anticipation He comes to the Universal 
 Church, to the First Christian Church, and to the New 
 Church, consisting of those who hear the Word of God and 
 do it, and whom He says are His Mother and His brethren. 
 As the Church is the presence of the Lord on earth, and 
 as all that is genuine in it, that is good and true, and of the 
 Word, is Himself, so these relations are also Himself, 
 divine and infinite ; and His mercy attributes them to men 
 and angels that human love in heaven and on earth may 
 claim affiliation and conjunction with the Father of 
 souls. In those who are His disciples His words are for 
 ever, Behold my Mother and my Brethren ; for whosoever 
 shall do the will of my Father which is in Heaven, he is 
 my brother, and sister and mother. 
 
22 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 XIL CHARACTER, NOT BLOOD-RELATION- 
 SHIP, LIVES AND CONSOCIATES AFTER 
 DEATH. 
 
 A sundering of all merely natural blood-relationships at 
 the death of the body, is here pointed out in the internal 
 Word. Nothing founded upon birth alone, survives. The 
 families of the spiritual world, to which we are all hasten- 
 ing, are families indeed ; goodness and truth in their 
 consanguinities are the great family of Maximus Homo 
 above : evil and falsity, in exact lineages of monstrosity and 
 perversion, are the opposite broods below. Each man and 
 woman becomes a substantial organization of affections for 
 Right or Wrong in their indefinitely multiplied forms. 
 And now something of the vanishing of mortal and terres- 
 trial relationships is taught to us in this supreme instance of 
 Mary, who even in this world is warned to part from her 
 still apparent Son. " Simeon said unto Mary his mother : 
 Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in 
 Israel ; and for a sign which shall be spoken against. Yea, 
 a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also, that the 
 thoughts of many hearts may be revealed" (Luke ii. 34, 35). 
 This distinction between the spiritual and natural worlds is 
 a sign which is spoken against, unwelcome news to the 
 natural side. Its sharp iron, a sword, pierced through 
 Mary's soul ; for iron signifies natural truth, here instructed 
 towards spiritual ; the sword of the Spirit. It tries human 
 love at first in revealing its origin in bloods and relation- 
 ships. So it lays bare the thoughts of many hearts ; and 
 explains the dissolution of family ties on earth ; a lesson 
 and anticipation of disjunctions and new conjunctions and 
 unions after death. 
 
 Jesus Christ extirpated or lived down the maternal 
 proprium or individual selfhood which He inherited, and 
 the God in Him which did this, in every ultimate act came 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 23 
 
 to the front, and stood there as a Divine Proprium. So He 
 made His Human divine. In us there is a corresponding 
 process when regeneration is going on. When bad ways 
 are resisted and evils shunned as sins against the Lord, the 
 heart is softened to His influx, the evil with its delights is 
 rejected to the circumferences, and higher degrees in the 
 mind through which the opposite good comes down, and 
 where it can abide, are opened. Tiers of being are added 
 to the man which practically do not exist before ; for they 
 are not his till then ; but are in waiting at the door, oppor- 
 tune for him to open it. He is rejecting his hereditary 
 character and his own previous life, and putting on a new 
 nature. But yet he never can reject his proprium or evil 
 selfhood as the Lord did, but only banish it from the centre 
 to the circumference of his nature ; from his delight to his 
 aversion ; from the warmth of his tropics to cold and con- 
 gelation. It is kept in frost by God, but is indestructible, 
 and sometimes a little of it is allowed to melt by the man's 
 lapsing and compliance, to show him what he is, and to lead 
 him back to greater humility and more complete acknow- 
 ledgment of his unworthiness. But his evil proprium, 
 though dormant at length and buried below his conscious- 
 ness, and in heaven far below his conscience, is indestructible; 
 and being fixed by birth in the natural world, is the basis of 
 his immortality ; of his everlasting Ego. Some permanent 
 memory of his natural man, upon which the spiritual man is 
 founded, extends upward through his spiritual faculties, and 
 so the foothold of natural law is still under him as a plane 
 giving the last substance and appearance to his life. 
 
 We make the Incarnation prefatory before coming more 
 closely to the Jewish Church, because this order leads 
 directly to the consideration of the former Churches, and 
 the human faculties made use of in them ; without which 
 the Mosaic Dispensation cannot be understood. For it was 
 not a religion, but an interregnum, a Theocracy between the 
 Ancient and the Christian Churches. A moving Peniten- 
 
24 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 tiary of an imprisoned, not a privileged race. The coming 
 of Christ when Judaism failed, sets the series and scale of 
 Divine interpositions in a broad daylight, and makes the 
 past and the future into an evident chain. The Incarnation 
 itself, however, requires to be understood through the doc- 
 trines of the New Jerusalem, according to which we attempt 
 to bring it before the reader. 
 
 XIILTHE REPRESENTATION OF A CHURCH 
 BY THE JEWS. 
 
 The Church with the Jews was the third inauguration of a 
 Church with a Revelation to guide it, of which Jehovah God 
 was the author. The first Church, called in Genesis, 
 Adam, was from the creation, the Adamic Church, 
 which passed through many variations signalized by names 
 of persons, and became extinct in the race before the Flood. 
 The second was the Church called the Noahtic, which, with 
 many changes, held the human race from Noah to Abraham. 
 This second Church became extinct in Asia, and in Africa 
 when the hosts of Pharaoh were drowned in the Red Sea. 
 The third Church was with the Jews and Israelites until the 
 dispersion of the Jews, and the destruction of the temple at 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Each of these religious epochs or ages, had a distinct 
 character, by reason of the spiritual elements extant in the 
 ^Eon to which it belonged. Love was the soul of the 
 Adamic Church, and perception from love was its mind. 
 This was the most ancient or celestial Church. After its 
 consummation, the Lord raised up a new church, and Faith 
 with conscience in which a new will was formed, became the 
 life of the Noahtic, ancient or spiritual Church. On the 
 extinction of this Church, no further dispensation could be 
 founded ; for the resources in human nature were at an end. 
 Yet a church with God present, and revealing Himself, is 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 25 
 
 indispensable for the preservation of man. Accordingly, a 
 Church was instituted with the Jews, but not in them, and 
 God Himself became the upholder of the Jewish dispensa- 
 tion. It was not a Church, but it was the representation of 
 a Church. Its virtue lay in implicit unhesitating obedience 
 to external divine commands, attested by perpetual miracle, 
 and reinforced by mortal fears and sublunary hopes. 
 
 Here was a third pause in History. Consider it carefully, 
 because upon a comprehension of the three crises above 
 mentioned, the understanding of everything in the Church 
 with the Jews depends. The Love Ages, the primeval will, 
 had passed away in the impure senility of the Adamic 
 Church ; and with the lusts which alone survived, the 
 central intellect in the heart was turned into "direful 
 persuasions."* So the likeness of God in man had 
 perished : the inward Sun of goodwill had set. The age of 
 instruction laying hold of the remains of the primeval 
 integrity, and built into a second will as a new human 
 faculty, a conscience, had in like manner run its course ; 
 and the Noahtic Church was consummated in Egypt, 
 Babylon and Assyria. So the image of God in man was 
 darkened ; and the ^Eon of Divine Truth communicated by 
 God from without had come to an end. Bear in mind 
 that these two great faculties or Churches were not of the 
 nature of man, but were superadded gifts and endowments 
 conferred upon him, and when he refused to continue to 
 receive them, they were no more, and like Astrea they had 
 left the earth. A world of idolatry and superstition was 
 left, and no revival was possible ; for the depravity of man- 
 kind was complete. The magnetism of love had grown 
 poisonous, and the voice of warning truth was drowned in a 
 triple dominion of evil and falsity, embodied in Egypt, 
 Assyria and Babylon. 
 
 * See my work, Oannes according to Berosus, where the last state of 
 this Church is described from its autopsy by Swedenborg, as well as 
 from Chaldean tradition. 
 
26 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 Such a dreg and residue of humanity could only be com- 
 pelled, not attracted or instructed, into the service of 
 heaven. Nothing internal was left. Self-love was left, and 
 its lust and pride of place. It was eminent in the Jews 
 more than in other races. They alternately accepted 
 and rejected Jehovah, and still would be His chosen 
 people. They brought a measured and frail obedience 
 to the compact. Compliance, not from Conscience, not from 
 Love, was in their bond. They could not become a Repre- 
 sentative Church, but the Representation of a Church. 
 Thus the depravity and selfishness of the world was the 
 instrument at God's disposal wherewith to found an ultimatum 
 on which heaven could rest, and be connected with man- 
 kind. Without such connection in a church or the mechan- 
 ism of a church, the natural man who is the seminary of 
 heaven, and the natural universe which exists as his foothold, 
 would perish : it would perish not by fire, or day of judg- 
 ment, but by uselessness which is uncreation. Jehovah did 
 not make the world evil, but found it so : and made it 
 representative of good by events, by combats, and by religious 
 rites and ceremonies ; and first of all by the Ten Command- 
 ments directly forbidding evils ; and then by Laws of order 
 containing correspondences of the order of heaven. A 
 Jewish Word was written by chosen men : by Lawgivers and 
 Prophets, and by King David. In this Word direct verbal 
 inspiration superseded the Jewish writer, and made him into 
 the scribe and pen of Jehovah. This Word in its spiritual 
 morality went utterly away from Judaism, and had the 
 Gospel shining through it ; and also was so accommodated to 
 the Jewish character, that it accepted its peculiar self-love, 
 and spoke according to it, allowing to it its naturalism, and 
 not unveiling what was hidden and internal. In an evil 
 world " it would not be difficult to enlist any nation in the 
 service of representing religion provided it had holy externals 
 of worship, and worshipped almost idolatrously ; and it was 
 the genius of the Jews more than any other nation completely 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 27 
 
 to worship external things as holy and divine apart from 
 anything internal : for instance, to adore their fathers,. 
 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and afterwards Moses and 
 David, as deities ; and also to hold as holy and divine every 
 piece of stone and wood which had been inaugurated into 
 their divine worship ; as the ark, the tables there, the lamp,, 
 the altar, the garments of Aaron, the Urim and Thummim, 
 and afterwards the Temple. By such things the communica- 
 tion of angels ivith man was brought to pass. It was effected 
 thus. Their external worship was communicated to angelic 
 spirits of simple character, who do not reflect upon internal 
 things, but who are interiorly good. Such are those who 
 correspond to the layers of the skin in the Maximus Homo. 
 In these simple spirits the interior Angels of Heaven saw 
 the things which were represented, consequently the heavenly 
 and divine things which corresponded. So the Holy of 
 worship was miraculously elevated into heaven, leaving the 
 Jews outside in the process " (Arcana Ccelestia, n. 8588). 
 
 Again, Sweden borg says : " As the representative of the 
 celestial kingdom began to perish when the Jews asked for a 
 king, therefore in order that the representation of the Lord's 
 kingdom in the heavens might still be continued on earth, 
 the Jews were separated from the Israelites ; and the Lord's 
 celestial kingdom was represented by the Jewish kingdom, 
 and His spiritual kingdom by the Israelitish kingdom " 
 (Ibid. n. 8770). 
 
 What a marrow of divine-human history, from the begin- 
 ning of the world to the ends of it, these revelations open in 
 thus opening the Word. 
 
 XIV. HOW A REPRESENTATIVE CAN 
 ASCEND. 
 
 Before proceeding further, an easy instance may help 
 writer and reader to begin to understand this difficult matter, 
 
28 I HE NE WJER USALEM 
 
 of spirits receiving the representatives of Jewish Worship, 
 and leaving out the unholy Jewish interpretation of them, 
 and thus rendering them fit to be presences in the heavens ; 
 so ensuring a sure communication of heaven with man from the 
 basis of impure expressions, which become unnoticed dregs. 
 Childhood sometimes shames grown men with this kind of 
 angelry. Now regard Psalm cix. It is chiefly occupied in 
 the Jewish letter with a prayer against the wicked who have 
 spoken against the Psalmist with a lying tongue; have 
 rewarded him evil for good, and hatred for love. If a Chris- 
 tian prayed it in the Jewish sense, it were an evil prayer. 
 " Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at 
 his right hand. Let his prayers become sin. As he clothed 
 himself with cursing as with his garment, so let it come into 
 his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones. Let it 
 be unto him as the garment covereth him, and for a girdle 
 wherewith he is girded continually." The whole Psalm of 
 which this is a small part is a prayer for curses upon an 
 adversary, upon his children and posterity, upon his fathers, 
 and upon his mother. It is a complete commination. To 
 the Psalmist it was a series of ardent wishes addressed as 
 prayers to the Lord. Good simple Christians dislike the 
 Psalm, do not read it, and so are rid of the Jewish nature in 
 it. But those who understand the spiritual sense of it all, 
 know that the adversary against whom we pray is our own 
 selfishness, and no person or persons outside of us ; that the 
 curses are specific prayers against those evils which curse us, 
 and which are our deadly enemies; and also which stand in all 
 the relationships which are correspondentially signified by the 
 adversary himself, by his children, his fathers, and his mother. 
 So in praying this prayer, it goes to heaven with no memory 
 of Jewish meaning ; it undergoes an apotheosis, and refuses 
 to have external enemies. So also when it is said of the 
 daughter of Babylon, " Happy shall he be that taketh and 
 dasheth thy little ones against the rock" (Psalm cxxxvii. 9), 
 the Jewish sense dies into the Angelic sense ; the daughter 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 29 
 
 of Babylon is the affection of our own love of dominion 
 over the counsels of heaven ; and the little ones are the 
 intimate desires born of that affection ; the rock of Divine 
 truth recognized is that which these affections assail, and by 
 which they perish. So the Jewish sense remains with the 
 Jews, is ignored by the Christians, and is perceived as the 
 road to heaven in the New Jerusalem. 
 
 XV. THE JEWISH CHARACTER WAS NOT 
 ALTERED BUT MADE REPRESENTATIVE. 
 
 The severe ritual given through Moses in no way 
 infringed the Jewish Character ; the commanded sacrifices 
 prevented the sacrifices of sons and daughters which were 
 practised among the nations. The idea of human sacrifice 
 was so ingrained in the world in the ruin of the Ancient or 
 Noahtic Church, and descended so lustfully upon the Jews, 
 that they continually fell back into the practice ; and they 
 were permitted to sacrifice cattle, sheep, lambs, goats, kids, 
 pigeons and doves, to divert their propensity, and also, from 
 the correspondence of the animals, to present and represent 
 the approach to heaven by good affections, the fruits of self- 
 sacrifice, and by worship from these. A cruel nation had 
 appetite for cruelty, as the Romans for gladiatorial murders, 
 and lions and tigers at play with human life. The Jewish 
 cruelty, ready to hand, was laid hold of by Him Who was 
 to come in the Redeemer, and made into a link in the 
 chain that bound mankind to heaven. We may say that the 
 butcher's craft was consecrated. If Jehovah had made the 
 Jews, unlimited sacrifice would have been in character, but 
 the Jews, like all obdurately natural men, made themselves ; 
 and He curtailed them, and made Divine use of them. 
 
 If we grant as a fundamental postulate the mere Drama or 
 Representation of a Church, in which the Characters were 
 in costume, and in artistry other than the Realities they 
 
3 o THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 stood or spoke for ; and in which their implicit obedience 
 to their parts and prompters was inexorably necessary ; and 
 if we always remember that a divine Church commanded 
 the situation, and that its existence was imperative, we then 
 find that every circumstance recorded of the Jews in the 
 Word puts on a new Justice and Judgment. The events of 
 Jewish history are spiritual things : the forty years in the 
 wilderness are the long trials and circuits of self-love, doub- 
 ling upon itself, and getting no nearer to the promised land. 
 Yet every day, notwithstanding its sins and punishments, the 
 vague moving host is exactly guided to a representative 
 end. The representation of a Church still subsists in spite 
 of the actors. The Battles of the Jews, and the extermina- 
 tion of the nations before Canaan was reached, and in 
 Caanan, if I do not mistake are always provoked, often by 
 :some excusable cause on the part of the nations. The 
 massacres which followed Jewish victories, or Jehovah victo- 
 ries, the slaughters of men, women and children, were a part 
 of the regime of the then world. Caesar did thus in Belgium 
 and Gaul, and Vercingetorix, like Agag in his country, was 
 murdered in Caesar's triumph, after the Gallic victories, in 
 Rome. There was nothing remarkable in these events ; they 
 -were ordinary human ways and games. Two things may 
 strike us. The Jewish Warrior minus Jehovah does not 
 seem a redoubtable man. But the wonder is that Jehovah 
 commanded the massacres after Victory. That Samuel, the 
 :good high Priest, hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. 
 That Saul appeared to be more merciful than Jehovah : that 
 on the vote of his people, which he dared not disobey, for he 
 feared the people and obeyed their voice, he allowed them 
 to take to themselves the best of the spoil, sheep and oxen, 
 the chief of the things which should have been utterly 
 destroyed, to sacrifice unto the Lord his God in Gilgal. 
 And then Samuel said, " Hath the Lord delight in burnt- 
 offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? 
 Behold to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 31 
 
 the fat of rams. For rebellion is the sin of witchcraft, and 
 stubbornness is iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast 
 rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee as 
 King." Here obedience to literal command is declared as 
 the keynote of the Jewish dispensation, and disobedience as 
 fatal to it, and to those who disobeyed. The Amalekites 
 represented sinners, while the Jews represented the righteous 
 rejecting their sins, and in terrible drama they had to kill 
 those whom Jehovah had vanquished. In this series, with 
 its awful logic, the Lord of hosts had commanded Saul to 
 go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, 
 and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant 
 and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. This was 
 because all the personalty and property of Amalek partook 
 of his representation : his women stood for mothers of evil, 
 his infants and sucklings for evil seed and its increase, his 
 oxen for bad affections, his sheep for shameless pleas of 
 innocence, his camels for general ways of wickedness, and 
 his asses for every man's private inventions. Exactly the 
 opposite of what the precious beasts signify in a series which 
 begins with a good dominant. In the real life of a re- 
 generate community the slaughter of the women and 
 children were obviously heinous ; in the representation of 
 such a life by the Divine Dramatist, where the reality takes 
 the lowest form of actuality, the slaughter of these perhaps 
 innocent women, and most innocent babes and sucklings, 
 oxen and sheep, was done on earth that it might be trans- 
 lated in heaven as the victory of good, and the extermination 
 of evil. It is indeed a difficult train to keep steadily in the 
 mind, and will convince but few ; but the Scripture facts are 
 there to be explained ; and the compulsory Representation 
 of a Church where there was no Church, not in the ideas 
 and imaginations, but in the flesh and blood and bones and 
 bowels of the Jews and the Nations and Peoples extant 
 from Abraham to Christ, this is the Keynote of a consistent 
 solution of this class of difficulties in the Old Testament. 
 
32 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 The most obnoxious example of a man " after God's own 
 heart" is King David.* Many of the deeds written in 
 his history were by no means according to our reading of 
 the Ten Commandments, or to the direct appointments of 
 Jehovah. For his private ends he slew two hundred of the 
 Philistines, and brought their spoil to Saul, to earn Michal, 
 Saul's daughter, to wife ; when Saul, not God, had desired 
 him to slay one hundred. He was inventively ruthless in 
 war, and pounded his captives in iron mortars. He com- 
 mitted adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the 
 Hittite, and compassed Uriah's death by treachery, 
 that he might have Bathsheba to wife. She bore him a son 
 who died for David's sin, stricken by the Lord. Afterwards 
 Bathsheba bore a second son, Solomon, and " the Lord 
 loved him." In the same chapter, with David's repentance 
 to Nathan the Prophet, who comforted him by the assurance, 
 Thou shalt not die, he took Rabbah the City of Waters. 
 " And he brought forth the people that were therein, and 
 put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under 
 axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln : 
 and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. 
 So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem." 
 (2 Sam. xii. 31.) David's death-bed also was alive with his 
 revenge and perfidy : he had Joab murdered, and in ordering 
 his death said, " Let not his hoar head go down to the grave 
 in peace. To Gera he had sworn by the Lord saying, I will 
 not put thee to death with the sword. But now with his last 
 breath he said to Solomon, Hold him not guiltless ; for thou, 
 a wise man, knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him. 
 But his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood. 
 So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city 
 of David " (i Kings ii. 5-10). 
 
 * The reader is especially advised to see on this subject, Paul and 
 David, or the Relation betiveen Personal Character and the Apostolic 
 and Prophetic Offices. By Rev. A. Clissold. London : Speirs. 1873. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 33 
 
 XV. SIGNS PRECEDING JUDAISM. 
 
 We read in the internal sense of the Word that Jehovah 
 in the call of Abraham, and up to the time of Moses, 
 designed to institute a representative Church in the Jewish 
 nation, but that the character of that nation made it impos- 
 sible to carry out this end ; and that therefore a representation 
 of a Church was established. The difference between these 
 two institutions has been abundantly shown above. This 
 apparent change of purpose is correspondent to the dealing 
 of God with individuals. He knows all men from the 
 beginning, and creates every man for heaven and its happi- 
 ness. But as the man is an independent freewill, he himself 
 settles his own future, whether it is to be providential, or 
 fatal. The divine knowledge in no way influences the 
 result. In the case of an evil end, it does provide a true 
 and safe administration of it. So Jehovah dealt with the 
 Jews. He gave them all opportunity ; so that neither they, 
 nor the succeeding ^on of Christianity, nor the higher 
 rationality of the New Jerusalem, can accuse the Creator of 
 injustice to the creature. He showed His Love and Mercy 
 in approaching them as if they could be the medium of a 
 Representative Church ; but His divine Wisdom in obedi- 
 ence to the truth that they were not fit for this holy office. 
 The opportunity of it demonstrated that by their own act 
 and deed they rejected the proffered dispensation. 
 
 This mode of thought, however, is of " the internal historical 
 sense," and it is difficult not to fall into it when we think of 
 the omniscience of God from time as foreknowledge. It 
 is not of the spiritual sense. That sense saves us from 
 attributing change of purpose to God, by the reverse process 
 of attributing to man what belongs to him. His lust which 
 pressed him into a dispensation under Jehovah is the account 
 of it. At first from the call of Abraham he had remains 
 which might be raised into a representative Church; and 
 
 c 
 
34 I^E NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 these were not extinct until Ztpporah's day, when the Jewish 
 nation had become fixed in that external state which has been 
 described throughout. This Church of the Patriarchs being 
 consummated, the sternness of Judaism commenced in the 
 circumcision of Zipporah's son ; circumcision being a sign of 
 purity. So there is no change in the Sun of Righteousness, 
 but in the Jewish Earth, turning its face away from the day 
 into the night. This thought, being spiritual, is easier than 
 that on which Belial and his debating society were engaged, 
 concerning " fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute, and 
 found no end in wandering mazes lost," as told by Milton. 
 Yet both lines meet practically in this, that man changes, and 
 God makes the best for the good, and for the evil too their 
 best in the to them painful process of preventing them from 
 growing worse. 
 
 The record of this is a history of marvels in the Letter, and 
 traverses the Jewish character. It began by signs and 
 degrees in the time of the patriarchs. From the beginning 
 they were alien to constituting a Church. Abram had to be 
 changed into Abraham, and Sarai into Sarah to represent 
 outwardly a portended support to his call. Jacob met a 
 man and wrestled with him all night, a man who would not 
 tell his name ; but Jacob, not overthrown by him, would not 
 let him go, but demanded his blessing, and the Man gave 
 him the name of Israel, and Jacob acknowledged him for 
 " God whom he had seen face to face." There is pressure 
 here into a divine office, and a claim on Jacob's part to have 
 wrestled with God. The change of name is to be noted as 
 an alias ^ again involving some necessity of the supersession 
 and hiding of the Jew, Jacob, as a representative member ; 
 and the underpropping of the man by a spiritual foundation 
 which made him into the persona of a Church, that is, into 
 the actor of it, and not into a religious agent in it. Mere 
 correspondences were evidently put in operation to stand as 
 external denominators when internal goodness and truth 
 were absent. The name of Jacob was at first the symbol of 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 35 
 
 the natural man, the name, Israel, signified the spiritual man 
 and the spiritual Church. These were not instituted but 
 were represented. 
 
 Further on in the Divine Letter, Moses is commanded by 
 Jehovah to leave his father-in-law, Jethro, and to go down 
 into Egypt, to his oppressed people, with a message of 
 deliverance from their bondage. On the instituted way, 
 " Jehovah sought to slay him." This loudly contains a 
 divine mystery. God, the maker of all worlds and all men, 
 sought to slay him ! There is divine humour here ; the 
 Psalms speak of laughter and derision on the part of the 
 Creator ; and how except in such figures should the Omni- 
 potent seek to slay Moses without effecting it ! But it is in the 
 same class of Word as when " it repented the Lord that He 
 had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart," 
 and as when He conversed with Abraham who interceded 
 for Sodom. These things are to be held up to spiritual 
 light, and then the shell becomes translucent, and divine 
 wisdom is revealed under the strangeness of the previously 
 opaque external. They are parturient with truth and good 
 which could not otherwise be brought forth, and uncovering 
 the internal fruit is a felicity to the spiritual mind. 
 
 Moses here, on account of the context, represents the 
 Jewish nature and nation. He had just shown unwillingness 
 to receive the command of Jehovah to expostulate with 
 Pharaoh, because he was not a man of speech, but Jehovah 
 told him that He who gave the command had also created 
 the mouth to obey it. Nevertheless the command was set 
 aside, and Aaron was appointed to be spokesman, and 
 Moses to be his God. Was this a stage in what was to 
 follow ? Moses was in the way in an inn, and Jehovah met 
 him, and sought to kill him. In the way signifies Institu- 
 tion. In an inn, mark the series of meaning from Moses 
 as its dominant, the external sensual mind separate 
 from the internal mind. And Jehovah met him, signifies 
 opposition ; namely, his opposition to Jehovah. And sought 
 
36 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 to kill him, signifies that amongst that posterity a representa- 
 tive church could not be established : in other words, that 
 that nation could not be received or chosen. Zipporah, the 
 daughter of the Priest of Midian, was Moses' wife. Zip- 
 porah now denotes the representative church. Moses 
 opposing Jehovah was menaced in himself with a defect of 
 all representation which was equivalent to his extinction. 
 Zipporah took a flint stone, signifies quality manifested by 
 that church by truth [operating upon it] : The flint 
 stone signifies the truth of faith. And cut off the foreskin 
 of her son, signifies the removal of unclean loves, and thereby 
 the laying bare of the internal. And made it touch his feet, 
 signifies, shewing the quality of that nation interiorly, which 
 appears when the external is removed. To touch his feet = 
 to exhibit his nature. And she said, thou [Moses] art a 
 bridegroom of bloods to me, signifies that it was full of all 
 violence and hostility against truth and good. And He 
 [Jehovah] ceased from him, signifies that it was permitted 
 that the Jewish nation should represent; for by Jehovah 
 seeking to slay him was signified that a representative church 
 could not be established among that nation ; so when it is 
 now said that He ceased from him, it signifies that it was 
 permitted that they should represent ; that is, that the repre- 
 sentative of a Church should be established, but not a 
 Church. The evil can represent a Church, but none except 
 the good can be a Church, for to represent a Church is a 
 mere external thing. " Those things which are of the Church, 
 and are holy, can be represented even by the evil, for a 
 representative does not respect the person, but the thing." 
 
 Then she said, " A bridegroom of bloods for circumci- 
 sions." This signifies that although the internal was full of 
 violence and hostility against truth and good, still circum- 
 cision should be received for a sign representative of 
 purification from unclean loves. This is said by Zipporah 
 because now it was permitted to that nation to represent the 
 Church, which is denoted by ceasing from killing him. When 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 37 
 
 the internal is not at all attended to, as was the case with the 
 nation which was in externals without an internal, there then 
 remains the signification of circumcision as denoting the 
 removal of unclean loves ; thus purification ; so that it could 
 serve as a representative sign. 
 
 Note that Moses is called by his wife, Zipporah, who had 
 born to him his son, a bridegroom, and a bridegroom of 
 bloods, but not a husband ; for she denotes a representative 
 Church, and he, the representation of a Church. 
 
 This is transcribed, but abridged, from the Arcana 
 Cwlestia, n. 7040-7049. It is hard reading to those who 
 are unaccustomed to the spiritual sense, with its mere elements 
 of good and evil, truth and falsity, living through their 
 endless variety in the Word. But although difficult, and 
 alien to the natural man, to whom the first view of such 
 spiritual things is repulsive, and from the immediate sense 
 of darkness, even awful ; yet if the same interest can 
 gradually be felt in it, and the same pains given, as in the 
 deciphering of the hieroglyphics, and then gathering up and 
 distilling their meaning, the readers will here find definite 
 knowledge, brilliant representation, and spiritual light 
 founded upon light scientific : in fact, underlying Divine 
 Testimony ; just as they find important human elements 
 which still have some scent and flavour of great scientific 
 verities long passed away in Egyptology and its strange 
 language. 
 
 We conclude this subject with that typical instance of the 
 Jewish and Israelitish nature when Moses being delayed on 
 Sinai, a further change was enacted by Jehovah to suit the 
 lapse of those two nations. It is a speaking illustration of 
 God's policy in managing the Jewish Drama. The 
 Ten Commandments, and the Old Word, were changed 
 on account of the quality of the posterity of Jacob. When 
 Moses came down after Forty Days with Jehovah from 
 Mount Sinai, and learned from Aaron of the golden calf, he 
 broke the tables of stone prepared and written on by 
 
38 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Jehovah, and another set of tables hewn by Moses himself 
 were then written upon, and became the Commandments. 
 A lower Word was thus given organic to the Jewish Char- 
 acter ; a Word full of those abnormal and barbarous things 
 which are stumbling-blocks to the present religious mind. 
 Jewish externality when commanded to exterminate enemies, 
 could not conceive that they were of his own household, 
 and in his own bosom ; and so his dispensation fell upon 
 men, women and children, and his morals were slaughters. 
 Yet were they perceived in heaven as wars in the heart only, 
 and exterminations of evils there. As shown above, such 
 was this astonishing " Representation of a Church." 
 
 XVLTHE WORD VINDICATED. 
 
 Theologians account for the apparent discords of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, and their obvious contrariety to the Divine Being, by 
 the formula that the Bible has a human element in it mixed 
 with the Divine element ; and that the human is chargeable 
 with the dross which modifies all human things. If there is 
 a really divine life, and a human imperfection written with 
 it, the task of divaricating the one from the other is super- 
 human, and no born intellect can be impartial and adequate 
 to it. Each man will throw away what does not suit his 
 temperament, or please his character, or condone his sins. 
 The breakers of commandments will each rule out of Court 
 the Commandment which should be his executioner ; as 
 Bacon in his Jest Book shows a criminal on a capital 
 charge, who says to the Court : Police, pointing to the Judge, 
 " take that man away, for I go in fear of my life because 
 of him." So also all things concerning Immortality, and 
 heaven, and hell, will be ruled out as human elements by 
 the wicked who have no bonds in their death. This will 
 happen surely when the divine and human elements, which 
 natural chemistry has to separate, are still two substances, 
 and merely mixed. Those also who deny and perhaps 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 39 
 
 deride the miraculous and supernatural, will unscrupulously 
 exterminate it from the whole Word, as being the absurd 
 human, while their own dust and ashes remaining is the 
 sublime divine. 
 
 But when, and moreover, instead of this, the Scripture has, 
 according to a more common formula of the learned, been 
 given through men's minds, with self-love and human 
 character generally as the recipient organism of it, then the 
 analysis of it into divine and human is superfluous, and we 
 must say that it is wholly human ; whether leavened or not 
 by any unaccountable divinity or insane enthusiasm. It 
 were as easy to think of a theology arising from it, as to 
 expect to elicit sunbeams out of cucumbers. It would be a 
 Word of man after Professor Clifford's heart ; and indeed we 
 have myriads of such words of man in Literature already. 
 
 The Word of God comes by a different way to this. It 
 comes neither partly through man, and partly to him ; as 
 perhaps the thought is in the first formula ; nor wholly 
 through man, as in the second. It comes to man ; it does 
 not come through him. The prerogative of a Word that 
 comes to man and not through him is to be exactly con- 
 formable to his state, to fit him in his whole mind, in every 
 spherule and rolling convolution of his brain, in the recesses 
 of his heart, in the inmost penetralia of his memory, 
 and in every crack and cranny of his individuality. 
 And withal, being conformable to him, to be utterly 
 independent of him. A word that comes through him 
 is himself over again, and he rebukes such a Word if 
 ever it is inconvenient to his evils, as it will rarely be ; he 
 drenches it with his own drugs, and stifles its warning. An 
 external Word impinging with its truths on the religious and 
 moral skin from without, may be rejected, but stands back 
 in protest, as a living mirror, sculptured cast, and legible 
 imprint of the sinner. It cannot be smothered internally. 
 It fits and will fit ; it smites and will smite. 
 
 An external Word, or Revelation from God to man, 
 
40 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 follows the state of man to converse with him. It was in- 
 deed in Man, and not external, except that man knew that 
 the voice of God was not his own voice, but Jehovah's, in 
 the Adamic Church ; for man was sympathetic to the pene- 
 tration of his Father and Creator, and from his heart of 
 hearts loved the Advent into his soul's soul. But in the 
 Noahtic Church the Word as the divine truth was an ex- 
 ternal instruction and appeal, seminal with Enoch tradition : 
 a high Revelation. In the Jewish Church a low Revela- 
 tion. In the Gospels, the Word made flesh and shining 
 as the life of men : in the New Church, the Second 
 Coming ; the Word made spiritual for Mankind, and Divine- 
 celestial in the Lord. So the Word is diverse, and God 
 appears to every man according to the state of each, and 
 He has also a different name of Divine quality in each 
 different heaven. 
 
 But now mark. Were the Word to come through man, 
 through hearts deceitful above all things and desperately 
 wicked, unless it destroyed its subject, it would partake of 
 his quality and be debased to it. When it comes to man it 
 does partake of his quality, and its divine truth and purity 
 are not affected by it. In order to accompany us on the 
 way the Word speaks by appearances and by Correspond- 
 ences. To the men of evil passions, Jehovah has human 
 passions. Wrath, revenge, delight in the destruction of 
 enemies, are what our nature sees of God while evil reigns 
 in ourselves. Our fixed literality is the gauge and meter of our 
 character. But because the Word is not written through us its 
 Divinity is reserved, and " God is His Own Interpreter ;" and 
 revealing the Divine Spiritual Sense, we know by slow degrees 
 of faith that our Father is never wrath, but loves His enemies, 
 and is the Friend of sinners. Yet the sternness of Divine 
 Truth remains, and is our way, truth and life. The evil 
 look of the Word, say here, the Jewish Word, is our own evil 
 upon which the letter is necessarily moulded. When the 
 science of correspondences is applied to that Word, and 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 41 
 
 reveals its spiritual sense, the letter perishes, and the 
 heavenly fills the vessels of the earthly. 
 
 In closing these remarks, all bearing upon the Mystery 
 of the Jews, and upon the problem of the cause and 
 manner of the Representation of a Church, it seems reason- 
 able to think that the wonderful means employed by 
 Jehovah are also in accord and series with His general 
 Government of the World. Without being peopled by 
 Jews, is not the world in 1894 mainly darkened with the 
 shadow of Judaism ? And as Judaism was propped by a 
 Theocracy, and the heavens were supported by that divine 
 Atlas-work, is not the same work as a necessity continued 
 with providential variation wherever divine support is needed. 
 It does not now institute or build a compulsory religion, 
 because a New Church, a New Religion, and a New Reve- 
 lation are presently in the world, and respect human 
 freedom as no previous dispensation has respected it : in 
 fact, re-create it. Moreover, the tiny heart and lungs of 
 this Infant Religion give the New Heavens a basis ; a new 
 earth and plane for the descent of the New Jerusalem ; and 
 for the pulse and breath of it to move human nature in 
 all its organs and members and climates. A Theocracy 
 which can never be absent takes charge of more external 
 things, as it did in Judea, and by constant events no longer 
 recognised as divine ; by rewards and punishments, by the 
 rise and fall of states and nations, by wars, pestilences, and 
 famines ; by shakings of the dead cosmos ; by signs of the 
 times, the Creator and Upholder overrules the days of evil, 
 and secures a place from the wrath of man in which as in 
 another Holy Land the descending City and the new 
 Humanity may be established. 
 
 Judaism in the Word, the Jews also, have universal signi- 
 fication. In the spiritual sense, which does not belong to 
 persons or nations, Jews are all those who have the quality 
 of representing a holy internal without having a holy 
 internal themselves. The Word is implied in a good sense 
 
42 THE hEW JERUSALEM 
 
 spiritually in the Apocalypse, where it speaks of those who 
 say they are Jews, but are not, but are of the Synagogue 
 of Satan, ii. 9, iii. 9. The like holds of other names in the 
 Word : they are not local or national or individual in the 
 internal sense. So Babylon, which signifies the love of 
 dominion over the souls of men, pre-eminently denotes the 
 Church of Rome, but also all other churches, institutions 
 and persons where this love is an essential quality. Thus 
 Judaism, like Babylon, exists wherever its quality is,, 
 whether in the Jews, or in any other denomination. 
 
 XVII. HUMAN NATURE NEEDS A 
 REVELATION. 
 
 From the Arcana Ccelestia, where a divine imprint shines 
 from every page, the following is commended to the reader 
 as bread for the day : 
 
 " Man, without a revelation from the Divine cannot know 
 anything about eternal life nor even anything about God> 
 and still less about love and faith to Him. For man is born, 
 into mere ignorance ; and must after birth learn everything 
 from worldly experiences, from which he must form his 
 understanding. He is also born by inheritance into all the 
 evil of self-love and love of the world. The delights derived 
 from these two loves are continually prevalent, and their 
 suggestions are diametrically opposite to the Divine. Hence 
 now it is that Man of himself knows nothing about eternal 
 life. Therefore there must be a Revelation to communicate 
 such knowledge." 
 
 " That the evils of the love of self and the world induce 
 such ignorance concerning those things that relate to eternal 
 life, is very manifest from those within the Church, who,, 
 although they know from revelation that there is a God, 
 that there is a heaven and a hell, that there is an eternal 
 life, and that that life is to be gained by the good of love 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 43 
 
 and faith, still fall into denial about these things ; as well 
 the learned as the unlearned. Hence it is further evident 
 what great ignorance would prevail if there were no 
 revelation." 
 
 " Since then man lives after death, and in such case, to 
 eternity, and a life awaits him according to his love and 
 faith, it follows that the Divine, out of love towards the 
 human race, revealed such things as may lead to that life, 
 and conduce to man's salvation. What the Divine has 
 revealed with us is the Word." 
 
 " The Word, as a Revelation from the Divine, is divine 
 in all things and in everything. What is from the Divine 
 cannot be otherwise." 
 
 " What is from the Divine descends through the heavens 
 down to man. In the heavens therefore it is accommodated 
 to the wisdom of the Angels who are there, and on earth to 
 the apprehension of the men who are there. Thus in the 
 Word there is an internal sense which is spiritual for the 
 angels, and an external sense which is natural for men. 
 Hence it is that conjunction of heaven with man is effected 
 by the Word." 
 
 " The genuine sense of the Word is apprehended by 
 none but those who are illuminated or enlightened, and 
 they alone are enlightened who are in love and faith to the 
 Lord, for the interiors of such are elevated by the Lord into 
 the very light of heaven." 
 
 " The Word in the letter cannot be apprehended except 
 by doctrine derived from the Word by one who is en- 
 lightened. The sense of the letter is accommodated to 
 the apprehension of men, even of the simple. Therefore 
 doctrine derived from the Word must be to them for a 
 lamp." 
 
 "The Books of the Word are all those which have an 
 internal sense; those which have not are not the Word. 
 The Books of the Word in the Old Testament are the 
 Five Books of Moses, the Book of Joshua, the Book of 
 
44 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Judges, the two Books of Samuel, the two Books of Kings, 
 the Psalms of David; the Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 the Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, 
 Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, 
 Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi ; and in the New Testament, 
 the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John ; and the 
 Apocalypse " (n. 10318-10325). 
 
 XVIILTHE THICK DARKNESS ABOUT GOD 
 ON MOUNT SINAI. 
 
 The cruelties mentioned in Section XVI., though apparent 
 commands of Jehovah, yet come by reflex action from the 
 Jews. But they exist in the Divine Word, and infernal as they 
 are, they have heavenly opposites and correspondences, and 
 they show the bed or nidus in which the Jewish Dispensation 
 was born. The very womb of it was Sinai, of which it is 
 written, " And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because 
 the Lord descended upon it in fire ; and the smoke thereof 
 ascended as the smoke of a furnace ; and the whole mount 
 quaked greatly. And after the commandments were 
 delivered, All the people saw the thunderings, and the 
 lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain 
 smoking; and when the people saw, they removed, and 
 stood afar off. . . And the people stood afar off, and 
 Moses drew near unto the thick darkness about God." In 
 the spiritual sense, which we now possess more indestruc- 
 tibly than we possess the English Language, and from the 
 same Lord God who spoke the Ten Commandments from 
 Sinai, these terrible appearings were far off from Jehovah 
 Himself, but were the project of the human nature opposed 
 to Him, and reacting against His Divinity : they denoted 
 the self-love of the Jews about to receive the last word and 
 dispensation which was then possible ; and about to reject 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 45 
 
 and destroy it. The thick darkness about God was the 
 nature of that race. The obverse love and truth which 
 alone are the Father was shown in condescension of Glory 
 when other Jews were blessed by Christ, and it came to pass 
 while He blessed them, He was parted from them, and 
 carried up into Heaven. God appears to every man, and to 
 all bodies collectively, differently according to the state of 
 each, which we shall be pardoned for repeating. 
 
 Also compare the overshadowing of the Virgin by Jehovah 
 the Lord, and the Heavenly Host with the Shepherds watch- 
 ing their flocks by night, and the darkness about God 
 dissipated by the Incarnation, these inaugurations of the 
 first Christian Religion, with the awful beginning of the 
 Jewish Religiosity. 
 
 XIX. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CORRES- 
 PONDENCE. 
 
 In such difficult studies it is useful to lead the horse, or 
 understanding of the Word, time after time, to principles in 
 which thirst for truth may be satisfied, and the way refreshed. 
 Let us delay here for a word about Correspondence ; since 
 this fact, doctrine and knowledge, is so often referred to in 
 these pages. Correspondence in the Word is between 
 earthly and heavenly things. In the Ancient Church all the 
 rituals were correspondences, and caused the presence of 
 heaven to sincere worshippers. Placing things in a holy 
 order, therefore, where the heart and mind were in the like 
 state, had actual and active power from God to sanctify and 
 potentize worship. There was Divine Spiritual Induction, 
 as now by physical placements we have electrical induction : 
 a proper plane from below to above and from above to 
 below is the condition in both cases. This knowledge of 
 spiritual correspondences came down from the earliest ages, 
 when during the first celestial innocence it was in the mind 
 
46 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 from the heart of the Family of Man, and was as instinctive 
 as the vitals of the body are now, and as the minds of 
 animals and birds and insects are. There was, however, 
 what there is nowhere but in man, a heavenly will to it, 
 which was not instinctive, but free, a free will. Nature so 
 far as was good and useful, was transparent to this mind, 
 flowed from it, and obeyed it by Correspondences. For 
 man and nature were of one affection by act of God, and 
 loved to correspond and converse, and so the world let man 
 into her bridal rooms where she was continually married by 
 new ends to her Creator, and where her teeming progeny of 
 love was born. Therefore the science of correspondences 
 was the science of sciences. In the Ancient Church the 
 knowledge but not the instinct of it survived; a broken 
 knowledge suited to the service of a more external Dispen- 
 sation. Egypt possessed the scientific profession of it, and 
 cultivated the " scientifics of the Church." It taught by the 
 lore of most ancient symbols how worship could commune 
 with heaven, and how those in heaven could flow into 
 worship. It was an organized body of religion ; a might 
 and a power. The arrangement of Correspondences under 
 the guidance of a pervading Revelation was like the build of 
 the organization in a man, which while it answers to life and 
 corresponds with it, brings life down into the body, and 
 begs the question of life by being alive. So this organic 
 science of the Church brought a fulness of life to faithful 
 religious worshippers, and made them a body under an 
 upper body in the spiritual heavens. This power when 
 attained was subject to the state of the worshippers, and of 
 the Church. The conscience formed to protect its integrity 
 was corrupted by the free will of the members ; oblivion 
 came between worship and God, and the vehicles of divine 
 truth were alienated. This was gradual, and the power of 
 the knowledge was slowly lost. The refuse of it was more 
 and more man-made, not God-made. It ruled minds from 
 priestly dominion, and attempted to control the nature of 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 47 
 
 things by Magic. Magic was not a false pretence but a false 
 performance. The Egyptian Magicians had its powers. 
 We have attestation of the spiritual lore of the Egyptians in 
 the saying that Moses was learned in all their wisdom ; and 
 the tradition of this wisdom was preserved in the legend that 
 Greek philosophers resorted to Egypt as to a fountain of the 
 truths of old. Herodotus also says that the gods once ruled 
 there. It had been and was a real power as we see from 
 Genesis, and continued to be such until the Ancient Church 
 was consummated and judged, and the coincidence of its 
 vastation in Egypt enacted in the overwhelming of Pharaoh 
 and his host. The refuse of the religion, the survival of the 
 dregs, which are always what can bear the degradation of 
 surviving, dwindled into the perversions signalized in the 
 temples and tombs, into the hieroglyphics concerning the 
 glory of dynasties, but with remains of Ancient Truth, Justice 
 and Judgment, in the book of the dead and their long-drawn 
 destinies. Effective Magic, such as the Magicians opposed 
 to the miracles of Jehovah through Moses, ceased, but still 
 has left traces in all the centuries ; and witchcraft was dealt 
 with in penal statutes till a late age in England and the 
 United States. We also recal Lapland and Africa. A form 
 of it consists in the arrangement of some mechanism meant 
 to coincide with a future event, and thus to bring that event, 
 whether death, or health, good or ill fortune, to pass, and so 
 to control the stars. Rebellion is witchcraft, said Samuel to 
 Saul. Superseding the Word of the Lord, and attempting 
 to command the cosmos by your own invention, is spiritual 
 rebellion. 
 
 When the Ancient Church was consummated and judged, 
 and ceased to be a Church, a severe and limited system of 
 correspondences was ordained, and magic and its symbols 
 were forbidden. It is this iron discipline that we now meet with, 
 and which we may reverently call Divine Magic in the stern 
 walk of the Jewish Dispensation. There is continuity of the 
 Revelations from Adam to Christ, and the might of Corres- 
 
48 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 pondences bares its arm in each, but with a different deter- 
 mination, because each several Church is two-fold, a Church 
 in heaven and a Church on earth, and a Word written in 
 correspondences is the uniting medium in every case between 
 the upper and lower Churches. 
 
 XX. JEWISH FREEDOM AND BONDAGE. 
 
 It does not appear that the Jews were condignly judged 
 for cruelties other than those which were forbidden by the 
 Lord in commandments, or through priests and prophets in 
 the events of the history. The terrible processes of David 
 were included in the general Israelitish mission of the exter- 
 mination of the nations. The details belonged to the 
 individuals, and to their several characters, and would be 
 judged individually after death, and also committed to the 
 bulk and record of the Jewish nature in the great Assize of 
 the Consummation. So the Jews too had a comparatively 
 free hand in a higher sense than Judaism permitted. They 
 were not machines. But in regard to particular laws as 
 symbols in the Divine Drama obedience was stringent, and 
 life and death were at stake. This was exemplified when 
 David numbered the people. We read the following : 
 " Now these be the last words of David, David the Son of 
 Jesse saith, and the man who was raised on high saith, the 
 anointed of the God of Jacob, and pleasant in the Psalms of 
 Israel : The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His Word 
 was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, the Rock of 
 Israel spake to me, he that rules over men must be just, 
 ruling in the fear of God. As the light of the morning when 
 the sun riseth, a morning without clouds ; the tender grass 
 out of the earth through clear shining after rain. Although 
 my house be not so with God, yet He hath made with me an 
 everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure, for it is 
 all my salvation and all my desire, although He maketh it not 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM, 49 
 
 to grow" (2 Samuel xxiii. 1-5). Then follow the names of 
 David's thirty captains, and the exploits of his chiefs, the 
 chiefs of the threes who were eminent over the thirty, making 
 thirty and seven in all. Uriah the Hittite is the last enumer- 
 ated. " And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 Israel, and He moved David against them, saying, Go, 
 number Israel and Judah." Why was this anger kindled ? 
 The inventory of David's mighty men, and their exploits, 
 and the summum bonum in Uriah the Hittite, is noteworthy. 
 The only mention of the Lord in the chapter is where David 
 would not drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem be- 
 cause it had value as the blood of the men that went for it in 
 jeopardy of their lives. These were not actions commanded 
 by Jehovah, or representative correspondences in the Dis- 
 pensation. But David exulted in his own treasury of valour 
 as its pieces were enumerated, and this led on to an infraction 
 of a Divine command. The anger of Jehovah, in the 
 spiritual sense, is David's manifested self-love. The avarice 
 and lust were continued onwards now in numbering the people 
 from Dan to Beersheba, that he might know the sum of the 
 people. He first counts his guineas and then his farthings 
 that he may be quite sure of his resources. He was warned 
 by Joab and the captains of the host against counting the 
 people, but his word prevailed against theirs. In con- 
 sequence of David's disobedience, the destroying angel 
 spiritually, the crime of David in voiding his representative 
 veracity sent a pestilence upon Israel, and there died of the 
 people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men. 
 Jehovah sends no pestilences, but EPIDEMIC MAN falls from 
 his own evil spirit upon his body, and kills himself. 
 
 " To number signifies to arrange and dispose ; and as it 
 belongs to the Lord alone to arrange in order and dispose 
 the truths and goods of faith and of love with everyone in 
 the Church and in Heaven ; therefore when this is done 
 by man, as it was done by David through Joab, it signifies 
 the ordering and disposition of such things by man and not 
 
 D 
 
50 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 by the Lord ; which is not to order and dispose, but to 
 destroy." Arcana Ccelestia, n. 10217. 
 
 If this be well considered, it explains why counting his 
 armies, taking a military census, which all chiefs do to-day, 
 was forbidden to David, because the Lord was his army, and 
 seventy thousand deaths by pestilence were the spiritual 
 measure of the offence whereby David denied that they were 
 Jehovah's men and counted them as his own. Remember- 
 ing all the previous deeds of the children of Israel in their 
 battles, and believing the same literally, and that the power 
 and terror of God was on these men against their enemies 
 so that handfuls of them routed hosts ; we may then know 
 that the conditions of Israel's warfare were miraculous ; and 
 that whatever rebellion against command broke the obedience 
 upon which the perpetual miracle of the Dispensation 
 depended, in the act destroyed the foundations, and left 
 Israel an easy prey to nations naturally mightier than 
 themselves. 
 
 The avarice of personal glory, the deepest Miser and 
 Hoarder of all, was dramatically or representatively stricken 
 here in bodily deaths. For everything in the Jewish Economy 
 was bodily and carnal, an outbirth of the Jews. The same 
 things outborn from Christians are, mentally as well as 
 bodily, propagated in modern states. The devastation of 
 countries and waste of armies takes place under destroying 
 angels, which are godless lusts of power ; attributes of glory 
 to nations themselves. Cupidities prowling after other 
 lands, brooding revenges centuries long, schemes for 
 universal dominion, mutual national hatreds and friend- 
 ships of hatred all round ; these and the parliaments of 
 Atheistic Man make Christianity worse than Judaism. 
 
 It is noteworthy that the Jews of these late ages are not 
 in the front in the conduct of wars, and that the worst part 
 of their nature as it was displayed when Jehovah was their 
 Ruler is dormant. Avarice is their hereditary passion, and 
 financial ability the use of honest Jews to the community. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 51 
 
 This latter is their best conversion towards Christianity ; and 
 it is a sufficient and considerable fact. While they wail for 
 their temple and their lost place in the Divine Drama, 
 they may thank God that they are emancipated from its 
 Letter, and that they sit politically and socially in so many 
 countries under their own vines and fig-trees. We have 
 succeeded to their Cross, but think to escape from the 
 responsibilities which weighed upon the chosen people. 
 
 XXL SAUL AND SAMUEL. 
 
 An instance illustrative of the Jewish Dispensation occurs 
 in the Word where Samuel presented Saul, the son of Kish, 
 of the tribe of Benjamin, to all the people as king, and 
 said, See ye him whom the Lord hath chosen, and all the 
 people shouted and said, [God save the king] Let the king 
 live. And Samuel said, Come, and let us go to Gilgal, and 
 renew the kingdom there. Then recounting the Lord's 
 doings from the days of Moses and Aaron to his own Priest- 
 hood, he thus rebuked the children of Israel for their 
 wickedness : " When ye saw that Nahash the king of the 
 children of Ammon came against you, ye said unto me, Nay, 
 but a king shall reign over us ; when the Lord your God was 
 your King. If ye will fear the Lord, and serve Him, and 
 hearken unto His voice, and not rebel against the command- 
 ment of the Lord, then shall both ye and also the king that 
 reigneth over you be followers of the Lord your God. But 
 if ye will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord, but rebel 
 against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand 
 of the Lord be against you as it was against your fathers." 
 i Samuel x. 25, xi. 15, xii. 12-16. "Then Saul, finding 
 that the people were scattered from him, though he had 
 been made king, and being afraid of the Philistines who 
 were assembled to fight against Israel, did not wait for 
 Samuel, who had appointed to meet him in Gilgal, there 
 
52 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 to renew the kingdom, but commanded the burnt-offering 
 and the peace-offerings to be brought to him. And he 
 offered the burnt-offering. And it came to pass as soon 
 as he had made an end of offering the burnt-offering, behold, 
 Samuel came. And Samuel said, What hast thou done ? 
 And Saul said, Because I saw that the people were scattered 
 from me, and thou earnest not within the days appointed, 
 and that the Philistines assembled themselves together at 
 Micmash, therefore said I, Now will the Philistines come 
 down upon me to Gilgal, and I have not entreated the 
 favour of the Lord. I forced myself therefore, and offered 
 the burnt-offering. And Samuel said to Saul, Thou 
 hast done foolishly. Thou hast not kept the commandment 
 of the Lord thy God which he commanded thee, for now 
 would the Lord have established thy kingdom upon Israel 
 for ever. But now thy kingdom shall not continue. The 
 Lord hath sought Him a man after His own heart, and 
 the Lord hath appointed him to be prince over His 
 people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord 
 commanded thee." Ibid. xiii. 8-14. 
 
 Saul set the State above the Church, or rather became 
 high priest by usurpation as well as king by divine 
 right. But the matter for our perception here is still the 
 revelation of the nature of the Jewish Dispensation. The 
 king's anxiety and impatience, and in his fear of delay 
 his wish to entreat the favour of the Lord, are obvious 
 motives for his conduct, and if we put out of sight that 
 he was under Jehovah, his offence might have been con- 
 doned If the reader is not careful to hold the condi- 
 tions in mind, he may fall into the thought that it was 
 hard that the first king of Israel should lose his kingdom 
 on such grounds. But if you accept the letter of the Word, 
 and the purpose of Jehovah in founding a representation of 
 a Church on mere obedience to the spoken words of God 
 Almighty, to the bond of the Letter, then Saul's misap- 
 prehension of his kingship becomes almost as marvellous 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 53 
 
 from below as Jehovah's action before seemed from above. 
 May we without irreverence liken the Jewish Church to a 
 game at chess, only to declare that in such a combat, as 
 between good and evil, the moves are fixed, and no exigence 
 allows them to be departed from. The perception of this, 
 we again repeat, depends upon our belief in the letter, and 
 also in our acceptance of the new Revelation about the 
 previous Churches, and the Christian Church which was 
 to come. Natural mechanics came after celestial and 
 spiritual dynamics. 
 
 We cannot but see that Saul had no knowledge of, or 
 belief in, the conditions under which he was living, and 
 that an impenetrable stupidity was manifested by the Jews 
 generally in the same regard. Living under miracle and on 
 miracle, they forgot this fact in the near presence of the 
 greatest signs and wonders. The manifestation of Jehovah 
 on Sinai, the casting of the golden calf, and the exultant 
 cry, These be thy Gods, O Israel, which brought thee out of 
 the land of Egypt, are almost synchronous events. Every- 
 thing here signifies that a last remainder of man was being 
 dealt with. This must be carefully taken into account in 
 the theory of a case which has no parallel in other history. 
 May we use a mythological trope in illustration. It shall be 
 of Atlas, who was condemned to support heaven on his 
 shoulders. His strength to do this depends upon an exact 
 care of his mind and body : a wrong meal, a debauch in 
 wine, a waste in his life, any disobedience to the needs of 
 his singular service, a grain of unwillingness, make his state 
 register a tottering foundation, and the weight of the sky 
 sways to destruction. 
 
 In the Divine Word another event is declared. When 
 Samuel tells Saul that his kingdom shall not continue, he 
 says, The Lord hath sought him a man after His own heart, 
 and the Lord hath appointed him to be prince over His 
 people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord 
 commanded thee. David is here declared to be a man 
 
54 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 after God's own heart. The Lord knew what David was, 
 and foresaw every deed that David would freely do in his 
 lifetime. This characterization of David by the Lord as a 
 man after His own heart requires neither more nor less than 
 zfirm knowledge of the essence of the Jewish Dispensation. 
 Obedience to command in that dramatic Church militant 
 was the essence. It seems to involve two elements, (i) 
 The Jewish capacity for assuming an external religion 
 under fear of punishment and hope of reward ; and (2) 
 the previous Jewish nature which was altogether intractable, 
 and must be allowed to have its way where it did not 
 infringe the borders of the strait commandments, laws, 
 regulations, and directions of Jehovah. The man after 
 God's own heart was one whose obediences to this regime 
 so far exceeded his punishable disobediences, that the 
 representation of an external Theocracy, however im- 
 perfectly acted, did not perish. All the war and the 
 slaughter was in David's nature and in human nature, and 
 Jehovah in commanding it made it representative of holy 
 war between good and evil and between truth and falsity. 
 How the case would have been with the Land of Canaan if 
 the Jews had not been led against its nations by Moses and 
 Joshua is a question which suggests itself, but it cannot be 
 entertained in any case of theocratic history. Jehovah was 
 the alone Agent, and apart from his Leadership the armies 
 of the Jews were shadows. 
 
 It might be said that David in his long reign committed 
 more infractions of orders than Saul, and yet he preserved 
 the realm. But Saul clinging to his kingdom after he knew 
 that the Lord had forsaken him, his demoniac possession 
 and madness, his resort to necromancy, and above all his 
 abominable hatred of young and wonderful David, and his 
 attempts to murder him and to have him murdered, are 
 strong notes of character. Yet none of these things is so 
 much of the essence of his deposition and destruction as 
 his two acts of disobedience, in himself offering the burnt- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 55 
 
 offering and not awaiting Samuel, and in preserving Agag 
 and the spoil of the Amalekites which Samuel by the Lord 
 commanded him utterly to destroy. After this his prayers 
 were of no offect ; although he worshipped the Lord, the 
 Lord was averted from him, and answered him neither by 
 dreams, by urim, nor by prophets. 
 
 XXIL IMPOSSIBILITIES WERE NOT ASKED 
 OF THE JEWS. 
 
 With regard to the intractable Jewish nature which 
 could not be reached by temporary fears or hopes, no 
 impossible conditions were demanded of it. In the 
 Psalms and Prophets it was tenderly addressed, and 
 mercy and justice and brotherly love were enjoined as 
 they were afterwards commanded by Christ. But they 
 were interpreted as towards friends and brethren, and love 
 your enemies was not expressed. These things were recom- 
 mendations, not commands, and disobedience to mental 
 injunctions did not infringe the Old Testament Code. 
 Adultery was severely forbidden and punished, but taking 
 to wife was interpreted according to the Jewish nature : it 
 included polygamy according to regulation. The Patriarchs 
 were polygamists, and the kings : David had as many wives 
 as he listed ; and it was not imputed to him for wrong. 
 Solomon loved many strange women together with the 
 daughter of Pharaoh. . . . women of the nations concerning 
 which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall 
 not go among them. And he had seven hundred wives, 
 princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives 
 turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his 
 wives turned away his heart unto other gods ; and his heart 
 was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was the heart of 
 David his father. He went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of 
 the Zidonians, and after Milcom, the abomination of the 
 
56 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Ammonites. And Solomon did that which was evil in the 
 sight of the Lord, and went not fully after the Lord as did 
 David his father. He built an high place for Chemosh, the 
 abomination of Moab, in the mount that is before Jerusalem; 
 and for Moloch, the abomination of the children of Ammon. 
 And so did he for all his strange wives. For these deeds 
 the Lord who had appeared to him twice, now said to him : 
 I will surely rend thy kingdom from thee, and will give it to 
 thy servant. Notwithstanding, in thy day I will not do it for 
 David thy Father's sake, but I will rend it out of the hand of 
 thy son. Howbeit I will not rend away all the kingdom, but 
 I will give one tribe to thy son, for David my servant's sake, 
 and for Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen. i Kings xi. 
 1-13. It is clear from this that the representation of a 
 Church was perishing among the Jews, and that their 
 adulterous lust was insatiable. Moses for the hardness of 
 their hearts allowed them to put away their wives, but from 
 the beginning it hath not been so. Matthew xix. 8. Male 
 and female made he them. For this cause shall a man 
 leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, 
 and the twain shall be one flesh. Mark x. 5. The Lord 
 did not answer the Pharisees respecting the polygamy 
 recorded in the Old Testament. But the narrative of the 
 letter shows that it was not adultery in that dispensation, 
 and that the practice of it by David did not violate the 
 scheme of Judaism ; neither did the handmaids of the 
 Patriarchs given by Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel to their 
 husbands to bear children to them. This was because the 
 Jew then could not be kept to one wife ; his nature made 
 it impossible, and therefore monogamy was not a life and 
 death condition of the Dispensation, and polygamy did not 
 preclude the miraculous communication of that religiosity 
 with heaven. Conjugial love, which reigns in heaven, where 
 Marriage is universal and perpetual, was not in those Jews, 
 and the polygamy of that nation, with the other lusts of the 
 internal man, was set on one side, or disregarded, when the 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 57 
 
 daily performed representatives were translated inwards,, 
 and perceived above. The process of this transmutation 
 has been already described (see pages 26-28). 
 
 XXIIL INERADICABLE POL YGAMY, JE WISH 
 AND MAHOMETAN. 
 
 Mahomet, whose supplementary religion wrought such 
 effective good for a multitude of nations, destroying their 
 idolatries, did not attempt to eradicate polygamy, which was 
 hereditary over the whole world, and his Allah, like the 
 Jehovah of the Jews, wrought with what was possible in the 
 fallen and corrupt nature of man, in the interest of leading 
 all, whether Jews, Mahometans, Africans, or Hindoos, by 
 the gradual stages of possible change, towards the New Dis- 
 pensation, in which again as at first one man will have one 
 wife here and hereafter, and naturally and then spiritually, 
 in heaven as on earth, they twain shall be one flesh. 
 
 We put in parenthesis here that missionary effort in in- 
 structing the heathen will have to follow Mahomet as he 
 himself followed the Old Testament, and will not succeed in 
 propagating the truths of the Old and New Testaments, if it 
 is attempted to extinguish Polygamy and Idol-mediumship. 
 The reception of the Divine letter of the Word unaccom- 
 panied by the dogmas of the Church will in God's good 
 time do its work with Polygamy, and the White man, himself 
 charged with the Bible, will take no steps towards inducing 
 any chief to turn a crowd of faithful hard-working women 
 who are indispensable to his industries, out of doors into 
 unmerited want and degradation, because, not to his or their 
 discredit, they are his wives. Let the Africans be under 
 Jehovah for His time, until they have those new eyes which 
 see Jehovah as Christ. We have used the phrase Idol- 
 mediumship. It is different from idol worship, and the more 
 the form is human to the worshipper, the more easily it may 
 be the first step on which he kneels to the true God. 
 
58 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 The form of God is divinely human. God is a Man. 
 This truth, which was visible as Jehovah, and tangible as 
 Christ, and audible in Genesis when " God said," for only 
 Man says is innate in every man, and embedded in every 
 fetish, and can be brought out to acknowledged humanity 
 according to Christian instruction and a life according to its 
 simple teachings. 
 
 About marriage the Lord's words to the Sadducees are not 
 followed out. Jesus said, Ye the Sadducees do err, not 
 knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the 
 resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, 
 but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching 
 the Resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which 
 was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of 
 Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ? 
 God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. The 
 Lord lays down the Canon for understanding this revelation : 
 it lies in knowing the Scriptures and the power of God. 
 They, the Scriptures, are spirit and they are life. The 
 Resurrection is the regenerate man and woman ; here, by 
 the question, in the heavens. Neither marrying nor being 
 given in marriage is the Sadduceeism in them. What is being 
 as the Angels of God in heaven ? The next verse " which 
 was spoken to you by God," answers this question. The 
 God of Abraham, is the Divine truth proclaiming the celestial 
 marriage, the God of Isaac is the Divine truth certifying the 
 spiritual marriage, the God of Jacob is the Divine truth pro- 
 claiming the natural marriage. The three heavens attest 
 immortal marriage with all their songs, psalms, and acclama- 
 tions. And for whom ? Not for the Sadduceeans. By the 
 letter, and by the spirit, the parties in this ecclesiastical suit 
 were seven dead men and one dead woman. Note the 
 initial difference between the resurrection in which they are 
 as the angels of God in heaven, and the resurrection of the 
 dead, and that God is not the God of the dead. But God 
 is the God of the living. Love is the life of man, and con- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 59 
 
 jugial love the holy life in which two are one. And man and 
 woman are man and woman for ever, married and conjoined 
 either in the Abraham-heaven which signifies the celestial, 
 in the Isaac-heaven which signifies the spiritual, or in the 
 Jacob-heaven which is the natural, according to their place 
 in Maximus Homo which is determined by the ardour and 
 quality of their virginity and chastity here on earth. See 
 Swedenborg's Revelation of the whole subject in his Book 
 on CONJUGIAL LOVE, which will be the Canon for all races 
 in the New Religion and its Churches, and will leave the 
 Mahometan and the African to his own new and regenerating 
 conscience confronted by the Word of both the Old and the 
 New Testaments. 
 
 XXIV. THE JE WISH DRAMA BECAME MORE 
 AND MORE INEFFECTIVE. 
 
 It would appear that the sternness of Judaism was relaxed 
 in the later stages of it, and that evil inheritance accumulated 
 in the Jewish race age by age, as is always the case, in a 
 falling mankind, though in no instance is there extant such 
 a record of it as we possess in the Bible. While it took 
 place, sins were overlooked legally, and condign punishment 
 was postponed, and this was written of in the Word as the 
 mercy of Jehovah, and as accorded for the sake of David. 
 Polygamy grew monstrous, and Polytheism was the mind of 
 it, and lust, the offspring of the two, multitudinous, peopled 
 Jerusalem. From one source, David and Bathsheba, it is 
 instructive to note what the Seed of a man means. In 
 Solomon, the wisest of men, the builder of the Temple of 
 Jehovah, murder and adultery were married as in his 
 father David. Another subject to be opened is, that poly- 
 gamy appears to have been restricted after the Babylonish 
 Captivity. " In the post-Babylonian period monogamy 
 appears to have become more prevalent than at any previous 
 
60 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 time ; indeed we have no instance of polygamy during this 
 period on record in the Bible, all the marriages noticed 
 being with single wives. During the same period the theory 
 of monogamy is set forth in Eccles. xxvi. 1-27. The prac- 
 tice of polygamy nevertheless still existed ; Herod the Great 
 had nine wives at one time. The abuse of divorce continued 
 unabated." Smith's Concise Dictionary of the Bible, Art. 
 Marriage. Thus during the period alluded to some reforma- 
 tion took place, whether from example of Babylon, or from 
 compulsion there, or from new thoughts instilled into the 
 rulers. At the same time some glimmering light about a 
 future state was inseminated into them. Such Reformations- 
 or Revivals are known in our countries as accompanying 
 and to a certain extent mitigating the last days of dying 
 States and Churches. They do not give life, but for a time 
 they recall better ages, and keep hope and Remains alive, and 
 thus prolong mortal days against the chronic and inveterate 
 diseases which cause THE END OF THE CHURCH or of the 
 Empire. It was in this way that the Reformation brought 
 the Bible out of its sepulchre in the Churchyard. It was 
 thus that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a 
 death-bed for a thousand years. 
 
 But, moreover, as the Jewish Dispensation was drawing to 
 a close, and Jehovah was leaving them to their own devices, 
 the sense of a new freedom could not but be felt, and a new 
 Atheism, what we all Agnosticism, concerning their guided 
 supernatural past, must come as a paralysis upon all even 
 external beliefs, and leave the Jewish mind open to both 
 ethnic superstitions and philosophies. This, which modern 
 writers generally regard as a distinct progress for Judaism,, 
 paved the way to the Romano-Judaic legality which ended 
 in the Crucifixion of Christ. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 61 
 
 XXV. NE W RE VELATIONS. 
 
 But spiritual reasons essential to the Jewish Dispensation 
 governed in all these cases ; reasons or causes which could 
 not be discovered without a new Revelation. Things 
 which are monstrous were permitted by the Lord. Hear 
 then what Swedenborg says : " There are not any laws of 
 permission by themselves, or separate from the laws of the 
 Divine Providence ; the laws of each are the same. There- 
 fore it is said that God permits, by which is not meant that 
 He wills, but that He is not able to prevent, in view of the end, 
 which is salvation." Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine 
 Providence, n. 234. " Solomon was permitted to inaugurate 
 idolatrous worship of many kinds. This was in order that 
 he might represent the Lord's Kingdom or Church, together 
 with all the religious systems of the whole globe. For the 
 Church established with the Israelitish and Jewish nation 
 was a representative church ; and therefore all the judgments 
 and statutes of that Church represented the spiritual things of 
 the Church which are its internals. The people itself repre- 
 sented the Church ; the King, the Lord ; David, the Lord 
 about to come into the world ; and Solomon, the Lord after 
 his coming. And since the Lord after the glorification of 
 His humanity had power over heaven and earth, therefore 
 Solomon His representative appeared in glory and magnifi- 
 cence, was in wisdom above all the kings of the earth, and 
 also built the temple. Moreover, he permitted and instituted 
 the rites of many nations, through which the various creeds 
 and practices in the world were represented. The like is 
 signified by his seven hundred wives and three hundred 
 concubines ; for wife in the Word signifies a Church, and 
 
 Concubine a Religion aside Many kings after 
 
 Solomon were permitted to profane the Temple and the 
 holy things of the Church, because the people represented 
 the Church, and their king, the head of them. And as the 
 
62 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Israelitish and Jewish nation could not long represent the 
 Church, for they were idolaters at heart, so they receded 
 in time from representative worship ; perverting all things of 
 the Church, nor resting until they had devastated it. This 
 was represented [dramatized] by profanations of the Temple 
 by their kings, and by their idolatries : the final devastation 
 of the Church by the destruction of the Temple, by the 
 carrying away of the Israelitish people, and the captivity of 
 the Jewish people in Babylon. This was the cause ; and 
 whatever is done from any cause, is done of Divine Provi- 
 dence according to some law of its own." Ibid. n. 245, 246. 
 Granting that there must be a church on earth for man to con- 
 tinue to subsist here and hereafter, and that a representation 
 or drama of a Church was the only Atlas left on earth to support 
 the heaven, and that the Lord in His Divine Providence 
 must make use of this support, granting this, Swedenborg's 
 Rational Revelation is as incontestable as the surest truths 
 of mechanical or mathematical science. Yet beyond human 
 finding unless God show it, which He has done. 
 
 XXVLTHE MEDIUMSHIP OF DA VID AND 
 THE PROPHETS. 
 
 When Christ was risen, and joined the two apostles who 
 were going to the village of Emmaus, they had not truly 
 believed what He announced before His Crucifixion. 
 And now He said unto them, " O foolish men, and slow of 
 heart to believe all that the Prophets have spoken. Ought 
 not the Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into His 
 Glory? And beginning from Moses and from all the 
 Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the 
 things concerning Himself." And when He stood in the 
 midst of the eleven at Jerusalem, and showed them His 
 hands and His feet, and said, " Handle Me and see that it 
 is I Myself, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 63 
 
 Me have," He then also said to them " that all things must 
 needs be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and 
 the Prophets, and the Psalms concerning me. Then opened 
 He their mind that they might understand the Scriptures. 
 And He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ 
 should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day, 
 and that repentance and remission of sins should be 
 preached in His name unto all the nations beginning from 
 Jerusalem " (Luke xxv. 28, 39, 40, 44-48). 
 
 Here the Lord claims the Scriptures as Himself the Word 
 of God. To those to whom the Psalms are a daily Gospel, 
 it is impossible to conceive that they refer to David and 
 the Jews excepting in a temporal sense. They express the 
 attributes and struggles of a Divine Man, a God, with His 
 feet in the world, and struggling against the fetters of its 
 flesh, to bring his Godhead into its Power, Kingdom and 
 Glory. To David, on the contrary, his Psalms signify 
 indeed his relation to Jehovah, his states and struggles of 
 mind, but all temporal and personal, though taking in his 
 posterity ; his consciousness of the disobedience of his 
 nation, and fear for the consequences of it to himself, his 
 reliance on the promises to his Royal Line which he regards 
 as binding on the Almighty : his adjuration of Jehovah to 
 take his side against his enemies, to carry out his curses, 
 and extend his cruelties. Within these lines David was a 
 devout man, and sufficiently faithful to his dispensation to 
 keep his throne in it, and die a king, and bequeath a 
 kingdom. 
 
 Swedenborg throughout his works has to reveal about 
 David, both as a person, and as a merely representative 
 character. As a person he partook of the Jewish nature, 
 especially in his capacity for an external worship of Jehovah, 
 while such worship had no internal response in his nature 
 and character. On this account, as a dramatis persona^ he 
 could receive from an angel of Jehovah, that is, from Jeho- 
 vah Himself, a verbal dictation of the Psalms, having always 
 
<5 4 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 some obvious reference to the man David, but also contain- 
 ing and hardly veiling a glory of Divine Truth and a fire 
 of Divine Love which were irrelevant to David. He never 
 proclaimed his own divinity ; but it was impossible that he 
 should not attribute to himself many of the expressions 
 which are obviously divine attributes. This kept him to 
 the representative worship of Jehovah ; and was therefore 
 an essential element in the Jewish Religiosity. Had he 
 seen the coming Messiah in the Word verbally communica- 
 ted, but inspired by Jehovah, he would not have been the 
 Jew David. His love of himself and his descendants was 
 in union here with the necessities of God's permission and 
 providence, and he adored an external institution which 
 suited his nature, and a word of the Lord which identified 
 fois name with a Royal Office, and did not make impossible 
 demands upon him of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Few of my readers will object to be relieved from the 
 " higher criticism " which tells us that David wrote but few 
 of the Psalms, that his " last words " are partly his, and partly 
 by some one else, etc., etc. To the main purpose here it 
 is sufficient that these are divine Jewish writings with an 
 inspired letter, and an internal sense. 
 
 These conditions must be kept up. As we have seen, 
 nothing in David's mere selfhood prevented him from repre- 
 senting the Lord spiritually. This he did both in his 
 lifetime, and by the Prophets after his death. " It is written 
 of David that he shall be king over them ; and they all 
 shall have one Shepherd : they shall dwell in the land, they 
 -and their children, and their children's children, for ever." 
 Ezekiel xxxiv. 24, 25. And again, "The children of 
 Israel shall return, and seek Jehovah their God, and David 
 their King." Hosea iii. 5. These words were written by 
 the prophets after the time of David ; and yet it is plainly 
 declared that he shall be their king and prince ; whence it 
 may be evident that David means the Lord." Arcana 
 Ccelestia^ n. 1888. Moreover every name in the Word, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 65 
 
 whether of kingdoms, countries, cities, or men, is a re- 
 ceptacle, and thus a repository, of the celestial and spiritual 
 things of the Lord. Ibid. The throne of David is not the 
 kingdom David had, but the kingdom of Heaven ; wherefore 
 David does not signify David, but the Lord's divine Royalty; 
 and throne signifies the Divine Truth which proceeds, and 
 which constitutes the Lord's kingdom. Ibid. 5313. I am 
 the root and the offspring of David, Apocalypse, xxii. 16, 
 signifies that He is that Lord who was born in the world, 
 and therefore the Lord in His Divine Humanity. From 
 this He is also called the Branch of David." Apocalypse 
 Revealed, n. 954. " He that hath the key of David, and 
 openeth, and no one shutteth, and shutteth and no one 
 openeth, Apocalypse, iii. 7, signifies, Who alone has omni- 
 potence to save. David signifies the Lord as to Divine 
 Truth. The key of David has a similar signification to the 
 keys of Peter. Ibid. n. 174. Enough has here been given 
 to show that David in the internal sense, which is communi- 
 cated for the new religion, denotes the Lord. And that His 
 own conversation to the two disciples going to Emmaus 
 was a declaration and prophecy by the Word made flesh, 
 and who dwelt among us, of a Revelation which brings His 
 omnipresence in the Old Testament from His own Divine 
 Rationality into our most human certainty. His medium 
 fulfilling this prophecy is Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 
 XXVIL THE IMMANENCE OF JEHOVAH IN 
 THE MOSAIC DISPENSATION. 
 
 Jehovah was near to the Jews in their Church Repre- 
 sentation. It was a regimen of personal and national fear 
 accompanied by signs and wonders ; of threats and punish- 
 ments ; and of victories and worldly prosperity for legal and 
 technical obedience. Jehovah spoke to Abraham and called 
 him. He was an idolater at the time, and did not know 
 
 E 
 
66 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Jehovah, and therefore was more susceptible of the call to 
 a new state than others in Syria among whom there lingered 
 perverted knowledges of the destroyed Noahtic Church. 
 He was indeed almost in the same religious state as the 
 peoples around him ; but, because he was emptied of the old 
 religion, he could be spoken to by Jehovah for the new, and 
 receive his Call. These characteristics were the beginning 
 and seed of the Jewish Church. The Fathers of that Church 
 were no better than the surrounding tribes, but they had a new 
 word of Jehovah with them, which the others had not, and 
 besides this, special fitnesses of dramatic emotional nature 
 which have been dwelt upon frequently in these pages. 
 
 The Old Testament declares throughout, the visible and 
 audible presence of Jehovah God. He said to Abram, Get 
 thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy 
 Father's House, into a land that I will show thee, and I 
 will make of thee a great nation. He appeared to him at 
 the place of Sichem, where Abram built an altar unto the 
 Lord who appeared to him. The Word of the Lord came 
 to him in a vision, and promised him a son and heir, and 
 bringing him forth abroad, said, Look now towards heaven 
 and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them ; and He 
 said unto him, So shall thy seed be. The Angel of the 
 Lord also counselled Hagar, whom Sarai had given to 
 Abram to be his wife, and prophesied to her of her seed, 
 that it should not be numbered for multitude ; and the 
 Angel said, Thou shalt call his name Ishmael. When 
 Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to 
 him and said, I, the Almighty God ! walk before me, and be 
 thou perfect. . . . Thy name shall be called Abraham ; for 
 a father of many nations have I made thee. Of this we 
 read in Swedenborg : " The letter H. was taken from the 
 name Jehovah, being the only letter in that name which 
 involves the divine, and signifies I AM and TO BE ; and was 
 inserted in the name Abram. In like manner with Sarai, 
 who became Sarah." Arcana Ccslestia, 2010. Jehovah 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 67 
 
 was thus immanent in the names Abraham and Sarah. 
 Again the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre ; 
 where three men stood beside him ; and he said, My Lord, 
 If now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I 
 pray thee, from thy servant. . . . The three men turned 
 their faces towards Sodom, . . . but Abraham stood yet 
 before the Lord. . . . The Lord conversed with Abraham, 
 who entreated his mercy respecting Sodom. Lot received 
 two angels in Sodom whom the Lord had sent to destroy it. 
 The Angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said 
 unto her, What aileth thee? Fear not, . . . I will make thy 
 son, a great nation. God tempted Abraham to sacrifice his 
 son, Isaac. Abraham's desire of ancient sacrifice came 
 upon him, and through the substituted Ram, burnt-offerings, 
 to prevent human sacrifices, were inevitable for the coming 
 Dispensation. The Angel of Jehovah, not the Tempter, but 
 the Divine Truth in an angelic personality, cried to him out 
 of heaven, and forbade him to lay his hand upon the lad. He 
 was literally obedient in heart to the God who tempted him, 
 and to the angel of the Lord who forbade him to obey the 
 temptation ; and the Angel of Jehovah called out of heaven 
 the second time, and blest all his obedience in both sorts. 
 For obedience was of the essence of his service. 
 
 This manifest Divine Government and Help, extended 
 to the Father of the Faithful and head and heart of the 
 Patriarchs, like the seed of a tree grows and ramifies through 
 the Jewish and Israelitish history. The nations so long as 
 they were under the theocracy, were led by Jehovah in all 
 their wanderings, fed by Him in the desert, their thirst 
 quenched by Him out of the flint which became a fountain 
 of waters. Their ways were mere hourly open providences. 
 Their victories were not their own, but the Lord's : number 
 did not count in their battles, but a panic from immediate 
 God overtook their enemies, and while the men of Israel 
 obeyed, they had an influx with them which made them as 
 the armies of Jehovah. Nature and human cunning yielded 
 
68 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 before them. The Red Sea and Jordan were streets with 
 walls of water for their hosts. The walls of Jericho fell 
 down before their trumpets. The miracles in Egypt dealt 
 with man and nature as the ways of right and wrong deal 
 ultimately with the mind and body of a man. Egyptian 
 humanity and its world while Israel was kept servile, evilly 
 treated, and held captive, were a hell of punishment and 
 torment : and, in the end, of weeping, wailing, and gnashing 
 of teeth for Pharaoh and his people. If the children of 
 Israel had kept the commandments, and obeyed the laws 
 and ordinances of Jehovah, they would have been even as 
 natural children of the lowest heaven, walking rightly to 
 each appointed end ; time, space and person obedient to 
 them, the forty years of wandering, a real dream soon over, 
 and the promised land entered by the very men and women 
 who had been led, with the pillar of fire by night and of 
 cloud by day, from the bondage of Egypt to the land flowing 
 with milk and honey. But miracle had two sides with 
 them ; for obedience, miracle of prosperity, of harvest, of 
 increase of flocks and herds, and of propagation of their 
 human race as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the 
 sea ; and for wickedness, miracle of destruction, as after the 
 worship of the golden calf ; of defeat, as of Saul's army by 
 the Philistines ; of pestilence, as when David numbered the 
 people ; of disaster from the wickedness of their kings ; of 
 captivity to Babylon, and of ultimate national extinction 
 when from the temple at Jerusalem a voice was heard, God 
 has departed. In the case of the Jews these events were 
 miraculous on both sides, the good and the evil ; for the 
 Dispensation was a miracle ; and not a man, woman or 
 child of the chosen race from Abraham was beyond its 
 sphere. We take the Word literally as it stands ; and 
 eliminate atheism and theism, denial, doubt, and criticism. 
 This then is what may be called the Immanence of Jehovah. 
 The dispensation of Miracle which held the Jewish mind 
 and nature in order to compel an external presence of God 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 69 
 
 on earth, which for miracle was a necessity, was so in- 
 different a thing to the Jews, that they easily were seduced 
 by the superstitions of the nations which promised gratifica- 
 tion of their propensities. Miracle of Jehovah was indeed 
 providential, but it was also providential that they should 
 understand nothing of its spiritual import ; in which case it 
 ranks only with the desire which it promises to fulfil, or with the 
 terror which it creates ; and it is not separable, except by mere 
 obedience, and the strong direction which this brings, from 
 miraculous manifestations magically produced from the hells. 
 
 In this age we see an analogous coincidence. The 
 spiritual world is now made known by open communication, 
 and its wonders revealed, and to those who do not receive 
 the true information, a way opens for their own inventions 
 of many kinds, and spirits are invoked, and not the Lord, 
 and have deceived many. 
 
 While often discussing difficult questions which arise in 
 reading the Old Testament ; such, for instance, as the destruc- 
 tion of the Priests of Baal by Elijah, from the humanitarian 
 point of view, a ruthless slaughter, I have found that the 
 correspondence of idolaters to infernal evils, the obedience 
 to a command to extirpate the men which were the personi- 
 fications of them ; the miraculous power given to the Jews 
 in the transaction, and the equally miraculous weakness 
 with which these Priests, for instance, were smitten, are all, or 
 in part, judged from the point of view of ordinary history. 
 In this case the Jewish Theocracy is not consistently held 
 as a fact ; but the reader is a critic, happily without intend- 
 ing it, of the ways of God to man ; which, however, are 
 now justified as in no former age. This Theocracy, as it is 
 our object to show, was a fatal divine necessity,* and as such 
 was in the very atmosphere of Jewish Life. 
 
 The Divine institution and conduct of Judaism seems to 
 be the most plainly revealed evidence of God in nature 
 which we possess in Holy Scripture. The influx into a 
 
 * See especially Swedenborg's Divine Providence and Arcana Cxlestia. 
 
7 o THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 whole external mind ; into nature and sky and atmosphere ; 
 into the ground ; the physical plagues of Egypt ; the Lord 
 on Sinai ; the supernatural harvests ; the flocks and herds 
 according to obedience ; the panics in hosts of enemies ; all 
 these divine-natural circumstances are indeed immanence of 
 Jehovah very close above and within the material sphere. 
 The Lord bowed His heavens and came down. Heaven 
 was under Him with all its angels ministering. He altered 
 the atoms of His previous creation by adding fresh provi- 
 dences and powers to them. The Incarnation seems nearer 
 to accomplishment by this immediacy of God in the mental, 
 natural and physical world, when He was about to descend 
 in Virgin Mary not as a thought or idea, but as the most 
 substantial of beings, the Divine Truth in Heaven. 
 
 XXVIILTHE MESSIANIC PROMISES. 
 
 For what reasons were the Jewish and Israelitish nation 
 allowed to delude themselves into the persuasion that 
 Jehovah had chosen them, and that He would come and 
 personally lead them to supremacy ? There were, as we 
 read, several causes. " One was that by having to name and 
 remember Him, they might be held together in His Worship 
 in a brotherhood ; without which Jehovah would have no 
 entry to any of them, and none of them would have had 
 any access to Jehovah. It was then as it is to-day, no one 
 has seen the Father at any time. The only-begotten Son 
 who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. 
 John i. 1 8 ; v. 37. No one comes to the Father but by 
 Me. The second Cause why so frequent a prediction of the 
 Lord's Coming was made, was, that the representative types 
 of their Church, all of which had regard to our Lord, and 
 the Church to be inaugurated by Him after the Advent, 
 might serve them as so many pointings and symbols of their 
 worship ; so that when He came, they should acknowledge 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 71 
 
 Him ; and permit themselves to be introduced into the 
 internal things of His Worship ; and together with the 
 nations which were around them, become Christians. The 
 third Cause was, that by the recollection of His Advent, 
 some glimmering notion or idea concerning the resurrection 
 and eternal life might enter their thoughts. Otherwise, in 
 their hearts they would say, What interest have we in the 
 Messiah when we are dead, unless we are to return, and see 
 His glory, and reign with Him ? From this their religious 
 invention (religiosum) poured forth a belief that at the time 
 of His Advent they were to rise again, each from his 
 sepulchre, and to return into the land of Canaan. The 
 fourth Cause was, that in their states of vastation and 
 oppression, when they were in trials and afflictions, they 
 should be supported and healed, as their fathers and 
 brethren were in the desert ; for without such support and 
 healing they would have loaded Jehovah with reproaches, 
 and would have gone astray in multitudes from the repre- 
 sentative worship of Him into idolatrous worship. For 
 these causes the Advent of the Lord is so often predicted 
 in the old Prophetic Word. For the same causes in the 
 New Evangelical and Apostolic Word, the Lord is 
 preached, and His Second Coming is predicted." Coronis, 
 n. 59. 
 
 We repeat here the reasons before alleged for the 
 capacity of the Jews to become the subjects of an ultimate 
 theocracy or material dispensation. They were above all 
 the nations then extant capable of assuming and keeping up 
 a holy external at the same time with a profane internal. 
 Internal truth was thus precluded to them, and they could 
 not profane it and make the holy external impossible, which 
 latter would have taken place if the mind had recognized the 
 higher divine light in an adequate conscience, and had 
 abused it. Lack of interest in such truth, as irrelevant to 
 their business and bosoms, deadness to it, prevented this. 
 The theatric holiness thus had its field in the external nature. 
 
72 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 The internal was thus closed against the internal things of 
 the Word and the truths which the rituals represented, and 
 the Jewish life with its passions went on unchanged in its 
 motives, while the external life and daily conduct was forced 
 to represent the order and mandates of heaven, hut these 
 also as modified into possible likenesses to the Jewish type. 
 The Divinity communicated not through but to the Jew with 
 heaven. So a representative or theatric Church as the last 
 resort before the Incarnation was instituted. Forms and 
 Ceremonies were its foothold ; heaven recognized on the 
 stage of the world : all the men and women merely players. 
 It was a religious drama, in which the laws of heaven were 
 acted in corresponding rituals and obediences and parts 
 and characters under the command of Jehovah God ; and 
 no more was asked of the actors themselves than unswerving 
 obedience to these externals. Yet the externals were not 
 spiritually fruitless, for in living according to them the Jew 
 led a life which is the way to his heaven after death. As 
 we see in Blessed Mary, there was a remnant in the Jewish 
 and Israelitish nations, and a considerable remnant ; this is 
 attested by John the Baptist, by the disciples, by the Seventy, 
 by the Apostles who were sent forth to evangelize all nations, 
 by the common people who heard Jesus gladly, by the great 
 multitudes who resorted to Him and were healed by Him ; 
 by the thousands whom He fed with His miraculous loaves 
 and fishes ; by the fear of the Chief Priests, Pharisees and 
 Rulers who crucified Him ; by the first Christians who were 
 chiefly Jews, and the first martyrs. 
 
 This latter requires to be said in addition to the sentence 
 that the Jewish race was then the worst on earth ; a sentence 
 given them by their own leaders, judges, lawgivers, psalmists 
 and prophets. It applies to the race collectively, and in its 
 dominion, and in its being obnoxious to the show of a 
 Church which came upon it from God. But it does not 
 apply to the infants and little children whom Jesus loved, 
 and whose angels always behold the face of the Father who 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 73 
 
 s in the heavens ; it does not apply to the Magdalen ; or to 
 the humble and simple men and women who were, so to 
 speak, out of the priestly, governmental, Pharisaic, Saddu- 
 cean and mammon-worshipping community. All these had 
 the strain of Jewish depravity in them, as the Virgin Mother 
 of Jesus also had, as we have the strain, deceitful above all 
 things, and desperately wicked, of English depravity, but 
 they had not added their own lives fatally to it ; and choirs 
 of their hearts seconded the new promise, recognized 
 their Lord's Advent, and entered the first Christian 
 Church. 
 
 The Jewish Church, though merely external, and having 
 the contrarious Jew for its exponent, as a religious drama 
 incarnated in a peculiar people, was not, by virtue of the 
 inconsistency between the congregation and the Church, a 
 hypocrisy, as some might imagine from the mutual relation 
 of the two factors, holy external, and profane internal. 
 Jehovah is the God of all truth, of truth of the heart, truth 
 of the mind, and truth of the outward man. His institute 
 here was of the outward man ; the only man then left on 
 earth ; for the Greeks with their " foolishness " were no 
 exception. The Jews were incapable of perceiving more than 
 their own privileges, of obeying more than literal commands, 
 of fearing more than pain, adversity and poverty, of loving 
 more than themselves and their descendants. The Lord 
 knew every man of them, and " that they know not 
 what they do." So when they obeyed the commandments 
 including all the rule of their religion, they did it with a 
 sincere external, and their conscience was not able from 
 any spiritual instruction to rebuke them, and produce the 
 battle of temptation between the inner and the outer man. 
 A hypocritical religion is impossible : hypocrites may exist 
 under any creed, and use it for their own purposes. A 
 hypocrite mixes good and evil. He himself is evil good and 
 good evil. The Jew is a natural substance ; the hypocrite 
 is an unstable compound ; and after death the two elements 
 
74 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 in him are torn apart, and he alone almost loses personality, 
 and so far as yet revealed is a sexless flitting phantom. 
 
 There were two churches before the Jewish Representa- 
 tion, the Adamic, and the Noahtic ; and these died of their 
 own accumulated corruptions, as all Churches and States 
 have a tendency to die. Now the men in the decline of the 
 Adamic or celestial or Heart-Church were the worst of all. 
 Of them it is said in the letter of the Ancient Word, that on 
 their account it repented Jehovah that He had created man, 
 for the spiritual sense of which see the Arcana Ccelestia. 
 A flood of lusts and persuasions against heaven, called in 
 the letter rain from heaven, symbolized the consummation 
 of the Adamic Church. The waters of the Red Sea were a 
 second flood in the consummation of the Noahtic Church. 
 A most evil nature was inherited from parents to children 
 in the Adamic Church ; and caused its extinction ; * a lesser 
 evil was in the generations of the Noahtic Church, by 
 which it ceased to be a Church ; and a more crass and 
 material evil was innate in the Jews, and was dealt with by 
 dispersion in the end of their drama. 
 
 The Jew was the worst race extant when the Lord was 
 born of Virgin Mary, and His birth itself was an attestation 
 of this, in consequence of the divine office which the human 
 He assumed had to fulfil. Swedenborg, however, affirms 
 that the Jew is not the worst race now. There were two 
 worst races before him ; worst for their times ; and the 
 worst varies with each ^on. The Christian world with its 
 Consummated Church is in bad pre-eminence now, and 
 embraces the area of civilization. The Lord as in a new 
 sense is still the born King of the Jews. Hearken to this 
 
 * The serpent correspondentially was the incitement to the dis- 
 obedience of Eve : the serpent, the perverted sensual degree of the 
 Celestial Church, insurgent against the higher degrees. In the con- 
 summation of that Church the hells formed of it, the subtlest and most 
 lethal of all, are of human serpents in inextricable folds, which are the 
 lusts and persuasions that God is merged in these Adamites, and no 
 longer exists but in them ; so that they are Gods. Coronis, n. 38. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 75 
 
 Scripture: " Verily 1 say unto you, This generation shall not 
 pass away till all these things be fulfilled'' The things 
 alluded to are the portents of the last Judgment. On 
 which passage Swedenborg remarks : ' These words signify 
 that the Jewish nation shall not be extirpated like other 
 nations. For as the tribe of Judah, more even than the 
 other tribes, could be kept in a state of external sanctity, and 
 at this day as formerly account those rituals holy which can 
 be observed out of Jerusalem ; and also retain a holy 
 veneration for their fathers ; and a particular reverence for 
 the Word of the Old Testament ; and as it was foreseen 
 that Christians would almost totally reject that Word, and 
 would likewise defile its internals with profanities ; therefore 
 that nation has been hitherto preserved according to the 
 Lord's Words in Matthew. It would have been otherwise if 
 Christians, acquainted as they were with internal things, 
 had also lived as internal men. In that case the Jewish 
 nation, like other nations mentioned in the Word, would 
 have been cut off many ages since. ' Heaven and Earth 
 shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away.' 
 This declaration was made immediately after what is said of 
 the Jewish Nation, because that Nation is preserved for the 
 sake of the Word." Arcana Ccelestia^ n. 3479. 
 
 The above interpretation is of the internal sense, and 
 man's capacity could not discern it if that sense had not 
 been divinely opened. In the letter " this generation " was 
 interpreted in its day as meaning that the prophecy in 
 Matthew xxiv. 34 would be fulfilled in the time of the 
 Apostles. But generation spiritually, and indeed most 
 literally, as connected not with time but with engendering, 
 means the Jew nature and nation in the midst of which the 
 Lord stood. The literal sense here is the complex, conti- 
 nent, and basis of the spiritual sense. The heaven and 
 earth which shall pass away, are the first heaven and the 
 first earth which passed away, Apocalypse, xxi. i : to 
 understand which read Swedenborg's Apocalypse Revealed. 
 
76 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Swedenborg says again : " That race has been kept, and 
 scattered about over a large portion of the globe, for the 
 sake of the Word in its original language^ which the Jews 
 hold in greater sanctity than the Christians do : and in the 
 several words of the Word there is the Lord's Divinity ; for 
 the Word is the Divine Truth united to the Divine Good, 
 which proceeds from the Lord ; and, through this, the 
 Word is the conjunction of the Lord with the Church, and 
 the presence of heaven. And there is a presence of the 
 Lord and of heaven wherever the Word is read holily. 
 This is the end or purpose of the Divine Providence in the 
 keeping of the Jews, and in their dispersion over a large part 
 of the globe." Divine Providence, n. 260. 
 
 Thus the Jew has the conservation of the Old Testament 
 committed to him still; but no race now has the New 
 Testament in its keeping. There is, however, a new Church 
 in promise, which will be the guardian of the whole Word. 
 But the first Christian Church has fallen as the Jewish 
 Church could not do ; it had- internal truths committed to 
 it, and an internal mind which the Jew had not ; and its 
 decline, defection, and consummation have taken place 
 under these conditions. The Jew had traditions, but not 
 doctrines in our sense. He made the Word of none effect 
 by his traditions. We, by the dogmas of Councils and by 
 heresies besides, have precluded the way to the truths of 
 religion derivable from the letter of the Word ; and have 
 filled the World with Atheism on the one hand, and with a 
 new Judaism in formalism on the other. 
 
 XXIX. THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM 
 
 CANAAN. 
 
 " The Jews were expelled from Canaan lest they should 
 defile and profane internal things by denial in that land, 
 where, from the most ancient times, all the places had been 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM, 77 
 
 representative of the principles of heaven and the Church. 
 They were cast out for the further reason that representatives 
 should cease." They were broken as the mediums between 
 the Church on earth and the Church in Heaven. Had 
 they remained in the Holy Places, and their rites and 
 ceremonies been perpetuated by themselves, heaven ceasing 
 to fill them, the superior state produced universally after the 
 Lord came into the world, and participated in by them as 
 an increase of their evil natural capacity and a great 
 capacity it is would have led them into a worse supersti- 
 tion about their privilege and power as the chosen people ; 
 and in all the places for them haunted by this spirit, they 
 would have found a fresh plane and occasion for their 
 derisive denial of Christ the Lord and Saviour. Their 
 love of the Old Testament would not have had the harmless 
 function it now has, had they remained as a nation in 
 Jerusalem. The work of Rome under Titus, the Con- 
 summation of their ./Eon, and the end of their unity as a 
 nation, is accounted for on these grounds ; as human history 
 will some day in new ages be all judged and accounted for 
 by spiritual causes discerned. 
 
 As a nation they were expelled from Canaan also on the 
 ground that representatives should cease. That is to say, 
 that no sanction of heaven should any longer appertain to 
 sacrifices, external rites, forms and ceremonies. In this 
 sense the rituals of the Old Testament were deprived of the 
 divine influx which gave them sanctity and power during the 
 Dispensation. Jewish worship was not abolished, but 
 subsists still, and has its blessing for good Jews, as the 
 Protestant and Catholic services have for good Christians, 
 but it now belongs to a freedom common to all religions in 
 decent political states, and carries nothing specially divine, 
 only honest piety where it exists. Its miracle is over ; the 
 ^Eon in which Jehovah controlled Nature for the Jews, 
 when the land was God's, and the Sabbatical year yielded 
 miraculous crops in the year of rest, the year of the Lord, 
 
7 8 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 the Jubilee ; and when Jewish poverty was unknown, because 
 Jehovah fed the obedient people according to His laws of 
 needful bread whether in the wilderness or in Canaan. 
 Representatives were abolished when the Lord assumed 
 humanity and made it in Himself divine. He fulfilled the 
 Word and was the Word made flesh : the ultimate declara- 
 tion that God is a Man. Then a godly and an honest life 
 became the sole foundation of heaven and the Church, the 
 Lord being acknowledged as the Dispensation of it. As in 
 Apocalypse : / saw no temple therein, for the Lord God 
 Almighty and the Lamb is the Temple of it. Worship in 
 His Freedom is thus left for each, and the sacraments of 
 baptism inaugurating our natural lives and sanctifying our 
 new lives, and of the Lord's Supper, in perpetual remem- 
 brance of His incarnation, remain as Representatives enacted 
 and undergone by Himself; and perpetuating the ancient 
 and most ancient days of representation. 
 
 The Rulers of Thought to-day will have it that there are 
 none of these diverse Divine ^Eons. It is our day's work 
 in the New Church to accept the Word of God as infinite 
 in truth, goodness, love and light ; and to abide by the 
 results of such faith and acceptance. And the more we 
 persevere in this course of receiving precarious intellectual 
 daily bread, the more the Divine Word opens, and a mind 
 is created before which important things for the immortal 
 man receive their importance, and light things are dissi- 
 pated. It is delightful to have the children of Israel 
 made into object-lessons of " the Divinity that shapes our 
 ends rough hew them how we will." In the long run, 
 though not in this century, the result will be struck be- 
 tween the policy of the kingdom of God, and the ventures 
 of Naturalism, and the sum will be declared in wisdom and 
 knowledge between these two, in the several fields of pro- 
 gress, and in the interests and insights of the earthly man 
 and the heavenly. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 79 
 
 XXX. A CHURCH MUST EXIST ON EARTH. 
 
 Whatever we have said hitherto flows from the necessity 
 of a Church on earth answering to the Church in heaven. 
 The reason of this necessity is unknown to Christians, for 
 owing to ignorance of the spiritual sense of the chapters of 
 Genesis from Adam to Abraham, the Jewish Church is the 
 first with which they are acquainted in the Bible. Hence 
 it seems as if the globe for long ages had had no visible 
 Church upon it. This has been corrected if the reader wishes 
 to learn, and the Adamic Church with one special Divine 
 gift, and the Noahtic Church with another, have been 
 revealed to view. The human mind was not otherwise 
 created than by and in planes of Churches. Do not here 
 think of ministering clergy, but of entire humanities fed 
 with enthusiasm and light of revelation by their loving God. 
 And the human body in its organization corresponding to 
 the mind, is the evolution of one Ecclesia, or call of man 
 by his Maker, after another ; each organic body having a 
 different reason for difference of being ; and accordingly 
 being different. Following this greatest of descents into 
 creations, and after the fall of man seeing its fatal necessity, 
 we have come to the Jewish Church prepared to understand 
 its place in the work of Providence. It was a miraculous 
 prop of the heavens when they would otherwise have tottered 
 to their Fall. For heaven is not self-subsisting or self- 
 sustaining, but exists continually, and so subsists, from the 
 Lord. If these points are understood, the Jewish Economy 
 takes its place as a new Revelation to the rational mind. 
 
 Now hear Swedenborg : In explaining Genesis vi. 13, I 
 will destroy them with the earth, " It may," he says, " be 
 observed that if the Lord's Church were to become entirely 
 extinct on earth, mankind could in no wise exist, but each 
 and every man must perish. The Church is as the heart 
 which while it lives gives life to the vitals and members ; 
 
8o THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 but when it dies all dies with it. So the whole race of 
 mankind, even those who are out of the Church, derive life 
 from the Church of the Lord on earth. The reason of this 
 is at the present day quite unknown. Now the human race 
 represents the natural body with its parts. In it the Church 
 acts as heart ; and unless there were a Church with which 
 as a heart the Lord might be united through heaven and 
 the world of spirits, disjunction would ensue, and, in conse- 
 quence of this separation from the Lord, man would instantly 
 perish. Hence, since man was first created, a Church has 
 always existed. Even when the" Church was about to 
 perish, it still remained with some. This was the cause 
 of the Lord's Advent into the world. Unless of His divine 
 mercy He had come, all men must have ceased to exist, for 
 the Church was at its lowest ebb, and scarcely any good and 
 truth remained. . . . Unless the Lord had compassion on 
 man, and conjoined him to Himself by the ministry of 
 angels, he could not live a single moment. Of this man is 
 ignorant." Arcana Ccelestia, n. 637. 
 
 " ' The powers of the heavens shall be shaken ' (Matthew 
 xxiv. 29). The foundations of the Church are said to be 
 shaken when they perish. The Church on earth is the 
 foundation of heaven. The influx of good and truth 
 through the heavens from the Lord is ultimately terminated 
 in the goods and truths which are with the man of the 
 Church. But when the man of the Church is so perverted 
 in his state as no longer to admit the influx of good and 
 truth, the powers of the heavens are said to be shaken. 
 Therefore it is always provided by the Lord that somewhat 
 of the Church remains, and that when an old Church 
 perishes, a new Church is instituted." Ibid. n. 4060. 
 
 11 The communication of heaven with man is a necessity 
 of the existence of the human race: a communication 
 hrough the Church. Otherwise men would become as 
 beasts." Ibid. n. 4545. 
 
 " If charity were in the first place, and faith in the second, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 81 
 
 the Church would have a different face ; for then none 
 would be called Christians but those who lead a life accord- 
 ing to the truths of faith ; that is a life of charity. Men also 
 would not then make many Churches by distinguishing them 
 according to opinions concerning the truths of faith, but 
 they would say that there was one Church, in which all who 
 are in the good of life are found ; not only those who are 
 within the region where the Church is, but also those who 
 are outside it. Then the Church would enjoy enlighten- 
 ment about those things which belong to the Lord's king- 
 dom ; for charity enlightens" Ibid. n. 6269. 
 
 " The Societies which constitute this order are scattered 
 all over the world, and are those who are in love to the Lord, 
 and in charity towards the neighbour. These scattered 
 Societies are gathered together by the Lord, and also re- 
 present one man, as do the societies of heaven. They are 
 not only within the Church, but also outside it ; and taken 
 together, are called the Lord's Church scattered and 
 gathered from the good of the whole world ; and this also 
 is called a Communion. This Communion, this Church, is 
 the Lord's kingdom on earth conjoined with the Lord's 
 kingdom in the heavens ; and thus conjoined with the Lord 
 Himself." Ibid. n. 7396. 
 
 " There are most general principles of the Church which 
 enter into all religions, and make this communion. These 
 principles are the acknowledgment of God, and a good life J> 
 (bonum vit<z). Divine Providence^ n. 325. 
 
 " The Church cannot exist with man unless its internal be 
 spiritual, and its external, natural ; there is no such thing as 
 a Church purely spiritual, or a Church merely natural. 
 . . . Therefore heaven could not subsist without the 
 Church with man, nor the Church without heaven. . . . 
 Thence the angels bitterly lament when the Church on 
 earth is desolated by falsities, and consummated through 
 evils ; and liken the state of their life then to sleepiness, 
 . . . but when the Church on earth is restored, they 
 
 F 
 
82 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 liken the state of their life to wakefulness." Coronis^ n. 
 19. 
 
 In reading these extracts, bear in mind that there are no 
 angels created such from the beginning, but that all in the 
 heavens have been men and women and children on some 
 planet-earth. The spiritual world in the complex is the 
 gathered sum and census from all worlds and ages of these 
 populations. 
 
 The necessity of a Church finds a parallel necessity in 
 government and subordination in order that citizenship may 
 exist. We have no examples of the existence of civil society 
 under any other conditions than that of power and force 
 organized and legalized from above downwards. The 
 Church also is as visible as the State, and, when it is not 
 perishing, more potent. While the man in civil society is 
 organic through human agents of his own kind, under the 
 Providence which cares for political states, the man in 
 religious society is organic through ecclesiastical and angelic 
 .powers under God-Man, whose kingdom on earth is the 
 Church. 
 
 XXXLTHE WORD, THE CONJOINING 
 MEDIUM. 
 
 The word which was spoken by the Lord through Moses 
 and the Prophets and through the Evangelists, descends 
 through the heavens, and in each heaven is clothed with a 
 sense adequate to the Angels there. In the celestial degree 
 or the highest heaven where love to the Lord begets wisdom 
 and the faculties of this degree, the word is celestial ; in the 
 spiritual degree or the second heaven, the Word is spiritual. 
 Below these senses the natural heaven has a pure natural sense 
 adequate to the understanding of the third degree of heaven, 
 the celestial-natural and spiritual-natural ; in which the other 
 degrees are represented in a lower and more external form. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 83 
 
 With this coheres the Letter of the Word, which is the 
 presence of the Lord in the true church and its worshippers 
 on earth. 
 
 The Word is thus one as the Lord is one, but becomes 
 various as the Divine Person addresses Himself to each 
 Heaven, to every angel in each, and to every man in the 
 Church. The variety flows out of the method of corres- 
 pondences whereby all creation is effected. The spiritual 
 Sun, the Sun of Righteousness, which warms and illuminates 
 the Angelic Heavens, is the source of creation ; Jehovah 
 God resides in it, and through its righteous heat and light, 
 the Word which is with God is spoken forth as the alone 
 reality of love and power. It is spoken into forms, appear- 
 ances of the Being who is ineffable, but who presents Himself 
 to us as His Images, by an Image of Himself as the Son of 
 Man in the Word. The forms are according to the heavens, 
 more and more ineffable and inconceivable, and imperceptible 
 to man in their ascent. But the highest plane corresponds 
 to the second, the second to the lower, and the lowest. This 
 lowest is our Written Word, the Old and the New Testaments. 
 
 It flows from this account that correspondences of outward 
 things to inward states are transmutable in an upward series 
 into meanings after meanings as they ascend. Our Word, 
 Jewish, and Christian, is written in our realm of nature, in 
 which space and time and person are present everywhere to 
 our faculties. These three real natural omnipresences have 
 no existence in the spiritual world. Everlasting appearances 
 of them have existence there instead of the fixations them- 
 selves. In the spiritual world the objects may be called 
 fluid fixations. So all the objects of nature are reproduced 
 and represented there, and indefinitely more and more on 
 the higher mountains of love and light. Objects are created 
 in a moment according to signification ; for they are all parts 
 of the language of the Word. The Lord converses with His 
 heavens from these His Divine Manuscripts, these floral and 
 faunal scrolls of living lands and skies. 
 
84 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 So He does talk with us in His Bible, the Word, and it is 
 the trysting-place in which He is present to the Christian 
 World. The Word contains all the prayers and praises that 
 the contrite and troubled heart, or the joyful mind, can 
 offer to His throne. And in reading it with sacred attention, 
 a hierarchy is reading it with us. By induction of the Word 
 itself, our wants of love and life are supplied in the reading. 
 The natural images of the letter suggest their spiritual 
 likenesses, and another letter is gradually given in us as a 
 higher Bible. Next, the spiritual kingdom is in the same 
 Word with us in the Church on Earth ; but with a penetra- 
 tion before which the letter of the Church has again dis- 
 appeared, and truth leading to good is made objective in 
 resplendent mental narratives of form. Higher still the 
 celestial heaven is in direct perception of good itself as 
 central ; the flaming light of which is the highest perpetual 
 self-evidence of the Divinity of the Word. 
 
 All is effected by CORRESPONDENCES. Science, which as 
 yet knows nothing of this term, may illustrate it by Sir William 
 Grove's teaching of the " Conversion of Forces." According 
 to this doctrine, energy is stored in nature, and by suitable 
 mechanical contrivances, and the motion of these producing 
 friction, and interior relations in substance, new kinds of 
 force are developed. So that motion, heat, light, magnetism, 
 electricity, and no doubt many other forces, are all modes of 
 motion ; each one being a new power, and given out to a new 
 contrivance which can receive it, and reactively manifest it. 
 All this is within nature, and so to speak in one plane ; but 
 the products in the series appear very different. Now before 
 motion put Will as correspondent to energy ; and will is 
 humanly alive, and life uses all these powers and forces for 
 definite ends; and distributes them according to Uses or 
 Functions. And so the Divine Will by the Word in pre- 
 pared minds makes the heat and light of men. The heat here 
 is love, and the light is wisdom. 
 
 " The sense of the Letter of the Word," says Swedenborg, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 85 
 
 " is that through which there is conjunction with the Lord, 
 and Consociation with the Angels. The conjunction is not 
 apparent to man ; but it lies in the affection for truth, and 
 in the perception of it ; thus in the love of the Divine truth, 
 and the belief in it, in the man himself. Consociation with 
 the angels of heaven takes place through the sense of the 
 letter, because there is a spiritual and a celestial sense in 
 the literal sense ; and the angels are in the above two senses. 
 They are evolved from the natural sense of the Word, or the 
 sense of the letter, while a true man is in that sense. The 
 Evolution is instantaneous ; consequently also the Consocia- 
 tion. By much experience it has been given me to perceive 
 that when I read the word in the sense of the letter, a 
 communication was made with the heavens ; now with one 
 of their societies, now with another ; and that those things 
 which I understood according to the natural sense, the 
 spiritual angels understood according to the spiritual sense, 
 and the celestial angels according to the celestial sense ; and 
 this in an instant. As this communication has been per- 
 ceived so many thousands of times, not a particle of doubt 
 remains to me about it. ... The spiritual angel evokes the 
 spiritual, and the celestial angel the celestial. They can 
 do no other ; for the things are homogeneous to them and 
 consentaneous to their nature and essence." 
 
 " Let this be first illustrated by comparisons with the three 
 kingdoms of nature. In the Animal Kingdom. Out of the 
 food when it is made into chyle the veins drink and evoke 
 their blood ; the nervous fibres their juice; and the substances 
 which are the origins of the fibres, their animal spirit. In 
 the Vegetable Kingdom. A tree with trunk, branches, leaves 
 and fruits stands upon its root, and out of the soil through 
 the root extracts and evokes a more crass juice for the trunk, 
 branches, and leaves, a purer juice for the flesh of the fruits, 
 and the purest for the seeds inside or within the fruits. In 
 the Mineral Kingdom. In the bosom of the earth in certain 
 places there are minerals impregnated with gold, silver and 
 
86 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 iron. Out of exhalations treasured away in the earth, the 
 gold draws its own element, the silver its own, and in like 
 manner the iron." 
 
 " Now by an example let it be illustrated how the spiritual 
 angels extract their sense, and the celestial angels theirs, 
 from the natural sense in which the Word dwells with man." 
 
 "Commandment, ''Honour thy Father and thy Mother? 
 Man by father and mother understands the father and 
 mother on earth, as well as all who are in the place of father 
 and mother : and by honouring he understands holding 
 them in honour and obeying them. A spiritual angel by 
 father understands the Lord, and by mother, the Church ; 
 and by honouring he understands loving. But a celestial 
 angel by father understands the Lord's Divine Love, and by 
 mother, His Divine Wisdom ; and by honouring, doing good 
 from him." 
 
 " Commandment, ' Thou shalt not steal? Man by stealing, 
 understands literal theft, defrauding, taking his neighbour's 
 goods away from him on any pretence. A spiritual angel by 
 stealing understands depriving others of the truths of their 
 faith and of the good things of charity by falses and evils. 
 But a celestial angel understands by stealing, attributing to 
 himself the things which are the Lord's, and claiming to 
 himself His Justice and Merit." Holy Scripture, n. 62-67. 
 
 XXXII. THE DIVINE VALUE OF THE 
 LETTER. 
 
 The internal sense is established as a fact of divine 
 language beyond all doubt for those who study it reverently 
 and with competent open minds. Those who are not able 
 to see it for themselves should take it on trust from others, 
 as we accept astronomy, mathematics and dynamics from 
 their professors. First let them consider that the Word of 
 the Lord must have a divine life and soul in it. And then 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 87 
 
 further, that a great part of the Word is only worthy of the 
 divine utterance when something is meant that is not ap- 
 parent to them in the letter. So let them know, if they do 
 not see, that " Blessed are they who have not seen and yet 
 have believed." True testimony is the first essential of 
 evidence. This testimony is uncounted thousands of years 
 old, being from the beginning ; and is as new as heaven is 
 new, being reasserted in this new age for every honest 
 faculty in the mankind of to-day. 
 
 The letter is the basis of the internal sense, and in its 
 interest requires to be gravely entered upon as a divine 
 letter. The spiritual sense once seen testifies that the letter 
 is a part of the LOGOS. The view thus attained is given 
 first especially to the rational and intellectual mind. There- 
 fore we counsel the gentle reader to brace his heart and its 
 faith to a complete admission of the presence in God's Word, 
 of first a divine letter, proved to be such by the spiritual 
 sense. Let there be light is the first utterance of the Word ; 
 divine internal, intimate light. The letter of it has a divine 
 sense in every iota. It has a natural sense besides as it 
 appears to the natural man. With the faith that this is so, 
 religion can be revealed religion, and be taken seriously ; 
 which Renan thought a mistake : but his church in his 
 early days had foreclosed against him the divinity of the 
 written Word, and the grave function of that divinity. 
 
 What is called the " higher criticism " is the post-mortem 
 examination of the dead Word ; that is to say, of the Letter 
 denied to be divine. It has its uses. But it tends to no 
 direct religious service for man. It is arrested by the letter, 
 and would spend ages, during which generations wanting 
 the Word are dying, in knowing who wrote half this Psalm* 
 and who wrote the other half; whether John's Gospel can 
 have John of the Apocalypse for its writer, since the narra- 
 tive and the vision differ in style ; whether the great earth- 
 quakes in the Apocalypse are not plagiarisms from natural 
 earthquakes which took place near Patmos ; whether the 
 
88 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Sermon on the Mount was ever spoken by Jesus Christ, as 
 it is not signed by any reporter who took it down, and who 
 would himself need to be countersigned in long succession ; 
 whether the Beatitudes are not invention, like Hannibal's 
 speeches in Livy, like those of Galgacus and Agricola in 
 Tacitus, and like those of Abraham and Moses in Josephus ; 
 whether the Gospels were ever heard of until they were 
 forged in the second or third century ; and whether un- 
 classical Greek is not an unpardonable sin, and a capital 
 shibboleth against scholarly inspiration. These queries, which 
 cannot be answered to satisfy those who put them, keep the 
 mind from looking at the revelation, now made in full light, 
 of the existence of a Divine Letter, the basis of the Word, 
 and written Correspondences which open one heaven after 
 another for the men of the Church. 
 
 We stop then to say that without discouraging any honest 
 study, or biblical learning which reverences spiritual religion, 
 it is not of prime consequence to the New Church who 
 wrote the Books of Moses, the Four Gospels, or the 
 Apocalypse, the Psalms, or the Prophets ; or at what date 
 they were written, or in what place or language. By the 
 internal or spiritual sense Jehovah God wrote them all ; and 
 through the celestial and spiritual senses under the Divine 
 sense, dictated them at last, word by word, to the chosen 
 men who penned Holy Scripture. The spiritual sense, 
 divinely revealed, is therefore demonstration of the divinity 
 of the letter. This view accepts the opened Word, and 
 prepares the way for the New Church to lie upon its 
 breast. 
 
 At the same time, if supernally gifted insight has need of 
 unlocking any external problems suggested by the Scriptures, 
 solutions can come to the believer which are not for the 
 scientist, to whom the Word itself is a dead letter. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 89 
 
 XXX2ILTHE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 The letter indeed wants attention from a higher scholar- 
 ship than has yet touched it. This it will receive only when 
 it is taken seriously as filled with a plenary inspiration of 
 meaning, and as one identical natural and spiritual language 
 from Genesis to Apocalypse. So it should be rendered 
 from Hebrew and Greek with a prayerful obeisant exactitude. 
 At present this is not the way, but the letter is the victim 
 of style, and varies from the original to avoid repetition and 
 please the ear. Liberties are taken against which con- 
 science would rebel if the letter itself were known to be 
 divine. Hence a new translation will arise from the pres- 
 sure of this doctrinal faith. Look at the Lord's Prayer. 
 Unaware that the Word is literal to a divinity within it, the 
 translation abolishes distinctions plain in the Greek. Let 
 us endeavour to translate it approximately ; if not for use in 
 families praying, yet for insight in reading. 
 
 " Father of us, Thou in the heavens, hallowed be the 
 name of Thee ; the kingdom of Thee come ; the will of 
 Thee be done, as in heaven, also upon the earth ; give to 
 us to-day the bread of us, the needful ; and forgive us our 
 debts as we also forgive our debtors ; and lead us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from the evil one ; for of Thee is 
 the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory unto the Ages. 
 So be it." 
 
 Let it read baldly at first unsmoothed by style. We can 
 get used to this, or be instructed to amend it, if access of 
 divine life flows into our hearts from more faithful words. 
 Father of us puts the Father first, and makes us also there- 
 by substances. The substantive pronoun us, which would 
 be lost in the adjective " our," takes its sense from the Father 
 of us. Us is a social word; here, with this Father, a 
 spiritual family abiding in its life in the prayer, and a greater 
 family as the consociate body moves forward in regeneration. 
 
90 THE NE WJER US ALE M 
 
 The fatherhood of God to us is prayed first, and our son- 
 ship is bespoken from the heavens. In my Father's house 
 are many mansions ; the prayer is to the Father, recognized 
 in the manifoldness of His heavens. Our versions ignore 
 this. Here in the natural sense all worlds are named, for 
 the heavens representatively are the Starry Firmament cor- 
 responding to the spiritual heavens. Father of us who art 
 in the heavens, Hallowed be the name of Thee. The 
 Personality is preserved in the pronoun name of Thee, but 
 merged in the adjective pronoun, Thy name. Name is all 
 that by which the Father is known and worshipped : the 
 name of everything recalls all that we know of it ; so as 
 Christ is all we know or can know of God, Christ is His 
 name ; and thus Christ is the Father of us, who is visible, 
 and we do not pray to the Father in Christ who is invisible. 
 Father of us, hallowed be the name of Thee. Come the 
 kingdom of Thee. Be done the will of Thee, as in heaven, 
 also upon the earth. Heaven here is single and singular : 
 not the house of many mansions, but the one will of the 
 Father of us, for heaven is the Lord's will. And heaven 
 comes first as His will there, and the prayer prays for the will 
 also here, that the earth may be the Lord's. Give us to-day 
 the bread of us, the needful : take no thought for the morrow, 
 the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself: here 
 lies the prudence of being under the Providence of the 
 Father of us. The bread of us, our vital support in our 
 work and works, in our thoughts and hearts, is the Divine 
 truth of the Word instructing, guiding, and obeyed ; and 
 when carried out in the duties of our calling, the Divine 
 Truth in our business and bosoms is made good is a word 
 made flesh in us. It is the Bread of us, for it is broken 
 differently for each of us, and the sacramental pieces are the 
 soul's constant individual sustenance. And forgive us our 
 debts as we also forgive our debtors. Here acknowledg- 
 ment of the infirmity of us enters the prayer ; we owe what 
 we cannot directly pay, but the Father of us remits the love 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 91 
 
 due to God when we obey His New Commandment, in 
 loving man, the erring, the enemy, the neighbour ; in loving; 
 our selfhood by reducing it to order. The higher debt is 
 forgiven when we become the images of the Father of us in 
 forgiving the lower. So, and not otherwise we love the 
 Father of us, and can receive His love. Into the love of 
 the brother whom we have seen flows the love of the Father 
 whom we have not seen. And lead us not into temptation. 
 It seems as if the Father of us does lead us into temptation. 
 He does try us, and form our minds even by appearances, 
 as by letting us see the sun go round the world, and then by 
 giving us a mind above sight He lets us know that the world 
 instead goes round the sun ; and that the appearance is a 
 fact but not the fact. This makes the sun both natural and 
 rational, an ascent from sun to sun. So the Father of us, 
 the One in the heavens, clothes Himself with Seeming, to 
 come to very sense where nothing is but all things seem ;. 
 and then He calls forth will of mind to uncover the Divine 
 Truth by slow degrees ; for we tolerate it slowly, and by 
 ^Eons. Then we find that the Father of us never leads 
 into temptation, but that another father of us, namely, our 
 proprium^ does so lead. All temptation is pleasant ; to 
 comply with it at the time is pleasure ; great or little it is 
 delight ; the delight of yourself, of your evil propensity, of 
 indulging your weakness. This delight of yourself, the 
 hereditary and acquired man, must be called forth to be 
 resisted and conquered. You yourself stumble into it in- 
 evitably sooner or later, here or in the spiritual world, but it 
 is all the world of the Father of us, and by its very nature it 
 finds out every evil and every weakness, and He permits the 
 finding out, and uses it for justice and judgment. This 
 world is a wilderness for trying the children of Israel by 
 forcing them to expose themselves, as in the days of the 
 golden calf ; and Canaan is the result for what is left of their 
 increase after forty years : 40 always signifies temptation ^ 
 and extermination is the commanded though not perfected 
 
92 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 result for the same selfhood represented in the lowest degree 
 by Jew and Canaanite alike.* 
 
 But deliver us from the evil one. There is no abstract 
 evil ; there is always an evil somebody, an evil man, indi- 
 vidual or collective. The first evil one is yourself; the 
 -heart or me of you. This heart or love associates with its 
 similars in this world ; and as it is reformed or regenerated 
 in a good life, with better and better similars. It also 
 consociates with it invisible similars in the spiritual world, 
 calls them to it, and lives from them ; from the hells if an 
 evil life is being led on earth : from heaven if the days are 
 .good and the nights are true. 
 
 For of Thee is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the 
 Glory unto the Ages. So be it. Of Thee gives a more 
 obvious sense of the procession of the Kingdom, the Power, 
 and the Glory than the adjective Thine in the Bible ; and 
 Christ here declares that these divine attributes proceed 
 by Ages or ./Eons : as when He also speaks of the con- 
 summation of the Age or yEon, which the Versions make 
 into the end of the world. Amen, So be it, is the plenary 
 hope and submission of our Christ's prayer to Him the 
 Father of us. 
 
 " We " are placed before the " Father of us," and earth 
 before heaven in our Versions ; whereas the order of the 
 prayer prescribed by Christ is from the Father of us in a 
 descending series, from God in the heavens to God in 
 heaven, and from heaven to earth, and from earth with its 
 supports of truth to be made good, through active love of 
 the Lord and the neighbour, against all temptations, until 
 we can hope and pray for delivery from the evil one ; and 
 then the prayer quits ourselves, and ascends to the Father. 
 As Charles Augustus Tulk used to say to me, the Lord 
 Christ's prayer is a little Gospel following our Father Christ's 
 
 * The Jewish host represented the Lord Christ in putting off by death 
 the entire humanity which left Egypt except Joshua, which is also a 
 form of the name Jesus. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 93: 
 
 life from His birth on earth, and through His conquests, 
 to His resurrection and ascension ; to His dominion, His 
 omnipotence, and His Glory. 
 
 Now hear Swedenborg : " It was given me to perceive 
 angelic ideas in the Lord's Prayer about the words, * Lead 
 us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil.' By 
 the good spirits who were near, the thought of temptation 
 and evil was rejected by a certain idea perceptible in me ;. 
 and this rejection went on, till nothing but a purely angelic 
 conception, namely, of good, without any idea of temptation 
 and evil remained ; the literal sense thus altogether perishing. 
 About this good in the first degree of rejection, innumerable 
 ideas concerning it were formed ; such as, how good comes 
 out of man's affliction ; and yet affliction comes from man, 
 and from his evil, which has its punishment inherent in it. 
 To this was adjoined a species of indignation that any one 
 should suppose that temptation and the evil of it can have 
 any other origin ; and that evil should be connected in their 
 thoughts with the Lord. These ideas were purified as they 
 ascended higher ; and the degrees of ascent were represented 
 by the rejections, which were effected with a velocity and in 
 a manner inexpressible, until they passed into the shade of 
 my thought. They were then in heaven, where there are 
 ineffable angelic ideas solely concerning the good of the 
 Lord." Arcana Ccelestia, n. 1875. 
 
 " Whilst reading the Lord's Prayer morning and evening,, 
 it was evident to me that there are things innumerable in- 
 the ideas of thought, and that those things which are con- 
 tained in order are from the interiors. On these occasions- 
 the ideas of my thought were constantly open towards- 
 heaven, and innumerable things flowed in, so that I observed 
 clearly that the ideas of thought conceived from the con- 
 tents of the prayer were filled from heaven. And such 
 things were also poured in as it is impossible to utter, and 
 also impossible for me to comprehend ; only I was sensible 
 of a general affection resulting from them. And the things 
 
94 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 which flowed in were varied every day. Hence it was given 
 me to know that in the contents of this prayer there are 
 more things than the universal heaven is capable of com- 
 prehending. And that with man more things are in it in 
 proportion as his thought is open towards heaven ; and 
 that fewer are in it in proportion as his thought is closed." 
 Ibid. n. 6619. 
 
 Those who regard the Letter of the Word as Divine, will, 
 when sufficiently strong in natural and spiritual knowledge, 
 and the good life of it, translate with a felicitous fidelity 
 unknown at present, but inspired out of the connectedness 
 of the internal sense. In the mines of the letter they will 
 find veins of gold which hide themselves from the prospecting 
 of old scholarship. The whole Word requires to be brought 
 to us afresh as a living letter. This is particularly wanted 
 in the Psalms. The translation of the Word, and the 
 restoration of it where the letter has been corrupted or 
 violated, will advance and grow in truth and light as the New 
 Church itself advances in life; and the English language 
 and literature will partake in the illumination. For the 
 Word is the first source and the last giver of nobleness 
 and dignity to every tongue ; yea, the languages of so-called 
 heathen races are no longer perishable when the Bible is 
 brought as a coal from the altar, and touches their lips. 
 
 XXXIV. GOODNESS AND TRUTH ARE THE 
 TWO SIDES OF THE WORD. 
 
 One thing in conclusion may be announced here from 
 Swedenborg as essential in the Word. It is a body of truth 
 which, like the divine humanity which it is, has a right and 
 a left side to it throughout. In this respect it is an exemplar 
 of all life, and as God is a Man the Word is a Man. The 
 right side corresponds to the Will, the left to the intellect. 
 You see this most easily when you think organically. What- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 95 
 
 ever enters the mind by the senses and the understand- 
 ing, moves the will in some degree, and what is a thought 
 in the understanding, in stirring the will becomes an 
 affection of it. In application to these two faculties the 
 Word has usually two terms which betoken their union. 
 The Word is itself the Divine Marriage of Good and Truth. 
 So nations and peoples are used ; nations having reference 
 to good and peoples to truth. The same terms imply also 
 evil and falsity according to the series in which they are used. 
 This bilaterality depends upon the correspondence of the 
 Word with humanity, and with our mental organization. 
 The reader will notice it readily in the Psalms, where most 
 verses exhibit it. Clauses also are married to each other, 
 and personal names. See especially Psalm Ixxviii. : Give 
 ear, O my people, to my law ; incline your ears, O my 
 people, to the Words of my mouth. The verses in this 
 Psalm are in almost uniform reduplication, as a bilateral 
 mind and man ; and a third clause is often added, a trine 
 dimension, wherein the Word stands on its Divine Feet. 
 So we have the heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
 firmament showeth His handiwork. We have justice and 
 judgment in many texts : Judah and Israel. In countless 
 instances Goodness and Truth, Love and Wisdom, Affection 
 and Thought, are represented \ and the one term is the will- 
 side, and the other the intellect-side. The movement of 
 life in the mind or spirit cannot exist without this twofold 
 compact, for mental existence is a process from the will 
 to the intellect, and a conjunction of the two into one, 
 preliminary to deed. The will is the motive, the under- 
 standing the means. Some delight of life always accom- 
 panies the continual momentaneous unition of the will and 
 the intellect; or otherwise motive, and consummation, 
 would die. Think then that here the Word comes organic 
 from the Divinity who is a Divine Man as Divine Good- 
 ness and Divine Truth ; and that the constant redupli- 
 cation in the Word is no arbitrary form of language, but 
 
96 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 that our spiritual existence is in plenary correspondence to 
 it, and that the oneness of our minds depends upon the 
 marriage union of the two elements signified by the Lord 
 when He says, If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye 
 do them. The will and the understanding are the twain 
 who are to be one flesh here. 
 
 XXXV. THE KEEPING OF THE JE WS FULFILS 
 PROPHECY. 
 
 For deprived as they are of inheritance in the land of 
 Canaan, and now after long ages native in many other lands, 
 and all these nominally Christian, the Jews are in part 
 voluntary exiles, we will not say, prisoners, in the dominions 
 of the only Messiah who has come out of the prophetical 
 Writings. Where will they find another Messiah whose 
 dominions compare in extent or human pretension with 
 His ? They are under His religion, though, now like 
 Christians themselves, not of it ; and in this still blessed 
 England they are in the enjoyment of their synagogues, 
 and of all privileges which spring from a toleration which 
 is not Jewish historically, nor Christian either, but in the 
 spirit of the New Church and its New Age. 
 
 This conversion of the Jews into good subjects of Christian 
 States must imprison the evil nature denounced to themselves 
 by Jehovah dictating the Old Testament to its Historians, 
 Psalmists and Prophets. Qualities repressed, * cabined, 
 cribbed, confined ' for thousands of years, and now not by 
 persecutions, but by even justice of laws common to Jew, 
 Christian, Mahometan and Hindoo, must become more 
 passive, more retiring into backwardness of organization, 
 more patient of impossibilities, and more capable of giving 
 in and of sometimes dying out. We know that radically the 
 Jew is an exception to this rule ; but externally he obeys it ; 
 and when the old persecution ceases, and politic brother- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 97 
 
 hood reigns for all good citizens ; and when the astonished 
 Jew hears of a religion brought forth from his own Old Word 
 (which has among its tenets that the Jew is by no means 
 wanted by the New Christianity, but that the Old Testament 
 wants him to stand by it when the Old Christianity deserts 
 it), he may lose, if Jehovah so ordains, somewhat of the 
 toughness and obstinacy produced not by his nature but 
 by oppression and persecution. If he has been a martyr in 
 a bad cause, still he has been a martyr, and the blood of 
 martyrs is the seed of the indomitable. Failing this, without 
 ceasing to be a Jew, a wise ductility may solicit him. One 
 thing we know, that his Jehovah, who is our Christ, affords him 
 every betterment that his character admits of ; although that 
 character for divine purposes keeps him a Jew. This is the 
 meaning in Matthew. " This people's heart is waxed gross, 
 and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have been 
 closed, lest at any time they should see with eyes, and hear with 
 ears, and should understand with heart, and should be con- 
 verted, and I should heal them,"xiii. 15. See also Isaiah vL 
 10. So it is not his restoration to Canaan which will fulfil 
 Prophecy, but his permanence as a Jew. He is prevented by 
 Jehovah from entering into the internal things of the Jewish 
 Dispensation, which are Christianity, because he would pro- 
 fane them : his avarice, and immersion in this world's interests 
 exclusively, alienate all interest in spiritual things excepting 
 under the divinely given stimulants of remote Messianic 
 promises. These he interprets for himself into earthly 
 dominion and privileged humanity and superiority. An 
 emphatic person, he holds that he is chosen by Jehovah who 
 is no respecter of persons. Yet he is chosen in the sense that 
 his self-love, which cannot be crushed without annihilating 
 him, is laid hold of to function as the property-possessor of a 
 Word which is accommodated to his character, and every 
 iota and tittle of the bare letter of which he regards with 
 a superstitious reverence ; even as thaumaturgic or magical. 
 The function of avarice is well discerned by Sir Thomas 
 G 
 
98 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Browne. " Trust not," says he, " to the omnipotency of 
 gold, and say not unto it, Thou art my confidence. Kiss 
 not thy hand to that terrestrial sun, nor bore thine ear unto 
 its servitude. A slave unto mammon makes no servant 
 unto God. Covetousness cracks the sinews of faith ; numbs 
 the apprehension of anything above sense ; and, only affected 
 with the certainty of things present, makes a peradventure of 
 things to come ; lives but unto one world, nor hopes but 
 fears another." Christian Morals, sect. viii. 
 
 Christians, not yet instructed in the internal sense of the 
 Word, are busy with the conversion of the Jews. They 
 may now know the reason why their efforts will be fruit- 
 less. The Jews are kept for use and service till the 
 Second Coming of Christ, as is plainly revealed in the 24th 
 chapter of Matthew. They are in a sense under the special 
 protection of Christ Who is Jehovah ; not indeed as any 
 longer the representation of a Church, but as fulfilling a 
 use essential to the offices of a New Church, which has to 
 enter upon the whole Word, and restore the truths of 
 the Ancients. 
 
 An attempt not pretending to benevolence is made by the 
 Czar and his ministers to exterminate the Jews from Russia, 
 or to compel them to embrace Christianity. We have seen 
 that Judaism is not a hypocrisy, but a religiosity of racial 
 and national self-interest, induced by Jehovah upon a unique 
 external capacity of religious seeming ; and which thus 
 contains at the core a mightily strong nature of persuasion. 
 This intervention of divinity still extant with the Jew makes 
 it perilous to treat him as an ordinary puppet for the Greek 
 Church to dandle. A contest with a divine Arbiter may 
 break the bones of the greatest monarch. The consequences 
 will not be discernible as such because the causes are not 
 admitted. But political demolition of an ancient religion 
 whose externals were divine, and whose Word is so still, by 
 another religiosity whose externals are human and supersti- 
 tious, is nothing less than the annihilation of religion itself 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 99 
 
 in the government which enacts it. It is more dangerous 
 now than the persecutions of the Papacy, and the auto da 
 fe of the Inquisition. And looking upon it as a sign of the 
 times, which signs the Lord enjoins us to notice, this 
 contempt of men's souls by Czarism spiritually brings forth 
 Nihilism, the special contribution of Russia towards the 
 rejuvenescence of society. Providence shows correspon- 
 dences* by perpetual coincidences. Each form of atheism 
 brings its own monstrous births. 
 
 XXXVLTHE FOOD OF THE JEWS DIVINELY 
 ORDAINED AND LIMITED. 
 
 It was the character of the Jews as being the most 
 external of all nations, or as carrying their holiness outside 
 themselves, being thus and then the worst of nations, 
 which forced the existence of the mere representation of a 
 Church, when that form, and obedience to it, was the one 
 resource left to the Lord for supporting the ancient heavens 
 and saving the human race. The same character made the 
 representatives grievous, and the carrying out of them atrocious. 
 If Romans, Mexicans, or Peruvians had been chosen under 
 the same necessity, their bad qualities must have largely 
 entered into the representation. For the representation is 
 made of the stuff of the actors themselves to such an extent 
 as that they can act in it. We are obliged to reinforce this ; 
 for it is the one point likely to be forgotten, and the point 
 which is cardinal to the understanding of this Essay. 
 
 The diet of the Jews was representative, and breach of its 
 prescriptions was on pain of death. Clean and unclean 
 animals were signalized, and foods with spiritual correspond- 
 ences on which they were forbidden to enter. " The reason 
 why it was so severely prohibited to eat blood and fat was, 
 that by such eating was represented the profanation of 
 
 * See my work, Epidemic Man and his Visitations. Speirs, 1893. 
 
i oo THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 Divine Truth and Divine Good. For the Israelitish and 
 Jewish nation lived in externals separate from internals ; 
 therefore in no Divine Truth and in no Divine Good of faith 
 and love, but in external worship alone. They were in the 
 love of self and the love of the world above other nations ; 
 consequently in the evils thence arising, in contempt of 
 others, enmity, hatred, revenge, fierceness, and cruelty. 
 Hence also it was that internal truths were not revealed 
 to them ; for if they had been revealed they could not but 
 have profaned them. Therefore they would have repre- 
 sented profanation if they had eaten blood and fat." 
 Arcana Coelestia^ n. 10033. This prohibition with regard 
 to blood " which is the life " is carried out to this day by the 
 Hebrew people, being one of the rites which does not 
 depend upon their presence in the Holy Land. 
 
 Some modern higher critics claim Moses as a cunning 
 sanitarian and medicine man, who foresaw by genius the 
 food that would build a strong race, and issued a dietary 
 accordingly, adding a superstitious authority to give the 
 prescript weight. Whatever wholesomeness might lie in 
 obeying the Levitical prohibitions and permissions of foods, 
 the existence of the most active nations upon a diet that 
 makes no account of the Old Testament table, is evidence 
 that sanitation is no master-key to the law we are consider- 
 ing. The key is theological and of Jehovah ; and the 
 prohibition of blood and fat is a cardinal instance command- 
 ing all the rest. Let not the phrase be misunderstood that 
 the Jewish Dispensation in its greatest and least aspects was 
 commanded by a Divine Magic throughout. Magic can 
 bear this highest sense. In it the supernal wisdom makes 
 use of the catenation of external means to induce the descent 
 of divine and to us miraculous power. Evil Magic is an 
 imitation of this, effected by some knowledge of correspond- 
 ences, as it was in ancient Egypt. 
 
 Our constant assertion of the doctrine that Jehovah stood 
 immediately over the Jews, and miraculously and in veiled 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 101 
 
 personality commanded them, is not more repetitious than 
 the same statement is in the Word, and than the denial of 
 the fact is in the commentators. Those who' dt> i)ot : deny 
 it, neglect and forget it. 
 
 Speaking of the food forbidden to the J?ws. ' $ir Triottifis 
 Browne remarks : " Withal in this distinction of animals the 
 consideration was hieroglyph icall ; in the bosome and 
 inward sense implying an abstinence from certain vices 
 symbolically intimated from the nature of those animals ; as 
 may be well made out in the prohibited meat of Swine, 
 Cony, Owl, and many more. At least the intention was 
 not medical, or such as might oblige to conformity or 
 imitation. . . . The Jews refrained from swine at first 
 symbolically, as an emblem of impurity ; and not from fear 
 of the leprosie, as Tacitus would put upon them." En- 
 quiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, chap. xxv. p. 142, 
 2nded., folio 1650. Thomas Browne, Doctor of Physick at 
 Norwich, was a profound Bible commentator, and by his gra- 
 cious interpretations and divinations seemed already to rejoice 
 in his pregnant genius at the promise of Swedenborg's day. 
 
 It were to be desired that every thinker on the Jewish 
 Dispensation would read the Arcana Ccelestia, vols. xi. and 
 xii., where the Garments of Holiness, the Altar, the Taber- 
 nacle, the Institution of the Sabbath, and in general the 
 Ceremonials and holy arcane structures belonging to the 
 Mosaic Law, are explained in the spiritual sense. No 
 earthly romance awakens such wonder ; no moral theology 
 is so commanding; no science of principles is so central and 
 far-reaching : no demonstration of the presence of Deity in 
 the world and its design so absolute as the demonstration 
 of the presence of the Lord in the Word, revealed by Him 
 in withdrawing the Veil from the Letter. O that our Church 
 of England, in place of wasting itself upon fruitless efforts 
 to make inspiration scientific, would deign to look upon 
 inspiration itself in glory here. 
 
 This spiritual or internal sense answers the question of 
 
102 THE NE W JERUSALEM 
 
 inspiration by showing us pieces or specimens of it from its 
 mine which underlies the entire Word. The old Churches, 
 Rqiparij, 'Greek and Protestant, possess no such evidences of 
 the existence ,of such a sense, nor consequently of the 
 inspiration /of, the letter. The Word says, "the letter 
 killeth," which is a declaration that there is a Spirit which 
 redeems the letter, and filling it with life, enables it to give 
 life and not to kill. While the letter alone is in evidence, 
 and a verbally concurrent spiritual sense is unknown, what is 
 the meaning of inspiration ? It is interpreted to mean that 
 God has inspired into certain men, chosen and fitting 
 instruments, to write by their minds under Divine influence 
 a holy scripture containing truths necessary for our guidance 
 and salvation, as Cicero and Seneca were inspired to write 
 good moral truths, and as the best writers of all times have 
 been helped providentially to give light to their races. In 
 this case, all these inspirations are embedded in the sub- 
 stance of the letter. You may write religious and moral 
 treatises from them, but your dissertations are no specimens 
 of inspiration. Failing to acquire any sensible knowledge 
 of this, you subject the letter to criticism rather than to 
 translation ; and your discredited letter, half-demolished and 
 then passed through a number of other minds, you postulate 
 as inspired when you interpret it into ecclesiastical dogmas. 
 Your opinions here are your own interpretation, not the 
 inspiration of the Divine Word. The Divine Word was 
 with God, and was God : how different that Word from the 
 letter. The Divine Word is settled in heaven : how different 
 that Word. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt with us, 
 and we saw His Glory; the Glory of the only begotten of the 
 Father. How different that Word from the letter. Shew 
 us then the way of eliciting the breathing spiritual sense 
 from the seemingly motionless and speechless literal sense, 
 that the letter may be seen to be divine, to breathe, to 
 speak, and to live. The way of the Lord was to descend as 
 the Word through the three heavens, of Love, of Wisdom, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 103 
 
 and of Works, and to clothe that Word with the speech of 
 each, and as the Son of ma.n thus garmented with His own 
 Divinity to come as an Angel Person to Lawgivers, Prophets,. 
 Psalmists, Evangelists, and to him, "I, John," of the 
 Apocalypse, and to speak to them, not through them, a 
 literal Word in the languages of certain chosen nations 
 whose minds and events prepared their chosen men to be 
 obedient penmen of the letter. The Jewish dispensation 
 employed men exactly competent to this office for the Old 
 Testament ; the Jewish character in them fitting them to 
 receive it for Jewish use. And now therefore we have the 
 heaven of the internal sense, and the earth of the external 
 sense ; the one corresponding to the other ; the literal sup- 
 porting the spiritual, and the spiritual inspiring the literal. 
 And demonstration is here to satisfy every faculty of every 
 mind made free by the truth ; for if any one asks you 
 what inspiration is, you can give him an object-lesson,, 
 specimen-proof, and sample of it, by taking the literal sense 
 of any psalm, or of any chapter of the Apocalypse, and open- 
 ing it word by word into a coherent higher chapter ; the 
 attesting grammar and dictionary of your single interpretation 
 being the answerableness and compliance of the entire 
 Word. 
 
 The Letter was compulsory to the Jew in his day, and the 
 spirit was precluded to him. The Spirit is preached to 
 Christians by the entire W T ord, and the letter without 
 it killeth. Is it not all-important to know now that the 
 Spirit is a substantial book and volume for a higher brain with 
 angels reading it in plane after plane above and within the 
 lower brain for the letter. When we advert to Archaeology 
 we may speak of inspiration again later on. 
 
 XXXVILTHE RESTORATION OF THE JEWS. 
 The Jews as the Nation and People of the Old Testa- 
 
io 4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 cnent and the Mosaic Dispensation will not be reconstituted in 
 the Holy Land. No crusade or anti-crusade will be under- 
 taken for them. They will have no Messiah such as they 
 have looked for. They are averse to the New Jerusalem. 
 This Jerusalem in the spiritual sense is the City into which 
 all who endure to the end, whether Jews or Gentiles, will be 
 gathered. The Lord of that city is no respecter of persons 
 or of races as such. All who are in the good of love and 
 the truth of faith will be its Jews, its inhabitants, its 
 Israelites in whom there is no guile. It descends from God 
 out of heaven ; and is again the Divine Truth now as the 
 doctrine of the New Religion. City here, the concentrated 
 grouping and habitation of the elect, the streets of their 
 divine order, signifies Doctrine. Doctrines are the 
 intellectual precepts corresponding to the mental affinities of 
 a spiritual-celestial civilization, or a heavenly citizenship in 
 the Church of the Lord. True doctrines, says Swedenborg, 
 constitute the Church, and a life according to them con- 
 stitutes Religion. 
 
 This function of true doctrines is plainly shown in the 
 internal sense of the Apocalypse, now the most open Book 
 of the Word to open minds. From ignorance of that sense 
 the Christian world interprets the promises made to the 
 Jews in the Old Testament as indicating that they will be 
 restored to the Land of Canaan, and will re-inhabit the Old 
 Jerusalem, making it the centre of the world. Christians, in 
 this consummation of the age, and end of the Church, are 
 like the Jews in their state, and believe that the choice and 
 salvation of man are dependent upon Divine Mercy irrespec- 
 tive of life and character ; and so they easily imagine that 
 the Jews and Israelites were chosen in preference to every 
 other nation, and therefore were more excellent than the 
 rest ; as the Jews and Israelites themselves believed. Hence 
 most Christians fall into the further belief that that nation 
 once chosen will be chosen again, and be brought back into 
 the Land of Canaan, according to the sense of the letter. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 105 
 
 In connexion with these subjects we repeat what Sweden- 
 borg says in another place: "The representative of the 
 Celestial Kingdom began to perish when the Jews asked for 
 a king ; and therefore in order that this representative of 
 the Lord's kingdom in the Heavens might still be continued, 
 the Jews were separated from the Israelites ; and the Jewish 
 kingdom represented the Lord's celestial kingdom, and the 
 Israelite kingdom, His spiritual kingdom." Arcana Calestia, 
 8770. 
 
 And again : " The Jewish kingdom represented the celestial 
 kingdom, or the Lord's Priesthood, and the Israelite king- 
 dom the spiritual kingdom or the Lord's Royalty. But the 
 latter was destroyed when nothing spiritual remained with 
 them. Whereas the Jewish kingdom was maintained for the 
 sake of the Word^ and because the Lord was to be born there. 
 But when they had completely adulterated the Word, and 
 thus could not know the Lord, then their kingdom was 
 destroyed." Apocalypse Revealed^ n. 350. 
 
 "By Judah is not meant the Jewish nation, for this was 
 nothing so little as a celestial church. As respected love to 
 the Lord,' and charity towards the neighbour, and faith, it 
 was the worst nation of all. And this, from its first fore- 
 elders to the present time. When the Jews turned aside 
 from their rituals to idolatries, they represented infernal and 
 diabolical things." Arcana^ 3881. 
 
 XXXVIILTHE FUTURE OF THE JEWS. 
 
 We have seen that the Jew is a providential antichrist, 
 because it would be worse for him and for the Church in 
 heaven and on earth if he had believed in Christ. His self- 
 love is enlisted in his Old Testament which promises him 
 so much, and he shows his faith in himself by feeding on 
 the promises. He has tenderness for himself, as who should 
 say often, Poor dear Jew! He has times and places of 
 
106 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 wailing. And he loves his own flesh and blood as when in 
 Shylock he cries out, ' O my daughter, O my ducats, O my 
 daughter ' ! He loves written bonds. Can we blame him ? 
 In a constitution formed and hardened for thousands of 
 years, he is incapable of receiving spiritual truth, though 
 now scarcely less capable than the Christians. Plis faculty 
 is truncated by absence of interest in anything which is not 
 of this world : the organs of the higher light, its eyes, are 
 shut in him. In worldly things how great is his capacity ! 
 In the range of the sensual mind, mounting up as it does 
 into the simulacra si all the higher faculties, he is intellectual, 
 philosophical, artistic, musical. He makes a good Unitarian, 
 a good ritualist, and is addicted to the higher criticism ; but 
 the latter when without changing his Jewish foundation he 
 parts unhappily with some of his reverence for the Old 
 Testament. He can be a great lawyer, financier, and 
 economist in Great Britain, and serve his father-in-law land 
 in these capacities. He can be a great statesman on the 
 lines of civilization, as we have seen in that free member of 
 the English Church, that head of our proud nobility, that 
 guardian of our empire and maker of its empress, him now 
 regretted by our patriots, and once respected and feared by 
 our enemies, Benjamin D'Israeli. A grand representative 
 in our need of the severe quality of the tribe of Benjamin. 
 
 We come again to the question, What will be the future 
 of the Jews ? Like futurity in general, it is veiled. Of its 
 events, of its days and hours, knoweth no man. For the 
 most part it resolves itself into the question of the relation 
 of the modern world to this conserved ancient nation. We 
 may attract or repel their multitude in one nation or another, 
 but we are powerless to exterminate them ; or to melt them 
 away by incorporation among our own people ; or by any 
 national or international action to overcome the Providence 
 that forbids them as a nation in the Holy Land. 
 
 The Jew is a model of the selfhood of race-preserving 
 nationality : dotted over all the countries of the world he is 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 107 
 
 still a masonic magnetic nation from age to age. English, 
 French, Germans lose themselves in foreign races after one 
 or more generations ; their faces alter to new social surround- 
 ings and influence of climates; but the Jew, however 
 modified superficially, is true to his type. The most inflex- 
 ible, he is also the most plastic, of natural men. He enters 
 into every country and belongs to its laws; he adopts its 
 language and becomes its citizen ; but remains Judean. 
 Whatever progress to a different goal than his own is made, 
 is in seeming : he moves with the tide of the race in which 
 he resides ; but the movement is accommodation and not 
 otherwise volition. He is related as a race to all races, and 
 would fain in some sense be at their head, yet he has no 
 interest in cosmopolitanism, or in the brotherhood of man- 
 kind ; no interest in the breadth and height of theology, in 
 the salvation of the Gentiles, in gathering all men into a 
 Maximus Homo, and helping humanity to be one fold under 
 one Shepherd. And where he enjoys political privileges, he 
 is not, unless he is a fleshless Anarch, under the demagogue 
 flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 
 
 It need hardly be said for the United Kingdom that no 
 social problem can be solved by meddling with our Jews. 
 It is a fair question whether any paupers or weaklings, Jews,. 
 or others, should be admitted into a country to share its 
 always limited needs of work and supplies of food ; and it is 
 the right of a community to stop an immigration that is 
 injurious to ,its own citizens. It is also right to supervise 
 immigrants who import unwholesome circumstances, or 
 abominable habits, or who live by sweating the poor, or 
 competing injuriously with honest hire. Nations should 
 keep the children they have bred, whether Jews or Gentiles, 
 and not ship them angrily and impudently upon their 
 neighbours. Each people is a body corporate, and should 
 maintain its own personality as represented at a given time. 
 Law should compel in these cases ; but we are too busy 
 
io8 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 feeding bad ambitions which pay us with diabetic sweetness 
 of promises that run destruction, to attend to the integrity 
 of our national state. We suffer from a bad disease of heart 
 and reins; from debauchery by the poisonous honey of 
 false hopes which waste our lives. 
 
 We have no rights against Jew or Gentile otherwise. 
 Suppose that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all imprisoned, 
 or banished, or Jerusalemized. Nominal Christianity in- 
 herits Judaism profoundly in its greeds, its worldliness, and 
 its Babylonian love of rule. The Jew has remorseless 
 Christian confederates and successors. The great capitalists 
 of America in sheer wealth, and capacity of money-making 
 without doing useful work, overtop the Jews ; as did the 
 Roman proconsuls and procurators who sucked the blood of 
 provinces and nations in their day. France and England 
 abound in floaters of huge loans to be wiled from small 
 men's certainties and widows' mites. And as long as 
 standing armies and rival navies last, and war expenses are 
 periodical and growing, money will be made by capitalists 
 and paper-promise men, by honey-sweet politically diabetic 
 men, whether Jews or Gentiles. From Caesar downwards,- 
 nay from Caesar upwards, the Jews have helped fighting ; 
 and when Divus Julius died, they howled and wailed for 
 him as for a very patriarch and brother. But now we have 
 learnt our lesson about banks and loans ; and if all Jews 
 were to become Christians, finance would undergo little 
 change. The heart of man, wild with false hopes, is at the 
 bottom of Pandora's box. 
 
 The conclusion seems to be, both from revelation, history, 
 and broad prudence, though not from French Antisemitism 
 or Russian jealousy, or English proselytism, that it is easiest 
 and best to leave the Jews alone, and under just laws like 
 other citizens. They are of use wherever they are as law- 
 abiding and as honest as their neighbours. Many of them 
 are excellent. Who could have known Sir Francis Gold- 
 smidt, and not say this? or Sir Moses Montefiori, or 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 109 
 
 Peregrine Fernandez, or John Elliotson ? The good Jews are 
 humane to their own people and self-respecting. They 
 have their poor always with them in a good sense. Their 
 lack of spiritual faculties is inherited ; and is now providen- 
 tially kept up through their active genius in worldly cares. 
 Moreover, from the proselytizing side, nothing definitely 
 better is offered them than their own religion ; and nothing 
 doctrinal is offered them at all. Christ comes before them 
 as one of three Gods, three God-persons, and they have 
 been warned by Moses and the Prophets that their own 
 proclivity is polytheism ; and they have been punished in the 
 past, and lost Canaan, for falling into it. Chiefly because 
 Christ fulfilled none of their ideas of Messiahship, and now 
 for pretext because they are monotheists, they refuse the 
 three Gods of the three mutually hostile Christian Churches. 
 As to civilized laws, so far as they are an improvement upon 
 former morals, the Jews are disciplined in the best way by 
 enforced attrition with western communities who do not 
 admit metaphor, parable and correspondence as veracity ; 
 their Orientalism is usefully tempered by a dead-letter of 
 truth-speaking as a rule of life and business. So though the 
 Jews will not change, they are outwardly modified ; and 
 images of mercy and tolerance of a gentler kind than their 
 own are held up before them. And no Providence denies 
 to any individual of them to enter the New Religion. The 
 doctrine that Jesus Christ is the Lord, One God in One 
 Person, may be accepted as a continuation of their Jehovah, 
 Who appeared to their prophets as the Ancient of Days in- 
 a human form. And when these new disciples read the 
 Gospels, they will learn that Christ on the cross prayed the 
 Father to forgive them because they knew not what they 
 did ; and also told us that His death was of His own consent ; 
 that no man took His life from Him, but He Himself laid 
 it down. May we call this, for our brethren's sakes, divine 
 confession and human absolution ? 
 
 Let us be then thankful for Good Use which is the desir- 
 
no THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 able administration of all things ; and let us pray for our 
 brother, the Jew, that he may indeed be the trusty keeper 
 and treasurer of the Old Testament, and clasp it in its 
 everlasting Hebrew ; and that our own Churches may sym- 
 pathize with him in the trust ; and still learn of the divine 
 letter at his hands. For we know by a new revelation that 
 he, the Jew, now in his best estate, is an ark and casket of 
 the Psalms, and of Moses and the Prophets, and that he is 
 enlisted in his very nature and its frailties on the side of this 
 divine fortune. 
 
 XXXIX. INSTANCES OF CORRESPONDENCES. 
 
 GOD AND JEHOVAH.- -It is expedient to- give some in- 
 stances of the internal sense which characterises the Word, 
 and shows its verbal inspiration; and which no writer, 
 whether Archaeologist or "Higher Critic," supposes to 
 exist in the polytheistic writings of the nations. This shall 
 be done as briefly as possible, and in simple language. 
 
 Goodness and Truth in their essence are One God. 
 Where the Word treats of Truth, God is mentioned ; where 
 of Good, Jehovah. In the first chapter of Genesis, God is 
 the Creator : the six days of Creation, from man's "earth with- 
 out form and void," through his various stages of regenera- 
 tion, up to the sixth day when he is an " Image of God," 
 are his receptions of Divine Truths into his life. ELOHIM, 
 gods, truths in the plural, are the Divine agent here. This 
 is no recognition of many gods ; but of the nature of Truth ; 
 for " divine truth is various, but divine Goodness is one." 
 
 In chapter two, Jehovah, the Lord, is the agent. The 
 six days of labour are over : the image of God, the spiritual 
 man, is created. He is not the end ; truth never is, but 
 life according to it ; making it good in the spiritual man in 
 charity. But there is a higher good to come, in love to the 
 Lord. Until this is effected, man is still the dust of the 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. in 
 
 ground. Man is now taken on the seventh day, no longer 
 by God, but by Jehovah, and formed into a " likeness of 
 God " ; or a celestial man ; an end of creation. ; where before 
 there was no man to till the ground. "The celestial man is 
 the seventh day on which the Lord rested." In him, the 
 celestial degree of life, love has gained the dominion ; and 
 what was still the dust of the ground correspondentially, is 
 Adam, the Lord's primeval man. 
 
 So there are not two creations, an Elohist and a Jehovist 
 creation, but one with no break in the narrative ; and there 
 are not two documents put together, but there is one divine 
 organ of continuous correspondences, introducing us for all 
 ages into a knowledge and acknowledgment of the primeval 
 or Adamic Church. 
 
 There is no more need for two creations here than for 
 several creations in one human life ; a boy is born ; a man 
 appears in the course of him, where there was no man ; but 
 the one life accounts for both without insisting that the boy 
 was one being and the man another; or that two makers 
 were demanded for the two. A rude analogy, but it may 
 help. 
 
 Without Correspondences, such things could not be 
 written, without a knowledge of them the writings cannot be 
 understood. This is the true most ancient and ancient 
 learning by which we can commune with the mode of being, 
 thinking, and speaking, which belonged to the first regenerate 
 men. It is the lore of the Garden Eastward in Eden. 
 When Jehovah's love and Adam's love were in harmony, 
 man in conjunction with heaven talked creations as Jehovah 
 acted them. The Word was written in him. These men 
 lived in the East, which signified love, and so were Orientals ; 
 but Oriental speech to-day, if more figurative than English, 
 is averse to the words which named all the creatures and 
 Jehovah sanctioned the , -nomenclature. Archaeology is 
 locked up in modern Orientalism ; and has the privileges of 
 it ; but they are not celestial or spiritual ; and apply to only 
 
ii2 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 one tier of mankind "a single instance" the natural man, 
 the lowest man. 
 
 THE NEPHIUM.-&Q& regard another Correspondence. 
 " When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, 
 and daughters were born unto them, the sons of God saw 
 the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took 
 them wives of all that they chose. And the Lord said, My 
 spirit shall not strive with man for ever, for that he also is 
 flesh. . . . The Nephilim were in the earth in those 
 days ; and also after that, when the sons of God came in 
 unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them ; 
 the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men 
 of renown " (Gen. vi. 1-5). " The giants, Nephilim, are those 
 who, from a persuasion of their own rank and pre-eminence, 
 regarded what was holy and true as nothing." Arcana 
 Ccelestia, n. 580. What are the sons of God here ? In the 
 spiritual sense there are no persons. The sons of God are 
 the Divine truths which were given especially to that 
 Adamic Church ; its doctrinals of faith. They are also the 
 truths of the Word for all ages. Christ is the Son of God 
 as the Divine Truth in heaven. The text above narrates 
 perversion. Therefore the daughters of men are corrupt 
 desires ; lusts ; for the man here is " flesh." The union of 
 these two, of the fleshly mind with religious truth, for carry- 
 ing out infernal ends, produces mighty men of old, men of 
 renown. ' Of old, signifies from the first, or, as usual,' It is 
 intelligible to us from the events of every age. Our own 
 worst states are so produced. When our desires pervert our 
 consciences, and overthrow their monitory truths, we become 
 mighty in selfhood, for we make truth itself into a lie and 
 a flattery. On a large-scale in the world, the monster evils 
 of mankind, hard and enduring, are the births of the union 
 of our ambitions with our Te Deums ; of our meanness and 
 shame with our glory. So infallibility marries antichrist, and 
 tyranny is at the altar with liberty, equality, and fraternity. 
 The Nephilim of this age are here. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 113 
 
 Have we not an abyssal instance of the sons of God, 
 which are truths in their origin, going in to the daughters of 
 men, which are desires permeating human nature, in the 
 state of modern rivalry and warfare, personal, social, and 
 national. The very Son of God Himself, the Lord Christ, 
 in the theology of Christendom, absolves mankind from this 
 earthly hell by atoning for it to the Father ; and all that the 
 sinners, private, public, and national, need do is, to lay hold 
 on Him as their Justifier : they continuing in their sins, and 
 never dreaming to get rid of them. Individual and universal 
 selfishness and Bellona are here the daughters of men ; and 
 the Son of God of the Churches is wedded to them ; and 
 Giant Evils incurable, and that no brain can think beyond, 
 Nephilim and Anakim, are born. Our Church wonders, 
 and completes its duty by preaching penitence on Ash 
 Wednesday. 
 
 THE FLOOD. It is a spiritual event easily read after the 
 correspondence of it is disclosed. " God breathed into 
 man's nostrils the breath of lives, and man became a living 
 soul." God's breath in man is man's life : it is his spirit. 
 In Adam it was a pure life, for before the Fall Adam had 
 not sinned, and was in no contrariety to Him whose breath 
 was his life : man's breath and God's, man's spirit and God's, 
 coincided. By Adam understand the first or Adamic 
 Church. When that Church had corrupted itself, and was 
 consummated, when man determined to be his own God, 
 the life that God had given could no longer be breathed 
 into him ; but the effort he made to breathe from himself 
 was what remained to him : the wrath of the tradition of the 
 first respiration. This was more and more obstructed by 
 the lusts and persuasions into which God no longer breathed, 
 for their spirit was against His spirit, and man therefore 
 ceased to be a living soul. As the Adam was thus, and as 
 all will, thought, speech, and writing run in the streams of 
 correspondences, this extinction of the respiration is called 
 by the Divine Author of Genesis, the Flood. The world 
 
 H 
 
ii 4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 to-day lacks the elements of understanding this ; because it 
 does not study the science of correspondences ; and also 
 because it makes no account of the doctrine of respiration, 
 which is the basement of the knowledge of the natural and 
 spiritual life ; and of the dwelling or intercourse of the soul 
 with the body. See Swedenborg's Animal Kingdom, the 
 Chapter on the Lungs. The Flood has constant analogies 
 in this time. Truths of the past, which once possessed the 
 people, become weakened by not being obeyed, and so 
 ceasing to teach ; and then they are suffocated by the onrush 
 of flattering falses. This is known as the changing Spirit of 
 the Age : i.e., Breath of the Age. It is overflowed from time 
 to time by a fresh wave of perversions from selfish ends which 
 bribe consciences. In the earliest time, the falses were 
 direful persuasions that man was God : now the falses of 
 the Zeitgeist are antitheological : man is man, godless, and 
 the kingdom of man is to come ; the name of God is to 
 cease. Little children in fair France are to forget it. 
 
 EGYPT. The names of nations in the Word do not 
 mean geographical places and their inhabitants, but great 
 organic humanities at work : thus faculties of man ; the vital 
 things of Churches. And Churches are not ecclesiasticisms 
 although they may contain them, but divine dispensations 
 coinciding with the above humanities ; and meant for guid- 
 ance and salvation in their ^Eons. 
 
 Egypt illustrates this. In the Ancient Church it signified 
 the culture of the Sciences of that Church. Let us try to 
 understand this. The lower base of every Church, as indeed 
 of all life, must be its sciences : the known things in its 
 natural mind : its natural theology born of Revelation. 
 What were the Sciences of the Church? They were 
 divinely-authorized rituals and reverences which brought 
 heaven near to the Egyptian man, so that when he, faithful 
 to God, was in them, the corresponding plane of worship 
 and precept was filled in his mind with the influx of God. 
 They are called Sciences of the Church; but the word 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 115 
 
 science rather means what we should call applied science 
 than anything apart and abstract. They were the truths of 
 the real presence arranged to ensure that Presence. Truth 
 for its own sake which we sometimes hear of, has no place 
 here : all the truths of the Word are divinely interested, and 
 are only true to the glory of God, and the good of man's 
 estate ; according to the formula of that Egyptian mind, 
 Francis Bacon of Verulam. 
 
 Well, Egypt signified this Cultus, this kind of worship 
 before it fell : it was endowed with the remains of the science 
 of correspondences ; of which hieroglyphics as they now 
 stand are the last " remainder-biscuit." Some man who 
 has two spades, both ace of spades and king of spades, both 
 spiritual spade and natural spade, will one day uncover 
 things which are hieroglyphic of the Ancient Church, and 
 no longer of Menes, Rameses, or Meneptah. It is impos- 
 sible that the most ancient of the nations of the Noahtic 
 Church can have spent its symbolic and lingual mind on 
 the names of dynasties and their glory, or its religious 
 mind on polytheism, and on an animal worship which was 
 signalized as idolatrous even in the time of Moses. 
 
 A great people which corresponded in its mental organiza- 
 tion to the science of worship, its divinely given natural 
 forms and comeliness, must have undergone long ages of 
 decline before its hieroglyphic genius became a Cadmean 
 Letter, or its Jehovah was lost in a pantheon. Materialism, 
 Churchyardism, must have destroyed the simple belief in 
 immortality before a nation could look upon its mummies 
 as its future state, and its funerals as its fee simple in im- 
 mortality. Scientifics, however, when they fall, believe in 
 death and change, and not in life and regeneration. We 
 in our day are Egyptian in our belief in a future life : ac- 
 cording to orthodoxy all our dead are slumbering in their 
 graves awaiting a final judgment in this little planet which 
 would not hold the gathered nations if they rose. 
 
 With regard to the first state of Egypt, when it was 
 
n6 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 a leading faculty and organ of the Ancient Church, 
 Swedenborg says : " From ancient times the Egyptians 
 knew Jehovah. They had among them the representatives 
 and significatives of that Church. The Egyptian hiero- 
 glyphics are nothing else. By them spiritual things were 
 signified. They also knew that they actually corresponded " 
 (Arcana, 7097). Also, " By Egypt was meant a church 
 which in the beginning was pre-eminent ; so Egypt, before 
 its Church was devastated, is compared to the Garden of 
 Eden, and to the Garden of Jehovah (Gen. xiii. 10 ; Ezek. 
 xxxi. 8) ; and is also called " the corner-stone of the tribes, 
 the son of the wise, and of the kings of antiquity " (Isaiah 
 xix. n, 13). 
 
 After this digression, the reader is requested to hold fast 
 the doctrinal revelation that Egypt and its Nile, and all 
 things in it, have reference in the Word to the scientific 
 plane and degree of man and the Church. Egypt signifies 
 the merely natural man, mere knowledge, facts, scientifics. Its 
 mummies are facts to-day : you know the very face of Rameses 
 in Cairo still as it protrudes into the nineteenth century. 
 
 Being scientifics, as we have no representative scientifics 
 of the Church of to-day except Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper, Egypt for us descends to mean the scientific prin- 
 ciple in all of us, and in all our nations. It means all the 
 facts of knowledge which we most value, and which are the 
 scientifics and thought-resources of our lives. To them we 
 continually go down as to Egypt. 
 
 With respect to this phrase we read thus : " Everywhere 
 in the Word it is said, ' to go down from the Land of 
 Canaan to Egypt,' and to ' go up from Egypt to the land of 
 Canaan.' The land of Canaan signifies the heavenly, 
 and Egypt the natural. Canaan, the heavenly kingdom; 
 and Egypt, the goods and truths of the external church, 
 which for the most part are scientifics" (Arcana, 5406). 
 " In a good sense Egypt signifies the scientifics which are 
 of service for the form of the Church " (n. 5580). 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 117 
 
 Egypt had remarkable relations to the Jews personally 
 and nationally ; and these are only explicable by the revela- 
 tion the New Religion now possesses that Egypt corresponds 
 to the scientific mind. Abram journeyed south, and went 
 down into Egypt to sojourn there ; for the famine was 
 grievous in the land where he was. When he returned from 
 Egypt with his wife, Sarai, he was very rich in cattle, in 
 silver, and in gold. An Egyptian handmaid Hagar, as it 
 were substitutionally married to Abram, bears him his first- 
 born, Ishmael, and prepares the way for the birth of Isaac. 
 But of Isaac when there was famine in the land, beside the 
 first famine in the days of Abraham, it is said that the Lord 
 appeared to him, and said, Go not down into Egypt ; dwell 
 in the land which I shall tell thee of, the land of Gerar. 
 The reason why Isaac was not to go down into Egypt is 
 given in the Arcana Cttlestia^ n. 3368, where it is treated of 
 at length. Abraham sojourning in Egypt represented the 
 Lord's instruction in scientifics when He was a child. Isaac 
 represents the Lord's entry into the rational ; and now that 
 He would not look to scientifics but to rationals. The 
 subject is too abstruse for these pages ; but can be ap- 
 proached by the reverent reader who desires to be instructed 
 in the different functions of rationals and scientifics in man's 
 regeneration ; and of how rationals receive light from the 
 Divine, and then enlighten scientifics. 
 
 Joseph also is sold into Egypt, and Jacob sends his sons 
 there, and goes thither himself. The children of Israel 
 become a people in Egypt, and are prepared for the posses- 
 sion of Canaan, and the representation of a Church there. 
 These events signify the indispensable character of Egypt in 
 constituting the Ancient Church, which was the foothold of 
 God's human creatures in the World from Noah to Abraham, 
 and to Moses. 
 
 Yet another event occurs in the Word. After the Lord 
 was born, and the Wise Men, the Magi, had fallen down 
 and worshipped Him, and opened their gifts; and were 
 
u8 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 departed, "behold the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph 
 in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his 
 mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring 
 thee word : for Herod will seek the young child to destroy 
 him. When he arose, he took the young child and his 
 mother by night, and departed into Egypt : and was there 
 until the death of Herod : that it might be fulfilled which 
 was spoken of the Lord by the Prophet saying, c Out of 
 Egypt have I called my Son.' .... But when Herod was 
 dead, behold an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to 
 Joseph in Egypt, saying, Arise, and take the young child 
 and his mother, and go into the land of Israel : for they are 
 dead which sought the young child's life. And he arose, 
 and took the young child and his mother, and came into 
 the land of Israel" (Matthew ii. n). This event is con- 
 nected in the word with two causes, the escape of the young 
 child from the murder of the Innocents by Herod, and 
 the pressure of Divine order in the Lord's entry into a 
 natural human mind, and its glorification by His life in it. 
 Respecting this we read as follows. " In the Ancient Church 
 there were doctrinals, and there were scientifics. The Doc- 
 trinals treated of love to God, and of charity towards the 
 neighbour. The Scientifics treated of the Correspondences 
 of the natural world with the spiritual world, and of repre- 
 sentatives of spiritual and celestial things in natural and 
 terrestrial. Joseph was made to go down into Egypt. The 
 Lord is represented by Joseph. Hereby then is signified, 
 that when the Lord glorified His internal man, that is, made 
 it divine, He first imbued the scientifics of the Church, and 
 from and by them made progress to things more and more 
 interior, and at length to things divine. It pleased Him to 
 glorify Himself, or to make divine, according to the order 
 in which He regenerates man, or makes him spiritual : 
 namely, from external things, which are scientifics and truths 
 of faith, successively to internal things, which are of charity 
 towards the neighbour, and of love to Himself. Hence what 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 119 
 
 is signified in Hosea xi. i, ' When Israel was a child then 
 I loved him ; and out of Egypt have I called my Son/ 
 These words were spoken of the Lord. See Matthew ii. 15." 
 
 This revelation from the Word begins to clear our eyes 
 and conceptions about the nature, process, and end and 
 object of the INCARNATION, and what the divine man did 
 for man in reconstituting the human mind, first in Himself, 
 and then for our whole natural humanity. He overthrew the 
 Hells by resisting them. He made them level with man's 
 power of resistance, and so gave man back his lost 
 freedom. He atoned for no sin, past, present, or to come. 
 But he made us all capable of working out our own salva- 
 tion, and also then of being strong in faith and love to 
 acknowledge that He fights when we fight ; and that He 
 alone, veiled Lord God Almighty, is our Victory and our 
 Heaven. 
 
 We adduce one more mention of Egypt commenting on 
 the same text. " Scientifics are things which they who are 
 regenerating must first learn, since they are a plane for the 
 things of the understanding ; and the understanding is the 
 recipient of the truth of faith ; and the truth of faith is the 
 recipient of the good of charity. That the scientific prin- 
 ciple was the first plane to the Lord when He made His 
 human, divine truth, or the divine law, is signified by the 
 Lord when an infant being brought into Egypt. By 
 scientifics are not meant philosophical scientifics, but 
 scientifics of the Church " (Ibid. n. 6750). 
 
 There are many passages in the Word which signify the 
 perversions of the natural mind and scientific principle de- 
 noted by Egypt. " Isaiah xxvi. describes the state of those 
 who wish to be wise from themselves in things of heaven 
 and the church. Of them it is said, ' Woe to them that go 
 down to Egypt for help, and do not look to the Holy One of 
 Israel, and do not seek Jehovah.', The imaginary things 
 which come from the fallacies of the senses are * the horses of 
 Egypt on which they stay.' That the natural man does not 
 
120 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 understand divine things from himself is signified by * Egypt 
 is a man, and not God.' That such intelligence is from the 
 proprium in which there is no life, is signified by ' his horses 
 are flesh and not spirit.'" Apocalypse Explained, n. 654. 
 
 " In seven chapters in the Revelation the consummation of 
 the present Church is described in like manner as the devas- 
 tation of Egypt. Both are described by the like plagues, 
 each one of which signifies some falsity which furthered 
 its devastation even to destruction. Thus this Church 
 which is at this day destroyed is also called Egypt." True 
 Christian Religion, n. 635. " 'The city which is called Sodom 
 and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.' The two 
 infernal loves which are the love of dominion from the love 
 of self, and the love of reigning from the pride of one's own 
 intelligence, are here signified. Sodom means all evil from 
 the love of self, and Egypt instead of Gomorrha all the falsity 
 thence derived." May we not say that Sodom involves all 
 atheist right to do whatever we lust and like with our own 
 souls and bodies, with ourselves, and with others, and 
 with all living creatures ; that it means, infernal godhood ; and 
 that Egypt here is the skilful genius and working hypothesis 
 of Atheism universally applied by Sodom in the killing of con- 
 science. Christ is crucified in all the abominations, cruel- 
 ties and vivisections of these two. They are a hell of the 
 present mind. The modern Church condones them. 
 
 SWEDENBORG. The Commissioner of the New Dispen- 
 sation, Emanuel Swedenborg, guarded and guided by the 
 Lord from his birth onwards, was also sent down into an 
 Egypt where no theologian had preceded him. He was 
 committed to natural science. In its pursuit he saw that 
 the highest natural sciences, namely, of anatomy and phy- 
 siology, were then in honest plenty, like the seven kine, fat- 
 fleshed and well-favoured of Pharaoh's dream, and which 
 fed in a meadow : and like the seven ears of corn on one 
 stalk, full and good. So with such a harvest before him he 
 also foresaw that the grain must be stored in good doctrinal 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 121 
 
 barns, since dearth might follow ; "for unless," says he, " I 
 mistake the signs of the times, the world's destinies are 
 tending thitherwards." His insight and onsight were borne 
 out ; for the Egypt which has since followed is of the lean 
 kine of materialism which but for him would have eaten up 
 the fat kine ; and of the thin ears which would have devoured 
 the seven good ears. In his time under this Joseph the 
 scientific earth brought forth by handfuls. " And he 
 gathered up all the food of the seven years which were in 
 the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities. The 
 food of the field which was round about every city laid he 
 up in the same." Cities in the Word are doctrines. Thus 
 he stored and garnered in these the abundance of the true 
 corn of natural knowledge. The cities or doctrines for the 
 wealth of storage were many ; and many were wanted, for 
 the corn of life when seven years means holy truth of 
 state in the mind, or truth tending to good, is " as the sand 
 of the sea," exceeding number. We know the names of 
 these cities. They are common senses about nature divinely 
 illustrated, digests and inductions, intuitions into ends and 
 purposes, divinations of natural wisdom poured into vessels 
 of faith. The field is the human body in which all the organs 
 and spheres become doctrines. Individually they are the 
 " Doctrine of Forms, of Order and Degrees, of Series and 
 Society, of Influx, of Correspondence and Representation, 
 and of Modification." 
 
 Perceptions of what the life of the body is ; of how it is 
 alive simply because it answers by perpetual service to the 
 living soul which has to dwell in it: of how the body is the 
 image and face and literal sense of the soul ; and the soul, 
 the model, the idea, the first form, the substance, the force, 
 and principle of the body, entered the mind of this non- 
 medical physiologist, who stood on a mountain of no pro- 
 fessional partiality. He has left universal truths yet to be 
 recognized in the Animal Kingdom, meaning thereby the 
 Soul's Kingdom, the human form, not the republic of 
 
1 22 THE NE WJER USALEM 
 
 Zoology. Of these uncoverings we may chronicle the 
 doctrine of the heart, how that it, like the will to which it 
 corresponds, makes and modifies for its own purposes in its 
 walled house, what it contains ; in the case of the heart, the 
 blood, which it next circulates. This doctrine, of the heart 
 as the supreme voter and ordainer of excellence and ranks 
 in the blood, dimly held by many, was fixed into verity by 
 Swedenborg. He also divined and showed that the brain is 
 faculty in every spherule, and is distinctly various in all its 
 globes of animations as the mind is various ; representing 
 also a partible genius corresponding to the moving sciences 
 and skills of the universe of creation : how from the soul 
 which is an inner brain, it builds the body according to 
 all natural light and knowledge and all physical departments 
 made alive. The doctrine of Uses is always the beginning 
 and the end : the Circulation of Uses. This is the Circle 
 of Life. The use of the body to the soul is intended in all 
 the organism. Signal to the writer among these scientifics 
 and rationals and spirituals is the uncovering of the spirit 
 which human breath is : the use of the lungs in breathing. 
 " For the lungs not only respire themselves but make the 
 whole organic body to respire along with them." Sweden- 
 borg has established in spirit, in reason, and in science 
 under it, the end, use and purpose which is served for man 
 and his life in that his body from head to foot heaves and 
 falls, and makes space in every atom of it by the motion 
 wherewith the lungs set it walking into mental and bodily 
 function. And this motion has nothing to do directly with 
 the breathing in and out of the air in the chest through the 
 mouth. It is the freewill of the body itself. 
 
 First a SEER through the medium of organic doctrines,, 
 this instrument in realizing the Lord's Second Advent was 
 sent down into the Egypt of the eighteenth century ; into 
 scientifics far outlying the Church scientifically ; into mines 
 and smelting works, into mechanical inventions, into theories 
 of chemical forms, into cosmic speculations, into the schools 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 123. 
 
 of old and new philosophy, into the workshop and the dis- 
 secting room ; into whatever would contribute by education' 
 to the betterment of his native land, especially in this regard 
 into Algebraand Mathematics. Nor did he disdain to help his 
 king in war, and his country in great mining and engineering 
 works. But as we said above, all was preparatory : a means 
 to uncover to himself, and discover for mankind, the doctrines 
 and disciplines lying in the science of the organization of the 
 human form : for this is the form of forms : the divine form,, 
 the form of heaven, and the form of humanity under heaven. 
 I revert to say again that up to this time the spiritual 
 cognition of the human body began and ended with Sweden- 
 borg. Since then cognizance has been manifold but unspiri- 
 tual : life unrecognizable, and soul not admitted. One 
 reason, apart from the End of the Church and the proud 
 sensuality of the age, has been that the experimental insight 
 into the corporeal frame of man has been more and more 
 under medicine and surgery, and motived towards profes- 
 sional renown and remuneration. Trade-medicine is the 
 death of spiritual insight into the bodily image of God which 
 a man is. When vivisection is added to the horrors of 
 unlimited surgery, the last connexion between medical in- 
 sight, and the soul, mind and body of mankind is ruptured. 
 So physiology through professionalism has nothing to do- 
 with men's souls, but everything with their miserable bodies 
 and pockets. And through the annexation of physiology to 
 medicine, the whole of the organic world from protoplasm to 
 humanity has been treated as an outlying empire of the 
 Physicians, and Darwin and evolution are the tyranny of it : 
 the survival of the fittest, the strong confounding the weak. 
 Like Solomon's seven hundred wives and three hundred 
 concubines, natural history, penetrated by the push of all 
 constituents from below, lies wealthy before us. This has- 
 supplied motive to live in a hopeless and death-bearing age ;. 
 and all that is won will be claimed in time to a greater than 
 Solomon. Meanwhile present hope lies in the entry of a 
 
i2 4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 true Christian Religion, and in its theology becoming the pro- 
 prietor of the natural body of the soul ; and in its Professors 
 .annexing this great present black Africa of physiology, to 
 their sphere of influence, to reconnect it with its proper life. 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg was installed in this work ; so that 
 when you read his Animal Kingdom, considered anatomically, 
 physically, and philosophically, you are reading of soul, mind 
 or spirit, and body, when you are reading of the forms and 
 functions of your organism. To be competent to this showing, 
 he underwent representatively the discipline of Israel, the 
 spiritual man, in Egypt from Joseph to Moses. He thought 
 to pursue the same path on the plain of nature, and did not 
 know for what mission the knowledges and sciences had been 
 used to train him. But " he went out to seek his father's asses, 
 .and found a kingdom." Asses again are scientifics, where 
 horses are understandings. And the kingdom was an open 
 intercourse with the Lord, an opening of the spiritual sight, 
 an opening of the spiritual sense of the Word, and of the 
 doctrine of the Divine Human, the revelation of which is the 
 Second Advent. 
 
 Register here then that the natural and scientific is the basis 
 to mankind of the New Church, and that the great develop- 
 ments of this age in applied sciences and uses, in themselves 
 neutral, can be preparations for an intellect descending from 
 God out of heaven, which will lay hold of them and make 
 them into means of influx, purging them of the Atheism 
 which comes from below. The temptations of Egypt, the 
 trials of materialism and its infidelities, can be the means of 
 first riddance for the men of thought and speculation, from 
 the Red Sea. The simple in faith will follow them not 
 knowing that they follow, and be safe. 
 
 ASSYRIA, AsHUR.Yhe. largest instances making history 
 in the Jewish Dispensation lie in the transport of its nations 
 into other lands. And now, since we have the spiritual 
 power which commanded these movements revealed to us, 
 and the spiritual sense of it accounting for each event, we 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 125 
 
 know in the first place that the sons of Jacob and children 
 of Israel were sent to school in Egypt before the spirit of the 
 Ancient Church died there, that they might be imbued with 
 the scientific principle, in order to begin to be the repre- 
 sentation of a church. Strange, Reader, is it not, that a 
 nation should be moved about bodily to represent a divine 
 principle ? But representation and correspondence is the 
 veiled Cosmos, and principles not seen are the thick darkness 
 about God. First school, and then punishment in manhood. 
 Egypt = science ; but Assyria = reasoning. Israel = the spiri- 
 tual man represented or dramatized. When this man fell 
 before falses and into evils, he fell by reasonings against true 
 and good principles. So ten tribes of him, Israel, were carried 
 away bodily into Assyria, and until this was done, represen- 
 tation was not satisfied. The inner and outer Cosmos, 
 Israel and Assyria, became what they really were one ; and 
 Israel left its simple good folks at home in Samaria, and 
 herself never came back. She was not lost, but was eaten 
 up by Assyria, and became of her body. Then Judah = the 
 celestial church or man represented or dramatized. The 
 evil into which this churchman fell was the love of dominion, 
 over souls. When this love gains the mind, it stands papally 
 between the Lord and man, and persuades man that the 
 church is between the Creator and the creature, and that, 
 an intermediate person as head of the Church is as God on. 
 earth. This perversion and infernal dominion against the 
 real presence, the holiest gift to man, is Babylon. So when 
 Judah sank representatively under this sin, and consummated 
 it in her wicked kings, she was representatively, that is, 
 really, carried away to Babylon, and the Divine Order enacted 
 the correspondence, and the unity of evil and punishment 
 was the unity of Judah and Babylon in the Babylonish Cap- 
 tivity. For reasons already given Judah was brought back, 
 though Israel was not. The Scripture does not record the 
 next event, excepting in the Lord's words as prophecy of the 
 Last Judgment in Matthew. It was the end of Judah ; not 
 
126 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 this time by the Babylon of the Euphrates ; but by the 
 historical Babylon, Rome, which as a principle of dominion, 
 .and where the Church is treated of, as dominion over souls, 
 is signalized throughout the Apocalypse. This was the last 
 dispersion, and this was the final levelling of Jewish pre- 
 tension and religiosity in the impartial Divine Cosmos ; in 
 which the use of the Jewish nature was reserved ; as is the 
 case with all natures while they last; that is, while the 
 Divine Providence can make use of them in conducting 
 humanity to a goal. 
 
 The seemingly abstract principles of good and evil are 
 here made into broad concrete history. The supernatural is 
 for ever the brain and nerve of the mundane story. In the 
 Word it is the whole flesh and blood of man, and by divine 
 appointment alone he lives and moves and has his being in 
 it there. 
 
 Now hear Swedenborg on the spiritual signification of 
 Assyria : " That Assyria denotes reasoning is evident from 
 the Word. It is constantly taken for those things which are 
 of reason in both senses ; namely, for rational things, and 
 for reasonings. By reason and rational things are properly 
 meant those things which are true, but by reasoning and 
 reasonings, those things which are false. Because Assyria 
 signifies thus it is for the most part joined with Egypt, be- 
 cause reason and reasoning are from scientifics." Arcana^ 
 n. 1186. 
 
 "Assyria signifies reasoning in Isaiah x. 5, 7, 13. 'Woe 
 to Assyria, the rod of mine anger, he thinks not what is right 
 and his heart meditates not what is right. He hath said, In 
 the strength of mine hand have I done it, and in my wisdom, 
 because I am intelligent.' " 
 
 " Nineveh signifies the falsities of doctrinals. There are 
 three falsities of this kind from three origins. The first is 
 the fallacies of the senses, the darkness of an understanding 
 which is not enlightened, and ignorance. Hence the false 
 called ' Nineveh.' The second origin is from the same 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 127 
 
 cause, but with a predominating desire either of innovating, 
 or of being pre-eminent. The falsities thence derived are 
 * Rehoboth.' The third origin is of the will, thus of cupidi- 
 ties : the not being willing to acknowledge as truth anything 
 but what favours cupidities. The falses thence derived are 
 called ' Calah.' All these three kinds arise by means of 
 1 Asshur,' or reasoning about the truths and goods of faith." 
 Ibid. 1 1 88. 
 
 " Assyria signifies the rational mind, as in Ezekiel xxxi. 
 3, 4 : ' Behold Assyria is a cedar in Lebanon, beautiful in 
 branch, and a shady grove, and lofty in height ; and her 
 shoot was among the thick fronds. The waters made her 
 grow, the depth of waters exalted her, the river drawing 
 round about the plant.' The rational is called a cedar in 
 Lebanon." Ibid. 119. 
 
 " When a man is natural he is in Egypt ; when he be- 
 comes rational he is in Assyria ; and when he becomes 
 spiritual he is in the land of Canaan, or in the Church." 
 Apoc. Expl. n. 654. 
 
 " * In that day there shall be a path from Egypt into 
 Assyria, so that the Assyrian may come into Egypt, and 
 Egypt into Assyria,' signifies that then the rational will be 
 opened for them by means of scientific truths, in order that 
 man may view the scientific things which are of the natural 
 man rationally, and thus intelligently. In that day Israel 
 shall be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the 
 midst of the land.' This signifies influx into them both from 
 spiritual light. Israel is the spiritual man who has light 
 from heaven ; Egypt, the natural man who has light from 
 the world ; and Assyria, the rational man who is midway. 
 He receives light from the spiritual, transmits it into the 
 natural, and enlightens it. ' Assyria, the work of my hands,' 
 is the rational man not from himself but from the Lord." 
 Ibid. n. 654. Since the spiritual is that from which what 
 is rational and scientific is applied to genuine truths, Israel 
 is called the inheritance, and Assyria, the work of my hands ; 
 
1 28 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 and Egypt, the blessed people, because all things are together 
 in their ultimate, the scientific." Ibid. n. 340. 
 
 This passage from the Authorized Version is as follows : 
 "And the Lord shall smite Egypt, He shall smite and heal ; 
 and they shall return 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 Egyptians 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 Egypt my people, and Assyria the 
 work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance " (Isaiah xix. 
 22-25). 
 
 Assyria, which we are specially considering here, is used, 
 as shown by these extracts, in a good, and in a bad sense. 
 The Ancient Church was established there, and the Ancient 
 Word, and that Church underwent decline for ages, and was 
 consummated, and then helped in the consummation of the 
 Israelitish Church. In its later history and as we also know it 
 from the monuments, Assyria was cruel, and ' Woe to the 
 bloody city ' is written of Nineveh in Nahum. To the 
 modern reader, especially if he be a politician to-day, this 
 sanguinary character may seem to militate against the signi- 
 fication of Assyria as in its perversion denoting or corres- 
 ponding to reasoning, for reasoning is Parliament in strict 
 definition, and how reasonable Parliament is ! But looking 
 into history, what has been more bloody on both sides than 
 reasoning ? Religious controversy and its battles, the wars 
 of Iconoclasts with Image- Worshippers from Byzantium to 
 Rome, from east to west in Christendom, the burning of 
 heretics in all lands, the mutual hatreds of the three great 
 Churches, Greek, Catholic and Protestants, and the malices 
 of Non-conformity, are indeed an Assyria, to which, as all 
 springing from personal power and national reasonings, we 
 may well fear the prophet's denunciation of Nineveh, Woe 
 

 AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 129 
 
 to the bloody city. Odium theologicum is the name of this 
 Assyria. 
 
 As an outcome of the furnace of hot reasoning, the god- 
 dess of reason was enthroned in Paris in the days of its 
 bloody Revolution. Here was another Assyria, typically 
 cruel, a political Assyria, after all religion was dead. 
 
 In regard to the spiritual signification of these nations, 
 as well as to the other alleged correspondences, if his heart 
 is not averse to the existence of such things, we counsel the 
 reader to try them while reading the Word, to prove to him- 
 self whether they yield the sense claimed for them. Try 
 thus Egypt, Assyria, Israel, Babylon, in their contexts, on 
 both sides, good and evil. It was by trials that the hiero- 
 glyphic and cuneiform were confirmed as languages. Go 
 down into Egypt here by patient experimentation. Prove 
 and hold fast that which is good. 
 
 XL. THE DIVINE NATURAL. 
 
 It is said in Matthew that as the women went to tell the 
 disciples of the resurrection, "Jesus met them, saying, All 
 hail ! And they came and held Him by the feet, and wor- 
 shipped Him" (xxviii. 9); and in Luke, "Jesus Himself 
 stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace unto 
 you. But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed 
 that they had seen a spirit. And He said unto them, Why 
 are ye troubled ? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts ? 
 Behold my hands, and my feet, that it is I myself: handle 
 me, and see ; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see 
 me have. And when He had thus spoken He showed them 
 hands and feet. And while they yet believed not for joy, 
 He said unto them, Have ye here any meat ? And they gave 
 Him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And 
 He took, and did eat before them " (xxiv. 36-42). The Lord 
 proved His identity to their doubting hearts by showing 
 
 i 
 
130 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 His hands and His feet as the parts where the crucifixion 
 had left its marks. In John the Lord again showed the 
 disciples His hands and His feet; and again specially to 
 Thomas, who would not believe until he saw in His hands 
 the print of the nails, and thrust his hand into His side. 
 "Then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the 
 midst, and said, Peace unto you. Then saith He to Thomas, 
 Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands ; and reach 
 hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side, and be not faith- 
 less but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto 
 Him, My Lord and my God" (xx. 25-28). 
 
 After this Jesus again showed Himself to the disciples at 
 the Sea of Tiberias, and caused them to take on the right 
 side of the ship a great draught of fishes ; and when they 
 came to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid 
 thereon, and bread, and Jesus said to them, Bring of the 
 fish which we have now caught ; which Peter obeyed ; and 
 Jesus saith unto them, Come, dine. Jesus then cometh, and 
 taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise. This is 
 now the third time that Jesus showed Himself to His dis- 
 ciples after that He was risen from the dead " (John xxi. 
 
 1-15). 
 
 In these events, which happened in nature, the Lord not 
 only proved to the doubting minds of the disciples His 
 identity, but also that He remained a Natural Man. We no- 
 where read that He was seen of the Jews ; the narrative is as 
 it were in another nature, but in nature still. He " showed 
 Himself" to whom He would. They could not themselves 
 say, Lo here, and, Lo there, to Him ; the women and the dis- 
 ciples did not look for Him ; in the instances of being seen, 
 He " showed Himself," that is, revealed Himself. He came 
 in when the doors were shut, and stood in the midst ; not 
 through material obstacles ; for there were none such. Yet 
 He was a Natural Man. He rose from the tomb as such. 
 We men are raised from our graves as spirits, leaving the 
 body to decay, and quitting our natural materiated frame 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 131 
 
 for ever. To angelic and human sight He left nothing in the 
 sepulchre except the linen-clothes, and the folded napkin of the 
 head. And He thought it good to preach " that a spirit hath 
 not flesh and bones as ye see Me have : " and to confirm this 
 as a divine announcement, proving it to two senses, sight 
 and touch. 
 
 Herein we see the consummated end of the Incarnation ; 
 the Lord having made the Word flesh, that is, natural flesh ; 
 that is, in Him, Divine Flesh : having glorified His hum- 
 anity; having put on the Divine Natural and the Divine 
 Sensual. So He is the Divine and Infinite Man in fulness 
 and power, in sentient infinitude and omnipotent natural will. 
 So in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. 
 
 The only thing rejected was what Swedenborg denomin- 
 ates the Corporeal, that which makes our bodies and minds 
 limited and extant : the dead matter which fixes us men to a 
 spot of ground, and imprisons us in a covering which enters 
 into all our thoughts and feelings, and tells us that we are 
 finite; the mind being imbued with the consciousness of this 
 dead experience ; and the memory sealed up to it. If we 
 lost this here or hereafter we should have no basis, but should 
 be instantly annihilated. In our spiritual world it is made 
 latent, as an invisible and unrecognized stratum under us ; 
 and being latent, the mind after death, in the heavens, par- 
 takes of the spiritual realm, and the Lord's mercy and gift 
 there makes the love and wisdom adopted into the character 
 into a moving image and likeness of the Infinite and the 
 Eternal. But the fixity of the corporeal man must be stable 
 at the lower end, or the Lord's gift would have no permanent 
 matrix to inhere in. Immortality is only possible by having 
 its everlasting ground in a first and past mortality. 
 
 The whole of this narrative is adapted, by plain declarations, 
 and by speaking correspondences, to teach us women and 
 men, the women were first with Him when He rose ; and 
 first of all Mary Magdalene, that the Lord after Death, and in 
 His resurrection-body, was in nature, was a natural man. He 
 
132 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 demonstrated this by another sign than mere sightandhearing; 
 He took dinner with the fishermen, His disciples. It is 
 recorded in three gospels that He ate before them, or with 
 them. He supped with two disciples going to Emmaus ; 
 having joined them on the way ; their eyes being holden that 
 they should not know Him. " And it came to pass as He 
 sat at meat with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and 
 break, and gave to them, and their eyes were opened, and 
 they knew Him, and He vanished out of their sight " (Luke 
 xxiv. 30, 31). The spiritual sense of breaking bread, and 
 giving to them, is "instruction in the good and truth of faith, 
 through which the Lord appears " (Arcana, 9412). 
 
 Note. The Author possesses an engraving from Rubens 
 (date 1643) representing the Supper at Emmaus, with an 
 inscription much in keeping with the doctrine of the Divine 
 Natural inculcated here : 
 
 Mihi quantus ignis torret ? inaestuas 
 Amore quanto ? Substituit Deum. 
 Deum reponit. Mira rerum 
 Vox opifex, taciturna vulgo : 
 Audita ccelo : manibus impiis 
 Horrenda : nobis gratior : se obtulit 
 Interminatus : quo locorum 
 Insideat, fugo suspicari. 
 
 Translation. 
 
 How great a fire burns within me ! 
 
 How great a tide of love swells in Thee ! 
 
 He has made Himself as God ! 
 
 He brings God back! 
 
 Voice wonderful, Creator of all things ! 
 
 Not spoken to the world ; 
 
 Heard in heaven ; 
 
 Terrible to the impious crew. 
 
 Too gracious to us-ward. 
 
 He shows no bounds to His dominion. 
 
 I forbear to look up to the seat where His throne may be. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 133 
 
 Now let us further hear Swedenborg where he opens the 
 passages in the Word concerning what the Lord ate, as 
 recorded in Matthew and in John. First as to fishes gene- 
 rally. "The reason why the 'creatures of the sea,' or fishes, 
 signify scientifics, is that the sea signifies the natural man. 
 So the fishes in the sea arej[the scientifics themselves which 
 are in the natural man. . . . Spirits who are not in spiritual 
 truths, but only in natural ones, which are scientifics, appear 
 in seas, and when looked at by those who are above, as 
 fishes : it is their thoughts which proceed from the scientifics 
 which they hold, which so appear. . . . The ideas of those 
 who are natural and think from scientifics only are turned 
 into the forms of fishes" (Apoc. Expl. n. 513). 
 
 "The honeycomb and the broiled fish which the Lord 
 ate after His resurrection, signify the external sense of the 
 Word; the honeycomb its pleasantness" (Ibid. n. 619). 
 "The broiled fish signify the natural as to truth from good." 
 In the correspondence they representatively absorbed the 
 truth that He was a natural man ; they had dined with Him 
 as such, and His resurrection was not to disprove it for the 
 disciples representing the Christian Church. 
 
 He was the same Divine Natural Man in heaven and 
 above the heavens, as then on earth. 
 
 Again we read : " The like things are signified by the 
 catching of fishes by thedisciples afterthe Lord's Resurrection. 
 The reason why the Lord manifested Himself while they were 
 fishing, was, that to fish signifies to teach the knowledges of 
 truth and good, and thus to reform. By the little fish upon 
 thehearth was signified the knowledge of truth from good ; by 
 the little fish, the knowledge of truth ; and by the hearth or 
 fire, good. At that time there were no spiritual men, because 
 the Church was completely vastated, but all were natural ; 
 and the reformation of these latter was represented by that 
 fishing (piscatura), and also by the fish upon the hearth" 
 (Apoc. Expl. n. 513). "The first animate things in the 
 
1 34 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 [human] creation of the fifth day in Genesis are called the fishes 
 of the sea and the birds of the heavens " (Arcana, n. n). 
 
 " He who knows that such people and things are signified 
 by fishes can see why the Lord chose fishermen for His 
 disciples, and said, ' I will make you fishers of men.' Also 
 why the disciples by the Lord's blessing caught a vast 
 multitude of fishes. Why the Lord caused the tribute to 
 be paid from the fish. And why, after His resurrection, 
 He gave the disciples fish and bread to eat, and com- 
 manded them to preach the gospel to every creature ; for 
 the nations they converted were in general truths only, 
 and in natural truth more than in spiritual " (Apocalypse 
 Revealed^ n. 405). 
 
 " Peter's taking a fish out of the sea, and finding in its 
 mouth a piece of money, which he gave for the tribute, 
 represented that the lowest natural, as a thing that serves, 
 would do this ; for fishes signify this natural " (Arcana, n. 
 
 Swedenborg, speaking of himself, says : " I was once 
 asked, 'How I, at first a philosopher, became a theologian?' 
 I replied, ' In the same manner that fishermen became the 
 disciples and apostles of the Lord.' I added that I also 
 from early youth had been a spiritual fisherman. My in- 
 quirer then asked what I meant by a spiritual fisherman ? 
 To which I answered, ' A fisherman in the spiritual sense of 
 the Word is a man who investigates and teaches natural 
 truths, and afterwards spiritual truths in a rational manner.' 
 He enquired how this is demonstrated. I said, From these 
 passages, ' The waters shall fail from the sea, and the rivers 
 shall be wasted and dried up. Therefore the fishers shall 
 mourn, and all that cast a hook into the sea shall lament ' 
 (Isaiah xix. 5, 8). And respecting the sea whose waters are 
 healed, 'The fishers shall stand from Engedi even unto 
 Eneglaim ; they shall be a place to spread forth nets ; their 
 fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great 
 sea, exceeding many'(Ezekiel xlvii. 10). Also this, 'Behold 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 135 
 
 I will send for many fishers, saith Jehovah, and they shall 
 fish them ' (Jeremiah xvi. 16). Hence it is evident why the 
 Lord chose fishermen for His disciples, and said, ' Follow Me, 
 and I will make you fishers of men' (Matthew iv. 18, 19; 
 Mark i. 16, 17). And why He said to Peter, after he had 
 caught a great multitude of fishes, ' From henceforth thou 
 shalt catch men' (Luke v. 6, 10). I then demonstrated the 
 origin of this signification of fishermen from the Apocalypse 
 Revealed^ thus : As water signifies natural truths, as also 
 does a river, so a fish signifies those who are in possession 
 of natural truths ; whence fishermen are those who investi- 
 gate and teach the truth. On hearing this, my questioner 
 raised his voice and said, * Now I can understand why the 
 Lord called and chose fishermen to be His disciples ; and 
 therefore I do not wonder that He has also called and chosen 
 you ; since, as you observed, you were from early youth a 
 fisherman in a spiritual sense, that is, an investigator of 
 natural truths. You are now become an investigator of 
 spiritual truths, because these latter are founded upon the 
 former.' To this he added, being a man of reason, * The 
 Lord alone knows who is the proper person to apprehend 
 and teach or communicate the truths which should be re- 
 vealed for His New Church ; and whether such person is 
 to be found among the dignitaries of the Church, or among 
 their domestic servants.' ... He concluded by saying, 
 1 Since you are become a divine, explain what is your system 
 of Divinity.' I answered, These are its two principles, 
 'THAT GOD is ONE, and THAT THERE is CONJUNCTION OF 
 CHARITY AND FAITH.' ' Who denies these principles ? ' 
 said he. I rejoined, * The Divinity of the present day when 
 interiorly examined ' " (The Intercourse between the Soul and 
 the Body> n. 20). 
 
 These texts from the Word, and explications of the 
 spiritual sense by Swedenborg, furnish a cumulative evidence 
 that fish, fishing, and fishermen have a subjective spiritual 
 meaning in both the Old and the New Testaments, and that 
 
136 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 that meaning gathers itself up in the great draught of fishes 
 taken by the disciples, and again by Peter, the truth of faith, 
 when the Lord commanded it after His resurrection. All 
 the circumstances of the narrative in Luke xxiv. not only 
 cohere but conjoin as it were in a living mathematical 
 teaching or doctrine. The Christian Church takes little 
 notice of such evidences of the Divinity of the Word. All 
 we have found in Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, 
 under the article Fish, is, " That on the walls of the oldest 
 Catacombs of Rome the representation of the IX9Y2 
 (Ichthus) is frequently discernible, and always interpreted 
 as an emblem of the Saviour." In my work, Cannes accord- 
 ing to Berosus, I dealt at some length with this subject, 
 and show that the signification of fishes from the records of 
 the Ancient Church, was what Swedenborg declares to-day ; 
 and that Cannes, the fish man, came from the Erythrean sea 
 to teach the Babylonians in their first and better days the 
 truths of the Word and of life. 
 
 Rational men must be caught, at first netted, by natural 
 truths, for they are fishes in the sea, and at sea, immersed in 
 the strong naturalism of the age. Even the scientisms with 
 no fish in them are a flood needful to drown the falses of 
 the vastated Church. We are living in the end of the 
 Church : its dead body so afflicts many ardent scientific 
 minds as to force them into denial of the Word. To them 
 we appeal with the spiritual sense. To them the knowledge 
 of the Divine Natural is especially necessary. It will enable 
 them to see God in Christ, and Christ now through a 
 revealed rationality, and as not only the Divine Infinite of 
 Theology, but as the Divine-Human Infinite of Sacred 
 History. 
 
 The Lord in the process of His glorification, and before 
 He had put off the corporeal, appears as a Man in History, 
 and thereby has given, and still gives, a fixed object of love 
 and worship, which is confirmed, and cannot be abolished, 
 in the natural mind. He is our God, and we are invited to 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 137 
 
 be His mother and His brethren. And our love must be 
 translated also into intellectual faith. For His divine is 
 illimitable. He is One above the heavens, divine in 
 heaven, divine celestial, divine spiritual ; and in heaven 
 and on earth, divine natural. There is no duality or trinity 
 of persons here, but He is one Man. He is Creator,. 
 Redeemer, and Saviour. Of His Creatorship we read in 
 Swedenborg : " Commit your thought to the angelic idea of 
 God as a Man, and remove as much as you are able the idea 
 of space, and you will approximate in thought to the truth. 
 . . . God, who appears far above the spiritual world as 
 a Sun, to whom there can be no appearance of space, is not 
 to be thought of from space. On this condition it can be 
 comprehended that He created the universe not out of 
 nothing, but out of Himself. Also that His Human Body 
 cannot be thought of as great or small, or of any stature, 
 because this also attributes space ; and hence it is that He 
 is the same in the first things and in the last, and in the 
 greatest things and the least, and moreover that the human 
 is the inmost in every created thing, but apart from space. 
 . . . In God there is Love and Wisdom, there is Mercy 
 and Clemency, absolute Goodness and Truth, because these 
 things are from Him. ... No one of these things is 
 possible apart from man ; man is their subject ; and to 
 separate them from their subject is to say that they are not ?> 
 (Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 285, 286). 
 
 So now we understand that the Lord in Jesus Christ gives 
 us a fixed object of Divine Worship before, and hence after, 
 His Resurrection and Ascension ; and when He had put off 
 the spatial corporeal, that He revealed Himself as the in- 
 finite natural, not as a spirit but as a man, " For a Spirit 
 has not flesh and bones as ye see Me have." He came into 
 their midst when the doors were shut. He showed Himself 
 to them as He would. He held back their eyes from 
 knowing Him when present with them. He was known to 
 them in the breaking of bread, and vanished out of their 
 
138 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 sight. He talked with them face to face, and yet " He said 
 unto them, 'These the words which I spake unto you while I 
 was yet with you.) that all things must be fulfilled which were 
 written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in 
 the Psalms concerning Me' (Luke xxiv. 44). And! He declared 
 His immediate Presence and Omnipresence to them as to 
 His Church to come, in saying, And Behold, ' I am with 
 you all the days up to the Consummation of the ^Eon. So 
 be it ' " (Matthew xxviii. 20). He had every quality we 
 conceive of spirit, and yet was a Divine Natural Man. 
 
 As in His appearances, so in His disappearance. Of this 
 last event there is no record in Matthew, but that " after the 
 Chief Priests had given the soldiers money to say that His 
 disciples came by night and stole Him away while we slept, 
 that then the disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain 
 where Jesus had appointed them ; and when they saw Him, 
 they worshipped Him, but some doubted. And Jesus came 
 and spake unto them saying, All power is given unto Me in 
 heaven and in earth." In Mark it is said, " So then after 
 the Lord had spoken to them, He was received up into 
 heaven, and sat on the right hand of God." In Luke, " And 
 He led them out as far as to Bethany, and He lifted up His 
 hands and blessed them. And it came to pass while He 
 blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into 
 heaven." 
 
 So after His Resurrection the Divine Natural Man did not 
 appear as an object of vision except when He made Himself 
 visible^ and at the last disappeared when He was parted from 
 them and received up into heaven. His pictorial ascension 
 making beautiful our Cathedrals, helps many natural minds, 
 and is of good use ; but the Word has a spiritual view, and 
 the Lord is parted from us, and no longer visible, when 
 His light and love transcend all our faculties. It is even 
 so with all revelations, nay with all subjects ; when they 
 exceed our capacity, they are " in the shade of our thoughts," 
 and they vanish from our lost attention. The Lord in All 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 139 
 
 Power sits on the right hand of God ; spiritually again, the 
 Omnipotence of divine truth is signalized. The Divine 
 Man as one of ourselves before His death, in memory and 
 thought intercedes between our unbelief and the divinity 
 which He is after His resurrection and ascension. But in 
 both characters He abolishes fear, which accompanies the 
 manifestation of a spirit, by His Real Presence as a Divine 
 Natural Man. 
 
 What further was done by these representatives : by the 
 Lord eating with the disciples ; by His causing the great 
 draught of fishes ; by His showing Himself to them, and 
 vanishing from their midst ? By creating a new natural faith 
 in the minds of the women and the disciples, He founded 
 the infancy of a Church which became a support in the 
 world to the Ancient Heavens. He also fulfilled the Word, 
 dictating to the Evangelists and again to John in the 
 Apocalypse, a plain natural Logos, nowhere written without 
 a parable, and therefore with a spiritual meaning and uni- 
 versal correspondence in it for the heavens, and a doctrine 
 and natural message for men. So He fulfilled the Word, 
 not only by obeying it, but by completing it in Himself and 
 in His contract and legacy, the New Testament. 
 
 The Lord put aside by His own right hand and His 
 holy arm the Jewish nature which He took upon Him by 
 being born of Blessed Mary ; and therein He glorified His 
 humanity, and made it divine. Was this consummated 
 when He said as in Matthew, " My God, my God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken Me ? " ? Was this the last struggle with the 
 maternal humanity, and the last state of humiliation ? In 
 Mark He spoke the same words, and " cried again with a loud 
 voice, and yielded up the ghost." In Luke it is further 
 written : " When He had cried with a loud voice, He said, 
 Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit, and having 
 said thus, He gave up the ghost. And knowing that all 
 things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be 
 fulfilled, He saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full 
 
1 40 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 of vinegar ; and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it 
 upon hyssop, and put it to His mouth. When Jesus there- 
 fore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished : and 
 He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost." Note also 
 His declaration in John x. 17, 18, "Therefore doth my 
 Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might 
 take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down 
 of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power 
 to take it again. This commandment have I received of 
 my Father." 
 
 Was the Divine Natural accomplished in the Lord in 
 putting aside the Jewish nature ? This He put off in His life 
 in Judea. In His death and resurrection He rejected the 
 elemental man which is necessary to our existence and 
 subsistence in this world ; the case of matter which fixes us 
 here, and by which we mean the limitaneous substances and 
 laws of nature. He rose with His own divine body, His 
 virtue, and with nothing else. We have need to be clothed 
 with matters and substances derived from the dead fire of 
 the sun of this world. It gives us fixed memory and 
 personal ego and identity. Our two memories, the outward 
 memory of the deeds done in the body, the inward, of 
 the account and balances of conscience, are our book of 
 Life, according to which we are judged ; and become per- 
 manent characters for good or for evil. The Lord had no 
 such Book of Life, but the Word which He fulfilled. So 
 the substances and matters which once formed a part of the 
 body derived from the mother were rejected because they 
 had no function and no Use. So the Lord first put off 
 Jewish Nature, and conquered heaven and hell and the 
 world thereby, and then by His own Merit, He put off by 
 death- whatever was dead in fixed nature, and added the 
 natural degree to His Divine Life, becoming a Divine 
 Natural Man. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 141 
 
 XLLTHE CANON OF THE WORD. 
 
 We have seen throughout that the Word is characterized 
 by the possession of a spiritual sense, which has been 
 revealed, and demonstrates its divinity. It is also important 
 where our belief in Holy Scripture comes in question, to 
 find corroboration from another point of view, which how- 
 ever leads up to fundamentally the same demonstration. 
 We have again to travel over the sacred ground of Luke, 
 and to listen to the Lord on the walk to Emmaus, and at 
 the supper there. In a Review of the World's Religious 
 Congresses, by the Rev. L. P. Mercer of Chicago, which that 
 enlightened New Churchman has sent me, I find a valuable 
 paper by the Rev. Frank Sewall of Washington. In the 
 course of this lucid document, he says : " The Christian 
 Scripture, the Holy Bible, is written in two parts, the Old 
 and the New Testament. In the interval of time between 
 the writing of these two parts, the divine truth and essential 
 Word, which in the beginning was with God, and was God, 
 became incarnate on our earth in the person of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, He, ... 'the true light that lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world,' placed the seal of divine 
 authority upon certain of the then existing sacred scriptures. 
 He thus forever fixed the divine canon of that portion 
 of the written Word." 
 
 "The Divine Canon is declared by Him where He says : 
 * All things must be fulfilled which were written in the law 
 of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms concerning 
 me.' And further: 'O fools, and slow of heart to believe 
 all that the Prophets have spoken ; and beginning at Moses 
 and all the Prophets, He expounded unto them in all the 
 Scriptures things concerning Himself? The Scriptures of 
 the Old Testament thus enumerated as testifying of Him 
 and as being fulfilled in Him embrace two of the three 
 divisions into which the Jews at that time divided their 
 sacred books. These two are the Law (Torah), or the five 
 
i 4 2 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 books of Moses, so called ; and the Prophets (Nebiim). Of 
 the books contained in the third division of the Jewish 
 Canon, known as the Kethubim or other writings, our Lord 
 recognizes but two : He names by title the Psalms ; and in 
 Matthew xxiv. 15, when predicting the consummation of 
 the age, and His own Second Coming, he cites the Prophecy 
 of Daniel. . . In the words of Jesus Christ the Canon of 
 the Word is established in a twofold manner. First, intrin- 
 sically . . Second, specifically, by naming the books under 
 the three divisions, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms. 
 The Canon in this sense comprises the five books of Moses 
 or the Law ; the books of Joshua, the Judges, First and 
 Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, or the so-called 
 earlier Prophets ; the later including the four great and the 
 twelve minor prophets ; and finally the Book of Psalms. 
 The other books of the Old Testament are Apocrypha." 
 
 "These divine books, besides being thus set apart by 
 Christ, declare themselves to be the Word of the Lord in 
 the sense of being actually spoken by the Lord, and so con- 
 stituting a divine language." 
 
 The writer proceeds to give scriptural and rational 
 evidence to show that the Gospels and the Apocalypse are 
 part of the Word. " Only to these books could one presume 
 to apply the words written at the close of the Apocalypse, 
 and applying immediately to it : ' If any man shall take away 
 from the words of the prophecy of this book, God shall take 
 away his part out of the book of life, and out of the Holy 
 City, and from the things which are written in this book ! ' " 
 
 Good bread this of yours, dear brother Sewall, in the great 
 Hall of the " RELIGIOUS SYMPOSIUM." 
 
 XLILTHE FOUR GOSPELS. 
 
 Believing these canonical books of the New Testament 
 to be literally divine, and knowing that they vary in their 
 accounts of the same occurrences, we may fairly ask How 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 143 
 
 far are they historical? We need not cite the apparent 
 dissimilarities in the four narratives. Learned Christians 
 have sought to reconcile the divergent statements, and so to 
 establish a " Harmony of the Gospels." 
 
 May the truth be that the Gospels embrace what is 
 called history, but are not limited by it, or included in it, and 
 that hence they are not in any ordinary sense critically 
 historical ? If we look closely at it, there is no such thing 
 as fixed history ; every event of the day, even every photo- 
 graph, though definite as nature, depends on its point of 
 view, and every variation of this gives a new portrait, as it 
 were another event, another face, a different place. History 
 lives upon research and discrimination, upon a many- 
 motived love of old facts about nations and peoples, with 
 a delight in filling up each hiatus, as maxime deflendus ! It 
 craves accumulations, and its greatest works and authors 
 differ, even clash, concerning actual events, but more 
 entirely about the interpretation, consequences, and the 
 good or evil, of men and things in the past. For History is 
 made of the voices and verdicts of the Historians. To 
 Suetonius, the Emperor Tiberius is a monster of iniquity ; 
 to Velleius Paterculus, a true man at first ; and to a class of 
 learned historians to-day, a great ruler consistent throughout 
 to his early fame. To Cicero, Julius Caesar is a destroyer 
 of virtue and liberty ; to Froude, he is a supreme man, a 
 Caesar indeed, an author and perpetuator of Roman great- 
 ness. To Sallust, Catiline is a cruel, remorseless rebel ; 
 to a liberal professor to-day, he is a noble and injured 
 gentleman, led into revolt by faction, injustice, and con- 
 tumely. The secular historian, looking for flesh wherewith 
 to cover the bones of the past, never has enough of new 
 and curious traits ; for history would fain accomplish the 
 impossible in giving itself a fixed reality alien to the 
 temporalities of this world. 
 
 Shall we be wrong in agreeing with Carlyle that Shakes- 
 peare was the greatest of our historical geniuses, because he 
 
i 4 4 THE NEW JERSUALEM 
 
 was a poet of poets. If this be allowed, the recording scribe 
 stands aside, and a higher and more liberal faculty presents 
 another ideal of scripture suggested by imagination, and by 
 art and its perspective. 
 
 That new ideal may help us to come nearer to the method 
 of the Word. Here we mean the Gospels especially, be- 
 cause, treating of one Life and one Person, they give us 
 different accounts of the same event and apparently contra- 
 dictory particulars. We select an instance which occurs in 
 all the four Gospels. It concerns the crucifixion and the 
 two robbers who suffered with Jesus. 
 
 It is written in Matthew : " Then are there two robbers 
 crucified with Him, one on the right hand, and one on the 
 left. And they that passed by railed on Him, wagging their 
 heads. Likewise also the chief priests mocking, with the 
 scribes and elders said, He saved others, Himself he cannot 
 save. He trusted in God ; let Him deliver him now, if He 
 will have him; for he said, I am the Son of God. And the 
 robbers also that were crucified with him, cast upon him 
 the same reproach " (xxvii. 38, 39, 41-44). 
 
 In Mark : " And with him they crucify two robbers ; the 
 one on his right hand, and the other on his left, and the 
 Scripture was fulfilled which saith, And he was numbered 
 with the transgressors. . . . And they that were crucified 
 with him reviled him " (xv. 27, 28, 32). 
 
 In the first place, consider these narratives as independent 
 texts, as written from the internal sense downwards, and as 
 containing internal history as well as external. The cruci- 
 fixion itself took place, and was written of among other 
 important ends to fulfil prophecy. As witness these declara- 
 tions : " After this Jesus knowing that all things were now 
 accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, 
 I thirst." "The scripture was fulfilled which saith, He 
 was numbered with the transgressors." " These things were 
 done that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of Him 
 shall not be broken. And again another scripture saith, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 145 
 
 They shall look on him whom they pierced." These things 
 declare the end and purpose of the narrative, that the True 
 Christian portion of the Word might be written. We have 
 dwelt on the office of the Word as ministering to those who 
 read it worthily the conjunction of earth with heaven ; the 
 conjunction of the church above with the.church below ; the 
 conjunction of men with angels. For this and in this the 
 scripture is fulfilled. The ancient and the modern heavens are 
 linked in the fulfilments. Thereby deep calleth unto deep. 
 
 Let us then regard these fourfold scriptures as each 
 filled with its own internal sense, and as written to exhibit 
 it. And let us endeavour to see something of that sense in 
 each case. 
 
 "The passion of the Cross was the last of the Lord's 
 temptations, through which He fully united the human to 
 the divine, and the divine to the human. Through the 
 passion of the cross He did not take away sins, but carried 
 them." "The Lord in the midst" represented the cruci- 
 fixion in Himself of the Jewish nature which died on the 
 cross, and was put aside and rejected. The crucifixion of 
 the malefactors represented the rejection of the Jewish 
 Church : the end of Jehovah's contract and covenant with 
 Judah, the end of the ^Eon. It terminated there and then. 
 The narrative in Matthew is fulfilled with details, history 
 within history. The two robbers come after the soldiers 
 who set up over his head his accusation written, THIS is 
 JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. One robber on the right 
 hand, and another on the left. These now are dominants 
 in the spiritual sense. The robber on the right hand 
 represents the evil of the Jewish Church, the robber on the 
 left hand represents its falsity. It had robbed the Lord^of all 
 His attributes = the evil side ; and triumphed in the accom- 
 plished end = the false. 
 
 They that passed by reviled Him, wagging their heads ; 
 and saying, Thou that destroyest the Temple, and 
 buildest in three days, save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of 
 
146 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 God, come down from the Cross. These are the external 
 men of the Jewish Church ; its evil side, of which un- 
 believing Thomas was the good side : the scientists of the 
 Crucifixion. Wagging their heads = scepticism idiotic with 
 cunning sensuality. To prove that the Divine Martyr was 
 the Son of God, they asked Him to come down from the 
 Cross, and save Himself. See Kenan's Vie de Jesus. He 
 who was voluntarily dying to save the world ! 
 
 "Likewise also the chief priests mocking, with the 
 scribes and elders, said, He saved others, Himself He 
 cannot save." Here the chief priests, the heads of the 
 Jewish Ecclesiasticism, the scribes, the custodians of the 
 written Law, and the elders, the official rulers of the people, 
 assailed Him with hypocrisies, evil goods, and lying truths. 
 For the Jewish Church in representative conclave admitted 
 His miraculous deeds of good, and also that being Salvation 
 Himself He cannot be saved. They also asked Him to 
 falsify Himself by making Himself the King of Israel, that 
 by coming down from the cross they might believe in Him. 
 He trusted in God ; let Him deliver Him now, if He will 
 have Him ; for He said, I am the Son of God. They 
 admitted His trust in God as His Father, and mocked at it, 
 and prescribed the conditions under which He would be 
 acknowledged as a divinity, the Son of God. And the 
 robbers also that were crucified with Him cast upon Him 
 the same reproach. The robbers were orthodox in the 
 same Ecclesiasticism, and subscribed the articles of the 
 passers-by, and of the chief priests, elders, and scribes. 
 As the ultimate confirmation of this state, they represented 
 the whole Jewish Church in defection and consummation. 
 " Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the 
 land until the ninth hour." The land here is the representa- 
 tive Jewish Church. The darkness is of the hells opened, 
 and the Sun of Righteousness eclipsed. From the sixth 
 hour to the ninth hour is the end of Christ's passion, and 
 in that end the loud voice wherewith He yielded up the ghost. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 147 
 
 Observe the completeness with which in few words the 
 whole Jewish dispensation, under the Babylon of Rome, 
 the king-maker, is brought into a final unity, and is all upon 
 the cross, and its litany of blasphemy inaugurated ; and then 
 is summed up in the two robbers. After the soldiers' 
 superscription of accusation, the whole sense evolves from 
 the words, Then were there two robbers crucified with Him. 
 These embracive robbers were also the passers-by, the chief 
 priests, the scribes, and the elders, and most significative 
 yet, and last and least, the condemned twain themselves. 
 They were the clerks who said Amen to the chief priests, 
 scribes, and elders. A synagogue of Satan. 
 
 Nearly the same words are used in the Gospel according 
 to Mark ; it is also said regarding His crucifixion with a 
 robber on one side, and a robber on the other, that herein 
 "the scripture was fulfilled which saith, And He was 
 numbered with the transgressors." The occurrence of an 
 almost identical text in the two first Gospels is a testimony 
 of two witnesses to the weight of the letter here. The 
 condemnation and rejection of the Jewish Church is the 
 sum of it. These synoptical accounts seem to be the 
 ultimate or lowest degree of the fourfold Evangel. 
 
 In Luke we have another elevation. Its letter is thus : 
 " And there were also two others, malefactors, led with Him 
 to be put to death ; and when they came into the place 
 which is called The Skull, there they crucified Him, and the 
 malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the 
 left. And Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they know 
 not what they do. And parting His garments among them, 
 they cast lots. And the people stood beholding. And the 
 rulers also scoffed at Him, saying, He saved others ; let 
 Him save Himself, if this is the Christ of God, His chosen. 
 And the soldiers also mocked Him, coming to Him, offer- 
 ing Him vinegar, and saying, If thou art the King of the 
 Jews, save Thyself. And there was also a superscription 
 over Him, THIS is THE KING OF THE JEWS. And one 
 
1 48 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 of the malefactors which were hanged, railed on Him, saying, 
 Art not Thou the Christ ? Save Thyself and us. But the 
 other answered, and rebuking him, said, Dost thou not 
 even fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemna- 
 tion ? And we indeed justly ; for we receive the due reward 
 of our deeds : but this man hath done nothing amiss. And 
 he said, Jesus, remember me when Thou comest into Thy 
 kingdom. And He said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, 
 To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise " (xxiii. 32-43). 
 
 This account is a milder indictment against the Jews, and 
 has in its midst the words, " Father, forgive them, for they 
 know not what they do." The rulers also, as unbelieving 
 Jews, had ordinary natural reason with them in saying, He 
 saved others, that is, we admit so much ; but now, as our- 
 selves the greatest authorities here, let him give us crowning 
 proof, let him save himself if this is the Christ of God, 
 His chosen. We have been His chosen people ; and God 
 has done miracles for us : Why cannot this man if He is the 
 Son of God ? Here, if they had not first crucified Him, they 
 were within Jewish rationality. The malefactor also be- 
 haved with great naturalness, and something like faith, when 
 he said, Art not thou the Christ? Save Thyself and us. 
 The Jews demanded proof positive, not knowing that there 
 was a divine reason opposing their sensual reason. The 
 malefactor on one side demanded to be saved from the 
 consequences of his guilt, including the desire that his fellows 
 crucified with him should also be miraculously released. 
 The worst of him was that he knew he was guilty, and was 
 not conscience-stricken ; and perhaps echoed the chief 
 priests with a purpose. The other malefactor owned to his 
 ill-doing, and had the heart to rebuke his fellow, and to tell 
 him to fear even God, seeing that death, and meeting with 
 God, was before him. And instead of asking of the Lord 
 to be saved from the cross, he besought to be remembered 
 by Jesus when He comes into His Kingdom. 
 
 Each interpretation of the Word rises from the internal 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 149 
 
 historical sense where events are recorded, to a deeper internal 
 sense in which the persons disappear, and the spiritual states 
 which they signify remain. Perhaps a single compound state 
 is portrayed where several persons are named, just as one 
 individual man may have several differing and even warring 
 elements in action within him at the same time. In the 
 Word these maybe represented by various persons. In Matthew 
 and Mark the Jewish Church in all its hierarchy converged 
 at last to the two robbers who were crucified with Jesus ; and 
 these two are one mind, which represents the evil and 
 falsity that robs the Lord of His rule in the soul, and 
 crucifies Him. 
 
 In Luke, in the third crucifixion, another letter has other 
 life in it. Light is divided from darkness as in the Book of 
 Creation. The Lord is about to ordain a singular remnant 
 of the Jewish Church. In the one perception of the Messiah- 
 ship, and in its recognition of the awe of Messiah on the 
 cross, a faith rare and exemplary, the malefactors, who are 
 one in condemnation, represent repentance on the one 
 hand, and evil rejected on the other, like the butler and the 
 baker whose dreams were interpreted by Joseph. ' Lord, 
 remember me when thou comest into Thy Kingdom,' 
 is a plain recognition of Jesus on the cross as the Messiah, 
 and that His kingdom is not of this present world, and yet, 
 according to the natural mind of the Jew, it is to be a kingdom 
 somewhere. The disciples showed the same mind when 
 they disputed who should be greatest in His kingdom, when 
 a little child was set in the midst. This illustrates the use 
 of the Messianic promise to the Jews, and its working where 
 their faith is real, to exact a belief in a future life ; not a myth 
 of heathen immortality learnt in the Babylonish captivity ; 
 but a hope beaming from their own scriptures when hard 
 times press them and mortality is closing round. 
 
 The rejection of some conspicuous evil from the heredities 
 of the Judaism which even here from the cross was to be 
 inserted into the Life of the future, is represented by the 
 
150 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 penitent malefactor rebuking his fellow in crime, pointing him 
 to God, confessing the sin of both, and the justice of their 
 punishment, and telling him that He who is in their midst, 
 on the cross, had done no wrong. The preservation of 
 Judaism recognizing its Messiah is presently indicated here. 
 And its self-love, believing that it is still the chosen people, 
 malefactor as it is in one sense, keeps it to its own piety, and 
 leads it to represent the custody of its Messianic Word. The 
 promise by Jesus, " Verily I say, This day shalt thou be with 
 Me in Paradise," signifies a state of the Christian Church, 
 derived from the Jewish, in which the Messianic promises 
 must be long held in a literal sense before anything spiritual 
 can be received. Other things might perhaps be taught in 
 this third Crucifixion to Christians, such as immediate 
 resurrection after death ; but such resurrection is only bodily. 
 'This day' is this your state, and rather signifies that a 
 repentance having the promise of remission of sins, is the 
 way to heaven ; that the beginning of it is accepted by the 
 Lord ; and that persistence in it is the way onward. As long 
 as the state lasts, the paradise-promise accompanies it. 
 Under these conditions fulfilled "this day" involves for ever. 
 The railing or blaspheming of the recalcitrant malefactor 
 expresses the evil which was rejected. He said to Jesus, 
 "If Thou art the Christ, save Thyself and us." Another 
 reading is, " Art Thou not the Christ ? Save Thyself and us." 
 This infidelity of state follows the same demand made by 
 the rulers, the people, and the soldiers. The malefactor 
 repeats almost their words, but includes himself and his 
 companion. The rulers said, " He saved others, let Him 
 save Himself if He be the Christ, the chosen of God ! " The 
 soldiers said, "If Thou be the King of the Jews, saveThyself." 
 " And a superscription also was written over Him, in letters 
 of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, THIS is THE KING OF THE 
 JEWS." The malefactor's appeal to the Christ to prove His 
 Messiahship by saving those who were being crucified, is here 
 in the text ; for Christ stands for the Messiah, the Anointed, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 151 
 
 the King. Again, as in Matthew and Mark, the Jewish 
 Church represented on the cross converges to an ultimatum, 
 but now towards the single malefactor who desires to be 
 saved in his sins. Christ's silence to his petition represents 
 rejection of this evil falsity scandalizing the cross. It rebukes 
 all Churches which base religion on any other foundation 
 than reform of personal character through regeneration of the 
 heart. 
 
 Finally, the words exchanged between the malefactors 
 represent the rending in twain of the Jewish Church from the 
 top to the bottom. The passage between the contrite male 
 factor and Jesus is the remnant represented by " this day " 
 or state imported into the first Christian Church. 
 
 In John's Gospel we have a fourth Word about the 
 crucifixion. By consent of many pious readers of the Bible, 
 this Gospel is higher on the mountains of Revelation than 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Edmund Sears, in a delightful 
 book, dares to name it THE HEART OF CHRIST. 
 
 " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
 God, and the Word was God. The same was in the begin- 
 ning with God. All things were made by Him, and without 
 Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was 
 Life, and the Life was the light of men. And the light 
 shineth in darkness ; and the darkness comprehended it not. 
 And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we 
 beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 
 Father, full of grace and truth " (chap i.). 
 
 This exordium is in complement and contrast to the 
 genealogy of Christ in Matthew from Abraham to David and 
 from David to Joseph the husband of Mary ; and to the 
 genealogy in Luke from Joseph, the " supposed " father of 
 Christ, upwards to Adam the Son of God. In John there is 
 no genealogy but " the divinity, humanity, and office " of the 
 Lord. This is concrete theology, corresponding to the 
 concrete creation of the spiritual heavens and the spiritual 
 earth in Genesis ; the Word God said being the agent 
 
152 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 there, and the Word with God and being God in John 
 here. 
 
 These particulars prepare the mind for a different dictation 
 and inspiration of the letter in the Fourth Gospel. In 
 Matthew and Mark the natural side is more represented, in 
 Luke the spiritual side, in John the celestial side. 
 
 Let us attend diligently to the Divine letter now in especial 
 reference to the circumstances of the fourth crucifixion. 
 
 " And it was the preparation of the Passover, and about 
 the sixth hour : and he (Pilate) saith unto the Jews, Behold 
 your King ! But they cried out, Away with Him, away with 
 Him, crucifyHim. Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your 
 King ? The Chief Priests answered, We have no king but 
 Caesar. Then delivered he Him therefore unto them to be 
 crucified. And they took Jesus and led away. And He 
 bearing His cross went forth into a place called from a skull, 
 which is in the Hebrew, Golgotha. Where they crucified 
 Him, and two other with Him, on either side one, and Jesus 
 in the midst. Then the soldiers, when they had crucified 
 Jesus, took His garments, and made four parts, to every 
 soldier a part ; and also His coat. Now the coat was without 
 seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore 
 among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, 
 whose it shall be : that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which 
 saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my 
 vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers 
 did. Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus, His mother, 
 and His mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and 
 Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, 
 and the disciple standing by whom He loved, He saith unto 
 His mother, Woman, behold thy son. Then saith He to the 
 disciple, Behold thy mother ! And from that hour that 
 disciple took her unto his own" (xix. 13-18, 23-27.) 
 
 In the natural sense the first malignity of the Jewish rulers 
 and people gives place in this Gospel to charges of blasphemy 
 in making Himself the Son of God, and of treason in not 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 153 
 
 denying that He was their King. The rage of the Jews 
 against Him is more represented here than in the other 
 Evangelists ; and Pilate's conscience, his expostulation with 
 the Chief Priests, and his longing to save Jesus, are strongly 
 written down. 
 
 The Jews crucified Him and two other with Him, on either 
 side one. 
 
 All that Christ underwent was representative of the state 
 of the Jewish Church. The crucifixion represented in bodily 
 cruelty the hatred of the Jews to the Divine Truth, which 
 their evils murdered in themselves. He, the Lord, suffered 
 all things and the passion of the cross at their hands. Herein 
 He resisted not evil. On the other hand His assertion of 
 His own power and kingdom over His own people, and over 
 the sick, the poor, the needy, the dying, and the dead, was 
 absolute. The miracles which He did were of this omni- 
 potence. Because He had come into the Jewish race, 
 nation, and Church, He Himself took on Him both characters; 
 of representing Jewish evil and wrong by suffering their 
 inflictions and not resisting, and also of manifesting divine 
 authority in the Judea and world which He had made, and 
 which knew Him not. His own natural mind, which was as 
 one of ours at first, underwent states of humiliation in which 
 His Godhead was obscured to His humanity ; and then 
 states of glorification when some word of the Father in Him 
 was made flesh by His virtue, and became a divine nature. 
 These remembrances may help the reader to expect that the 
 internal sense of the Word, especially where the tragedy and 
 judgment of the human universe are spoken forth, contains 
 unexpected revealings. 
 
 Observe therefore first that the robbers of Matthew and 
 Mark, and the malefactors of Luke, are not extant in John's 
 Gospel. If we were dealing with history written by man 
 without being also inspired and dictated by God, we should 
 justly say at once that of course what one Gospel has said is 
 clearly implied in the series of the same events, whether it be 
 
154 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 stated or not, in the others. And therefore that the two 
 crucified with the Lord are identical throughout. But the 
 internal sense which lives only within the verbal and iotal 
 literal sense forbids any historical treatment of the kind. 
 John's Gospel has no malefactors here, such as those of the 
 first Gospels, and this for spiritual reasons. The difference 
 of the robbers of Matthew and Mark from the malefactors of 
 Luke, proves that rules of circumstantial evidence from 
 Gospel to Gospel are inadmissible in dealing with the Word. 
 
 As Jesus took up His cross that His divine natural 
 humanity might be purged of all inherited Jewish nature, that 
 He might die to it ; and as we also are to submit to the same 
 discipline in our finite degree, in order that our characters 
 may be subdued into consonance with heavenly order, so this 
 our crucifixion beside Him cannot fail to be represented in 
 all the Gospels. Crosses are in the path of life : calamities 
 for the wicked, afflictions helping regeneration for the good. 
 The soul who knows Christ, and follows Him, must undergo 
 His cross ; not only bear it in the sense of carrying it to the 
 place of a skull and then going his way in the day's life ; but 
 also in measuring His affections and thoughts, His works or 
 hands, His ways or feet upon it ; and by binding or nailing 
 these to its confines, make them conform to the two commands 
 of love to God and the neighbour, until their old nature is 
 remote and their apparent death gives new life to the soul. 
 This process, easy to write about, is seldom carried out far 
 into life : its word is not often made flesh. But at least we 
 see where the Divine exaction lies. 
 
 In the case of the band of men and women who were the 
 first followers and disciples, the natural agony of all they felt 
 and saw gives them in the internal historical sense, which is 
 one degree above the Letter, a full title to be regarded as 
 those who chiefly were crucified with Jesus. Mary perhaps 
 on the left hand : the iron entered into her soul ; and John 
 on the right hand. The dawning Church represented by 
 blessed Mary was here made part and partaker of the great 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 155 
 
 sacrifice ; and it became the sole property of John whom 
 Jesus loved. John = Good Works, the Good of Life. Other 
 leading affections of the Church underwent the same agony 
 from the cross ; and Mary Magdalene came last, as in her 
 the gates of hell had been sealed when the seven devils of 
 profanation were cast out of her by Christ. 
 
 "Jesus saw" signifies divine perception for ordination of 
 the faculties that were below Him in the Jewish nature, and 
 which could belong to His Religion : the four women repre- 
 sent the affections of good which constitute the Church, and 
 Mary Magdalene their devout adoption. 
 
 In recapitulation, the robbers in Matthew and Mark, as the 
 condemned ultimate of those who railed on the Lord, were 
 the sum and conclusion of the Jewish Church. The whole 
 hierarchy was represented by the robbers, and that the end 
 of its crimes had come upon it. 
 
 In Luke, the lowest remains of the Jewish nature and Church 
 are represented ; meaning by the remains the same as " the 
 remnant of all nations which shall be saved." On the cross 
 itself, Christ is acknowledged as the inheritor of the Kingdom, 
 as the Messiah, by the one malefactor ; and faith in a future 
 spoken of by him in the words, When thou comest into thy 
 kingdom, is answered by Jesus, This day shalt thou be 
 with Me in Paradise. 
 
 A Roman declaration of kingship, which in its sense of 
 kingdom in this world Christ had refused, was put upon the 
 cross by Pilate : Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews. 
 Remembering Christ's refusal, succession to the Jewish 
 Babylon was here crucified in the first disciples, and forbidden 
 to the coming Church. A Roman governor in temporal 
 power had the declaration and accusation written. Rome 
 has not heeded this part of the furniture of the crucifixion. 
 Nor the fact that John = good works. Good in act is the pos- 
 sessor and owner of the Church, which was given to John on 
 the cross by Jesus. Peter had been the rock under the Church, 
 the faith that " Thou art the Christ the Son of the living 
 
156 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 God." John as Love is in the first succession : both repre- 
 sentatively, but not as persons. 
 
 From Noah as the initiation of the first spiritual Church 
 which succeeded the lost celestial Church called Adam, the 
 human will and understanding underwent successive declen- 
 sions, until at length in the children of Israel these faculties 
 were extant only as depravities. They had ceased from 
 spiritual capacity, and were used by Jehovah God for 
 interested obedience to a superstitious and sensual religion ; 
 that is, for the representation of a Church. This will and 
 understanding covering thousands of years, and extant over 
 the East in nominal churches, was crucified and rejected on 
 the cross by the Divine Man who had borne it, and subdued 
 it in Himself. A new heart and a new mind was given to 
 the race of man in all universes by an event seemingly local, 
 but which yet had such extension within it. 
 
 Some further explanation of divine history seems requisite 
 here. Swedenborg has been made to furnish it. " The 
 Lord," says he, " came into the world to save the spiritual." 
 Before the declension spoken of above, in the ages when man, 
 by obeying his newly-given conscience was still so far uplifted 
 from selfishness and sensuality as to be capable of heaven, 
 the natural world, as its function is, fed the spiritual world, 
 and then the heavens, with good and true men and women, 
 -children of the conscience, and fathers and mothers of dutiful 
 -daily lives, and so the divine purpose was carried on. That 
 purpose is, in the creation of the worlds of nature, to form 
 of their men and women, of which this world is the nursery, 
 an everlasting heaven where love and wisdom and their 
 happiness can have a home. This end is accomplished so 
 long as the river of new-comers from the earth, the thoracic 
 duct of the Maximus Homo, as Swedenborg, the spiritual 
 Psychologist, names it, contains a preponderance of regene- 
 rated lives in its ever-flowing current. 
 
 Here, Reader, reject all fallacies about churchyards as 
 containing your dead ; about expectant Mummies waiting 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 157 
 
 for their KA, and about Paul's Last Trump, and the resur- 
 rection of the body. The folk you are thinking of have 
 gone on before, and are every one in the spiritual world ; also 
 have been virtually judged already according to their 
 characters ; will go to home, or to finality : and whenever a 
 great ^Eon is accomplished may be rearranged in new mercies, 
 or exactions, of divine order, as God pleases. So the indi- 
 vidual judgment and general judgment, both of them always 
 in the spiritual world, and only casually represented in courts 
 of law and diseases and calamities and catastrophes in the 
 natural world, have truth with them both. Understanding 
 this, and believing in God, and a life after death, and that 
 spirits eschew churchyards, you easily see that the state of 
 the spiritual world, in a given age, is a knowable problem for 
 the willing mind : a problem of emigration, and as it were 
 colonization. You know who have emigrated. In a tumbling 
 epoch it is a death-rate and death-life-rate of teeming magni- 
 tudes of evil, sensual, dishonest men and women fabricating 
 new states and places whereby and wherein to gratify and 
 propagate their realms of lust and falsity and ceremony. 
 Mere Census is alone sufficient to show what sort of nations 
 and peoples are proximately above us and below us now 
 under these conditions ; what they will all vote for, what 
 sort of Parliaments they will have, what governments will be 
 sweet to them, and what atheist priests, what Word, what god 
 will be found in their churches or charnel-houses. To 
 comprehend anything of spiritual history, which now is widely 
 opened for us, it is first necessary to know that every woman 
 and man is a permanent creature ; goes as a spirit three days 
 after death into another world, being drawn out of the dead 
 body by the Lord ; and there awaits either the second death, 
 which is the life alien to God, or enters by the first resurrec- 
 tion on the road and way that leads to the home in heaven, 
 and to the unfailing marriage in the home. 
 
 We come back to the question, How did Christ save the 
 Spiritual. First, by assuming the Divine Natural in Himself. 
 
T58 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 By this means, which did not exist until His incarnation, a 
 natural basis of virtue was added to the Divine Spiritual 
 which existed from eternity, and then the whole Creation 
 became Christ's. Man's Freewill, which is the whole man 
 himself, was the only thing that outlay the Redeemer. In 
 His Life from His birth to His death on the Cross, He 
 gathered round Him the Remains of the Church from 
 Abraham downwards ; the fishermen who could become 
 disciples, the women who would be ministers, and the 
 Magdalenes who would be humiliations. He built them up in 
 His intercourse, penetrated them by His wonders of mercy, 
 and instructed them by His Word. They were all natural men 
 and women ; He too was a natural man, Ix^Sj and became 
 the Divine Natural Man. They were new natural men and 
 women, and as His Divine Natural communicated with and 
 corresponded to His Divine Spiritual, so their natural could 
 be regenerated or made spiritual ; not at once, but through- 
 out their lives, and in their descendants. Their innocent and 
 honest naturalism is plain throughout the Gospels : they 
 expected the day of judgment in their own lifetime : they 
 were eager to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes 
 of Israel : they took the Master's words in a literal sense 
 with no spiritual reserve behind it. They did not heed what 
 He said of His Resurrection. They were not only fishermen 
 but fishes and fond of eating spiritual fish : they were natural 
 men. And this, notwithstanding that He taught them that 
 He always spoke in Parables. 
 
 The restored capacity of regeneration, the power through 
 their freewill of controlling the natural, and so bringing the 
 spiritual into it, so that it became spiritual-natural, and 
 leaving the natural basis, became spiritual after death, made 
 this world again into a Nursery of Heaven, fulfilled the 
 divine law that heaven can never be full, but increases by 
 fresh angelic populations, and the mundane divine law that 
 regeneration of individuals fills the earth with inheritances 
 of good men and women, who here are a basis to the Ancient 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 159 
 
 Edifices of God, and who now subsist in safety in the Divine 
 Natural assumed by Christ. 
 
 The former natural capable of all this is represented in the 
 Fourth Gospel by the two who were crucified with Christ ; 
 these being the entire remains of the Natural Man which could 
 serve as the "Tabernacle of the Son, which cometh forth as 
 a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong 
 man to run a race. There is nothing hid from the heat 
 thereof. In that heat the law of the Lord is perfect, con- 
 verting the soul ; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making 
 wise the simple." This is an account of the capacity now 
 first restored to the heavens and firmament of the Remains 
 of the natural man consenting to share in the Crucifixion, 
 and so to enter the path that leads to the spiritual man ; 
 and that leads the spiritual man when adequate to contribute 
 again to the fulness of the spiritual heaven. 
 
 These things become self-evident in the revealed doctrine of 
 the Churches. The incapacity of the natural man to become 
 unselfish and heavenly-minded during the Jewish Dispen- 
 sation, and the restoration of man's freewill by the Lord's 
 Incarnation, have been treated of throughout in this work. 
 
 We have now gone through the various Words of the 
 Crucifixion in the Four Gospels, attempting to draw out from 
 each a few crumbs of its own spiritual sense. 
 
 In Matthew'and Mark the Jewish Church is crucified with 
 and rejected by Christ on the cross, and perishes. In Luke 
 a Messianic remnant is received, which if it will, can have 
 an inheritance by and by. In John the Crucifixion is 
 extended to the coming Church, its whole natural man is 
 measured on the cross, which becomes the sign and banner 
 of regeneration and salvation. The series is maintained. 
 
 The spiritual sense is the harmony of* the Gospels for those 
 who accept it : it proves that no finite man wrote these 
 portions of the Word. They asseverate to subsequent man- 
 kind that the Lord controls His own records. The genera- 
 tion in the Lord's time attests Christ, and His life, death, 
 
160 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 resurrection, and ascension. The first Christian Church is 
 the tree from the seed planted by Christ in the first disciples. 
 The Second Christian Church as given to man fulfils the 
 Scriptures completed in the First. 
 
 John, the evangelist, he whom Jesus loved, is the only 
 disciple mentioned who witnessed the Crucifixion. The 
 letter of his Word was dictated to him as Holy Scripture. 
 The omission of detail as to those who were crucified with 
 Christ is therefore not his omission. It has a divine purpose. 
 And in this as the final and highest Gospel the signification 
 covers the universal and general meaning in which the cross 
 leads and will forever lead the generations on. The dicta- 
 tion to the four evangelists seems to culminate here. 
 
 There are some other things which are prerogatively brought 
 forward in the Fourth Gospel. 
 
 "Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took 
 His garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part ; 
 and also the coat : now the coat was without seam, woven 
 from the top throughout. They said therefore among them- 
 selves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall 
 be : that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They 
 parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they 
 did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did " (xix. 
 23, 24). 
 
 To approach the spiritual sense of this scripture, remember 
 that the person on the cross was the Lord God Almighty in the 
 last act and hours of redeeming the human race. His gar- 
 ments and the coat cannot but ascend to a Logos commen- 
 surate with Himself. The Scripture sounding from ^Eon to 
 ^Eon is fulfilled by what is done with these coverings belong- 
 ing to the Lord's Body. The soldiers did what they did that 
 the fulfilment should take place : therefore they did it. 
 
 The Lord's garments represented truth in the external 
 form, and His vesture truth in the internal. The vesture is 
 the spiritual sense of the Word ; the garments are the literal 
 sense, which is parted among the disputants. The spiritual 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 161 
 
 sense, the coat is woven without seam from the top through- 
 out. The top of the divine garment is the origin of that 
 sense from Him who wears it, and from whom it descends 
 through the heavens. Coming downwards it is Divine Truth 
 Spiritual from the Divine Celestial. The coat being not 
 divided signifies that such divine truth could not be dissipated 
 because it is the internal truth of the Word. Casting lots for 
 it signifies indifference of utter incapacity. It is not said 
 that it had an owner among those who diced it away. The 
 seamless coat is now with the New Church wherever the life 
 represented by John, namely, good works, or good in act, 
 is found. Observe that this " coat without seam woven from 
 the top throughout " is a revelation only found in John's 
 Gospel. 
 
 The reader, astonished that the Lord's coat without seam 
 has such things in it, and such Scriptures heralding it a thou- 
 sand years before the Crucifixion, will remember the exact 
 clothing of Aaron that he might represent High Priesthood 
 in the Church with the Jews : also that it is said in the Psalms, 
 cii. 26, 27, " the heavens shall wax old like a garment; as a 
 vesture shalt thou change them and they shall be changed." 
 We also read of garments of holiness, and that fine linen is 
 the righteousness of the saints. In the Apocalypse it is 
 written, " He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, and 
 His name is called the Word of God," where the divine truth 
 in the letter to which violence has been done is signified. 
 A vesture there is truth investing good, and when predicated 
 of the Word, the sense of the Letter. Again it is written, 
 " And the armies in heaven followed Him upon white horses, 
 clothed in fine linen, white and clean. ... He hath on His 
 vesture and on His thigh a name written, King of Kings and 
 Lord of Lords." This signifies that the Lord teaches in the 
 Word what He is, namely, the Divine Truth of the Divine 
 Wisdom, and the Divine Good of the Divine Love ; therefore, 
 the God of the Universe. The vestment signifies the Word 
 as to Divine Truth, the thigh as to Divine Good. 
 
 L 
 
162 THE NE WJER USALEM 
 
 The Word is full of instances of garments representing 
 internal things. In the spiritual world every one is clothed 
 according to his nature and character : the dress can come 
 upon him without his consciousness. Also garments assumed 
 cause the interiors to be for a time what the exteriors signify. 
 As a general form, truth is a garment which invests good, 
 and natural things are sheaths, coverings, or garments which 
 invest spiritual. The face is a representative garment to the 
 interiors of the mind, and the body to the soul. Now apply 
 the instances from Revelation to the vestments in the Fourth 
 Gospel, and you will see what the things that have clothed 
 the Lord must mean. 
 
 The Lord gave up the spirit before those who were cruci- 
 fied with Him had their legs broken by Pilate's compliance. 
 The bodies were taken away, so as not to remain upon the 
 cross on the Sabbath day, the high Sabbath day. This was 
 the end of the natural man and his Church ; on the part of 
 the Jews, an end in profanation ; on the part of those who 
 were crucified, an end in consummation of the Church, and 
 in defection of the human race. Representatively Jesus 
 was dead. The two who were crucified had their legs broken. 
 The legs signify the lowest natural man, and his walk and 
 way, his progress on his own basis from his own power. Of 
 this the Psalm says, " The Lord delighteth not in the legs 
 of a man." The legs thus broken = the suicide of human 
 nature, dead in Church, in state, in will and understanding, 
 in godlessness, and then in useless propagation. " But when 
 they came to Jesus, and found that He was dead already, 
 they brake not His legs. But one of the soldiers with a 
 spear pierced His side, and forthwith came thereout blood 
 and water." The infirm natural had deceased in Christ, the 
 divine natural was in assumption. He, the first nature, was 
 dead already ; the second nature advanced to completion. 
 The bones which the soldiers did not break were the infinite 
 basis and stability of it. We cannot think of Christ as dying 
 on the cross as men die. The divine body which His life 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 165 
 
 had implanted in the natural man suffered no extinction. 
 It became in death His whole body, and did not die. " These 
 things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled ; a 
 bone of Him shall not be broken." The death was most 
 real, because it laid aside the human natural. Its act was 
 voluntary, and was imminent resurrection, because the Divine 
 Natural Man was there. The bone here signifies the rock of 
 the entire natural divinity. 
 
 When man dies a natural death, the spirit is still in the 
 body, and remains there until the third day. Celestial angels 
 sit beside the body, and await the fact of death, to awaken 
 the new inhabitant, and to welcome him. The spirit is 
 drawn out from the intricate flesh by the Lord's attraction, 
 and by no power of its own. With the Divine Man the case 
 is different. He gave up the spirit by His own deed, when 
 He said, It is finished, = the Divine Use of His Passion is 
 completed ; and He rose on the third day by His own proper 
 Power of infinite Will and Wisdom. There was no interval 
 but union between these acts of God. The third day signi- 
 fies a full state, not a period of time. He was not in the 
 grave as a man is, but the state of Glorification was 
 going on. The days signify the order of preparation. When 
 the Infinite Man comes, infinite operation and use are 
 evidently in transaction. The three days signify omnipotent 
 work for souls which no human thought can fathom. 
 
 But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and 
 forthwith came thereout blood and water. This signifies the 
 death of human nature in its relation to the Letter which 
 killeth ; the blood, the death of the good that had been with 
 it to the last ; the water, the death of the truth. The soldier's 
 spear, the violation by man himself. The Divine Natural, 
 the Divine Humanity, then remained alone to ascend to the 
 Father, and with Him those whom He had prepared to insti- 
 tute the new race of men on earth, to repeople the spiritual 
 heaven. For " the Lord came into the world to save the 
 spiritual." 
 
164 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 That a divine sense lies in the soldier piercing His side, 
 is brought to our recognition by the words of John, who 
 witnesses. " And he that saw, bare record, and his record is 
 true, and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe. 
 For these things were done that the scripture should be 
 fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken. And again 
 another scripture saith, They shall look on Him whom they 
 pierced." In the Apocalypse it is said, " ' Behold He cometh 
 with clouds, and every eye shall see Him, and they which 
 pierced Him.' The clouds in which the Lord comes, are the 
 sense of the letter, in which He will reveal Himself, and 
 reveal the spiritual sense after the Last Judgment, at the end 
 of the first Christian Church. And every eye will see Him, 
 signifies that all those who from affection are in the under- 
 standing of divine truth, will acknowledge that sense. In 
 the spiritual sense eye does not mean eye, but intellect. 
 The others see, and also understand, but do not acknowledge. 
 These are signified, because it follows that they also will see 
 who pierced Him. These signify those who are in falses. 
 By piercing Jesus Christ nothing else is meant than destroying 
 His divine truth in the Word. Blood and Water are the 
 Divine Truth Spiritual and Natural. Thus the Word in the 
 spiritual and natural sense. And to pierce the side of the 
 Lord is to destroy both by falses, which was done by the 
 Jews. All things of the Lord's Passion represented the 
 state of the Jewish Church with regard to the Word " (Apoc. 
 Rev. n. i). 
 
 The importance of these texts is attested by three 
 memorable scriptures ranging over three dispensations, the 
 Jewish, the first Christian Church and the New Church. 
 The reader will find proof here that the Lord's garments and 
 coat, His bone that shall not be broken, and His pierced 
 side, are weighty with the Godhead of the spiritual Word ; 
 and that there is no rectitude or sound reason in taking the 
 letter just as it is written, which is impossible, and being 
 satisfied that religious justice has been done to Holy Writ : 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 165 
 
 that Christ's vesture means no more than yours or 
 mine. 
 
 The Lord's words to Peter, Simon of Jonas, thrice coun- 
 selling him to feed His lambs and then His sheep, signify 
 that all innocence of nature and of wisdom should be of 
 primary concern in the life of a Church which makes three-fold 
 profession of love to the Lord. But the prophecy, " When 
 thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither 
 thou wouldest ; but when thou shalt be old thou shalt stretch 
 forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee 
 whither thou wouldest not ; this spake He, signifying by 
 what death He should glorify God. And when He had 
 spoken this, He saith unto him, Follow me." The prophecy 
 imports that faith represented by Peter would lose the mis- 
 sion wherein the truth had made it free, of commanding the 
 union of faith with love as the life of faith and the means of 
 Salvation ; and would in the end be enslaved and debauched 
 by the growing depravity and falsehood of the Church, to 
 teach justification by faith alone apart from works. Peter, 
 faith, is thus carried whither he would not. The death by 
 which he should glorify God implies this depraved faith 
 dying, and good works, good life, honest Christian character 
 in all daily callings, in a word, charity, which alone has true 
 faith, taking its place. Peter's martyrdom is the meaning 
 generally given to the prophecy. Every church, as Sweden- 
 borg says speaking of Babylon, begins as a virgin and ends 
 as a harlot. When the latter dies, not as a martyr but as a 
 malefactor, a new church is raised up, which glorifies God. 
 
 We will now adduce some words from Swedenborg. " John 
 was the first of the apostles, because he represented the good 
 of charity. That not Peter but John was the first is evident 
 from the fact that John lay on the Lord's breast, and that 
 he and not Peter followed the Lord." " The Lord said con- 
 cerning John that ' he should remain until He came,' thus 
 to the present day, which is the Advent of the Lord ; and 
 therefore also, the good of life is now taught by the Lord for 
 
1 66 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 those who will be of His New Church, which is the New 
 Jerusalem. As John represented the good of love, therefore 
 the Revelation was made to him. Revelation from heaven 
 which is really such, cannot be made to any others than those 
 who are in the good of charity, or of love. Others can indeed 
 hear the things which are from heaven, but they cannot per- 
 teive them." . . . John represented the church as to 
 good works, and good works contain all things of love to 
 the Lord and of charity towards the neighbour. . . . That 
 the Lord's Church is with those who live in charity in act, 
 or in good works : and not with those who are in faith 
 separated from works, is signified by what is related in John 
 xxi. As John signifies the goods of charity, or good works, 
 and these constitute the Lord's Church, therefore not Peter 
 but John followed the Lord, and the Lord said to Peter, If 
 I will that he remain until I come, what is that to thee ? 
 Follow thou me. By which is meant that the good of 
 charity will still remain with those who are the Lord's, even 
 to the end of the Church, and when there is a new Church. 
 And not with those who are in faith separated from this good. 
 This is signified by these words to Peter, What is that to 
 thee ? . . . Peter said of John, What is this ? that is, that it 
 is not anything. Jesus said, If I will that he remain until I 
 come, what is it to thee ? " Observe that throughout the 
 Lord's conversation he calls Peter, Simon of Jonas, which 
 marks a change of representation in that disciple, whose 
 decease as a false faith will glorify God. 
 
 These cumulative passages are adduced to reinforce the 
 position of the Gospel of Love, the Heart of Christ, John's 
 Gospel. The verbal inspiration of the Letter shines through- 
 out it. And John as a representative speaks for himself, and 
 yet not of himself, when he says at the conclusion, " This is 
 the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these 
 things : and we know that his testimony is true." As the 
 Word was dictated to John, so the Divine Natural Man, the 
 Word, the Son of Man, the Son revealing the Father, here 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 167 
 
 attests his Work complete in John. It is a direct voice from 
 above. 
 
 "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, 
 the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose 
 that even the world itself could not contain the books that 
 should be written. Amen." The Redemptive acts by which 
 the Lord overcame the hells, and reduced the spiritual world 
 to order, by which He glorified His Humanity and made it 
 divine, and by which He became the Saviour of mankind, 
 are in these four small books. The divine Author and 
 Artist has written them from the ground of infinite Use 
 which selects all truths as they are wanted. That use is 
 indefinitely various, and the differences of its administration 
 are not discrepancies which have to be reconciled by in- 
 genious commentators, but wisdom to be seen and perceived 
 from love of the spiritual and celestial senses which are 
 intended. Each Gospel Word as a truth for application has 
 infinite contents. Infinite things are compressed into the 
 letter, that the world may have room for honest secular 
 men. Take an example. " If thy right eye offend thee, pluck 
 it out, and cast it from thee." Seen spiritually, the right eye 
 which offends is the intellect charged by the corrupt will, 
 and insinuating and dictating act. Here in the mind it is 
 the organ of the vision of lusts. In these few words, human 
 life is traversed from end to end, and books which would fill 
 the world might be the history of the carrying out of it. All 
 greed, evil mastery, and delight of self-love, are the lusts in 
 the ban of this excommunication. The immensity of the 
 work commended to us by our Saviour finds few echoes in 
 our literature. And yet the work is imminent ; for after 
 death, when the tree lies, and the mind's habits in what little 
 is left of the mind are immortal, the evil eye cannot be 
 plucked out or cast away : it sees its love, and nothing else 
 it sees, and drones on in its dead desires for ever. 
 
 In John there is no account of the Lord's Ascension. 
 The Divine Natural Man proclaims His union with the 
 
1 68 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Father only in a special Gospel of Love. He disappears in 
 witnessing to John. 
 
 So in endeavouring to elucidate the Four Gospels spiritually, 
 we have first gone down into Egypt for the facts and know- 
 ledges of the Letter which has divine natural contents in it. 
 We have then taken the pathway to Assyria, and found there 
 the rational certainty that all things of the Lord, even His 
 coat without seam, must be divine and infinite: Assyria, 
 Reason, says must be. And then Israel is the third, the all in 
 all, with Egypt and with Assyria ; is the spiritual sense of 
 the Gospels and of the entire Word ; even a blessing in the 
 midst of the land. 
 
 I conclude this section with the following extract from 
 the PARABLE OF CREATION, by the late Rev. John Doughty : 
 an exposition of the First Chapter of Genesis, which makes 
 its spiritual sense self-evident, and prepares the reader to 
 receive a similar sense in Holy Scripture throughout : 
 
 " The Word of God cannot be a book of natural history 
 or science. It must contain, in its essence, only spiritual 
 truth. As history, it must give only a history of the spiritual 
 states of church or man. If, therefore, their surface appear- 
 ances indicate that it is something else, those appearances 
 must be false. The child might imagine that ^Esop's Fables 
 were given for the mere purpose of relating curious stories 
 of the conversations of birds and beasts which took place in 
 the long ago, but that does not prove the child to be correct. 
 A belief in error never makes error true. But the well- 
 instructed man knows better. He is fully aware that the 
 real design of those fables is to teach a lofty moral by 
 means of a written story. 
 
 " Much more is this true of the Word of God, of which 
 the fables of ^Esop are a faint imitation. History is here 
 used not for the history's sake, but for the sake of the 
 spiritual lesson which lies concealed within it. Geography is 
 used, not to give any lessons concerning the relative situa- 
 tions of the seas, rivers or lakes, cities, countries or moun- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 169 
 
 tains of olden times, but because of their adaptability to 
 expressing the relative spiritual situations or states of men. 
 An account of creation is given, not with the idea of furnish- 
 ing man with an epitome of geological science, but because 
 it forms a fitting dress for the portrayal of the regeneration 
 of man. As all Scripture is given in parables and for the 
 sake of its spiritual teaching, a history of creation must be, 
 in its essential meaning, a description of the creation and 
 development of the spiritual nature within us. This is 
 called by our Lord, the rebirth, or regeneration," pp. 34-36. 
 
 XLIILMAR Y MAGDALENE. 
 
 John's Gospel contains the following concerning Mary 
 Magdalene which does not occur in the other Gospels : 
 
 " She turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, 
 and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, 
 Woman, why weepest thou ? Whom seekest thou ? She, 
 supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou 
 have borne Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, 
 and I will take Him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. 
 She turned herself, and saith unto Him, Rabboni ; which 
 is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not ; for 
 I am not yet ascended to my Father : but go to my brethren 
 and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your 
 Father, and to my God and your God. Mary Magdalene 
 came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and 
 He had spoken these things unto her" (xx. 14-18). 
 
 This passage is full of Mary's kind affection : she craves 
 Christ's dead body, and longs to take it away with her. She 
 would not lose sight of it. She is a devout natural woman, 
 through Christ in possession of herself. She is present at 
 the crucifixion ; first at the sepulchre on the morning of the 
 resurrection ; the first to see Jesus after He rose from the 
 dead, and showed Himself unto her. 
 
 Jesus calls her Mary ; she calls Him, Master. To which 
 
1 70 THE NE WJER USALEM 
 
 he rejoins, Touch Me not. May we break this bread, and 
 see a spiritual sense in it ? 
 
 Mary Magdalene represents ardent natural affection for 
 Jesus ; natural devotion ; a necessary accompaniment 
 of the first Christian Church, founded as it was upon 
 personal intercourse with the Saviour, and upon loving 
 memory of brotherhood with Him, and of His wondrous 
 words and works. Her history represents an uncontrolled 
 spirit redeemed by Him : for out of her He had cast seven 
 devils. All her behaviour when she supposed Christ to be 
 the gardener, evidences her strong, unsuspecting natural 
 affection. While this was dominant, He could be to her 
 no more than a grand natural man. Touching Him then 
 means loving Him from her proprium. He forbids her to 
 touch Him as He has not yet ascended to His Father : her 
 love has not yet apprehended Him as her God. She has 
 her old familiar recognition of Him as He was before His 
 death and resurrection in His infirm Humanity. Yet this 
 ardent natural affection rebuked as it was, being a good love, 
 is made the medium of a revelation from the Lord to the 
 minds of His brethren, to whom Mary is told by Him to 
 say, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my 
 God and your God. The abashed natural love becomes the 
 means to instruction and revelation concerning the Lord's 
 Divinity in His Divine Humanity. The Lord's brethren 
 are those who hear the Word of God and do it : and He 
 here spoke the Word to such. This is for the New Church, 
 and belongs to the spiritual sense now revealed to it. Merely 
 human affection for Christ, except with little children and 
 simple minds, has detracted, and detracts, from the recogni- 
 tion of His Divinity ; and has made it more obvious to think 
 of Him in His Humiliation and infirm Jewish humanity than 
 in His Godhead; to pity the Lord rather than to adore 
 Him ; to think of His flesh not as divine good, and of His 
 blood not as divine truth, but as carnal and sanguinary real 
 presence from His dead body on the cross ; and so of the 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 171 
 
 merits not of His life, but of His agony and death. The three 
 great Churches have had their Via Dolorosa, and have dwelt 
 minutely upon Christ's sufferings, having no knowledge 
 of His victories over the Hells and over spiritual death. 
 They have wailed over Him as a man of sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief. Yet He said, just before His cruci- 
 fixion, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep 
 for yourselves, and for your children. The natural affection 
 for Him who took our flesh upon Him, and lived a divine 
 life in it, making His humanity divine, can indeed never be 
 abolished : it should live as a lamb in every little child : and 
 wherever the Gospel is read or known, be it here on earth, 
 or in the worlds of the spiritual firmament in the vast com- 
 munion after death, this affection, from personal experience, 
 or pious memory, should always rest as a reserve to our 
 thoughts and feelings about our Saviour. But age by age as 
 we know His Godhead by the process of our own regeneration, 
 our love will be transmuted into a spiritual affection to which 
 the Lord will appear in His Kingdom, Power and Glory. 
 Rituals commemorating His suffering, fixed seasons of 
 humiliation, relics authentic or not authentic, whenever the 
 simple can be weaned from them, will disappear into relative 
 unimportance. The New Church will be emancipated from 
 the Crucifixion as a natural agony upon which the Lord 
 after His resurrection ceased to dwell. It will live to ages 
 of ages on account of the Spiritual sense which alone makes 
 all Scripture divine : the Crucifixion now of our own evil and 
 false proclivities will be the heaven and the blessing of it. 
 For the sake of this we read in Luke, " Ought not Christ 
 to have suffered these things, and to enter into His Glory?" 
 
 XLIV. RESIST NOT THE EVIL ONE. 
 
 Bear in mind that we speak from appearance when we say 
 that the Lord rejected the Jewish Church. The converse is 
 true. He did not resist evil. He came into the world into 
 
172 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 a Jewish humanity that could be tempted, and with a divinity 
 in Him that could resist the most grievous temptations of 
 earth, of heaven and of hell. This humanity could not fail 
 to be assaulted by all these, for it was an opportunity for all ; 
 and it admitted all ; and when the assault took place, it 
 admitted the evil to be evil, as it was ; and so held it as evil ; 
 and then the divinity confronted it : in no wrath, in no anger : 
 God is never angry with the wicked although He is angry 
 with them every day, for His anger is Love, which when it 
 looks upon them precipitates them downwards : being of 
 opposite essence they cannot abide His truth which is the eye 
 of His Love. It turns them inside out and upside down, and 
 to regain their own state, they sink away below it. 
 
 Here we come upon that passage in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, " Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an 
 eye, and a tooth for a tooth : but I say unto you that ye 
 resist not the evil one : but whosoever shall smite thee on 
 thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man 
 sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have the 
 cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, 
 go with him twain" (Matthew v. 38-41). 
 
 In a well-meaning book by Count Leo Tolstoi, The 
 Kingdom of God is within you, 1894, this text has been made 
 use of to set forth " a new Life-conception of Christianity," 
 changing man's relation to the state, to social organizations, 
 to his fellow-man, to the guardianship of property, and to the 
 treatment of offenders against existing law and order. Espe- 
 cially recommending non-compliance with military service, 
 and non-intercourse with legal tribunals. The scheme intends 
 external reform from the ground of written Scripture, which 
 is to be fulfilled by exemplary courageous men leading the 
 way into a New Age of non-resistance, which is to bring in 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 In using the WORD, our endeavour has been to hold to 
 the very letter as the pillar on which its senses stand, and 
 Count Tolstoi is an instance of how much danger of per- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 173 
 
 version and false dogma is incurred if this allegiance to 
 verbal reality is disregarded. The Count has altered the 
 letter into Resist not evil by violence, taking this transcript 
 apparently from Adin Ballou. The text is Resist not the 
 evil one. That the evil one is literally right is shown by the 
 number of evil persons you are straightway commanded not 
 to resist. By violence is an addition to the text. It 
 abolishes the meaning of the command, and sets you forth 
 on a career and propagandism of passive resistance: whereas 
 resistance with no qualification is forbidden. The book 
 itself proceeds on this mistake, and whatever political or 
 social results it may have, they have no connection with 
 Christ's doctrine of non-resistance. Tolstoi, though (p. 65) 
 he once mentions Swedenborg disparagingly as among 
 sectarian founders, is unaware of the spiritual sense which 
 resides in the words, Resist not the evil one. 
 
 The command is evidently to an enduring or passive 
 state. It was carried out by Christ in His active life from 
 the beginning to the end. He, the innocent, the sinless, 
 was the most tempting prey for all the hells ; the Lamb to 
 all their wolves. He was assaulted by temptation, and He con- 
 quered by seeing and owning it : He stood as Christ and the 
 devil left Him. Each temptation made no mark on His 
 inherited nature, but a white record of truth made good in 
 His newly-planted flesh. That is not our case. We fall 
 and fall, and the mind, the book of life, is a blurred record 
 of good and evil. If we examine ourselves we admit 
 continual failing ; evil complexions to the neighbour, self- 
 love and its greedy demands. Our present self-love is our 
 ground of temptation ; our past life, of rebuke. This 
 rebuke is what we are not to resist. It comes from the 
 same source with our temptations. It is the revenge of the 
 Evil One for not being admitted as an associate on our way. 
 If we went boldly on we should never be rebuked, but be 
 received in the abyss under its triumphal arches into the 
 skeleton arms of destruction. 
 
1 74 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 This is to say, that by our evils we are in sympathetic 
 alliance with the hells, and if they cannot make us worse, 
 whenever low states of mind and body supervene, the devil, 
 the accuser, turns over our book of 4ife, and reads despair 
 to us from its pages. Shall we dismiss him? Can we say 
 to the Father of Lies who thus tells us his evil truths, Get 
 thee behind me, Satan ? Christ commands us in this case 
 of accusation not to resist the Evil One. This means 
 spiritually that we should not deny our evils however 
 brought home to us. If one side of our internal man is 
 smitten with just accusation, help comes from the Deliverer 
 and Saviour in exploring the other side also : both are part 
 of the peccant life. If the enemy will legally have our coat, 
 and make the sins under it naked, we are to use our freedom 
 to review the faults hidden till now under the cloak. If the 
 Satan compel us to misery over the course and journey of 
 our past lives, we are to double the mileage of our wander- 
 ings with him, and in this good way of repentance the evil 
 one, not resisted, disappears. Swedenborg also tells us that 
 such self-accusation, prompted by the hells, if it becomes 
 too sore for man, is mitigated by instant angels, who take 
 part with the penitent, and even excuse his errors and sins, 
 as the devils and Satans aggravate them. 
 
 Distinction should be made between temptations and 
 trials. Temptation involves attempted seduction by some 
 pleasure agreeable to yourself, and which ought to be re- 
 sisted because to indulge it is wrong. Discipline comes in 
 here. Trial on the other hand is the pain of self-examina- 
 tion, and this, wherever it springs from originally, ought not 
 to be resisted. Treatment for cure then follows it. 
 
 An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth means the op- 
 posite spirit to Resist not the Evil One. It discloses that man 
 since the Noahtic Church and before Christ had no internal 
 reward and punishment in him, but lived as an external 
 natural man : his book of life was written out in this world, 
 and no revelation was possible for him about another. He 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 175 
 
 worshipped the evil spirits that he knew, and called them 
 gods ; and hatred and revenge were permitted in the legal 
 eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. These things too are 
 in the basis of our minds ; and our difference from the old 
 state is, that we are more capable of self-examination, and of 
 literal acknowledgment of the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 of the commands and precepts of Christ. The New Church 
 which has*come, and which is to come, now knows of the 
 spiritual Word, and the Spiritual World, and of the Divine 
 Natural Man, and will open the ^Eon in God's time, and 
 lay bare every evil, public and private, with which the 
 enemy of mankind helps the Friend of mankind in charging 
 us. It is a truth that in our present condition, with our 
 hearts and minds as they are, we need the Society of Evil 
 Spirits to sustain our natures and characters, not in getting 
 worse, but in mere existence, pending the slow process of 
 our regeneration. If all our bad habits, which are equivalent 
 to our evil familiar spirits, were suddenly removed, we should 
 be remitted into a hopeless infancy on the road to annihi- 
 lation, until we were revived by the corruption of evil 
 communications. Self-love is the arm of the industry of the 
 present world. Evil cannot be taken away except by 
 regeneration, and most gradually. I rejoice to see that my 
 old friend, Herbert Spencer, is aware of this troublous truth. 
 Meanwhile the evil spirits who like strong drinks stimulate 
 us to make our selfishness muscular and useful, whenever 
 we determine to turn over a new leaf, and to refuse their com- 
 forts to our often infirmities, are in anger and fury, and 
 the freshly sensitive conscience is their place of assault. 
 Our past lives are made into frescoes on it. We are then to 
 look on these steadily with acknowledgement of what the 
 heart is, and in the prayer, Lord, be merciful to me a sinner, 
 the devil will depart from us when he has performed his 
 use. We submit to Count Tolstoi that this is a crumb of that 
 bread which the Sermon on the Mount teaches in the Word, 
 Resist not the Evil One. 
 
176 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 XLV. ESTIMATES OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 Swedenborg's dictum that it was foreseen that Christians 
 would almost reject the Word of the Old Testament, finds 
 confirmation on all hands in the Christian Church down to 
 this day. Already Josephus, the Jewish Historian, and a 
 Romanized Jew, was agnostic to the divine supernatural element 
 in the Dispensation to which he had belonged. The first 
 part of his standard book bears the appropriate title " The 
 Antiquities of the Jews " : whether this title was given by 
 himself, or not. He regarded the earlier Bible narratives as 
 a record of superstitions ; and held that in his day God had 
 forsaken the Jews, and gone over to the Romans. When he 
 relates the miraculous passage of the Israelites through the 
 Red Sea, he says that " he tells everything as it is written in 
 the Holy Books, and doubts whether the sea went back of 
 its own accord, or by God's special command. Every one 
 might think of it as he pleased." Of God's coming down to 
 Mount Sinai he says, " Let every one believe of it as he will : 
 he relates what he finds in the Holy Books." With respect 
 to the declaration that God was the Author of the Law of Moses, 
 he expresses the same unconcern. So also of what is told 
 of Jonah and Nebuchadnezzar. " In his second Book against 
 Apion he says, that Moses from his justice and piety might 
 very well judge that he had God for his guide ; and when he 
 had once persuaded himself of that, he did well to persuade 
 the people to think so too ; as the Greeks pretended to have 
 their laws from Apollo, whether they really thought so, or 
 thought it the best way to make them received of the people." 
 Dr. Willes, the author of " Two Discourses upon Josephus " 
 prefixed to the translation of that author by Sir Roger 
 1'Estrange, adds to these statements, that " the disesteeming 
 the rites and ceremonies of the Law of Moses, and setting so 
 great a value upon the precepts of morality, are two con- 
 siderable steps that Josephus made towards the doctrine of 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 177 
 
 Christianity." From which it might seem that Dr. Willes him- 
 self was an agnostic with regard to the supernatural character 
 of the Jewish Dispensation, as well as of the Christian. For he 
 says further that " when Josephus makes the Jewish religion to 
 consist in piety, justice, concord, and observing God and His 
 Providence, he comes very near the description of Christianity." 
 
 The Jews themselves during their miraculous time exhibited 
 a wonderful capacity of forgetting Jehovah : under Sinai they 
 lapsed into Egyptian idolatry. The causes of their oblivions 
 were themselves supernatural in some sense. They were 
 idolaters in heart, Jehovah was one of many gods, and their 
 religiosity was superstition. So they were moveable from 
 one manifestation to another, and had no central foundation 
 in faith ; no special love of their God : they easily wor- 
 shipped the gods of the nations ; and when magical powers 
 were exhibited, or professed, they went over to their 
 Priests. Solomon did the same thing on the greatest scale. 
 There is no such narrative of defections in the face of divine 
 miracles as that presented in the Bible. Josephus inherited 
 from the Jews, and disbelieving the authenticity of their 
 dispensation, he was naturally disposed to see the Messiah 
 in the Emperor Vespasian. 
 
 Throughout the Christian ages there has been no recog- 
 nition of Judaism as a continuous miraculous dispensation 
 in the sense in which we have been enabled to acknowledge 
 it in these pages. It has not been looked upon as a body 
 religious, held together by miracle and commandment, con- 
 stituting a unique theocracy. Any rational account of it as 
 such has never been attempted. To this time, it is for the 
 Old Church and for those who outlie it, a hieroglyphic 
 unread. We will not say that the Old Testament has not 
 been accepted reverently and religiously, at least by 
 Protestant Christendom ; but that nothing has been made 
 of it to show its necessity from the past or importance for 
 the future. Theology has not been able to justify the ways 
 of God to man in this difficult field. 
 
1 7 8 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Acute scepticism about it has appeared in all countries 
 and in every century; and Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, 
 which I once read with admiration, gives a voice still to a 
 large class impatient of their ignorance of the why and 
 wherefore of the Hebrew story. Paine, as I recollect him 
 sixty-six years ago, was not consciously impious, but if he 
 had not been inflamed politically, could perhaps have 
 received true Biblical information had it been forthcoming. 
 His tract on Theophilanthropy is a declaration that religion 
 is summed up in love to God and love to man. Although 
 he was less mannerly than the moderns, who are in the full 
 liberty of their opinions, and therefore under no excuse of 
 irritation, he was a loud theist, and nothing worse. 
 
 Before this Thomas Hobbes was an acute commentator, 
 and the student of his Leviathan will find sagacious obser- 
 ration and interpretation of the letter of the Bible. He was 
 a Churchman, and also a theist, and addicted to historical 
 criticism, and well worth reading for specimens of it. He 
 sheds no light upon the supernatural side of religion, and 
 does not find it in the Bible. Why is he regarded as an 
 atheist ? Perhaps because he denied freewill, and maintained 
 that human actions are inevitable links in a pre-determined 
 chain of causes and effects ; and that good and evil men 
 are fixed fates. Did not Calvin also hold the same. 
 
 Among the commentators Sir Thomas Browne is a signal 
 exception to the understanding of the letter of the Old Testa- 
 ment. His strong faith often comes near to the spiritual 
 sense, and discerns vistas of meaning that are hidden from 
 those who regard the style of the Word as loose and indeter- 
 minate. His remarks on the foods forbidden to the Jews by 
 the Levitical law have been already quoted. The Pseudodoxia 
 or Vulgar Errors contains suggestive chapters on creation 
 and Scripture history : and opens the Christian gospels as 
 the heart of intellect alone can perceive them. Speaking of 
 John on the text, that John the Evangelist should not die, he 
 says : " He alone of the twelve beheld Christ's passion on the 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 179 
 
 Cross. Wherein the affliction that He suffered could not 
 amount to less than Martyrdom : for if the naked relation, 
 at least the intentive consideration of that passion, be able 
 still, and at this disadvantage of time, to rend the hearts of 
 pious contemplators, surely the near and sensible vision 
 thereof must needs occasion agonies beyond the compre- 
 hension of flesh" (p. 305). And speaking of the Lord Christ he 
 says, " In Holy Scripture it is recorded He sometimes wept, 
 but never that He laughed. Which howsoever granted, it will 
 be hard to conceive how He passed His younger years and 
 childhood without a smile ; if, as Divinity affirmeth, for the 
 assurance of His Humanity unto men, and the concealment 
 of His Divinity from the devil, 'He passed this age like other 
 children, and so proceeded until He evidenced the same. 
 Nor need we be afraid to ascribe that unto the incarnate Sonne 
 which sometimes is attributed unto the uncarnate Father, 
 of Whom it is said, He that dwelleth in the heavens shall 
 laugh the wicked to scorn." We proffer these extracts though 
 somewhat apart from our remarks on the neglect of the Old 
 Testament, to remind the reader of Sir T. Browne's claim to 
 take high rank among those who have worked in the mines 
 of Holy Scripture. 
 
 Theism with regard to the Old Testament is prevalent in 
 the Church, especially among the learned. This must be so 
 until the new revelations are received which allow them to 
 accept the Letter just as it is, with no natural explanations ; 
 and to be instructed and educated into the spiritual truths 
 and reasons which infil and justify the Word throughout. 
 The humble people in these late centuries have possessed 
 their Bibles uninjured, and their faith has kept them out of 
 the darkness which the learned have gathered round them- 
 selves as the Jews, gathered for themselves the "thick dark- 
 ness about God." The letter thus accepted by the simple 
 has a pious modesty with it which is not superstition, but an 
 earnest of enlightenment to come to these " souls under 
 the Altar." 
 
i8o THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Dean Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church are a typical 
 instance of learned and courteous dismissal of the super- 
 natural element in the Old Testament. Throughout his 
 attractive Guide-book the revelation of Jehovah is of God in 
 man, and not of God to man. Whereas to the Jews there 
 was no such revelation, for Jehovah was with them, but never 
 in them. Supernaturalism was necessarily typical here ; for 
 the Jewish race was all mere human nature, and the Jewish 
 dispensation had no nature to it, but supernal governance 
 alone. Neither was the Jewish Race an instance of " the 
 universality of prophetic inspiration. This," says the Dean, 
 " extended to the whole nation. The history of Israel, from 
 Moses downwards, is not the history of an inspired book, or 
 of an inspired order, but of an inspired people." Moses 
 contradicted this when he said to Joshua, " Would that all 
 the Lord's people were prophets ; and that the Lord would 
 put His spirit upon them " (Num. xi. 30). So little were the 
 Jews inspired in the Dean's sense, that their great Prophets 
 themselves were not inspired excepting with obedience to 
 verbal dictation ; and neither they nor the people understood 
 the prophecies, which never came through their own minds, 
 but from without to their senses. As they were receptive of 
 the dictation, so they were obedient to any open commands 
 in it. The prophetical inspiration was confined to a few men ; 
 and consists in large part of the denunciation of the wicked- 
 ness of the Jews and Israelites, and of the surrounding nations, 
 Egypt and the others. Terrible immanence and pressure 
 from Jehovah, dictatorship from without, and stern com- 
 mandment, were on the one hand ; and unquestioning 
 obedience to rituals, and reasons which were beyond their 
 understanding, were imperative on the other hand. The 
 inspiration which the Dean is thinking of is that virtus and 
 exaltation of human genius which all strong natures feel at 
 times, and in which the Jews were not deficient. It led them 
 in the end to attribute the work and Word of God to them- 
 selves. Josephus dared to conjecture this of Moses, and that 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 181 
 
 he acknowledged Jehovah only to hold dominion over the 
 people. Such hypocrisy is denounced against the children 
 of Israel throughout in the Psalms. The two nations- 
 added to it century by century, until the consummation 
 of their ^Eon, when the commingling of their supernatural 
 leading with the pride of their hearts gave rise to loss of 
 freewill, and then to demoniacal possession such as existed 
 in the Lord's time. 
 
 It were easy to multiply instances of the Dean's agnostic- 
 ism all through his pursuit of the Old Testament narrative. 
 The account of Sinai has no objective reality left to it on the 
 spiritual side ; the natural scenery is florid, and Jehovah is 
 a pallid oracle, not only invisible, but vague and unthinkable ; 
 whereas in the Bible His voice and His writing are the evid- 
 ences of a God man. The objectiveness is so reduced that 
 Moses acting on the host by hypnotism through " swarmery " 
 might have been the juggler of it all. From the Dean's 
 version, no remembrance of the events could be constructed. 
 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could be so treated, but not 
 Holy Scripture. And the Dean is not candid like Josephus,. 
 who tells you to think what you like about the story. In 
 treating of the destruction of Sodom, and the doom of the 
 Cities of the Plain, the insinuation is that nature and not the 
 Divine in judgment is the agent. "There is yet another 
 occasion on which Abraham appears in connexion, not indeed 
 with the revolutions of armies or of empires, but with the 
 more awful convulsions which agitate the fabric of the world 
 itself. What were the precise special means by which the 
 fertile vale of Siddim was blasted with eternal barrenness 
 how and to what extent the five guilty cities of the plain were 
 overthrown, is still a vexed question equally with theologians 
 and geologists. We need here only consider the aspect of 
 the catastrophe as it was presented to the Patriarch " 
 (Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, Part I., p. 46). 
 The Scripture says, " The Lord rained upon Sodom and upon 
 Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, 
 
182 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the 
 inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon theground" 
 {Gen. xix. 24, 25). The Dean sees no precise special means 
 of destruction in the Lord raining fire and brimstone, but 
 theologians and geologists find a vexed question in it and 
 join the patriarch and the Dean in gazing on the results ; 
 as if Abraham and they are scientist tourists unacquainted 
 with their Bible. 
 
 One more indication of the fact that the Old Testament 
 might die out as a portion of God's Word if it were left in 
 the hands of the learned, who pervert it into fables as the 
 Greeks perverted the religion of the ancient Church. We 
 have already given the interpretation of the following text. 
 41 And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, Go, return into 
 Egypt. And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them 
 upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt : and 
 Moses took the rod of God in his hand. . . . And it came 
 to pass on the way at the inn that the Lord met him and 
 sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off 
 the foreskin of her son, and made it touch his feet, and she 
 said, Surely a bridegroom of bloods art thou to me, so he 
 let him alone. Then she said, A bridegroom of bloods 
 because of the circumcision" (Exodus iv. 19-26). 
 
 On this event Dean Stanley comments as follows : " On 
 the journey a mysterious and almost inexplicable incident 
 occurs in the family. The most probable explanation seems 
 to be that at the Caravanserai either Moses or his eldest child 
 was struck with what seemed to be a mortal illness. In some 
 way, not apparent to us, this illness was connected by 
 Zipporah with the fact that her son had not been circumcised 
 whether in the general neglect of that rite among the 
 Israelites in Egypt, or in consequence of his birth in Midian. 
 She instantly performed the rite, and threw the sharp instru- 
 ment, stained with the fresh blood, at the feet of her husband, 
 exclaiming in the agony of a mother's anxiety for the life of 
 her child, * A bloody husband thou art, to cause the death 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 183 
 
 of my son.' Then, when the recovery from the illness took 
 place (whether of her son or her husband), she exclaims 
 again : ' A bloody husband still thou art, but not so as to 
 cause the child's death, but only to bring about his circum- 
 cision ' " (Ibid. pp. 1 1 6, 117). 
 
 The reader is referred to pp. 35-37 above respecting this 
 event. The Dean again ignores Jehovah and guesses His 
 seeking to kill Moses into a common case of illness, 
 eliminating every trace of the divine and supernatural from 
 it. He makes Zipporah throw the flint knife at Moses' feet, 
 instead of touching his feet with the foreskin. In a note he 
 designates the almost inexplicable incident as ' a story.' He 
 invents circumstances, puts words into Zipporah's mouth, 
 and makes her call Moses ' husband ' when the Hebrew for 
 a purpose says bridegroom." 
 
 Of course he discredits the witch of Endor calling up 
 Samuel to Saul, although myriads of such cases occur at the 
 present day. His pages are full of the virtue of the Jews, 
 and of their deserts as the chosen people. The invisible 
 God is acknowledged as in them, and they are near by 
 promise and performance to a Christianity which is a con- 
 tinued, established, and endowed Church of Judaism. Both 
 Testaments are ignored. The Book may not unfairly be 
 regarded as a well-oiled systematic Pantheism wrestling with 
 two revealed religions, and bent upon casting them to the 
 ground. 
 
 XL VLETHNOLOG Y. 
 
 If we find no recognition of the peculiar character of 
 Judaism as it is written of in the Old Testament in works of 
 so-called Theology, so neither does Ethnology, which ought 
 to treat of all the great causes that determine the character 
 and history of races, admit as an explanation the Divine 
 interference recorded in the Scriptures. Oscar Peschel's 
 learned work, The Races of Man, treats the Jews as a self- 
 
184 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 developed people. The theory of Evolution is what accounts 
 for their Monotheism. They were once savages in a remote 
 past, and worked up through polytheism to one God in long 
 ages. And after the Captivity those who chose to return 
 brought back from Babylon enlightenment about immortality, 
 and a modified temper purged of some of the cruelty and 
 revenge which were signal in their ancestors. They were 
 brought nearer to Christ by these additions to their know- 
 ledge and their morals. That a purpose even of this kind 
 was served for the best of the race need not be doubted ; it 
 was chiefly due to the " blessing of adversity " : but the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, and the final dispersion after the 
 Crucifixion of Christ, forbids us to think that the race itself 
 was influenced towards Christianity. And the obduracy of 
 the Jews to-day proves that the core of Judaism is unmodified. 
 Oscar Peschel follows the writers of the Old Church in not 
 taking the Jewish Dispensation for granted ; and in ignoring 
 the miraculous march of it, which seems to be the easiest 
 account, and the only account, of whatever has concerned, 
 and still concerns, that interesting, and to the most of thinkers, 
 that mysterious people. 
 
 XLVIL ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE 
 MONUMENTS. 
 
 Professor Sayce, that untiring Archaeologist, to whom we 
 owe so much light on ancient history and rediscovered 
 languages, cannot be reckoned among the defenders of the 
 Old Testament as an objective revelation, or as part of a 
 special Divine Word. His thesis is that the Bible of the 
 Old Testament has been hitherto at a disadvantage in standing 
 alone : there has been no other known record to compare 
 with it : an unfair glamour has surrounded it, and prevented 
 the same study and attention being given to our Scripture as 
 to any other book. Reverence for its presumed holiness 
 has closed it against true appreciation, which can only be 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 185; 
 
 attained where strong prepossession is absent. If you 
 approach it from the first as awful and divine, you are not 
 likely to dare to understand it, at least not in the learned 
 Professor's way. 
 
 The cause of this paralysis of attention is now removed ;. 
 the mind need not cower henceforth in Bibliolatry. The Old 
 Testament no longer stands alone : a number of other docu- 
 ments belonging to religions more ancient than the Jewish, 
 and perhaps ante-dating the Pentateuch, have been brought 
 to light ; the cuneiform and hieroglyphic in which they were 
 written are deciphered, and read by many learned men ; and. 
 so we may be said to have a shelf of Bibles of which Moses 
 and the Prophets are a modern part. 
 
 History stretches new arms of power through these great 
 and curious discoveries, and comparative Bibliology comes 
 in view, as comparative anatomy and physiology, comparative 
 philology, comparative mythology, and comparative religion, 
 have already been inaugurated. Soon therefore we shall be 
 comparatively well-informed all round, on subjects hitherto 
 stunted by lacking the tests of relationships. 
 
 The gain to history is indubitable : and historians may 
 exult in it. We shall probably learn before long great land- 
 marks and many details respecting the Holy Land and; 
 Mesopotamia before the Israelites conquered Canaan. The 
 Bible will be illustrated as regards its geography and its 
 earliest and least historical events. It is good to be learned,, 
 and good to be historical, good in a limited, and not in an 
 absolute sense : good according to the use you make of your 
 knowledges. 
 
 Now to quote the Professor himself, and do him no- 
 injustice. "The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone. 
 Its Books could be interpreted and explained only by them- 
 selves. They were what logicians would call ' a single 
 instance.' There was nothing similar with which they 
 could be compared : no contemporaneous record which 
 could throw light on the facts they contained. From ' a 
 
i86 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 single instance ' no argument can be drawn." Of the last 
 sentence we ask, if it were not good to find some instances 
 beyond argument. Something like Ego and freewill that 
 -stands alone however many of it there are. Central principles 
 are such. To argue about them is not to perceive them : when 
 conscience knows them as right and wrong, true and false, 
 arguing is historical but dangerous. 
 
 But in the Professor's meaning, does the Old Testament 
 stand alone, awaiting a family of brothers and sisters from 
 the monuments, to tell us who is who and what is what, in 
 our Scriptures? On the contrary, according to received 
 opinion which has every warrant, the Bible contains earlier 
 books than those attributed to Moses. In this case we have 
 in the covers of the Book itself, the Sacred Books of three 
 different Religions already, and with the New Testament of 
 one Theophany and four Religions. Here the argument of 
 the " single instance " disappears, and we find a multiplicity 
 in the Old Testament itself, which forecloses the need of any 
 other series to furnish grounds of comparison and illustra- 
 tion. In supplement to this argument, and as a greater 
 multiplicity, the Bible is a congeries of Booklets reaching in 
 nominal authorship over thousands of years ; and the 
 consistency and the difference they offer from great distances 
 of time and place is such as must be absent from the " single 
 instance," but is many-voiced in the Bible, and suggests end- 
 less comparisons, textual and real ; and a Unity as of one 
 God in all. 
 
 We need not then go to Babylon and Assyria to increase 
 the pregnant wealth of Bible truth, by which we mean now, 
 self-certification as a basis for further conception. The 
 Books indeed can be explained and interpreted only by 
 themselves, but they are so many and so various, that upon 
 each point of themselves that needs it, the testimony suffices 
 to justify an interpretation sanctioned by the whole. The 
 historical facts contained in the Bible can be attested by the 
 monuments, and can be received without such attestation. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 187 
 
 The divine facts are attested by the Fourfold witness of the 
 Word itself. 
 
 The Bible language is a whole literature like the Latin 
 language with all its authors : its words form a complete 
 dictionary which admits of no other tongue in its alphabetic 
 series. How if there be an inner meaning to every word ? 
 Here is the highest and absolute rescue from the charge of 
 single instance. 
 
 We find in the monuments, a narration of the Flood 
 which is similar in many details to the account in Genesis. 
 Other coincidences between the Old Testament histories 
 and the newly interpreted inscriptions demonstrate that 
 Genesis had no monopoly of such legends. They were a 
 floating property in a large region of the ancient world. In 
 this sense the peculiar divinity generally attributed to them 
 in the Bible as its private possession is challenged by heathen 
 monuments. What for instance would we say if we found in 
 a Latin author who had never heard of Jesus, an account 
 similar, even verbally, to the death and resurrection of the 
 Divine Person of the New Testament ? Should we say that 
 it is the nature of such legends, which if true must be miracle, 
 to be common to many races ; as the flood is reported to 
 find a place in numerous mythologies ? In this way should 
 we strip the Holy Scripture of its unique authority, and 
 relegate it to the books of the nations. 
 
 There is such a passage in Ovid's Metamorphoses in the 
 account of the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of 
 Hercules after his twelve labours completed. He, the Son 
 of Jupiter and Alcumena, puts off the finite heredity of the 
 Mother, and ascends in pure Godhead to his Father. The 
 Poem is full of spiritual contents ; and is a lesson for Clergy 
 in the true theory of the Incarnation. 
 
 So if we find in Christian lands, and in the best races, a 
 high standard of moral law with a religion to back it ; and 
 yet if we find ruder notions of right and wrong in all races, 
 and idola or gods even in the lowest ; and if we think towards 
 
1 88 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 a comparative morality and a comparative religion : must 
 the commonness of these good, better and best things dilute 
 their central examples, and be a proof against their primeval 
 special gift from above ? 
 
 Comparison seems to work that way : we are in a world of 
 dilemmas. If all truth is thus comparatively true, and good 
 comparatively good, the centre is washed away by the circum- 
 ferences. Yet we have a refrain in the mind which exults 
 otherwise. " The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, 
 the world and they that dwell therein. For He hath founded 
 it upon the seas and established it upon the floods." Here 
 the overflowing generalities are obeisant towards establishing 
 the earth of the Lord. 
 
 In the midst of our opened mounds and treasuries of books 
 and inscriptions, with our Bibles still in our hands, may we 
 not use our new facilities for comparison, as means to recog- 
 nize what is centre and what is circumference in our stores 
 new and old ? May not revelation come from God, although 
 there be many copies of it extant which are partial and 
 questionable? May not a true and good revelation be 
 primary, and echoes of it, and perversions of it, and imagina- 
 tions and impostures of it be secondary? May not all 
 mythology be a beggarly legacy of a primeval wonder-mind 
 which based on nature and regeneration perceived the deep 
 things of God as we cannot perceive them ; which thought 
 creatively and redemptively ? Which had all dispensations 
 and thousands of years in its open ideas ? In which the Fall 
 of the Recoverer were immanent ? 
 
 Comparisons between things need not be on a dead level : 
 no science comes out of the Cities of the Plain. Eminence,, 
 mountains and hills, are as necessary in logic as multiplicity 
 for syllogism. There is a will in reason, and end, cause and 
 effect are its souls. So in comparing heathen Bibles with 
 Holy Scripture we fall into the condition of the " single 
 instance." For however extensive our Shinar Plain may be, 
 and however many stories go to the Babylonish tower, yet 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 189 
 
 if revelation be sunk in the monuments, the whole becomes 
 one ; it is confronted by no eye, and it ceases to be objective 
 to thought, which always demands to be above and internal 
 to its object. 
 
 We may, however, assume that the Bibles of the monu- 
 ments are more important than our Bible ; though few will 
 venture this. It is too evidently above while they are 
 beneath. 
 
 Can we not then more easily institute comparisons, down- 
 wards than upwards ? If we begin with our feet and reason 
 from them to ourselves, we shall have no heads to appeal to. 
 If we begin with our heart and lungs, we pervade our system : 
 the central ark of the bosom breathes and burns : the belly 
 and the members expand and pulsate : their life comes from 
 the bosom ; and in this way these solidities also breathe and 
 burn. Centrality governs, and outlying things obey. 
 
 The monuments in Egypt and Mesopotamia belong for 
 the most part to the period anterior to the Mosaic dispensa- 
 tion: the traces of the Israelites in Egypt are few and doubtful. 
 Archaeology has therefore little relation to this part of the Old 
 Testament. Is there any comparative thaumatology which can 
 throw light on the facts here ? Jewish history and Christ's life 
 are comparatively recent history ; and miracle and God In- 
 carnate are in record here. Within this four thousand years 
 the Jews underwent their drama, Jehovah presiding : within 
 two thousand the Lord Christ made His Divinity and His 
 miracles into the Word. Dominant disbelief is of no con- 
 sequence to the facts. Neither is comparison at hand with 
 either of these strongholds of supernatural religion. There 
 are no similar records or archives ; and the perfection of the 
 Old and New Testaments stands alone as the Word of God 
 in the waste of literature. 
 
 We approach nearer to comparative cases before the time 
 of Abraham. In one sense the monuments seem on the 
 plane of the dawn of history in the Pentateuch. But in a 
 material respect, what equality is there between the Bible 
 
1 90 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 conserved by thirteen hundred generations of faithful Jews 
 " who counted its words and letters, and considered this a 
 weightier business than ascertaining what they actually meant, " 
 and the fragmentary remains of the library of Assurbanipal, 
 with its fire-baked and sun-dried tablets, often broken in 
 pieces ; and in the whole having no beginning or end to the 
 collection were it all edited even by the Professor, unless 
 such wholeness be suggested out of the perfect revelation of 
 Genesis. The legend of Gisdubar, save as a curiosity, con- 
 taining as it does the Babylonian story of the Flood, has no 
 gravity either for archaeologist or historian unless as a pendant 
 to Noah's deluge. It attests the prevalence of a flood-story; 
 but it does not attest the Flood, or render it more probable. 
 It lends no support to Bible history ; nor reveals why the 
 Flood was written of, nor how it now takes rank as spiritual 
 necessity, with breath of life as natural. 
 
 The monuments give no Testamentary light on the first 
 eleven chapters of Genesis from Adam to Noah, but 
 confront us with a forged heathen Codicil. In my work, 
 CANNES ACCORDING TO BEROSUS, after studying the learned 
 Professor's Hibbert Lectures, I found that anything generically 
 similar to the account of the six days' creation in the first 
 chapter of Genesis, and to the creation of Adam on the seventh 
 day, was not found elsewhere than in the Word. The end 
 of the most ancient Church is portrayed by Berosus. Its 
 consummation, which he mistook for the creation, was of 
 monsters and abominations, coagulating, breeding, and work- 
 ing in an infernal sea or Chaos. Belus put an end to this 
 state of things by means of self-sacrifice which is recorded 
 and interpreted in my CANNES. The northern mythology 
 in its account of creation similarly omits the Divine order 
 of life found in Genesis i. and ii. ; and begins with giant- 
 generation. In neither case do the primeval revelation or 
 the innocent Adams who accepted it, find any record. The 
 reason may be that this state called Adam was inconceivable 
 to the next humanity: it was pre-eminently "alms for 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 191 
 
 oblivion " ; and that anything lay in it, or could come out of 
 it, was beyond belief to those whose once heavenly faculties- 
 had been drowned, and their inward breath extinguished, by 
 their damnable persuasions called in the then current language 
 of correspondences the FLOOD. 
 
 There is therefore no Adam apparent in the monuments ; 
 no Adamic Order answering to the innocence before the fall,. 
 and to the rational certainty that Jehovah then moving in 
 manifest creativeness gave gifts ineffable to us to his first sons 
 and daughters. Here then the Bible has no competitor : it 
 is beyond compare, and is a single Divine instance as God 
 Himself is One. 
 
 The Word begins thus : " In the beginning God created' 
 the heaven and the earth. And the earth was formless and 
 empty ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep : and 
 the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And 
 God said, Let there be light : and there was light. And God 
 saw the light that it was good : and God "divided the light 
 from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the 
 darkness He called Night. And there was evening, and there 
 was morning, one day." 
 
 An Assyrian tablet which according to the Professor " bears 
 a striking resemblance to the account of the creation in the 
 first chapter of Genesis," and which he inclines to think may 
 not be earlier in its present form than the seventh century 
 B.C., has the following : 
 
 " At that time the heavens above named not a name, nor 
 did the earth below record one. Yea, the deep was their 
 first creator ; the flood of the sea was She who bore them all. 
 ... At that time the gods had not issued forth, any one of 
 them ; by no name were they recorded ; no destiny. Then 
 the Gods were made ; Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth. 
 They grew up. ... Next were made the host of heaven and 
 earth ; the time was long. The Gods Anu. The host of 
 heaven and earth." . . . The narrative continues : " The 
 Creator made beautiful the stations of the great Gods. . . .. 
 
192 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 At that time the Gods in their assembly created. They 
 made beautiful the mighty. They made the living things 
 come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the field, and 
 the creeping thing"* (pp. 22-24). 
 
 God's first work in Genesis is creation ; His first spirit or 
 breath moves upon the face of the waters. His first word is, 
 Let there be light. His first naming calls the light day, and 
 the darkness night. The heavens and earth of the Assyrian 
 tablets have no names, none of the division of quality signified 
 by such. The deep was their first creator : the flood of the 
 sea was SHE who bore them all. She is here probably the 
 woman Omoroka, of whom the author treated in OANNES. 
 " The woman Omoroka is the regent of all the monsters 
 engendered in the darkness and its waters. She is the sea, in 
 identity with the regnant Moon : the Moon being the Queen 
 of the heavens, Ashtaroth, or Astarte. The sea in its evil 
 sense signifies the great Hell ; and the moon, the self-intelli- 
 gence which obeys its tides. Her rule is the empire of lusts 
 by persuasions. She is woman in the evil sense; the 
 listener to the serpent of the sensual selfhood. The Mother 
 of evil" (pp. 26, 27). 
 
 The Gods are impossible without names. When they 
 issue forth, they are Lakhmu and Lakhamu. What these 
 -signify the Assyriologists must inform us. As the progeny 
 of the sea-woman Omoroka whom Belus cut in twain, they 
 are the monsters recorded by Berosus ; and Anu, and the 
 next gods, the new generation, still of gods, who could sus- 
 tain the force of the new or spiritual light. See, however, 
 the interpretation of Berosus in my OANNES. His account 
 is more in connection with the Word than any tablets yet 
 translated from the monuments. It has a remainder of 
 spiritual sense. But the passages from Berosus as well as 
 from the tablets yield no record of God the Creator, or that 
 God made man in His image after His likeness: or that 
 
 * Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, by A. H. Sayce, M.A. 
 1886. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 193 
 
 the Lord God formed man, the dust of the ground ; and 
 breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became 
 a living soul. 
 
 Hesiod in the Greek mythology has the legend of the ages, 
 golden, silver, brazen, heroic and iron ; and also some legend 
 of the first happy race. From this the golden age has been 
 often celebrated in classical literature. It seems to have 
 entered Greece from Asia, and is in some accord with the 
 ages in Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel. It 
 has on it the fabulous stamp of Greece, and is in no sense 
 suggestive of being a remainder of the Holy books of any 
 nation. Indeed, excepting in the Poets, there are no writings 
 which suggest a scriptural comparison in the literature of 
 Greece and Rome. Nothing like what the monuments yield 
 to us in Egypt, and in Assyria and Babylonia. 
 
 Is there then any account attainable of the origin of these 
 monuments of the Old World, and of their relation to the 
 books of the Bible ? Has Providence in these days, when 
 such light is wanted, vouchsafed to shew by a new Revela- 
 tion how the case stands between the Word of the Old 
 Testament and the fragments that are left of what was once 
 the same Word in the graves of " the famous nations of the 
 dead " ? We answer this question in the affirmative. The 
 earlier portion of our Word, the first eleven chapters of 
 Genesis down to the call of Abraham are a portion of an 
 Elder Word, and depict in correspondences which were the 
 modes of thought, speech, and writing in the first times, the 
 rise and decline of two Churches, the Adamic and the 
 Noahtic. Noah, the tenth Church from Adam, was the end 
 of the Adamic, and the Patriarchs were the end of the 
 Noahtic Church. A true Word of God, of which we have 
 the chapters just mentioned, but which contained other 
 books, was revealed to the Noahtic Church in all its natures 
 and races : these were participants in the second great ^Eon 
 of Revelation. The account therefore is that the Word, as 
 now extant, and as it existed in other books in the early part 
 
 N 
 
1 94 THE NE W JER US ALE M 
 
 of the yEon, was known, for the most part, as we now have 
 it to all the branches of the Ancient Church : that it was the 
 ground of their true religion : that it maintained them in life 
 for ages. That when the nations and peoples over which 
 this Word presided became apostate, they still had its letter, 
 and corrupted it by their several dispositions and different 
 geniuses to magic and idolatry : these being two great de- 
 stroyers of good and truth in the human family. Love of 
 dominion signified by Babylon is the Imperial form of these 
 evils, giving them leave to propagate : and represented by 
 ruling men in Church and State, is Atheism, and does what 
 it likes. With these infernal factors in the world, spiritual 
 depravation of the Word is ensured. A false spiritual world, 
 a false heaven and a false earth, become as it were revealed 
 to the human mind and senses. Every lust of human days 
 ministers to this : sham oracles, dreams, omens, abuse of 
 correspondences, intuitions become superstitions, fanatical 
 persuasions, hysterical diseases in weak members laid hold 
 of by the strong to formulate a whole mythology, as the 
 Vala in Voluspa has given a whole improvisation of the 
 birth of Gods and man to the North in the Edda. There- 
 fore we have no difficulty in seeing that the Ancient Word 
 was revealed to a great group of nations. The identity of 
 parts of the legend of the Flood with the Word itself in 
 Genesis bespeaks that the whole Word unaltered once was 
 in Mesopotamia, and the alterations of it are accounted for 
 by the decline of the Ancient Church, and by the active 
 spiritual parasites of heathenism which then inhabited its 
 ruins, the owls and the bitterns of Holy Writ. See my 
 Work on Revelation, Mythology, Correspondences, where I 
 have treated of these subjects, and shewn that where the 
 Spirit of God leaves mankind, Spirits of Hell take the place 
 of it, and that the remainders on the evil side are not ma- 
 terialisms, as they apparently are at this day, but diabolic 
 possessions and satanic credal institutions. 
 
 This, then, is our answer to the learned Professor's invita- 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 195 
 
 tion to enlarge Scripture by adding to it the recent lore of 
 Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. It gives us ample reason to 
 keep Israel to itself until the spiritual sense of the Word is 
 fully seen, and until Israel can be the third, the highest and 
 the predominant partner with Egypt and with Assyria, a 
 blessing in the midst, and a divine power of ordination and 
 executive discrimination. 
 
 If Swedenborg had written in 1894 he could not have 
 given a stronger instance of prophetic answer to a want of 
 to-day, than in his revelation of the existence of the Ancient 
 Word uncorrupted over the nations represented by these 
 Graves and Monuments still pregnant with spiritual death. 
 The learned Professor gives us, to our great satisfaction, 
 materials for a most detailed history of the perversions of 
 early mankind, and he lends us a power, that these also 
 may not come under the ban of the " single instance," of 
 comparing them with the Word of God, which rejects them 
 into incantations and superstitious myths. 
 
 We will now submit to the reader some extracts from 
 Swedenborg which show that he was fully aware that a Word, 
 which he calls the Ancient Word, existed among the great group 
 of nations in question, and also that in after ages it had been 
 corrupted and destroyed in their midst. The following 
 quotations are summaries taken from The Swedenborg Con- 
 cordance of the Rev. John Faulkner Potts ; a work that 
 should be in the hands of every Biblical Archaeologist. 
 
 " The doctrinals possessed by the men of the Ancient 
 Church were preserved out of the revelations and perceptions 
 of the Most Ancient Church. These doctrinals were their 
 Word" (Arcana, n. 1068). 
 
 " The first Ancient Church, signified by Noah and his sons, 
 was not confined to a few, but was extended through many 
 kingdoms, namely Assyria, Mesopotamia, Syria, Ethiopia, 
 Arabia, Lybia, Egypt, Philistia, all the way to Tyre and 
 Sidon j and through the whole land of Canaan on both sides 
 of the Jordan. ... A certain outward worship afterwards 
 
1 96 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 began in Syria, which in time spread far and wide through 
 many lands, especially through Canaan, and which differed 
 from the worship of the Ancient Church. There arose hereby 
 a new church, which may be called the second Ancient 
 Church ; and of which Heber was the institutor " (Ibid. n. 
 1238). 
 
 " In process of time the first Ancient Church degenerated, 
 and was adulterated by innovators as to both outward and 
 inward worship, and this, in various places, especially in this 
 way, that all the significatives and representatives that the 
 Ancient Church had from the mouth of the Most Ancient 
 Church were turned into idolatries, and with some nations into 
 magical arts " (Ibid. n. 1241). 
 
 " The worship called Babel did not prevail in the first 
 Ancient Church, but in the succeeding Churches, when men 
 began to be worshipped as Gods especially after death ; 
 whence came so many Gods of the Gentiles " (n. 1327). 
 
 "That the first Ancient Church was deprived of the 
 knowledges of truth and good, is evident from the fact that 
 its nations for the most part became idolaters, and still had a 
 certain outward worship" (n. 1328). 
 
 " The Ancient Church had its last time, when all charity 
 grew cold, and all faith was darkened ; this was about the 
 time of Heber. Then was the Last Judgment on that Church " 
 (n. 1850). 
 
 "The last remains of the Ancient Church were in Syria " 
 (n. 3249). 
 
 " The Ancient Church established by the Lord after the 
 Flood was a Representative Church. All and each of its 
 externals of worship represented the celestial and spiritual 
 things of the Lord's kingdom, and in the supreme sense the 
 divine things of the Lord. And all and each of its internals 
 of worship had relation to charity. That Church was spread 
 through a great part of the Asiatic World, through many 
 kingdoms there, and although they differed about doctrinals 
 of faith, the Church was one, because all the members in 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 197 
 
 every division of it made charity the essential. They who 
 at that time separated faith from charity, and made faith the 
 essential, were called * Ham.' In process of time this Church 
 turned away to idolatries, and in Egypt, Babel, and else- 
 where, to magic. They began to worship outward things 
 apart from inward, and as they receded from charity, heaven 
 receded from them, and spirits from hell who led them, 
 took its place " (n. 4680). 
 
 " The Ancient Church at its institution was at first without 
 truths ; was afterwards instructed in truths ; and at last 
 rejected them " (n. 5433).*, 
 
 " The first and second states of the Ancient Church in 
 the regions round about the Jordan and Egypt were like 
 the garden of Jehovah (Gen. xiii. 10). The case was the 
 same with Tyre (Ezek. xxviii. 12-15). Ashur was like a 
 cedar in Lebanon (Ezek. xxxi. 3-9). Wisdom flourished 
 in Arabia, as evidenced by the visit of the Queen of Sheba 
 to Solomon, and from the three ' wise men.' The third and 
 fourth states of that Church, its states of vastation and 
 consummation, are described in the Word throughout in 
 both its historical and prophetical books. The consum- 
 mation of the nations round about the Jordan or the 
 land of Canaan is described by the destruction of Sodom, 
 Gomorrha, Admah, and Zeboim. The consummation of 
 the nations of the Church within Jordan is described by the 
 expulsion of some and the slaughter of others. The con- 
 summation of that Church in Egypt is denoted by the 
 drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea " (Coronis, 
 n. 41). 
 
 " As this Ancient Church, typical of the Church which 
 was to come, converted the representative correspondences 
 into magic and idolatry, Jehovah raised up the Israelitish 
 Church " (n. 42). 
 
 " The Hittites were among the better ones in Canaan. 
 Abraham dwelt among them, and afterwards Isaac and 
 Jacob; and were also buried with them. They behaved 
 
198 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 with piety and modesty towards Abraham. Hence, they as 
 an upright nation represent the spiritual Church, or the 
 truth of the Church. But, as with the rest of the Ancient 
 Church, in course of time they fell away from charity, so 
 they afterwards signified the false in the Church. Still the 
 Hittites were among the more honoured. This is evident 
 from Hittites being with David, namely, Abimelech, and 
 Uriah whose wife was Bathsheba, by whom David had 
 Solomon " (Arcana, n. 2913). 
 
 Wherever the Ancient Church is mentioned the Ancient 
 Word is mentioned or implied, and hence the whole of the 
 nations and peoples whose remains furnish " the monu- 
 ments " are simply covered by the Word, let us say, for the 
 general reader, by the Bible or Holy Writ, which was once 
 their Bible, and from which, by their corruption, have 
 sprung the great heathenisms of Asia and Africa, and ulti- 
 mately of Greece and Rome. Again we say that the 
 comparison can now be instituted between the inspired 
 books of the living Word which are one body from Genesis 
 to Revelation, and which have an internal spiritual 
 soul, and the remains of the skeletons of the Ancient 
 Churches. They are broken bones, fragments which 
 portray the vanity of this world, but have no spiritual 
 cohesion, excepting in those parts which are identical with 
 the letter of the Ancient Word. These capital pieces are 
 here the skulls. We hope that archaeology may carry the 
 truths now revealed into its investigations. They will 
 become fruitful of good historical information, and would 
 in this way, by comparison, instruct the modern world 
 respecting the lusts of dominion and the cruelties of 
 superstition which destroyed the ancient ^Eons. 
 
 The Lord says, "heaven and earth shall pass away, but 
 my word shall not pass away." Heaven and earth have 
 passed away five times, including the " former heaven and 
 earth, and the sea " named in the Apocalypse. These 
 heavens and earths which perish are the dead but still 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 199 
 
 pretentious churches in the spiritual world which are left at 
 the end of each /Eon, and are there and then the subjects 
 of Last Judgments. The Word judges them. Its divine 
 truths come into living contact with the "imaginary" heavens, 
 and they sink into new hells. There are imaginary heavens 
 here also, which must be cleared away before the new city 
 can descend. 
 
 We see now that the spiritual sense of the Word based 
 upon the verbally inspired letter, instead of leading into 
 philosophical abstractions, goes directly home into concrete 
 history and sits there as a judge, and that the Ancient and 
 even the Most Ancient past comes out of the night of time 
 towards a new day as the mind opens to the Revelations of 
 the New Jerusalem. 
 
 XL VIILTHE BOD Y OF MAN. 
 
 The body is the letter of which the mind is the spirit. 
 The spiritual part by which alone we feel and know that we 
 have bodies, and are anybody, must be omnipresent in 
 physiology and psychology, or the lower reality has no true 
 life in it. The use of the body to the spirit is the end and 
 final cause of our embodiment. 
 
 God is a Man and the only Man. Hence the theological 
 science of the human body is its veriest science. 
 
 Revelation claims the human body as a subject to be 
 entered by theology. Man is made^r the image and like- 
 ness of God, and when he is regenerate he is in that image 
 and likeness. If the body regarded as the human form is 
 for a divine image and likeness, all its organs, members and 
 viscera, are orderly component parts of the design of that 
 building of flesh which is for use in this world as a preliminary 
 temple. 
 
 The "beginning," in Genesis, must be followed out in the 
 Word of God ; for nowhere else do we find sanction for 
 
200 THE NE W JER USALEM ^ 
 
 considering the fleshly frame as a dwelling for the soul, and 
 a designate house of the Lord. We are at no loss for the 
 mention of the principal organs which enter into our 
 revealed constitution. They are ready to our hand, and 
 each endowed with a theological import. The head, the 
 heart, the reins or kidneys, the lungs, the bowels, the stomach, 
 the belly, the shoulders, arms and legs, the hands and feet ; 
 the breast, the loins, the generative members ; and the five 
 senses ; and last, not least, the bones. The Word makes all 
 these parts and organs, and indeed the body itself, canonical ; 
 and claims them for natural thought for conduct ; for spiri- 
 tual thought for doctrine, and for spiritual enlightenment 
 about the Revelation which contains and owns them. 
 
 If our organism can have a theological use for the mind, 
 there must be a theological gate into anatomy, physiology, 
 and psychology. In other words, the structure and functions 
 of the body can be studied as a branch of spiritual instruction. 
 At present they are studied principally for two objects- (i) as 
 a ground for medical and surgical education, knowledge and 
 practice ; and (2) as science for its own sake, to build up the 
 fabric of knowledge, and complete a mental survey of nature. 
 In the Word, however, where the organs are spoken of, we can 
 have no such limited purposes ; for we have with us every- 
 thing that is human. Whatever there is in man, good or 
 bad, is flesh in his body, and the tendency to the leading 
 incarnations of his life and character is given in the seed of 
 that body that begets him. Hence his drama of existence 
 is written and prompted in every organ, nay, in every organic 
 thought. Already out of this fact general principles of 
 knowledge are gathered applying to the human race, and to 
 no other, as that the heart is the word for the affections, and 
 the head for intelligence. These names for spiritual things 
 belong to humanity alone. Comparative anatomy and 
 physiology show comparative faculties analogous to those of 
 man ; but no problem of the soul, no regard to theology, 
 occurs primarily in the investigation of animal similitudes. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 201 
 
 They are a rich outlying province when the central realm is 
 admitted, and when its truths are at work. 
 
 The sciences we are considering, after the labour of 
 thousands of years, consist of valuable stores of carnal facts, 
 elicited to a great extent by scientists working independently 
 of medical practice, and chiefly for the second object before 
 stated, namely, love of knowledge. The knowledge gained 
 is a large estate, and it is a question, What faculty of mind 
 can show right to it by worthy use and administration of 
 so splendid a property ? At present materialism is in undis- 
 puted possession ; and in alliance with medicine, itself en- 
 dowed and established by State patronage and protection, 
 Matter as a first cause of man is a national scientism 
 almost as the Church of England is a national eccle- 
 siasticism. 
 
 The gate whereby Theology enters the sciences of the 
 body of man is already given in the fact that man is to be 
 an image and likeness of God ; and finitely to correspond 
 to the infinite Creator. This law of Correspondence, 
 an omnipresent image-and-likeness-law, descends through 
 every degree of his being. It means that his soul is the 
 first given correspondence, reserved in its three degrees, 
 celestial, spiritual and natural ; that his spirit is to follow in 
 act and life ; that his will and understanding are to be 
 images and likenesses, or correspondences, by behaving as 
 such ; and that there is to be a spiritual body within him 
 corresponding to his natural body. If this be so, then every 
 natural organ is full of Uses, and has a spiritual organ 
 within it uniting it to correspondent faculties next above it ; 
 and by private degrees of ascent to the soul and the Creator. 
 So considered, theology will be at home in physiology. 
 
 The first recognition of this must be effected by leading 
 instances embodying universals. These are at hand, as 
 mentioned already. And consider, first, the LUNGS. 
 
 The Spirit of men is embodied in their breath and breath- 
 ing. What is this breathing but a momentaneous corre- 
 
202 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 spondence during wakefulness to thinking ? If the reader 
 observes, every intention of thought modifies his breath to 
 suit itself, and to carry to the soles of his feet, and to the 
 crown of his head, the peculiar opening and shutting, ex- 
 pansion and contraction, inspiration and expiration of the 
 lungs. By these ratios he weighs and estimates himself 
 in every thought every second ; and proves, or approves 
 himself. This is the chief bodily spirit in man ; a true 
 consideration, an entire bodily understanding of his moving 
 case. The second and lesser bodily spirit is the air breathed 
 in and breathed out. This carries the man into the world, 
 and is the sphere of his whole bosom and its loves, his 
 bodily contribution to the Zeitgeist. The correspondence of 
 thought with breath, whereby man breathes good or breathes 
 evil, breathes peace or breathes slaughter, means well or 
 means ill, is the perpetual union of the soul with the body, 
 and is ultimately the spiritual body itself which lives after 
 death and becomes the permanent life and character of the 
 individual. For the spirit has a respiration of its own, the 
 result of the spiritual state acquired by all the respirations of 
 the will and understanding in the natural body. 
 
 Here we have in the first new function of our mortal day, 
 in our first breath leading to all breathing, one gate by 
 which the whole body is in close relation to the Author and 
 Giver of Life, Himself the Infinite Spirit, whom we are to 
 " worship in spirit and in truth." 
 
 These correspondential functions of the lungs, obvious as 
 daylight, are unknown and unteachable, unless we have a 
 belief in the higher term, the spirit, and an interest in the 
 moving fact that we are always transmitting our ruling love 
 by its spirit, breath, or intellect, into our persons, and making 
 them into its image and likeness. 
 
 Theology is in sole possession of this domain of the 
 lungs, which embraces the whole organic body under the 
 whole conscious and more organic mind. 
 
 The HEART corresponds to the affections by feeling them 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 203 
 
 in itself, as we correspond to those we love, and feel with 
 them. They are out of us and away from us, but we cor- 
 respond to them. The Heart makes love, because by Cor- 
 respondence of form and mingling it is Love. The affection 
 within it is in its own form, a Heart of Heart. It loves the 
 whole body, and by pulses or beats of love feeds it with 
 good blood. So it keeps alive all the organs of rebuilding 
 and purification. We say that it makes love ; for in itself it 
 is the highest organ of blood-marriages ; in its chambers 
 and beds effecting unions which are to enrich the body with 
 the choicest progeny of secretions, so creating digestion in- 
 the stomach, juice in the pancreas, general and universal 
 fluid wealth in the capillaries, and nervous joys thence to 
 the very brains. This is because all these things are 
 images and likenesses of a Love of which they are the 
 children, and to which in USES they correspond in the 
 most bodily, the most spiritual, and the most celestial 
 fashion. 
 
 Theology is the sole owner of this heart also, and claims- 
 all its sciences, spiritual and natural, as its necessary title- 
 deeds : it must feed upon them all. 
 
 So again, if the body is the continent and incarnation of 
 all that we are, the belief in what we are fixes what we accept 
 as the contents of our bodily selves. If we are material 
 stuff throughout, the words breath and spirit, heart, affection, 
 love, survive indeed in language, but have no other than a 
 carnal sense. If the organs have divine or unknowable uses, 
 yet they are of use to nothing we believe in, and their in- 
 struction only repeats our flesh. But if the Revelation which 
 teaches us that our spirits are ourselves is our faith, and that 
 love to God and man is their life, then these are the contents 
 which our bodies and members have to recognize in our 
 anatomy, and in our freewill to incarnate. 
 
 The Heart and the Reins are united in the Word. The 
 right side of the heart receives the venous blood from the 
 whole body, and with it the new chyle which feeds, and 
 
204 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 the lymph which vivifies the blood ; and these it mingles 
 and unites, and sends them through the lungs, in the capil- 
 laries of which they are purified in expiring, and in inspiring. 
 The blood returns from the understanding lungs to the 
 loving heart ruddy and arterial. It is received in the left 
 side of the heart. Introduction and association is the func- 
 tion of the right side : marriage is the function with the left 
 side, and also extends to the whole heart. For the heart is 
 the blood-maker ; as love, to which the heart corresponds, 
 is the maker and perceptive distinguisher of affections. The 
 heart enjoys in conjugium the central blood of the body, 
 because it is representatively the lord of life, and the head 
 of the love which is the life. By the strong muscles of its 
 affections it couples its humanities together ; and by the 
 same acts and deeds it purifies itself; and through the 
 coronary arteries and veins discards whatever is effete for 
 its intimate circle into the lower service of the body, where 
 it can still be useful and worthy. Thus the heart itself is 
 the mint that coins and stamps the golden blood, and gives 
 fortunes to all its brides. 
 
 The REINS or KIDNEYS in their office purify the serum or 
 watery element in which the blood consisting of globules 
 floats. Like every organ they have in them an instinctive 
 freewill of their own which incites them to their work. 
 This is made lively by the expansion and contraction which 
 they undergo as an individual personality of the general 
 movement compelled by the breathing lungs. The kidneys 
 breathe in the serum with the blood which it surrounds. 
 And their whole organic life is a miraculous machinery for 
 attracting the worthless serum with the worthy blood ; and 
 while the latter circles easily in its own right through nodes 
 of labyrinthine arteries, the stale serum, angular and lame with 
 chemicals, stumbles down into straight tubes and pits, and 
 is on the way out of the body. It is not the purpose here 
 to pursue in detail these functions, which the reader without 
 some knowledge of anatomy will fail to understand ; but 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 205 
 
 rather to indicate that there is a spiritual side to the human 
 form, in which the soul, spirit, or mind, will and under- 
 standing are made flesh. Being made flesh, however, these 
 organs, in their functions and judgments, reveal the fates- 
 and destinies of the higher faculties, that is, of the man 
 himself, when this corporeal frame is laid aside. 
 
 All the physiological knowledge that I have which tran- 
 scends the text books, is derived from the Treatises of 
 Swedenborg, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, CONSIDERED ANATOMI- 
 CALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND PHILOSOPHICALLY, and THE ECO- 
 
 NOMY OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, which I translated 51 and 
 48 years ago, and which I now read with wonder. The 
 great Swedish Physiologist, Prof. Retzius, at a meeting in> 
 Stockholm held in honour of Swedenborg as a distinguished 
 member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden, stated 
 that he (Swedenborg) had discovered nothing new in Physi- 
 ology. This is true in the same sense as that Swedenborg 
 has discovered nothing new in the Word of God, and also 
 as the Biblical saying is, 'that there is nothing new under 
 the sun. Discovery is one thing, and Revelation, which 
 has many kinds, is another. And I dare to affirm that the 
 ANIMAL KINGDOM above alluded to is a continuous revela- 
 tion of things previously unknown and unknowable, and 
 that it is preliminary to the Arcana Cazlestia, and to the 
 Heaven and Hell^ which are further miracles of divine light, 
 but not records of discoveries. 
 
 The former works are seeings of what the designs and 
 uses in the human body are, and Swedenborg, after the 
 amplest knowledge of his facts, is the SEER of them ; as he 
 also is of the spiritual world. 
 
 Now the seership of the intellect is the highest kind of 
 perceptive induction and deduction ; and throughout the 
 organs of the body of which he treated, he read them off 
 through these processes into rational explanations of their 
 uses corresponding to their forms, and of their times cor- 
 responding to the ages of man. Where Newton divined one 
 
-206 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 gravitation for this material world, Swedenborg saw a 
 thousand centres from organization to life, all held to the 
 one Centre, the Lord. 
 
 Listen to the following from the chapter on the Kidneys 
 in the ANIMAL KINGDOM : 
 
 " As the blood is continually making its circle of life, that 
 is to say, is in a constant revolution of birth and death ; as 
 it dies in its old age, and is regenerated or born anew ; and 
 as the veins solicitously gather together the whole of its 
 corporeal part, and the lymphatics of its spirituous part ; and 
 successively bring it back, refect it with new chyle, and 
 restore it to the pure and youthful blood ; and as the kidneys 
 -constantly purge it of impurities, and restore its pure parts to 
 the blood ; so likewise Man, who lives at once in body and 
 spirit while he lives in the blood, must undergo the same 
 fortunes generally, and in the progress of his regeneration 
 must daily do the like. Such a perpetual symbolical repre- 
 sentation is there of spiritual life in corporeal life ; as like- 
 wise a perpetual typical representation of the soul in the 
 body. In this consists the searching of the heart and reins , 
 which is a thing purely divine " (n. 293). 
 
 In a note to this passage Swedenborg says : " In our 
 doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall 
 treat of both these symbolical and typical representations ; 
 and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not say in 
 the living body only, but throughout nature, and which 
 correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things, that 
 one would swear that the physical world is purely symbolical 
 of the spiritual world : insomuch that if we choose to express 
 any natural truths in physical and definite vocal terms, and 
 to convert these terms only into the corresponding spiritual 
 terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth or theo- 
 logical dogma in place of the physical truth or precept ; 
 although no mortal would have predicted that anything of 
 the kind could possibly arise by bare literal transposition : 
 inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 207 
 
 other, appears to have absolutely no relation to it. ... This 
 symbolism pervades the living body." 
 
 The kidneys, ureters and bladder are the lowest of the 
 chemical organs. They administer purification and rejection. 
 Of those persons who constitute this province in the Greatest 
 Man, Swedenborg says : " They are of such a genius that 
 they like nothing better than to explore and search out the 
 quality of others ; and there are some who desire to chastise 
 and to punish if only there be some justice in the case. The 
 functions of the kidneys, ureters and bladder, correspond 
 to this. They explore the blood thrown into them, to see 
 if there be any useless and hurtful serum there : and they 
 separate such from the useful, and afterwards chastise it ; 
 driving it down towards the lower regions ; and on the road 
 they agitate it in various ways. These are the functions of 
 those who constitute the province of the kidneys. . . They 
 explore and search into the quality of others ; what they 
 think and what they will ; and live in the desire to find 
 occasion to condemn with an especial view to chastising. . . 
 Many of this kind when they lived in the world were judges, 
 who then rejoiced in heart when they found cause which they 
 believed to be just to fine, chastise, and punish. ... By this 
 passion these spirits communicate with the hells; but by 
 the justice of the cause, which they seek for before they 
 punish, they communicate with heaven. On this account 
 they are kept in the province of the kidneys " (Arcana, 
 n. 5381-84). 
 
 "From these things," says Swedenborg, "it may appear what 
 is meant in the word by Jehovah searching and trying the 
 reins and the heart, and by the reins chastening, as in 
 Jeremiah. Also by the following, Jehovah that triest the 
 reins and the heart (xi. 20). Jehovah that triest the just, 
 and seest the reins and the heart (xx. 12). In David, the 
 just God trieth the hearts and the reins (Ps. vii. 9). Thou 
 hast possessed my reins (cxxxix. 13). I am he who trieth 
 the reins and the heart (Apoc. II. 23). The reins signify 
 
208 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 spiritual things, and the heart celestial things : the reins those 
 things which are of truth, and the heart those which are of 
 good. For the reins purify the serum, and the heart, the 
 blood itself. Hence trying, examining and searching the 
 reins signifies these processes applied to the quantity and 
 quality of truth, or of faith, in man. That this is so is 
 evident in Jeremiah : Jehovah, thou art near in their mouth, 
 but far from their reins (xii. 2). And in David, Behold thou 
 desirest truth in the reins (li. 8). And my reins chasten 
 me during the nights (xvi. 7) " (Ibid. n. 5385). 
 
 The nights are spiritual states of sadness and reproach 
 when our evils and impurities come home to us, and motives 
 and resolutions to a better life can receive strength from 
 above. 
 
 In these remarks on some organs in the Body of Man I 
 do no more than indicate the grand future uses of the sciences 
 of anatomy and physiology. A small part of them is suffi- 
 cient for medicine : a still smaller part for surgery. On the 
 other hand the whole field is a basis for the Theology of the 
 New Church. It is significant that the knowledge of anatomy 
 has been gained principally by anatomical specialists, with- 
 out immediate regard to the healing art or to any obvious use. 
 Experts indeed are indignant at the thought that the men of 
 the experimental laboratory have for an end the low motive 
 of helping the cure of diseases. Anatomy and physiology 
 for their own sakes is their motive. In Homoeopathy, the prin- 
 cipal System of Medicine in this century, Hahnemann 
 relies on abnormal symptoms and states as indications of 
 disease : and requires only regional anatomy as a plane of 
 location for his corresponding drug symptoms, that similia 
 similibus curentur may be enacted. Schiissler also, the 
 inventor of Biochemical Medicine, has slender need for 
 Anatomy and Physiology in their breadth and facial expres- 
 siveness. Armed with his twelve cell-salts he aims to rectify 
 the mineral man, redundant, or deficient, in chemical constitu- 
 tion. He would have us properly crystallised. Beyond this, 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 209 
 
 the general form and make of the patient, and the use of his 
 organs in health, do not interest him. His drug divinations, 
 if angular, are admirable in practice, and mark a peculiar 
 genius for estimating the balance of important weights in the 
 body. Biochemistry seems to be an instinct of the atomic 
 theory striving to enter organization, and implying definite 
 attractions, relations and compositions of atoms as last 
 resorts, all working in life as a mysterious place just above 
 physics. It is singular that Swedenborg inaugurated a Bio- 
 chemistry in his doctrine that the formal atom of sea-salt is 
 the mineral cross upon which the blood globule is built. He 
 essayed to figure this atom as he had done with the atoms of 
 many other chemical substances in his early work on the 
 Principles of Chemistry. 
 
 Anatomy and Physiology developed as mere knowledge, will 
 then be a valuable possession for the coming JEon, but at 
 present their hypotheses end in no theory, and in nothing 
 but uncertain metaphysics, with the Unknowable always at 
 hand. The estate passing to spiritual faith as a successor 
 becomes a basis to the new Revelations now given to the world 
 by commissioned Swedenborg. 
 
 He has himself given first the physiological light which 
 makes the organs available for spiritual use. He has given 
 a human theory of the uses of each by which it is a piece of 
 spiritual man. And next he shows the magnitudes which 
 amplify organs into whole humanities, as the provinces of the 
 Greatest Man. For even in this world, every society is an 
 organic man ; also every kingdom ; the whole world too : 
 and in every organic man, all the organs are present to con- 
 stitute the individual, the social, and then the general per- 
 sonality. The same is the case in application to the spiritual 
 world which is marching upwards to the heavens ; and to 
 heaven itself which is continually fed with new members, 
 expects them individually, and thereby and in itself, of the 
 Divine mercy, is continually marching onwards in perfection 
 towards the Lord. 
 
210 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 This fact involves two things ; first, that every man belongs 
 to some province in the greatest man, and is on his way 
 thither when he dies : he is new food for the celestial brain 
 if he belongs to the highest heaven : for the heart or the lungs 
 if he belongs to the middle heavens ; for the abdomen if he 
 belongs to the lower heavens : and he is received for his 
 own province by the constant attention all the way of the 
 assimilating personalities of the Greatest Man. 
 
 Dr. John Worcester gives a diligent survey of this awful 
 subject in his Physiological Correspondences ; Boston, 1889; 
 those who desire instruction should read it. All who die, 
 and who are to nourish heaven by their spirits, and to be 
 there, require to put off the earthly, and to put on the 
 heavenly. The Greatest Man, in passing them to their homes, 
 consists of ministering angels and spirits who correspond to 
 the functions of spiritual purification, adaptation, and fitness ; 
 and by instruction, guidance, and trial, the new-comers are 
 led, as new food is led, into the spiritual flesh and blood of 
 the kingdom. They pass according to their fitness through 
 few or many disciplines of association. All that can at 
 present be said will be found in this admirable Book, which 
 tells of the pilgrimage of men from earth to heaven. It flows 
 in a stream of divine order from the first reception of newly 
 departed spirits by the lips of the Greatest Man, to the 
 final blessedness of home in the heart, all the way through 
 personal organs which are love and truth, promoting and 
 correcting ; angelic individuals and societies being the only 
 organs here. 
 
 The purpose of this section is to indicate that human 
 anatomy and its integral physiology reserve their main use for 
 the Church, in which they will be a basis of spiritual know- 
 ledge by enabling the mind to dwell on the uses of organs 
 by which they correspond to the personalities of the individual 
 and of all the incorporations of man from the least to the 
 greatest. This carries the lesser proposition that all sciences 
 so far as they are not applied to immediate arts will be 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 211 
 
 similarly the property of the New Jerusalem, according to 
 that law of the Word, " There shall be a highway out of 
 Egypt into Assyria, and Israel shall be the third with Egypt 
 and with Assyria." Israel is the spiritual Church. 
 
 There is yet another realm in which a knowledge of the 
 body is a necessity. No true metaphysics can be attained 
 without it. For it alone makes all thought personal. This is a 
 large subject which cannot be entered upon here. Swedenborg 
 availed himself of his seership into the human economy to 
 lay bare mental secrets which have been inscrutable to the 
 learned since material science began. Speaking of what can 
 be gained from this source he says, " All the things that can 
 be known of the will and the understanding, or of the love 
 and the wisdom ; therefore which can be known of the soul 
 of man, may be known from the correspondence of the heart 
 with the will, and of the understanding with the lungs." 
 This algebra, in which the process is from the known to the 
 unknown, yields the true metaphysics ; from the anatomy of 
 the body reveals the anatomy of the living mind. The result 
 is stated at length in The Divine Love and Wisdom, Part V., 
 as it was revealed to Swedenborg. "Those things which 
 correspond to each other," says he, " act similarly, with this 
 distinction, that the one is natural and the other spiritual." 
 By working the above correspondences he has even shewn 
 how the analogue and basis of Freewill is organic in the 
 peculiar blood-life which emancipates the lungs from the 
 dominion of the heart, and enables them to breathe or think 
 either with or against the affections. The body is therefore, 
 as stated at first, the Letter of which the will and the under- 
 standing are the Spirit. 
 
 XLIX.THE WELLS OF ABRAHAM. 
 
 The Patriarchs preceding the Jewish Dispensation, begin- 
 ning from Abraham as an idolater in Chaldea, represent the 
 
2i2 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 Lord in His human nature about to make His humanity 
 divine. This, by which the Word was fulfilled and made 
 flesh, was progressive, and took place from the inmost, 
 highest, or celestial degree, through the middle or spiritual, 
 to the lowest or natural. The celestial was represented by 
 Abraham, the spiritual by Isaac, and the natural by Jacob. 
 Love, Wisdom as the rational principle of Love, and actual 
 life or Use, are plain correspondents to these three systemic 
 denominations. 
 
 It is said in Genesis, referring- to Isaac as the Divine 
 Rational, "And all the Wells which his father's servants digged 
 in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped 
 them up and filled them with dust. . . . And Isaac returned, 
 and digged again the wells of waters, which they digged in 
 the days of Abraham his father, and which the Philistines 
 stopped up after the death of Abraham ; and he called their 
 names, according to the names which his father called 
 them" (xxvi. 15-18). 
 
 The Wells of waters of Abraham, stopped up and filled 
 with dust by the Philistines, even at first sight suggest a 
 second meaning. This is clear also in the Word because it 
 is said further on that the servants of Isaac dug in the valley, 
 and found there a well of " living waters " (19). Abraham's 
 wells, spoken of as not in a valley, are more living waters 
 than these by virtue of the signification of Abraham and of 
 Isaac. 
 
 The internal sense of this part of Genesis treating of the 
 Lord's Coming through the humanities signified by the 
 Patriarchs is of divine significance, and in the mere virtue 
 of it as communicated in the Arcana Ccekstia, it confirms 
 the mind in the faith that the Old Word is as the New Word, 
 a direct Will or Testament of God. 
 
 As Abraham signifies the Divine Love in assumption, his 
 servants are truths of love ministering, and the wells of 
 waters they dig are doctrinal knowledges of charity in the 
 field of the Church. They are dug because instruction is 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 213 
 
 necessary about them, and reception or attainment is implied. 
 In the spiritual church signified by the servants such doc- 
 trines are not natural fountains, but spiritual obedience to 
 truths. The Philistines filled the wells of waters with dust. 
 This signifies the conversion of these truths into mere hear- 
 says and knowledges ; the conversion of them from hand- 
 maids of love into matters of external faith. In this case 
 they become a mere system of knowledges, scienfia cogni- 
 tionuniy and are not commanding truths. " In the Ancient 
 Church and afterwards those were called Philistines who 
 paid very little heed to life, but very much to doctrine, and 
 who in the succession of time even rejected the things which 
 belong to life, and as the essential of the Church they acknow- 
 ledged those which belong to faith, which they separated 
 from life. These are the uncircumcised Philistines. Dust 
 signifies terrestrial things, that is, the loves of self and of 
 gain. Those who are called Philistines, that is, who are not 
 in life but in doctrine, obliterate interior truths by earthly 
 loves, that is by love of self and of gain, and can do no 
 other than fill up the wells of Abraham with dust. These 
 loves induce darkness, which extinguishes the light of truth 
 from the Lord. The love of self and of gain suffers nothing 
 of truth from the Divine to come near to it. Still its Phili- 
 stines are capable of glorying in, and boasting of, their 
 knowledge of truths ; they even preach them with a sort of 
 zeal. The fires of these loves are what kindle and excite ; 
 and the zeal is only the fervour of these fires. This is plain 
 from the fact that they can preach against their own veriest 
 life with the like zeal or fervour. These are the terrestrial or 
 earthly things, by which the Word itself, which is the 
 fountain of all truth, is stopped up" (see Arcana, 3412, 
 
 3413)- 
 
 " The Wells of waters which they digged in the days of 
 Abraham " signify the goods and truths which were known 
 and received among the ancients. These truths are at this 
 day obliterated, insomuch that scarce any one knows that 
 
2i 4 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 they once existed, and that they could be any other than 
 what are taught at this day. They were, however, quite 
 different. They held representatives and significatives of the 
 celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's Kingdom, thus of 
 the Lord Himself; and they who understood these were 
 called wise ; and they were wise ; for so they were able to 
 speak with spirits and angels. . . . And as the angels were 
 in the representatives and significatives of the Lord's King- 
 dom, in which there is nothing else than celestial and 
 spiritual love, so the ancients had also doctrinals which 
 treated solely of love to God and charity towards the neigh- 
 bour, by virtue of which again they were called wise. From 
 these doctrinals they knew what charity is, namely, that it is 
 the affection for being of service to others without any 
 design of recompense. Also they knew what the neighbour 
 is to whom charity is due ; namely, all in the universe, but 
 still each with discrimination. These doctrinals at this day 
 are utterly lost, and in their stead we have doctrinals of faith, 
 which the ancients made nothing of in comparison. Who 
 knows at this day what that charity is which is void of all 
 self-seeking, and averse to all that is for self's sake? Who 
 knows what is meant by the neighbour ; namely, every 
 individual with discrimination according to the quantity and 
 quality of good belonging to him ; thus good itself in a 
 supreme sense the Lord, because He is in all good, and all 
 good is from Him, and the good which is not from Him is 
 not good, however it may appear to be so. And as it is not 
 known what charity is, and what neighbour is, so it is not 
 known who they 'are that in the Word are signified by the 
 poor, the miserable, the needy, the sick, the hungry and 
 thirsty, the oppressed, widows, orphans, captives, naked, 
 sojourners ; by the blind, the deaf, the halt, the lame, and 
 others. The doctrinals of the ancients taught who these are, 
 and to what class of neighbour, and thus of charity, they 
 belong. The whole Word in the sense of the letter is 
 according to those doctrinals. When the Divine passes 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 215 
 
 down to the natural plane with man, it passes into such 
 things as works of charity, with discrimination according to 
 genera and species. The Lord also spake in this same way 
 because from the essential Divine. As in Matthew, " The 
 King shall say to those on the right hand, Come, ye blessed 
 of my Father, possess the Kingdom prepared for you ; for I 
 was an hungered and ye gave me to eat, I was thirsty and ye 
 gave me to drink, I was a stranger and ye took me in, I was 
 naked and ye clothed me, I was sick and ye visited me, I was 
 in prison and ye came to me" (xxv. 34). The works here 
 recounted signify universal genera of charity, and in what 
 degree they are good or belong to good ; and show who are 
 the neighbours towards whom charity is to be exercised. And 
 the Lord in the highest sense is the neighbour ; for He says, 
 " In so far as ye have done it to one of the least of these 
 my brothers, ye have done it to Me " (40). 
 
 " By Isaac returning, and digging again the wells of waters 
 which they digged in the days of Abraham his father, is 
 signified that the Lord opened those truths which were 
 known and received among the Ancients" (Ibid. 3418). 
 
 " He who lays stress on the literal sense, believes that if he 
 gives bread to a hungry person, takes outcasts or vagabonds 
 into his house, and clothes the naked, he shall on that 
 account be admitted to glory, and to heaven ; when yet these 
 are mere external acts, which the wicked may perform to 
 merit heaven. But the hungry, the afflicted, and the naked 
 signify those who are spiritually such ; different states of 
 misery incident to man, who is the neighbour towards whom 
 charity is to be exercised " (Arcana, 3419). 
 
 The averment by Swedenborg of truths lost out of life, 
 and of ancient wisdom departed, cannot but seem unwar- 
 rantable to an age which reckons itself new and great in the 
 possession of stores of fact and knowledge in which former 
 ages were deficient. But however clever humanity may be 
 at this time, it has a short memory, and this is becoming 
 shorter and shorter as time, more and more crowded with 
 
2 1 6 THE NE W JER USALEM 
 
 events, makes one thing obliterate another in our passage. 
 The railway car of change from state to state favours no 
 possession of sense, and we live in an age of its sensations. 
 Now Swedenborg mentions two heads in which the Ancients 
 did surpass us. One will not be denied if it be conceded 
 as a possible gift. By perceiving the correspondences of 
 things the first men were not sensualists, but were in 
 equation with the angels and with the spiritual world, and 
 as men and spirits are both generically the same people, and 
 had then the same language, namely of correspondences ; 
 so they spoke with each other by these real hieroglyphics, 
 which were not Cadmean letters, but inward creations to the 
 soul, and outward creations to the senses. Nature, at first 
 coincident with man, was thus intended as part of the Book 
 of God, and the Word comprehended it. 
 
 So far those who do not deny primeval intercourse with 
 heaven may accept the position that truths inspiring life, 
 which are now forgotten, were still extant in the Ancient 
 Church. But when we come to the second clause, that the 
 truths or doctrinals concerning charity have existed in the 
 past, and do not exist now, an age so busy with " charities " 
 may well be exercised in examining so apparently merciless 
 a statement. 
 
 The clue to its justification is that a true religion is the 
 fountain from which true charity proceeds, and that those 
 who are deficient in this religion, and from mental or 
 hereditary causes incapable of it, are the principal objects of 
 the charity to which the Ancients attended. In the better 
 ages I do not speak of Churches in decline, but in up- 
 rightness they had the asylums and hospitalities that were 
 needful in their own way; and they gave benefactions where 
 they were wanted. But the other charity 'was the main 
 thing, and automatically ensured not the short but the 
 ample commons of human kindness. 
 
 It is obvious that if charity be another name and state 
 for love, the amount and quality of it is measured not by 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 217 
 
 the number of persons housed, fed, clothed, and otherwise 
 provided for, but by the genuineness of the love which does 
 this work also, and of the religion which enjoins and con- 
 secrates the love. And if charity or love needs discri- 
 mination with regard to its objects, it is clear that the 
 wisdom that regulates and administers the love must be 
 present and in operation. Without religion neither of these 
 factors exists. And if charitable institutions were a hundred 
 fold as plentiful as they are, without the charity which is 
 love, and the administration which is wisdom, the country 
 would still be restless with a woeful remainder of wants and 
 incurables in all classes. 
 
 The charity that is wanting is thus more needful at first 
 for the charity givers than for the charity receivers. " There 
 are two great starvations in the modern world : religious 
 starvation, and irreligious. The religious starvation comes 
 directly from the dogma that faith without works is saving. 
 This shuts up the very heart of man, and starves it. Loss 
 of open and true understanding, paralysis of brotherhood 
 follows. Irreligious starvation, of which Atheism is the final 
 name and ground, is pinched and starved by self-satisfac- 
 tions and their liberalities ; it believes pre-eminently in itself 
 and its lucre, and that giving matter, whether money or 
 bread, supports the people, and shall be called from old 
 usage, charity. It would feed the hungry voter until he is all 
 mouth with no end to it : a hydatid. The sure debasement 
 and depravation of charity, confining its field of operation to 
 poverty, ensues of necessity from the starved hearts or wilful 
 minds of these two opposite genera of charity givers. 
 
 The relief of poverty and material distress is then one 
 thing, and love of the neighbour, the injunction of the 
 second great Commandment, is another. In our day, when 
 there is no faith or inward truth left on earth because there 
 is no charity, Society, for its own sake, lest ruin overtake it, 
 minds its workhouses, and prisons, and private individuals 
 establish almshouses and benevolent institutions to supple- 
 
218 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 ment the debt of the trembling State to its members. It 
 might seem as if Relief is to become universal, and that 
 all of us are to be fed by trade regulation. This goal is 
 one solution of the first question, the relief of poverty and 
 of material wretchedness. It is apart from religion, and 
 the lust of power goes to and fro within its still limited 
 den as a roaring lion. 
 
 The second thing is the love of the neighbour. This is 
 not a product of legislation or of the State, but as the 
 Second Commandment it proceeds from the First ; from the 
 Love of the Lord thy God with all thy soul, with all thy 
 mind, with all thy heart, and with all thy strength. These 
 two loves embrace the Commandments. 
 
 All men will admit that you are bound to love only that 
 which is good in your neighbour. It is evident that Jesus 
 Christ, who gave these two new Commandments, sanctions 
 no other love than this. Your neighbour's evil ways, vices, 
 crimes, you are not to love, but only what is good in him ; 
 and you are to love this because by your selective brother- 
 hood he and you both become better. Good itself which 
 is God is the First Commandment ; good derived which is 
 a good man and every good man is the Second; and good 
 possible in those who are naughty is included in the love 
 of the neighbour. The good of punishment and of 
 separation comes in here when needed. Good possible you 
 may long presume to exist though your eyes have not the 
 magnifying glass of sufficient charity to see the small germ 
 of it that may save what is left of an unfortunate character. 
 One germ that does not hate will do it. 
 
 Because there is in the world a new Religion based on 
 these two Commandments, and it is received intellectually 
 by a few, and because John, or Charity in act, has tarried 
 till this second Advent in some simple hearts irrespective 
 of new religious knowledge, therefore we cannot say that 
 there is none of that Love of the neighbour which is enjoined 
 by the Lord. If there were none, the Lord would not be 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 219 
 
 here, He would have no remains to vivify, and the world 
 would die. But it is the doctrinals of Charity which are 
 absent ; and being designed as the commanding and public 
 truths of the Church, they are nevertheless not to be found 
 in it. I do not here speak of the New Church as an 
 ecclesiasticism, but of the National Church, in which, 
 according to Swedenborg, the true Religion should be 
 made known. 
 
 If we look round upon our Societies, the superficial 
 appearance is that the world grows steadily worse. Un- 
 paralleled enormity of crime in private stalks abroad as a 
 moral principle ; as a conviction. Suicide is epidemic. 
 Murder reddens every newspaper. Insurrection against all 
 establishment, and notably against individual freedom, is 
 universal. Malignant pulling down of old things, and 
 efFacement of old landmarks of right and wrong, are sops 
 to restless multitudes maddened by demagogues. The 
 classes of Society are rhymed and marshalled by the 
 rhetorician against the masses. The black heaven is starred 
 over with atheists, banefully constellated in parliaments and 
 ministries ; and they are mighty men, men of a name. 
 His Holiness the Pope is at one with us here. On 
 March 2, 1894, he told the members of the Sacrefl College, 
 in referring to the condition of the Church, that the need 
 of making its beneficent action universally felt was urgent. 
 For " all the old conceptions of honesty, justice, authority, 
 liberty, social rights, and social duties have been over- 
 thrown." This has taken place in spite of the Catholic 
 Church, in spite of the other Churches, and of the Non- 
 conformities. A religion has died out : the consummation 
 of its j^Eon has come. That consummation is written on 
 the walls of our dying century in lust of pre-eminence at 
 any price, in new greed and dishonesty in all classes, in 
 luxury demanded for, or by, everybody, in power conferred 
 especially on manageable ignorance, the clay of the dema- 
 gogic potter ; in the notable absence of religion from 
 
220 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 journalism ; and in the deadness of ecclesiastics on all 
 hands to the signs of the times. 
 
 Where then is there any sign of that love of the neigh- 
 bour which loves only what is good in him ; associates with 
 that good, brings it out, and being its brother, fosters and 
 supports it ? Ask anybody you like who is not professedly 
 .godless, and he will endorse the above statement, even 
 although he reserves reasons to mitigate it. 
 
 Evil also associates with evil, and the evil of the com- 
 panion, who is no brother, and no neighbour, is the charm 
 and wealth of him. The present society is the first 
 standing army of the bands and regiments of evil. The 
 most opposite lusts shake hands, and hating each other 
 with deadly hatred, yet form great battalions, medical, 
 legal, ecclesiastical, proletariat, to destroy the good of the 
 neighbour. 
 
 These things are known in the city, in the Church, in 
 municipal life, and are accepted with a shrug of the shoulders, 
 and a placid humour about the situation. Being patent and 
 universal, there is no need to discuss what is an admitted 
 state of things, and no worse for one person than for another : 
 only keep thee, my comrade, from present legal crime ! It 
 may not be legal crime long, and then you can enjoy its 
 virgin parterre. 
 
 But if social silence and concealment make it difficult to 
 know that there is no love of the good that is in the neighbour 
 in our world of society, for the sure process is that at a 
 certain stage evil is called good, yet another magnitude 
 of object-lessons restates the case most expensively. How 
 of the relations of nations to loving that which is good in 
 each other, and nothing else? First, Where is the love? 
 Let armaments speak. Let fear speak ; fear which occupies 
 the seat of love rejected. Europe is dying of its battalions : 
 industry and homes are dying with it. What nation in modern 
 times has ever loved what was good in another nation because 
 it wasgood. Emotions of admiration for chivalric exploits have 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 221 
 
 been, but they are not born of love and they lack its sub- 
 stance as not being sanctioned by Christ's Religion. We 
 pause indeed over splendid passages of history, but they are 
 not to the point of admiring righteousness in them. The 
 smallest causes exasperate nation against nation. All the facts 
 demonstrate that these large humanities in varying degrees 
 hate each other, and that this, with their self-love, creates 
 larger and larger armies and navies, with destruction of each 
 other more fiercely in view every decade. And as in private 
 hatreds, and political hatreds, so they can form alliances 
 between totally opposite and warring evils, for temporary 
 menace to other peoples, the most hated for the moment. 
 These are the national friendships of evil. 
 
 This year an interviewer sought M. Zola for his opinion- 
 specially on Anarchism : What could be done to meet the 
 newness of the case ? The French Realist confronted the 
 fact that demolishing the present society with dynamite tran- 
 scended crime as being on the top of a diabolic temple, and 
 there transfigured into duty and conviction : in short become 
 a New Faith . Recognizing this, he said, that the only counter- 
 poise he could suggest was a New Religion ; were such a 
 thing possible. 
 
 There are two solutions, the one of which prepares for the 
 other. " Resist not the evil one," is a way of stating the first 
 necessity. We know all these bad things alleged against us ; 
 we are in the " science of knowledges " about them, in 
 scientia cognitionum. In our scientific age they can be 
 classified just like the species and genera in zoology or botany 
 or mineralogy. Yet we do not believe and confess them to be 
 evil otherwise than with the mouth. We do not accept it as 
 a truth of our personal salvation that they must be repented 
 of, and put aside ; and as a truth of our personal damnation 
 that we persevere in them. And if we acknowledge some- 
 thing of our " evil one," our heart's self, we do not use the 
 insight to accompany the accusing conscience from one 
 misbehaviour to another. Perhaps we 
 
2 2 2 THE NE W JER U SALEM 
 
 " Compound for sins we are inclined to, 
 By damning those we have no mind to." 
 
 We do not, as Sir T. Brown says, " dive into our inclinations " 
 with a purpose to overhaul and imprison them. This must 
 be done ; and if the Church, somnolent with faith alone, and 
 under the opium of the atonement, cannot waken sufficiently 
 to warn us, then a new responsibility rests on Journalism, for 
 which Carlyle predicted this use, to take the pulpit of 
 -ecclesiasticism into its offices. 
 
 Ceasing to do evil is the preliminary to learning to do 
 well. After this, in whatever field of life it takes place, a 
 plot of ground becomes more and more prepared for the 
 seeds of the New Religion. Its seeds are the truths which 
 can be refreshed into vigorous life by the wells of waters 
 unstopped by Isaac from the dust with which they have been 
 filled by the Philistines. The wells of Abraham ! Forget 
 not the translucent Word. The way to work the neighbour's 
 good is then to cease to work him evil. So the Lord be- 
 comes present in the faculties, and reveals as a new field what 
 the best thing of the neighbour's mind is ; for when you begin 
 to love him in this sense, the fire of it makes a light of 
 -charity in which you see almost all of him as a new creature. 
 You see the worth of him, and the sin of wronging him. 
 What beauties love reveals to a man in his sweetheart when 
 first he loves her. Carry this to the value you would have 
 of your neighbours if you loved them as the second com- 
 mandment enjoins. But this is not a given natural condition 
 like the other love ; but is strictly dependent on the keeping 
 of the first commandment of love to the Lord. 
 
 The immensity of the field of loving the neighbour, namely, 
 divine charity, can go as duty into a small compass, and 
 therein embrace all humanity with affection's own arms. The 
 kingdom is to come, "as in heaven, even so upon the earth." 
 "To the above," says Swedenborg, "I will add this memorable 
 relation. In heaven all who perform uses from affection for 
 use, by virtue of the communion in which they live, derive 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 223 
 
 as their portion that they are wiser and happier than others. 
 And to perform uses there with them is to act sincerely, 
 rightly, justly and faithfully in the work proper to the calling 
 of each. THIS THEY CALL CHARITY. Acts of adoration in 
 worship they call signs of charity, and the rest of offices they 
 call dues and kindnesses. They say that when everyone 
 does the work of his own calling sincerely, rightly, justly and 
 faithfully, the Community subsists and persists in its good ; 
 and that this is to be in the Lord, because all that flows in 
 from the Lord is Use, and it flows in from the parts into the 
 community, and from the community to the parts. The 
 parts there are the angels, and the community is their 
 society" {Divine Love, n. 431). 
 
 Here comes the use of being able to talk with angels, and 
 to learn how practical these brethren of ours are in regard to 
 honesty, and how wise we shall become when we accompany 
 their footsteps towards ever new uprightness. 
 
 Descending from these altitudes, we notice that no pro- 
 minent man, either ecclesiastic, or statesman, seems to have 
 any perception that a religion, once a spiritual power, but 
 now falsified in half the civilized world, and rejected by the 
 other half, implies a material alteration in the peace and 
 stability of mankind. And yet facts show that the loss of 
 religious influence over a community has alarming conse- 
 quences. The French Revolution and its Goddess of reason 
 is a proof and a prophecy to this effect. And it is only a few 
 weeks ago since a savage mob at Valentia assailed a body 
 of pilgrims on their way to Rome, and did bodily violence 
 to many ; including dignitaries of the Church : this in Spain, 
 now, like France, beset by Anarchs; and with its Old Religion, 
 once a power, now dead within it. The greater the .domin- 
 ance of a religiosity in the past, the greater the revulsion 
 when it is found out, and its influence is at an end. What- 
 ever things it has protected and held upright will come to the 
 ground, unless a new power at the same height, namely, in 
 the religious sphere, supplies the needful spiritual pressure. 
 
224 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 To pursue our point, the most ostensible though not the 
 leading anarchs are defiant Atheists. They are proof on 
 the smallest scale, namely, in the individual, that the highest 
 and greatest pressure of the past cannot be taken off, and the 
 man-serpent not swell with all his self against his abhorrence 
 of vacuum, and with all his venom for the loss of his old life, 
 and the direness of being his own god. 
 
 To a spiritual view it is clear that all the evils we have 
 characterized are due to an end of the Church, to the con- 
 summation of the First Christian ^Eon. Minds accustomed 
 to exact observation in natural things should know that there 
 are mental dynamics and pressures as well as physical. You 
 cannot diminish respect for so secondary a power as rank 
 and station in any country without calling up brutal manners 
 with angers and dishonesties in the lower and once 
 respectful strata : their earth will quake from diminished 
 pressure. You cannot cashier one chamber of legislature, 
 and leave the other unchecked, without the survivor, whether 
 higher or lower, becoming a pit of passions with its worst 
 men stirring them, and restraint of the nobleness of probity 
 gone. Reasoning from such common things, it is easy to 
 see that by leaving out God who governs the world, and by 
 discarding the Word declaratory of His existence and right- 
 eousness, you debauch out of the mind the highest custom 
 of reverence and obedience, and that the residual lord of 
 himself explodes sooner or later, individually and socially. 
 
 So a dead Church cries out in the rational mind for 
 nothing less than another and a living church to keep the 
 race of man to divine order. Even Comte saw this, and 
 believing in his way in yEons, he invented the church of 
 humanity, whose religion it is to worship our noble selves 
 past and present and especially future ; and let it be added 
 in "positive" justice, to behave ourselves with increasing 
 propriety age after age to justify our creed in our own god- 
 hood. This recognizes the necessity of an ^Kon, though 
 without a God to begin with, or an immortality as an end. 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 225 
 
 It is not however what we want. It is not a pressure on us, 
 because we may be taller than it is : for it turns out to be 
 our Tom, Dick and Harry exaggerated by apotheosis. 
 
 But as we have seen in these pages throughout, we have 
 not to invent a religion. It has pleased the Lord to make 
 His Second Advent in the Word of both Testaments which 
 in their spiritual sense reveal His Godhead ; and also declare 
 that man's regeneration, his good character in the divine 
 sight, is the condition of heaven in him here and hereafter. 
 This, in those who accept it, and strive to live it, supplies 
 again the pressure of responsibility, justice and judgment 
 which has been lost by the inanity of the Old Church. The 
 new Revelation has in it the sure and certain hope of the 
 regeneration of the world. The dogma of justification by 
 faith and imputed righteousness gives the world up as a city 
 of the plain of uniform sin perpetually forgiven and per- 
 petually sinning till the day of judgment. The doctrine of 
 the truths of charity applied to life regenerates the individual 
 man, and gives him a character which can bear the light 
 and heat of heaven, and by power of inherited good and 
 continual regeneration this will realize on this earth, where 
 no Last Judgment can ever take place, the kingdom of the 
 Father who is Christ. 
 
 But when shall these things be ? Well, they are already, 
 in the people who accept the new commandments in life as 
 the only means of salvation. But when shall they be in the 
 world, and as a New Earth answering to the New Heavens ? 
 Plainly, only as the majority which votes for charity by 
 enacting it, is confronted by a minority which embraces 
 all our old "evil ones," and by its love makes inroads 
 upon these unfortunates and begins to turn many of them 
 round. We do not now however speak of numerical majori- 
 ties and minorities, because not of opinions but of lives. 
 The number of charities that are in a man counts. Christ had 
 infinities of charity in Him. When the entire universe voted 
 for evil, and One Man stood against it, that universe sue? 
 
 p 
 
226 THE NEW JERUSALEM 
 
 cumbed and sank down. So miracle is again involved. 
 And does it not seem impossible that into such a world as 
 ours a veritable Religion should again enter as a conqueror 
 of our Hell and Death, without great and successive miracles ? 
 The divine part of it has come by mercies ineffable, and 
 as God's work greater than miracles ; for miracles are over- 
 rulings of ordinary levels by higher reasons. But in the 
 divine there are no miracles and no corrections. It is our 
 human that needs and scans the miracles. And as the first 
 Advent came with such, so the second Advent comes, but 
 with spiritual miracles instead of natural. The natural 
 miracles in both Testaments are given, and they are the 
 loving clouds and veils in which the spiritual miracles to 
 which we shall awake seem to be reposing. In consequence 
 of miracle, great multitudes followed Christ, many sought 
 to touch Him ; He healed all manner of sickness and all 
 manner of diseases in them : He fed them in their thousands 
 with natural bread of His creation : He healed individuals, 
 and restored their lost senses : He raised the dead. He 
 gave the power of healing and casting out devils to His 
 disciples and apostles. So these miracles are to be repeated 
 on a higher plane. And it will be a discipline in the Word 
 to receive divine instruction of who are the blind, the deaf, 
 the palsied, the fevered, the possessed, the raging men among 
 the tombs, the halt, the lame, the poor, the sick, the hungry 
 and the thirsty ; the naked, and those who are in prison. 
 The truths of doctrine become the active eye or intellect for 
 applying exact charity to those who are spiritually in the 
 states signified by these incapacities, will be the Lord's 
 miracle workers ; and the descent of the New Jerusalem 
 to the earth in successive multitudes of the hungry and 
 thirsty, will be the miracle. It may take place in long ages, 
 or it may come rapidly, the Marriage of the Lamb. It is 
 sure to come when His Bride has made herself ready. From 
 a desk of small work it seems to me that the turning-point 
 will not be so long in time. The evils permitted to-day are 
 
AND THE OLD JERUSALEM. 227 
 
 such in enormity and magnitude, the hopes of the Devil and 
 Satan are so mighty, the invasion of humble and simple souls 
 appears so imminent, that the supreme gravity of circum- 
 stance seems to be reached, and the Divine may be about to 
 bow the heavens and come down. 
 
 If this be attended by national humiliations, a way will 
 still be prepared for conscience and its Author again to reign; 
 for Patriotism to look to Godliness and not to glory. 
 
228 PERSONAL IDENTITY. 
 
 L. PERSONAL IDENTITY. 
 
 Wherein does personal identity lie? We answer, it is 
 the name of each individual as I, I containing in 
 perpetuity all that the man is, was, or will be ; and all that 
 he can be. It is by no means to be confounded with 
 memory, but is an instant witness of individual existence 
 communicated to mankind. As conscience with men, where 
 it exists, is an abiding monition of right and wrong, so 
 consciousness, which is identifiable with Ego, I, is the bare 
 subject at the other extremity of the person. It is a sense, 
 and lives in the sensual nature, which itself is an everlasting 
 factor in man. 
 
 It is not the same with the memory of the past, for in 
 that case it would be incomplete unless the whole thick 
 dictionary of memory were carried about in its hands. It is 
 the smallest of things ; the personal point, hominis punctum 
 naturale. Conscience is the still small voice speaking from 
 God ; Ego, I, or consciousness, is the small shrill voice 
 pleading one's self. In it a man always re-asserts, not 
 remembers, that he is, and that I am he. It is not 
 needful that he should be conscious of the former stages of 
 his existence to constitute him an individual man : his early 
 childhood he has never known ; his ego then existed, but not 
 the mind that could claim or express it ; but the bystanders 
 knew that he had it, and would jealously appropriate it by 
 his all-peculiar self-will. Of the rest of his existence in 
 detail his outward memory preserves but little, but his ego 
 grows stronger in this oblivion, often in consequence of it. 
 Look at an old man, and see how little allowance he makes 
 for childhood and boyhood : his friends, to make him toler- 
 ant, have to remind him of the forgotten fact that he was 
 once a child and a boy. Of love affairs among the young, 
 how he can call them "stuff," until some good wife reminds 
 
PERSONAL IDENTITY. 229 
 
 him that he was once made of that stuff, and went through 
 its play. 
 
 Memory therefore is not necessary to personal identity ; 
 not even one grain of it ; though indeed much of it accom- 
 panies the man, and is the memory of his various faculties, 
 welling up, like the faculties themselves, from his basic ego. 
 But the ego is no faculty, but for him an ever-present point. 
 It is not however an uncompounded thing, but is the whole 
 concrete man, body, parts, and passions, from moment to 
 moment. In other words the man is continuously himself. 
 He applies it to memory, as to all the rest, and says, I did 
 this, I thought this, I loved this, and so forth. It is the bond 
 and bound of his nature. 
 
 You identify a man by his person, and by your memory, 
 and his own ; but he identifies himself by his Ego, and by 
 nothing outside it. He is, and knows it. 
 
 Personal identity is often in apparent abeyance, as in 
 dreamless sleep, but leaps into its central seat the moment 
 the sleeper wakens. It can be in apparent abeyance in mad- 
 ness, when the mind is sometimes divided in itself, and the 
 man is beside himself, and reflects more than one ego on the 
 broken surface. But this is disease, as it were again a 
 sleep. Seldom however does the madman give up his ego, 
 but fastens it to his disordered faculties. If he seems to 
 give it up, another ego indistinguishable from his own claims 
 to dominate him, and he is said to be possessed. Some- 
 times a voice unlike his own speaks through his person, and 
 the personal pronoun may not be used, as is often the case 
 in narrative writing ; but some ego is understood by refer- 
 ence under the third person. These are collateral cases, and 
 have little to do with the matter in hand. 
 
 The chief difficulty that has been felt arises out of the 
 common identification of memory with personality. Of this 
 we have already spoken. Many a thought and many an act 
 among the smaller elements of this life is utterly forgotten 
 by the man, and yet it is plain that each such element has 
 
2 3 o PERSONAL IDENTITY. 
 
 contributed to the formation of his character. Volitions 
 and deeds of larger import may be likewise forgotten, and 
 yet the person is laden with them and responsible for them ; 
 and of wrongs done it is no justification before any law that 
 they are not acknowledged by the perpetrator. The ques- 
 tion is whether he, a personal ego, did them, not whether he 
 recalls them. Here we transcend the first statement of ego, 
 and find that it is to be identified also with acquired cha- 
 racter. Waking or sleeping, well or ill, sane or insane, this 
 never leaves a man, because it is the man : the only definite 
 article of him. 
 
 The Ego is therefore a progressive entity, and gathers 
 more as life goes on : gathers it not only or chiefly into 
 memory, but into essential substance, by its own power 
 converting it into such. 
 
 " But the greatest demonstration that memory is not the 
 root, is furnished by death, and the life beyond it. At death 
 the natural brain, which is the seat of all memory and mind 
 here, perishes, and all thought and recollection subsisting 
 in and through it, is impossible : that is to say, without a 
 natural cerebrum and cerebellum it is impossible for man 
 to think naturally or to utter a word of any natural 
 language. These brain organs are gone, and no event of 
 the past life can be recalled naturally, though it may be 
 represented for the purposes of adjustment, not from the 
 memory, but from the character. This latter is permanent, 
 indeed everlasting; and after death spiritual faculties, 
 organs and tongues in which it is enshrined in the good, 
 and incorporated in the wicked, and which have been 
 forming here on earth, carry forth the character or ego into 
 its result. The persons have no recollection ultimately of 
 who they were on earth ; if they had they would haunt earth 
 still ; but each of them has the personal /as his possession : 
 and no sense of any break in it. This is personal identity, 
 and all that is requisite to complete it. The possession of 
 character in this is entire. It carries no burden of the 
 
PERSONAL IDENTITY. 231 
 
 past, but a statical moment is the whole of it. Time is 
 gone. 
 
 What is this miraculous I, so small that no thought has 
 seen it; so embracive that it is the mortal and immortal 
 man ? John Morley, a man of thought, has made a guess 
 at the answer, and though wholly wrong, is not far wrong if 
 he will let himself be put right. He regards personality, 
 the ego itself, as a delusion. It is impossible with such a 
 despotic presence as yourself to get quite away from the 
 truth. Personality or ego is not a delusion, but the opposite 
 to it, a real appearance, and if claimed as absolute, then 
 for the claimant it is a delusion, but a permanent one. 
 Felony committed on it does not alienate it, for were it 
 abolished, there would be no character and no man. Where 
 from disorder it is even fragile, the man is mad and out of 
 reckoning. 
 
 But whence comes ,this true appearance which is personal 
 life? We can only say that it is from God, and is His seal 
 on every human soul. Yet still it is an appearance. The 
 world's misunderstanding is that man is alive on his own 
 account ; that his life is his own ; that for his time he is an 
 absolute being. The correction is that there is only one 
 life, namely, the divine life; and that man of himself is 
 dead ; but his created form and faculty is an instrumental 
 recipient of the divine life, and in perpetual reception of 
 this, most involuntary reception, man is alive. The appear- 
 ance is communicated to him that his life is his own in order 
 that he may be a man ; and the knowledge, through Religion, 
 is also communicated, but by instruction from without, that 
 his life is not his own, but his Maker's, in order that know- 
 ledge may by slow degrees end in practical acknowledg- 
 ment of the real truth. Thus appearance and reality can 
 co-exist in him. 
 
 A word more about Memory, which we may seem to have 
 slighted. There is an inner man and an outer ; a spiritual^ 
 man and a natural. Each of these has a distinct memory. 
 
232 PERSONAL IDENTITY. 
 
 The deeds done in the body are represented in both 
 memories ; but with no failing in the spiritual. They are 
 constantly translated thither from the natural memory into 
 a living record ; into the book of the man's life. This 
 Swedenborg, from revelation, calls "the internal memory." 
 Things are not there as mundane events, but transformed 
 into states of good or evil ; as constituents, or, it may be, 
 fixations of the character. By them man is judged ; they 
 are not his recollections but his ruling love ; they are his 
 veriest self. This memory therefore is his finite I am, his 
 ego, his love, his formed character ; and whether he be a 
 good man or a bad man he is receptive of a personal 
 identity in it, and loves either himself, or his Creator, with 
 an everlasting affirmation of his own being as a separate Ego. 
 The Angel still talks of I with an after-confession of Not I, 
 but Thou, O Lord : the Satan asseverates I with appro- 
 priation of a divine gift to himself. 
 
 A right conception on the subject of personal identity 
 may enable some good friends, but self-puzzled thinkers, to 
 believe more easily in the fact of personal immortality. 
 
 At the end the question of the natural man in the doctrine 
 here propounded will revert continually, Who is Who ? To 
 which we reply that in the spiritual consideration to which 
 the subject leads, the final question for each man is, not 
 Who he is, but What he is. From this what, this quale or 
 qualification, he receives hereafter a real name in which his 
 identity abides ; and therefore he is never a nameless entity 
 but a deeply nominated man. By this, his spiritual fellows 
 on the good side know him and hail him as Adam knew 
 the creatures and named them. Substance of name is here 
 given instead of shadow. Moreover, let us add for the 
 consolation of our clinging nature, loath to part with 
 mortal times, that all memory of the past as it was trans- 
 acted in this world is immortal, though not reproducible 
 at will ; that the whole natural mind is indrawn as a sleep, 
 and kept as an ultimatum and foothold ; and by repre- 
 
THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 233 
 
 sentatives in series of any length the man can be let down 
 into it, and brought face to face with all his former states ; 
 but for divine uses ; therefore when God pleases. So even 
 in this memory identity has a central throne, and the 
 man is again himself for ever, and for ever. He is forced 
 on trial to say, I was it all, and I did it all, and / result. 
 Unfailing mercy meets him there, and makes the best of 
 him. And then for the most part natural memory ceases 
 into long oblivions. 
 
 LI. THE CHANCES AND LIKELIHOODS Of 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 Inasmuch as Jehovah God has created and made the world 
 and all good things that are therein, and that He governs all 
 good and bad things by His omniscience and omnipotence, 
 for divine ends, the question of finding out and knowing His 
 works and ways, which in their ultimate result are the world, 
 proposes itself as the question of questions for science. 
 
 What scientific mind, and what prcesupposita in it, can 
 enter upon this knowledge ? The world enters our senses 
 in infancy as a theatre of disconnected sensual facts. 
 Things occur, inextricably connected with our human 
 affections. The first experience of solidity is a mother's 
 breast ; the first warmth sensed is a mother's warmth. 
 Human knowledge is the beginning of knowledge ; and 
 this fate pursues man in every career through all action and 
 speculation. Himself is his field and his ring-fence, and 
 what he gradually makes of himself is his possibility. All 
 his knowledges are his intentional action and reaction with 
 his fellows ; all are his ruling loves and good or evil 
 ambitions in unsuspected forms of thinking : all are ways of 
 advancement " steeped in affections." 
 
 For the most part the sciences occupy the field of sensual- 
 ism first given in infancy, but with infancy no longer 
 
234 THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 
 
 permitted in it. The first humanity lies dead around the 
 scientific cradle. A bird of larger brood has shouldered it 
 to the ground. Yet the field of sensualism is vast and of 
 itself ordinate, and faculty after faculty of knowledge can be 
 developed through it. The world can thus be accounted 
 for from end to end by amour propre working by means of 
 the reasons, the pros and cons, of sensual things. Sensual 
 intuitions start up readily on the way ; new sciences, and 
 cunning arts, are born ; and man is full-fledged with new 
 faculties of his own creation : new broods of intelligence. 
 
 The result is imposing. " Men run to and fro and 
 knowledge is increased." It is an immense pyramid with 
 no point. Or if it has a point it is a culinary one ; an end 
 of making the mind gloriously comfortable in the kitchen of 
 nature among its own Egyptian flesh-pots. 
 
 The sensual immensity of things is however on any showing 
 worth all the trouble that can be honestly bestowed upon it ; 
 and if man will not and so cannot now make use of his 
 God-given powers, the secondary powers that he himself 
 engenders are left to him, and he has work for them. 
 Sensual facts, and their inferences, inductions and deduc- 
 tions, remain, and are the plane which is explorable. It is 
 a big study, bounded only by the "flammantia moenia 
 mundi." The Atheist, Lucretius, has given us these words, 
 and they mark a practical limit for knowledge, as they con- 
 tain, by correspondence, a true doctrine of the girdle of 
 space ; and almost divine its "cherubic" character. 
 
 There is in fact a great gulf fixed between the possible 
 knowledges of godly science, and of godless science ; a gulf 
 for the most part undiscernible at present ; because the better 
 and nobler science is scanty as yet ; is not recognized where 
 it appears ; and the light of it is darkness to the ways of the 
 voluptuous senses. The warmth of it also is hateful to them 
 as destructive of their progeny. 
 
 But not to rest in general propositions, let us take an 
 example from human physiology. The body of a man is 
 
THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 235 
 
 simply the house of his soul, with all its faculties, love, 
 intellect, reason, senses, incarnated in it in this world for 
 his time ; and the organs the body contains are derivations 
 from these sources, and principiates from these principles. 
 All the currents in the body, and it is a cosmos more final 
 than the great world, are influx and reflux, carrying and 
 representing spiritual ends of life, and realizing them 
 momentaneously. In this body the man's life is building 
 up the human form which will be his for ever. Starting from 
 these faiths of certainty, God-given, and making them into 
 the scientific faculties through which perforce, and not 
 perchance, you view the human body, you will have a 
 Physiology, sensual indeed, for the body is of sense, yet not 
 limited by the senses, but descending by degrees of order 
 from the soul, and with each faculty sought for in it, and 
 when the science is attained, represented in it. The 
 "flammantia moenia corporis " are then the doors by which 
 the life enters, and this life constitutes the body for know- 
 ledge as the image of God. 
 
 In the meantime, before this faith is given you, the dead 
 body has to be explored by all common and uncommon 
 manipulation, and the facts of form and connection must be 
 elicited from age to age ; for the sensual sciences must be 
 learnt first, or real objects for thought would not be present, 
 and the mind would not be in its nature which is its earliest 
 basement and existence. Observe however that nothing but 
 mere facts, and the knowledges closeabove them, belong to this 
 field, and that nature like a cope of stone bounds it in. It 
 may be cultivated into surprising minutiae and details ; but 
 reasons and principles are out of its legitimate scope. At 
 the highest and lowest it is pure naturalism. There is no 
 bridge between it and the sphere in which all that accounts 
 for and inhabits the body is situated. No anatomy or sen- 
 sual physiology touches the love, intellect, reason, imagina- 
 tion or senses, in, for, and from which the body exists, as 
 any other than atom-work and matter first materially and 
 
236 THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 
 
 then sensually energizing. Such science, if it insists on 
 exploring these things on its own account, does not proceed 
 many steps before it denies the soul. Indeed, at this day, 
 this is the general mind of physiological and so-called psycho- 
 logical investigation. Nothing can come of it but ingenious 
 surface after surface proclaimed as depth and height : as it 
 were cock-crowing of a morning which is deepening mid- 
 night. 
 
 Of course it is obvious for the theist to say, What evid- 
 ences of design are here ! What textures of realized plan ! 
 In a word, what amazing organization and maintenance ! 
 What divine Wisdom ! Truly there is nothing to cavil at in 
 this ; and God is manifestly at work in it all to those who 
 believe in a God. But such Theology is a head with no body 
 to it : with no middle truths to bring it down to human care 
 of intelligence. The plan, design, organization, is for some- 
 thing. What is it for ? Obviously, it is to build and launch 
 the vessel of a man. And what is a man, but a capacity of 
 loving and being wise if he pleases by means of intellect, 
 reason, imagination, sense, heart, hands and feet ; by all his 
 soul and all his strength ? No physiology and no psychology 
 solves its accounts without showing how these ends are pre- 
 pared for and rendered reasonable in the human frame. With- 
 out this achievement, the living man is left out, and though 
 God is posed, it is as an organic Designer meaning something 
 by his elaborate work, but what that something may be, is 
 physiologically in darkness. The " argument from design " 
 explodes on these terms. The body is a fortress which has 
 abandoned its keys to nature and evolution. The above 
 question therefore brings back the necessity for the missing 
 links, the missing " middle truths " ; so important in all 
 solid reason and thinking. What then is the preparation in 
 the human structure for the faculties which the man gradually 
 gets and uses in his natural lifetime ? They are himself, 
 incarnated in him from top to toe. If they were not in him, 
 as the main and only things in his organization, we should 
 
THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 237 
 
 have no right to look for them in the genius of his body : 
 Being in him, and being him, we can ultimately be bound 
 to look for nothing else. Behind brains, spine, heart, lungs, 
 bowels, liver, kidneys, genitalia, there is no view but into 
 man's soul and spirit, and their attributes, faculties and 
 functions. To discern these in the organs, is to see what 
 the organs are, and what they are made for ; and by placing 
 the middle truths, to replace the argument of design, capable 
 of completion as long as science and intelligence live ; and 
 so to reclaim the fortress of the human body as an incarna- 
 tion of the soul : to reclaim it from being self-made, against 
 which David warns us, " Be ye sure that the Lord He hath 
 made us, and not we ourselves." 
 
 Is it possible to effectuate such a psychological physiology? 
 It is possible, on two conditions ; a knowledge of the forms, 
 fluids, functions and organic capacities of the body, so far 
 as this can be gained from the dead subject, supplies for 
 elementary science the realities of structure and the channels 
 of.influxion. Personal observation on our own living bodies 
 gives the first life to this corpus of knowledge. We know 
 that the brain thinks and wills, that the lungs breathe, that 
 the heart beats. These knowledges are put into the corpus^ 
 and it lives so far. Observation extends these knowledges 
 to all our external functions. " The light of the body is the 
 eye." It sees and notes what we are in its ocular measure. 
 
 But the mind has to be shown in its incarnation. For 
 this object no sensual knowledge is other than a basis. 
 The mind as answering to the body is an unknown entity ; 
 nor can it be known excepting by new truths about it which 
 are revealed doctrines. These make the mind as definite and 
 structural as the body itself; they reveal the mind as a 
 frame of spiritual organs with a spiritual order in them. 
 When these truths are admitted and received, there can be 
 parallelism and correspondence between the two realities, 
 the body and the mind; the embodied mind and the 
 mentalized body can coalesce in one doctrine. 
 
238 . THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE, 
 
 To exemplify this is beyond our limits. We can only 
 adduce our familiar instance that the understanding and the 
 will are to the mind what the lungs and the heart are to 
 the body. The one pair of organs performs the life-function 
 mentally which the lower pair performs physically. The 
 union of the soul and the body is the agreement or corre- 
 spondence between them. It is a bare statement, but can 
 be studied out in the psychological and theological writings 
 of its author, Swedenborg. The whole mind, shown by him 
 to be organic, in similar statements or doctrines stands over 
 against the whole body, and claims it as its instrumental 
 image ; as the mind claims the face as its working expression 
 or image ; but veritably-structurally. 
 
 Here we end one illustration of the " chances and likeli- 
 hoods " of merely sensual and material science penetrating 
 beyond matter and the sense of it even into the proximate 
 mental sphere above : and we may make the point-blank 
 assertion that no chance and possibility of the kind lies in 
 its powers, or opens to its ambitious future. 
 
 The immensity of natural science, and its increasing 
 difficulties, vote in our favour. If science had struck any 
 great central point either of doctrine or humanity, material 
 of real confirmations would be co-extensive with it, and 
 difficulty and size would be a decreasing phenomenon ; 
 whereas the reverse is the case, and the human frame and 
 its contents, Man and Mankind, are more unintelligible to 
 the present men from day to day. Their incessant business 
 at present is to undervalue and brush aside these contents. 
 
 A science that is advancing on the right road would 
 also have a conscience of admonitions of relevancy and 
 irrelevancy pursuant with it, clearing it of useless accumu- 
 lations of particulars, and warning it from mean fields of 
 search ; it would build with unhewn general stones as fit 
 for temples ; and not with rubble facts. It would not 
 mistake its huts for temples. This, we say, is a department 
 for the intuitional conscience ; a true Episcopal realm. 
 
THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 239 
 
 Such function at present is not performed ; and science is 
 squandered in accumulating dust, to choke " the Wells of 
 Abraham " with it as the Philistines always do. 
 
 Take another brief illustration of " chances and likelihoods " 
 from cosmical science. It also works on the godless track. 
 Matter, space and time are its feeders, and mechanics and 
 mathematics are the end of it. Now in spite of telescopes and 
 other wonderful instrumentation, and of geological exploration, 
 nearly the whole realm of heaven and earth lies beyond the 
 senses, and not within reach of natural reason. The firma- 
 ment with its suns is a woof of imponderables invisible and 
 incomprehensible, as it were the nerves of a creation suscep- 
 tible and unitary from end to end ; an inconceivable system ; 
 dark with excess of light ; and, for science, cold with incredible 
 heat. No natural-rational account of its maintenance is 
 possible. Imagination droops under the weight of bare 
 sense. Science, piling up knowledges, accumulates the 
 arrear of difficulties, but does not desire their solution. 
 What is the solution ? A world above nature with another 
 heaven and another earth to it, out of space and time, in 
 which the Divine Love is the sun, and the Divine Wisdom 
 is the light of it. A world in which God is enthroned, and 
 from which He creates by material correspondences the 
 framework of Nature, suns, planets, and their spheral spaces. 
 For this knowledge a doctrinal or teaching Revelation is 
 needed ; for of that higher world no man of himself knows 
 anything. Such a Revelation stands over the world below 
 as the Revelation of the mental faculties stands over the 
 organs of the body : and it tallies with the great cosmic forms 
 and forces, as things corresponding to those which it makes 
 known. God is the centre of it, and God is Love, and love 
 is heat indeed, and God is Wisdom, and Wisdom is light 
 indeed. The Revelation of God descending from these two 
 principles into science, meets the suns and systems which 
 are its subjects, and by the Divine life, infinitely one and 
 infinitely manifold, supplies the ends of nature, intelligizes its 
 
240 THE CHANCES OF SCIENCE. 
 
 causes, and substantiates its uses or effects. Love, intellect, 
 reason, imagination, sense, are vivified thus by Revelation ; 
 are humbled, ordained, and corrected by it : and the presence 
 of God with nature is rationally proclaimed. No fact is dis- 
 regarded ; for sensual facts are the basis ; the ultimate guid- 
 ing lines into which all Revelation fits ; the Revealer being 
 himself the Creator of all these sensual ultimates. They are 
 the knowledges, memorial and irreversible, which teach us to 
 walk ; and revelation coming down to us at last, is the way, 
 the truth and the life in our natural pilgrimage and scientific 
 wayfaring. 
 
 " Chances and likelihoods " for science in this field also 
 have no existence apart from a doctrinal revelation. 
 
 There is one subservient faculty which may be singled out 
 as having a strong sensual relation to science, namely, the 
 imagination, to which the world is a Poem. The first fire 
 and light of the senses come from it. We may call it their 
 infancy and delight tending to their manhood. It is deficient 
 in science now because men are afraid of it, having no 
 reverent faculties to control its waywardness, and keep it 
 within the cosmic lines of definite knowledges. And yet 
 without it science is lacking in its primitive genius ; in its 
 happiness of suggestion ; in its appetite and stomach for 
 hypotheses. Revelation aloneand its commanding influence, 
 can prescribe its lines ; and tame this wild horse into a real 
 Pegasus, with legitimate scientific wings. For considering 
 that the Works of the Allwise are for our speculation, imagina- 
 tion is not a faculty to be dreaded but cultivated by the 
 reverent mind ; under whose pressure it will put off gradually 
 the erroneous proclivities of sense, and penetrated by the 
 higher reason, be transfluent with orderly intuitions, and 
 ultimately itself wear the guise of spiritual insight. 
 
 Among the circumstances of the present mind we notice 
 its addiction to sensual things below, and its repugnance 
 to them above. It knows that they are the marks and 
 characters of reality wherever they occur, and demanding 
 
SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 241 
 
 them for this world, it gets rid of the other world by denying 
 them. But senses and external objects of sense, that is to 
 say, the human form and a sensible world, are as much the 
 necessity of spiritual as of natural existence ; and without 
 the appearances of space and time, of Cosmos, there is no 
 foothold for human beings. Ideas also, thoughts and 
 affections, are clothed with forms and shapes for ever, 
 even to the highest and most intimate degrees, for finite- 
 ness exacts this as a necessity. Love cannot be seen 
 nakedly, but it is visible to man as a Man and as a Sun : 
 Wisdom cannot be seen in itself, but it is essential Man, 
 and the light of Man ; and there is a visible and tangible 
 world answerable all through to these centres. This is a 
 matter of Revelation, and cannot be realized without it. 
 Here also Science on its own ground has no chances and 
 no possibilities. 
 
 Neither has it any such in regard to the internal series 
 of human history, which is contained in the spiritual sense 
 and Revelation of the Word alone. 
 
 The inference from these remarks is, that psychical physio- 
 logy to be completed, requires the descent into it of a 
 revelation of the organic mind, faculty by faculty : and that 
 cosmology requires the like information and infilling from 
 the revealed attributes of the World-Maker and World- 
 Ordainer. The Science of Correspondences, now given and 
 possible for man, is the supply of the missing link in both 
 these cases. And it is the supreme and noblest incentive to 
 the prosecution and exact knowing of all the legitimate and 
 useful natural sciences. Intuitions and arts now inconceivable 
 will be born of it ; for both worlds were made for it, and 
 are at one with its genius. Similia similibus intelligantur. 
 
 LILSOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 
 
 To the Christian the rights of man are limited by his 
 duties ; no power is his own in an absolute sense, but each 
 
 Q 
 
242 SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 
 
 has an owner and proprietor other than himself ; the man is 
 a co-proprietor; and his ownership is subordinate to that of his 
 Master in him. The Atheist is sole lord of himself; he is 
 himself his lord. This latter estate has some privileges, and 
 carries them out. Being his own, he can do, and does, what 
 he likes with his own. 
 
 Each several Atheist is in himself a seed, and is limited 
 by the size of his own will and courage. Original Atheists 
 of governmental capacity invent far-reaching powers appli- 
 cable to the fields of their life and action. And Atheism 
 is social and congregational, as what is not ? It becomes 
 therefore a world in itself, with a government, laws and institu- 
 tions. In this world, being absolute, it is a godless god, 
 and may do all it can. 
 
 Like every seed, its first and abiding aim is to transcend 
 its own limits, which are as wide as matter, but with a felt 
 narrowness co-extensive with the width. With a philosophy 
 of its own, it beats against the bars of death by the creed of 
 a social in lieu of an individual immortality. With peculiar 
 arts and sciences it works to lengthen individual life to any 
 degree beyond the present span. It would not discard a thousand 
 yearsas a properenjoyment of this world. And here some of its 
 bodily privileges come in. Judging by the rule of Autocracy, 
 it is a present king in Medicine. This is exemplified in 
 experimentation on the poor, to educate the life-prolongers 
 in their work for the poor and the rich. Being, as we postu- 
 late, absolute, that is to say, within the sphere of the mutable 
 social conscience, and having its own, and all our lives, 
 for an end ; it is in its own right, lord over the animal crea- 
 tion, and may do to the subjects of it whatever it considers 
 will conduce to its arts towards individual immortality. 
 All within social permissions, which mean at first laws of the 
 land, fellowship with profitable Christians, and at last through 
 Atheistic ages, respectability, whatever that may mean, as a 
 residual terminus. If cutting up men alive, as Erasistratus 
 did, could presumably lengthen the average of human life, 
 
SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 243 
 
 Atheism can perform it with a free hand. The social con- 
 science is the only limit here. None but an injudicious 
 Atheist would vivisect his own reputation. No one but an 
 unsocial Atheist would injure the reputation of his clan. 
 
 Yet, as regards the disposal of Life, Atheism has no more 
 undeniable privilege than the right of Suicide. The circum- 
 ambient social conscience may limit this right somewhat, 
 but it is there for occasions, and the Atheist has only to 
 balance the inconvenience and pain of the mortal immorta- 
 lity around him, against his own propensity, and to determine 
 accordingly. To be, or not to be, that is the question. His 
 life is his own absolutely, and the end of it is his own : if his 
 will is made up, there is no power to say him nay. Others 
 may kill themselves in madness or intolerable states when 
 their God is not audible. He can end himself in ordinary, 
 because he prefers it. Who is there to give the reason to ? 
 "There are no bonds in his death." There is nothing 
 after it. 
 
 Atheism has also an indefeasible right to patronize any and 
 every religion for the simple and the vulgar, on the way to 
 their emancipation into the atheistical light. It can be a 
 church-conservative, and make the lower orders powerless 
 for mischief to itself by keeping them in the darkness of 
 religion. 
 
 Next, Atheism, besides its care for its corporeal body, 
 its dignities and pleasures, looks after its own soul which 
 also is its body. It cannot do without a soul in present 
 Society. Looking round for a soul, it finds one made to 
 its hand in various religions, and lays claim to it. To 
 conscience, and the virtues which lie under it, and spring 
 from it, it lays strong claim. It is under no restraint 
 of commandments in annexing the good things of the 
 world, and conscience is the best of all things socially. 
 Atheism appropriates it in this sense, and walks proudly in 
 the light of its fellow-men, and of all men. This conscience 
 with its virtues is mutable from time to time, and Atheism 
 
244 SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 
 
 lives in its rigour when respectable, and in its relaxations 
 and indulgences in looser times. Being a law to itself there 
 is no denying this, and no helping it. So Atheism has a 
 time-soul. Its privilege here is to acquire it, and to turn it 
 to social gain. 
 
 Atheism demands a society not too remote at a given time 
 from the present codes. This it finds ready to hand in the 
 society around us, and which, though no product of atheism, 
 it is not prevented from appropriating as its soil. For 
 what principle prevents it from appropriating? Expostu- 
 lation is out of place with the masters of legions, and 
 atheism, not being an internal potentate, does not, except 
 through pressure from without, expostulate with itself. 
 It therefore adopts property, marriage, family, country, the 
 laws and the State, as social needs, and calls them its own. 
 And the more readily, because being now creations of its 
 mouth, it has only to bide its time, and utter them 
 differently, or repeal them, according to its new wills and 
 lights. Being itself its author and its throne, it is clearly 
 absolute frdm age to age in these material things. So 
 Atheism stands in social costume with the privilege of 
 appropriating from a wide world of religious modes, and 
 putting on from time to time from their stores what is 
 becoming. 
 
 Atheism has also the privilege of providing itself with 
 Goodness ; a mystical quality which it must possess. Here 
 its supplies are large. With its faculty of appropriation, 
 for it is the great Proprium in all men, it is the realm of 
 present free trade with all religions, and claims all their 
 goods, bartering in exchange for their commodity freedom 
 from the religions themselves which have supplied the old 
 corn and wine. It will keep the goods as long as it wants 
 them, and Nature will be its greater source for the next 
 supplies. 
 
 Atheism, being its own Truth, leans on nothing but itself 
 for truth in the general acceptation. It does not borrow 
 
SOME PRIVILEGES OF ATHEISM. 245 
 
 this from religions, but is a light unto itself. Here in its 
 avowal of its name its honesty shines. Nature is its truth, 
 and Science its high priest of nature. It loses nothing of 
 respectability by declining scientific commerce with religions, 
 for nature of itself knows nothing of them, and science is a 
 neutral field of knowledges. But it has its compensation 
 in a privilege of hypotheses and fancies all its own. With 
 these it fills its world : fills it so that no room is left for 
 theologies. These hypotheses it has stamped from of old 
 with its own absoluteness, and they are in general currency. 
 Such bills of sale are the eternity of the world ; the infinity 
 of matter, space and time ; the materiality of mind ; the pro- 
 duction of life from nature. These are its instruments 
 by which it brings within its grasp a multitude of corre- 
 sponding particulars. Their realm is its fairy gold minted 
 for its autocratic treasury into certainties. For Atheism 
 would be poor without its facts, and these are they. It 
 comes thus into the privilege of speculation and belief : and 
 appropriates eternity and infinity as peculiarly its own. For 
 who sees an end of its space, or notes a beginning of its 
 time. 
 
 Its absoluteness privileges Atheism to demand a Cultus. 
 For what other ground for Cultus or Worship has any reli- 
 gion than the affirmation of a supreme Being, and the Atheist, 
 individual in small things, and collective in great things, 
 is a supreme being, an absolute self? His privilege 
 therefore lies in the worship of himself. For hypothetical 
 endowment and establishment here, all the absolute little 
 selves make one general unselfishness ; like finite inches 
 making up spatial infinitude. 
 
 Atheism is neither King nor Priest, neither Order nor 
 Law, excepting as it is circumpressed by these passing 
 expedients : but the Atheist is an essential politician. The 
 hoary mountain of religion oppressing his breast makes him 
 glow and smoke and erupt, and the ground reverberates 
 with him. He is ruminating a world of new ages in which 
 
246 THE FERTILIZATION Of FLOWERS. 
 
 he himself will be all in all. No one as he is privileged for 
 the work of change, of abolition and demolition. The old 
 world is a tradition of mummeries ; its states and institutions 
 are the sum of them. He stands among them, but 
 is not of them. He holds no principle or affection 
 which respects them excepting as temporary needs minister- 
 ing to his honour, glory, and gain. He is a typical reformer 
 privileged to put on the present .as a garment, and to tear it 
 to pieces when he can. His following in all the above privi- 
 leges is vast, unbeknown to itself. For the wind of Atheism 
 is a strong wind, and can carry away churches and states 
 that are not founded upon the opposite Rock. And in the 
 present non-foundation, Atheism has its day of genius, and 
 a large privilege of hopes and expectations in the politic 
 secular belly of accidents, occasions and opportunities. 
 
 LIILTHE FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS 
 BY INSECTS. 
 
 Thinking much of the train of observations of the 
 illustrious Naturalist, Darwin, on the above subject, the 
 wonder occurs that they were not made before ; for the facts 
 are as patent now as the flowers and the insects always 
 were. Can it be that the common human eyes are holden 
 for an appointed time ; and that as there is a time for every- 
 thing, there is a time naturally for opening them ? 
 
 Note here a higher realm of life and organism conjoined 
 by ministry to a lower. The lower is enriched by it, gifted 
 with new colours and varieties as if so much light and chem- 
 istry were born of the warmth of the conjunction. Nor only 
 that, but the plant-systems are perpetuated and extended in 
 area where otherwise they might die out. Male and female 
 flowers would oftener be abortive, and engender no seeds, if 
 there were not winged go-betweens to carry the fertilizing 
 spur from the one to the other. It is a provision for fixed 
 
THE FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS. 247 
 
 natures which to a good extent cannot meet, or help one 
 another. Also for interblendings which ensure strength of 
 progeny. The plants know nothing of their providence, the 
 insects. The insects are on their own work intent, and 
 mean nothing by their uses to the plants. But both parts 
 reap the benefit of the unconscious good in the coming 
 season. There is mind in the distant background some- 
 where. 
 
 The matter does not begin here, for the vegetable world 
 at large is a ministry for the mineral, converting its surface 
 into new substances and varieties. The shedding of leaves, 
 and the universal death of trees and plants, conjoin mineral 
 and vegetable in a common mould from which natural life 
 begins, and without which the planet would be a bald stone. 
 The trees and plants themselves are like the birds and 
 insects here ; movable or removable, where the ground is 
 immovable. Accordingly, through their decease and fortunes, 
 every unctuous spot has some vegetable inhabitant, great or 
 small : iron Gellivara has infinitesimal lichen on its apparently 
 naked ore, and the ore, a film of iron mould to make this 
 possible. Marriage here ! The precipices grow pines in 
 their rifts, the crow dropping cones into their crannied 
 mould. It is hard to say where such ministration ends. 
 The crust of the earth keeps the hearth of the under world 
 warm ; makes a walled house of it, and precludes the escape 
 of its heat into space. Fire, if fire be the terrene centre, is 
 banked up into perpetual fire by the solid globe. Against 
 its nature, it becomes the footstool of fixtures. 
 
 These are facts and parables from nature. Facts because 
 they are true circumstances. Parables because they point 
 away to universals and stand under them. 
 
 We can dwell on very few of these, but with gratitude to 
 Darwin for the initiation. 
 
 Society may be a first illustration. Wherever there are 
 ranks and orders in a common body the analogy of things 
 at rest and things in movement obtains, and those at rest 
 
248 THE FERTILIZATION OF FLO WERS. 
 
 are ministered to by those in movement. Irrespective of 
 the problems of good and evil, this is the case in the social 
 field. The upper strata are superposed upon the lower in 
 planes of services or uses. Capital wandering over masses 
 of men, and looking out for sinews and capabilities, fertilizes 
 labour, and gives it forms, colours and varieties which the 
 working mind would not have otherwise ; gives it, because 
 capital is itself a mental order, a discipline which the insect 
 cannot give to the plant ; and in the discipline, a unity which 
 makes armies of industry out of mere individuals. This is 
 fundamental to Society. Other suggestions from the Dar- 
 winian beginning are easy. The ordinary services of man 
 to man, and of one rank to another, follow the same lines. 
 They all lie in the fact that a moving and designing upper 
 plane gives a lower plane a help and a chance which it has 
 not in itself. It is a set of endowments strictly descending 
 and communicated from above, and awaiting reception from 
 below. Divers orders or degrees are the modes and means 
 of the beneficence of Society, as it were so many falls and 
 forces of mutual service. And the ultimate service is that 
 the lowest plane is the foundation and the basis. Service to 
 it is therefore the due of the whole. The highest social 
 service is example, a winged thing which brings men's minds 
 together, and puts the senses of the lowest and the highest 
 individuals in rapport with their own internal things, con- 
 joining interior faculties otherwise remote from each other, 
 and impregnating and fertilizing natures, so that by good 
 sense they produce good works. It is needless to dwell on 
 this theme, because, with Darwin's unveiling clearly before 
 us, Society is one great expansion and illustration of this 
 law of the service of the lower plane by the ministry closely 
 above it. And so on, to the top ; which descends through 
 all ; and not only through all, but also to all immediately 
 when occasion requires : for the Queen can enter the cottage 
 in person, as the Monarchical State from its height comes to 
 it as Law, Order, and Security. Immediate therefore as 
 
THE FERTILIZA TION OF FLO WERS. 249 
 
 well as mediate is the inflow of uses where there are tiers 
 of membership with a head to them. Due honours and 
 dignities are one useful result. 
 
 It may be thought that a whole class or plane does not 
 stand in analogy with our so-called male and female plants, 
 but the analogy, though strict, does not follow literal lines. 
 The lower stratum becomes procreative and receptive mutually 
 all round by the influx of the higher. This develops mutual 
 events into the power of satisfaction. The natural man is 
 made up of wants, bodily, and the rest ; and the social 
 planes are enriched and vitalized, say fertilized, in them by 
 the planning wealth of the higher. The social dealing of 
 man with man expresses this reciprocal relation. It would 
 scarcely exist if society consisted of only one degree in any 
 of its faculties. 
 
 So much for the field and garden of men in one con- 
 sideration. It has also its earthworms continually worming 
 and animalizing its soil with a view to the upper services. 
 
 But the individual mind stands also in analogy with the 
 Darwinian parable. Think of what its faculties gain by the 
 descent of the higher into the lower. The naked eye 
 becomes a lens and a telescope clothed upon by the mind's 
 exclusive optics. And so forth throughout the round of the 
 cultivated senses. The free mind of art and invention wan- 
 ders over them, seizes their points of limitation and infirmity, 
 and its vitalizing genius extends their scope through instru- 
 ments that carry them into the depths and recesses of a 
 nature unknown to their naked organisms. In a word they 
 see, hear and touch in a new sense from the mind above 
 them. 
 
 It is always the truth of a higher mind which vitalizes the 
 good things in the stratum of a lower. The latter left to 
 itself would remain an obscure life of casual and unconscious 
 change incapable of reciprocations with itself, and in itself 
 infertile ; passive, like a lower class with no planned work 
 given it to do. We need not go through the mental faculties 
 
250 THE FERTILIZATION OF FLO WERS. 
 
 to illustrate so obvious a truth, though the working of its 
 problems has not perhaps sufficiently engaged the attention 
 of metaphysicians. But we know by common observation 
 that the mind lies in planes ; that sense, observation of 
 sensual things, induction from these, constituting sciences, 
 imagination, reason, intellect, and faculty of conscience, rise 
 one above another as at last a hierarchy of degrees. We 
 also know that in just order the higher influence the lower, 
 and that the highest have as their mission to supervise, con- 
 trol, and often to subjugate the lower, and keep them to 
 their places. The lowest deal with the present moment, 
 they see, hear and touch it. The whole of the upper 
 influences have wings beyond its time, and do not rest in it. 
 Mounting the scale, the higher you ascend the whole mind 
 is taken up into a present simultaneous with the future. 
 The inner man may be said to live justly, if not in, yet for, 
 the future : it is present in his cogitations. Here the 
 Darwinian Parable recurs. The passive things are visited 
 by the active of which they at first know nothing by them- 
 selves, and they get their own life from its life, and as the 
 mind is alive and habitual, they expect its advents, and 
 would die without them. 
 
 In this garden ail the healthy and profitable flowers call 
 aloud for their bees and their butterflies. They plead, My 
 Lords, help us. But en passant, a cardinal thing is to keep 
 the mental pile of faculties to their order of stratification, 
 and not to allow them to shift their places ; for whichever is 
 constituted at the top has the powers of the top ; the descent 
 and the force of it : for instance, if the conscience is put 
 below the senses, they become its instigators, it is sensua- 
 lized by them, and acts out their mortal behests. It is all a 
 thing of order and placing, and the natural parable still 
 holds of it whether for good or for evil. 
 
 The same remarks apply to the affections ; they too are 
 in planes one better than another, if we please to give 
 the highest rule. The other faculties are but their truths or 
 
THE FERTILIZA T2ON OF FLO WERS. 25 1 
 
 images. They penetrate all, because ultimately they are all 
 in all. They are selfish at the bottom : the infant loves his 
 mother as his convenient milk. Winged instruction, itself 
 coming from affection, supervenes in time ; and objects of 
 natural love are discriminated. The young creature feels that 
 there are others in the world besides himself, and takes 
 apparently from without the germ of a moral being. But 
 each plane of these natural loves called affections is content 
 with itself, in other words is passive, until the plane of induc- 
 tion above comes over it, and warms it with the beginning 
 of a new life. Truths, as we said before, are the winged 
 things in this garden, which when they are obeyed, make 
 the affections rightfully alive ; and hence the gardening or 
 Eden-making here lies in the obedience of the natural 
 affections to these truths of life. 
 
 Divine things are not averse to this true fable. The 
 Spirit of God hovered upon the faces of the waters, and 
 Creation followed, a creation from death towards divine life. 
 The Word makes frequent mention of such breedings ; and 
 where the man is receptive, there is no state so helpless and 
 dead that has not God helping and awakening it, and giving 
 his image away to it as hope, life, and ideal. Without this 
 inflow, whether received or not, there would be no existence ; 
 for man as a mechanism is dead in himself, motionless and 
 powerless ; but he is allowed to feel life as his own, and lives 
 in the feeling. The gift is final and inalienable, and not 
 subject to natural death. In fact, death is the beginning 
 and basis of it, and not the end or abyss. For without 
 death or fixity, which is nature, are not her laws fixed, 
 the immortal man would have no ressort^ no individuality to 
 lean against, and when he died, he would slip into nothing- 
 ness. Fixation is therefore the beginning of him, and it is 
 insinuated from this first life into every conscious state to 
 which he ever attains. The internal sense of the fable here 
 is divine help. Every faculty is brooded over, and from 
 being dead is made alive. Be sure also, following the par- 
 
252 THE FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS. 
 
 able, that orders of subordinate ministrations are in atten- 
 dance to convoy and convey the help where the death is 
 most urgently felt. He Who provides these succours for 
 the lilies of the field, teaches thereby that He provides 
 them for all willing mankind. He provides them imme- 
 diately, but mediately also by the higher and lower brethren 
 in either world. For all words now, following the Word, 
 come from without ; to the simple by wise simple teachings ; 
 to others, by other monitions from more recondite sources. 
 Ministration of the higher to the lower is thus universal for 
 men ; and ministration or service from the Highest is the 
 perpetual ground of it all. 
 
 So far the fact, parable and myth of the great Naturalist 
 holds good throughout. We say advisedly and repetitiously 
 fact, parable and myth ; for the natural world is all these 
 three in every detail. That nature is a fundamental fact all 
 men allow, and the idealist acts upon it like other men. 
 That nature is a teaching parable few allow, because few 
 care about it as such, and therefore will not go to the school 
 where they can learn it. That nature is a divine myth fewer 
 still will own. Yet as nature proceeds from an Infinite Love 
 and Wisdom, it images His attributes as men's works image 
 the minds of their authors. So the age of Mythologies is 
 past, because nature as a given fact will become our Mytho- 
 logy. But this, by gradual stages ; and future Darwins 
 unearthing pregnant hieroglyphs will help to found this 
 spiritual-natural science. 
 
 We have somewhat anticipated that other realm in which 
 the planes of mutual service, the higher ministering to the 
 lower, and the lower substantiating the higher, are still 
 exemplary necessities. Close above nature and resting upon 
 it there is a spiritual world which contains all the departed 
 from the beginning of times, and it is linked to this world by 
 consanguinities of affections. It has part of its life in our 
 very wills and hearts. It is a world potential and capable of 
 presences beyond all mortal imagining ; transfluent on its 
 
DARWINISM CARRIED OUT. 253 
 
 heavenly side from the One Lord throughout ; and minister- 
 ing, as was mentioned above, under His direction to our 
 humanity. It too all lies in planes of inductive affections, 
 with divine truths embodied also in ministries apportioning 
 and uniting them. Use and service are the keynotes of the 
 heavens. They are to our world what just and orderly 
 Society from above downwards is to itself, and what the 
 kingdoms of nature are to her order and maintenance by 
 creation. Infringing no freedom, if they find us dead they 
 would fain make us alive. All that is good in us, all the 
 secret thoughts and inspirations of our minds and hearts, pass 
 through them on the way to us, and are held by permission 
 momentaneously in their hands. However high they are, 
 we are their brethren, though our time-state is immeasurably 
 below their spiritual state. The interval, however, between 
 them and us is filled by a love and mercy which is adequate 
 to these necessities. Its wings as of the Holy Dove are 
 over us, and foster in us the heavenly implanted by the Word 
 in the earthly. 
 
 LIV. DARWINISM CARRIED OUT. 
 
 It is remarkable that Darwin, so acutely observant in 
 regard to one plane of fertilizations, should nothavegeneralized 
 its facts to the next orders of nature above plants and insects, 
 and inferred that birds and animals also function in impart- 
 ing fresh potencies to the lower series and to the atmospheres 
 and cosmos around them. He has indeed shown this of 
 earthworms, but there must be higher forms of it. For nature 
 repeats herself with variations suitable and correspondent to 
 all stages. Not much is observed in this field save that the 
 excreta and exuviae of living creatures, including man, enrich 
 the ground, as dead leaves and trees also enrich it. These are 
 farmers' truths. We may also note the treatment of seeds 
 eaten in pregnant berries by birds, in which the bird serves 
 
254 DARWINISM CARRIED OUT. 
 
 as a hothouse. But the fertilization of flowers by insects is 
 so much higher and more active than these functions that 
 one must expect that in the lives above insects other and 
 important planes of service are indicated. They are some- 
 what visible in the destruction of noxious insects and even 
 reptiles by birds ; also in one tribe feeding upon another ; 
 and in the limitation of the procreant animal world by many 
 " selective " means. This is a purging ministerium. But 
 what we intend is not so visible, and therefore easily scouted 
 by the senses. All natures have their own spheres about 
 them, and these bulge out into space. They keep the tracts 
 the creatures inhabit modified and comfortable for them by 
 emanations from themselves, and so by mediations : even 
 the breathing of living organisms by its motion and modified 
 air, and the more subtle pulsation of their hearts, have this 
 result. There is vegetable air, and air almost non-vegetable. 
 In spring and summer and autumn the air is variously filled 
 with effluvia from the varieties of the seasons. In the 
 Mammoth caves the air is almost mineral. Those who 
 have sensed it, know. There is also animalized air from the 
 effluvia of many animals together. But this is not the sphere 
 of which we are in search. It is a subtler influx impinging 
 upon external ether, and sending through it the impact of 
 the character of the animal itself : letting nature feel in her 
 depths that the creature is her ward and domestic. There 
 is a scientific view extant, that every vibration penetrates 
 through space to indefinite distances, as a blow is diffused in 
 sound from a vibrating drum. To those who hold this 
 theory the present subject may be commended for amplifica- 
 tion. The view of the benign effect of good animal spheres 
 commends itself to me for a practical end; as a plea against the 
 destruction of animal life, wild and tame, and especially wild, 
 wherever it can be prevented, or avoided. Kill nothing good, 
 except for good use ; kill nothing recklessly, lest the murder 
 destroy a harmonic medium, and make "a gap in nature." 
 Avoid extermination as a horror. I am prone to believe that the 
 
DARWINISM CARRIED OUT. 255 
 
 cruel and wasteful destruction of the buffalo has deteriorated 
 the climate and serenity of the United States, and that the 
 murder of the seal in the sea and on its islands, and of the 
 walrus and white bear, makes the polar cold more intolerable 
 and inhuman ; that the extermination of the whale, " the 
 king of the sea," will unship a Zooarchy, a spirit in the 
 waters, and ordained by a divine Neptune. 
 
 Darwin might have drawn some of these conclusions, and 
 lent his weight to the practical recommendation here in- 
 dicated. He might have done so had he, like Swedenborg, 
 believed in Ends and Uses as an evident chain and harmony 
 in things. Not believing in this, but in the force of life, 
 availing itself of circumstance, his fruitful "fertilization by 
 insects " yielded no inferences ; and in his hands it remains 
 as a comparatively solitary and thus piteous fact ; when yet 
 the two worlds of matter and spirit, earth and heaven, are 
 ready to accompany it with a shining train of corroborations. 
 
 "The Lord's Kingdom is a kingdom of Uses." 
 
 Confirmation of the above position which deals with the 
 invisible may be had from the earlier stages of the earth in 
 regard to development of life upon its surface : in particular 
 from the huge animal forms which then inhabited it. The 
 ground and the waters teemed with these monsters, and a 
 series of organisms led up to them and succeeded them. 
 We ask, why was this ? The question involves for its first 
 answer that a divine end existed for such creations. It is 
 illegitimate unless we may affirm that final causes produce 
 all the effects in nature. A further answer is that all pre- 
 vious forms are preparations for the human form; for Man. 
 How are they preparations? Analogously as the human 
 foetus is a series of organic stages leading to the birth of 
 man, to the perfected infant. Nature in this respect may be 
 regarded as a scaffolding of instincts, as one organism with 
 man at the summit. The special services or Uses ministered 
 by the advancing lower to the higher are a scheme of planes 
 
256 DARWINISM CARRIED OUT. 
 
 in a manner opposite and complementary to the services of 
 the higher to the lower. Not much can yet be seen or said 
 upon them excepting in the merest generalities ; for they are 
 not scientific but primarily theological entities, which how- 
 ever may ultimately enter science from above. However, 
 they are not yet in it. As we have already hinted, they are 
 ministries of life with its instincts and magnetisms pervading 
 mother earth and nature, and suiting her or making her 
 good for coming implantations. They are to the general 
 system what the mould and the soil are to the vegetable. 
 They are ground raised higher towards life, rendered quasi- 
 living, and made moveable, so that the brood of life finds 
 ready a floating nest from life to be reared in. This is a 
 function not depending so much upon decay, as in the 
 vegetable case, as upon perpetuation of exterior and lower 
 movement ; as it were a lung-function ; for the lungs move 
 all, and thus effectuate all things even in the body beneath 
 them. The eye for this function lives from faith in God 
 as always regarding ends, and therefore doing nothing in 
 vain ; and also as placing end within end in a wise or ever- 
 lasting series. It is a heavy argument, and of right over- 
 bears science. It is also to be observed that the vegetable 
 has a like preparatory magnetism with it for the cosmos ; 
 the mould being only its material ultimate. Such heavy 
 arguments, against which there is no appeal, are indispens- 
 able for the religious mind. Another of them is brought to 
 bear in the religious doctrine of the inhabitation of the 
 planets by men, women and children. No telescope con- 
 firms this, and there are strong scientific reasonings from 
 material heat and cold against it. Yet nevertheless it is 
 heavily true from enlightened religious faith, because the 
 human race, and a heaven formed from it, is the purpose of 
 the creation, and God does not make suns and systems for 
 anything less than the omnipresent end of ends. 
 
 To this it may be added for argument that universal 
 nature is telegraphic, teledemic, telepathic and telephonic ; 
 
SUN WORSHIP. 257 
 
 words derived from the root reA.^, distant, and implying that 
 the world and all that is within it intercommunicates, 
 and is effective from the first cause within itself. Of this 
 there are many suggestions if not as yet scientific proofs, in 
 the harmonies of time, in the Zeitgeist, which makes each 
 epoch, physical, organic, mental and affectional, in keeping 
 with itself. This Time-spirit is subtler than heredity, and is 
 continuous from the centre of things to the circumferences, 
 and from the past into the future. To be operant it must 
 pass through things on its way, and carry their essentials 
 along with it, and control them. It is the regulative will of 
 a providence that makes for unity, and in this embeds all 
 things by something derived from each singular. The 
 smallness of the animals contemporary with man is an illus- 
 tration of it ; they are shorn down to adequacy with his 
 existence and purposes by the severe necessities of his sphere 
 which bounds them and hems them in. These however are 
 recondite considerations, in their origin theological; and 
 will no doubt be limited and thus extended as religious 
 thought is opened. 
 
 So USE is the third with love and with wisdom in the 
 Divine Trinity ; and " the gems of purest ray serene in the 
 dark unfathomed caves of ocean," are in its reserve and 
 intention ; and " full many a flower that is born to blush 
 unseen " has a life, property and prophecy in it which breathes 
 to a future when the desert shall blossom as the rose. 
 
 LV.SUN WORSHIP. 
 
 Some Biblical Commentators have imagined that the 
 adoration of the sun as the apparent source of the mainten- 
 ance of life in nature is- the earliest and most obvious form 
 of idolatry. There are however reasons which contravene 
 this conjecture. A first reason is that idolatry is now proved 
 to have proceeded from the decline and corruption of the 
 
258 SUN WORSHIP. 
 
 Ancient Church which was a revelation co-extensive with the 
 ancient world. That Church inherited a knowledge of 
 representatives from the Most Ancient Church ; and the 
 representatives imported that all the good objects in nature 
 are representative of divine qualities from which they 
 creatively proceeded, and which they signified to the earliest 
 men. All nature, as we have often said, was perceived as a 
 theatre of correspondences. When this perception was lost, 
 and the residue of faith in it weakened, in inevitable suc- 
 cession to it, the mind regarded certain objects as divine, 
 and was prone to sink the Creator in the creature, selecting 
 such things as had been the most holy representatives for 
 especial adoration. But this was a process of many ages. 
 The two states of faith, the ecclesiastical and the idolatrous, 
 were gradually mingled, until the latter became central, and 
 overcame the former. We are therefore to consider that the 
 representative Ancient Church subsisted, especially in Egypt, 
 long after images had been apparently worshipped, and that 
 the One God still came through them to priests and people 
 in what on a superficial view we should regard as idolatrous 
 times. Swedenborg, our only authority on this subject, 
 alleges that the record of the end of the Ancient Church is 
 the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea ; 
 also the destruction of the nations in the land of Canaan. 
 In the former case the whole sojourn of the Israelites from 
 Abraham to Joseph, and to Moses, was still in the epoch of 
 that Church, and Egypt, however perverted and perverting, 
 had not utterly ceased to be a branch of it. Idolatry there 
 had not yet extirpated its remains. Some traditionary 
 rituals of Egypt were genuine enough to be transplanted 
 into the Israelitish and Jewish Church, which was then 
 imminent for mankind. 
 
 The Ancient Church had no Sabean worship, no adoration 
 of the sun as a representative. Its gods in Egypt, as the 
 sun-god Ra, were in human forms, or sometimes in animal 
 forms compounded with human, and which in the Ancient 
 
SUN WORSHIP. 259 
 
 Church signified human affections and faculties. They were 
 not peices of dead nature, large or small, not sun, moon, or 
 stars. They were human myths, not otherwise solar. For they 
 were descended by degradation from the worship of Jehovah 
 Who made man in His own image and likeness which is 
 divinely human. The Church which succeeded, the Jewish 
 Church, went down into Egypt to take up its religious scien- 
 tifics for incorporation into the new dispensation. But the 
 idolatry of Egypt, the worship of its symbols as in themselves 
 worshipful or divine, was expressly forbidden. 
 
 It may therefore be seen here that in Egypt, as well as 
 in Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria, and afterwards in 
 Greece, the primitive idolatries regarded human and 
 animal forms, thus things of life, and not dead nature. 
 These forms still suggested Man and God. And the same 
 anthropomorphism still subsisted in the worship of heroes 
 and ancestors who were deified after death, and often became 
 synonymous with the more primitive gods, and nominally 
 supplanted them. In this there was still a worship of spiri- 
 tual forms. The veriest fetishes, idols of wood and stone, 
 pointed to humanity. 
 
 The case became different when inorganic nature in whole 
 or in part was worshipped. Such worship no longer regarded 
 representative symbols with a possible inhabitation of some- 
 thing spiritual as its mediating gods, but evidently lifeless 
 existence itself as divine. This is a worship of nature as a 
 creator and a cause. It is not Pantheism, for the human 
 God Pan was in Pantheism. Chaldea and its neighbouring 
 countries were the seats of nature-worship, and when it was 
 established, the worship of the sun and moon was an obvious 
 stage : Baal and Ashtoroth came upon the scene. This 
 seems to have been a final stage of departure from a 
 detailed revelation : a worship of the presumed essences of 
 time and space. Fire, in itself a destroyer, was at length 
 the most sacred, not emblem, but substance. 
 
 This view may be important in the history and classification 
 
260 SUN WORSHIP. 
 
 of idolatries, some of which were mild and semitheistic ; 
 others gross, and culminating in a rigorous anti-theism. 
 Among the latter, Swedenborg, to the surprise of some lovers 
 of the sun, declares that the worship of that delightful lumi- 
 nary is the worst kind of nature-worship. It is a position so 
 little obvious at first that it requires to be defended. We 
 essay this after Swedenborg by showing that it swallows up 
 all human conceptions of Jehovah, and cancels the last 
 representatives of the ancient religion by absorbing it into 
 nature. All forms and rituals perish before it, and matter 
 is the be all and the end all. 
 
 Something of this is exemplified in a common and growing 
 creed of the learned to-day, that all the mythologies are 
 resolvable into solar and astronomical myths ; and that 
 light and heat, sun and moon, day and night, are the esoteric 
 contents of the ancient theogonies and theologies. Such a 
 creed marks out that the worship of the sun is not a 
 primitive but a final state of the anti-theistic mind. 
 
 For in itself the sun in its form is not an emblem of the 
 Creator. No mind can associate love, wisdom, intelligence 
 or life with a globe of fire : it has no prosopopeia, no face 
 to express these things, and no arms and hands to carry 
 them forth. And therefore the more pressing it is upon the 
 senses, the more sternly it must be rejected as seeking an 
 entrance through them into the holy of holies. The 
 moment a man dies the Sun is gone, and he stands face to 
 face with another order of things from which natural heat 
 and light are absent, not a ray of them possible in fact or 
 thought, and in which their fostering, so needful here, is 
 non-efficient. Not a vestige of them can enter into the 
 spiritual world. 
 
 The Word proves Swedenborg's declaration as to the 
 heinous nature of the worship of the Sun. When the Lord 
 God brought Ezekiel in the Visions of God to Jerusalem, 
 and showed him the abominations which the elders of the 
 House of Israel do in the dark, every man in his chambers 
 
SUN WORSHIP. 261 
 
 of imagery, the image of jealousy was in the entry, alienating 
 God from his sanctuary. In an inner door by which 
 Ezekiel entered other great abominations were seen, " every 
 form of creeping things and abominable beasts, and all the 
 idols of the house of Israel portrayed upon the wall round 
 about." To these the odour of the cloud of incense 
 went up. Then the Lord said also, " Thou shalt again also 
 see other great abominations : And behold, there sat the 
 women weeping for Tammuz, Then said he unto me, 
 Hast thou seen, son of man? Thou shalt again yet see 
 greater abominations than these. And he brought me into 
 the inner court of the Lord's House, and behold, at the door 
 of the Temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, 
 were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the 
 Temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east ; and 
 they worshipped the sun toward the east" (Ezek. viii. 1-17). 
 
 The same declaration is proved out of the following in 
 Jeremiah where the end of sun-worship is seen. " At that time 
 saith the Lord, they shall bring out the bones of the kings 
 of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of 
 the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of 
 the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves : and they 
 shall spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the 
 host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have 
 served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they 
 have sought, and whom they have worshipped : they shall 
 not be gathered, nor be buried; they shall be for dung 
 upon the face of the earth " (viii. 1,2). 
 
 Swedenborg's words are, " The activity of the natural sun 
 is not from itself, but from the living force proceeding from 
 the sun of the spiritual world. If the living force of this 
 sun were drawn back or taken away, the natural sun would 
 collapse. Therefore it is that of all the forms of the worship 
 of God, the worship of the sun is the lowest ; for it is quite 
 dead like the sun itself, and hence that worship is called an 
 abomination in the Word " (Divine Love^ n. 157). 
 
262 THE HUMANE SUN. 
 
 In that world however there is a Sun, as we have often 
 said above, and there are heat and light. The Spiritual 
 Sun is for the heavens, and the Lord is in it. Yet neither 
 can it, a globe of spiritual fire, and a living sun, be 
 worshipped, because the Lord, Whose apparent mansion 
 that sun is, is a divinely human mind, a human form within 
 it, and as such alone is the object of all worship. His sun 
 is the veil under which He can appear to angelic senses ; 
 His human form divine is the reality under which alone He 
 can be loved and perceived by Angelic minds. A corollary 
 from this is that the worship of the natural sun in this world 
 is the last resort of sensuality, which in the character imports 
 the final rule of the love of self. 
 
 LVLTHE HUMANE SUN. 
 
 The mighty work through the dead sun consists in the 
 exclusion and preparation of dead nature as a first theatre 
 of human life. Considering whose obeisant creature the 
 sun is, its operations in a secondary sense may be called 
 humane, just as the heat of fires and stoves, and the light 
 of candles, by reason of their use, and as proceeding, from 
 man, though dead, are also humane. It is important to 
 plant this heavy conception upon science when it comes to 
 deal with the agencies which are visibly at work in and from 
 the central orb. Do not be afraid of the lessons of the 
 sun. A just theology tempers it, and puts reason into it. 
 
 The Sun itself is one thing, and its proceeding is another. 
 Its heat and light come down through firmaments of ether 
 in to us noiseless passages, and chaos and darkness are met 
 and abolished by them. Close around the sun there is 
 indescribable activity, as it were of the commissioning and 
 starting of these travellers and messengers on the highways 
 of finite space, which are tracks of divine uses to the 
 planetary worlds. Such innumerable goings forth cannot 
 
THE HUMANE SUN. 263 
 
 but be attended with courages, partings and emotions with 
 which the glowing surface pulsates and respires ; for the 
 sun, which is dead, still images Him Who is living. The 
 apparent unrest is on the surface. The outfit for this host 
 of messengers, which are mundane heat and light, involves 
 the first surprises of matter when by alienation from the 
 central fire it is, analogically speaking, frozen into substances 
 which have names on earth. A perturbation in first matter but 
 not in the sun. Immeasurable jets of such substances are 
 observed ; the beating and breathing of the uses of the 
 secure, serene and pacific Sun. To the first thought it is 
 a volcano ; but there is no Vulcan here, but Apollo in all 
 his significant splendour ; if we may use these good myths. 
 For the sun has no furnace and no anvil, but radiance is 
 its nature, and it has only to ray to produce the substances 
 which it gives away. Perhaps they occur freshly at every 
 distance from the centre. The spectroscope shows that 
 on our earth its terminal beams are charged with many 
 of the matters which we know here. We infer, it 
 may be hastily, that they also exist as such in the Sun. 
 But is not their alienation from the Sun their separate 
 creation ? 
 
 Of the body of the sun we know nothing from present 
 science. Nor of the weight of it. Nor whether it has 
 weight at all. Centrality may have a quality in it which 
 stands for weight in a world of gravitating weights : a close 
 dead analogue of the creative will making itself felt in 
 universal physics : a form of forms. The sun's weight or 
 importance lies in its imponderables. The pivot of worlds 
 seems answerable to no claim or pull of its offspring but 
 that of instant active service. The sun itself is hardly visi- 
 ble to the naked eye, being hidden in a blaze inferior to 
 itself. There is no reason to suppose that any of the 
 material elementary substances as they are called exist in the 
 body of the sun. They would be dissipated there, and be 
 resolved into what the sun is, the central universe of fire. 
 
264 THE HUMANE SUN. 
 
 And what is that fire ? It is not a fire of combustion kept 
 up from without, but, under the divine auspices pure or 
 autocratic fire. Combustion begins from the surface of the 
 orb where separation occurs, and specialized things, not 
 subsisting there, are produced and ignited. We have already 
 used the word frozen in speaking of the first creations from 
 that heat of heat : for the solidity of nature may be regarded 
 as the congelation of substances at a distance from the sun. 
 The sun regarded as fire is therefore essential or as Sweden- 
 borg says "pure fire," the intangible and irresistible sub- 
 stance of all terrestrial subjects. Do not conceive the idea 
 of fire as of what is flimsy or baseless ; it carries the whole 
 dead creation in it and on it and is the might and weight of 
 nature. 
 
 Another thought we draw from this. The perturbation of 
 the surface has no place in the solar centre. There are no 
 elements there to be resolved : the pure (TTV/O) fire is not 
 mixed with these : it subsists in its aloneness, and there 
 is nothing like it or second to it in its cosmos. Doubtless it 
 is an architecture, a palace of uses to the whole world ; an 
 indefinite programme and order of details : but to none of 
 these can we assign lines and currents of solids or fluids in 
 any oceanic or planetary sense. Only we know that the 
 pillars of the edifice are for ages of ages : enduring so long as 
 the divine uses performed from that footstool-throne are 
 required by its group of children, its earths or satellites. 
 That is the limit of the existence of any particular sun. 
 But the thought before alluded to is, that in all this work, 
 the substantive sun remains peaceful and humane, and being 
 constructive through deity in its outgoing, it is not destructive 
 to itself. A proof, if you please from design, of this, is 
 found in the distance at which the rest of the creation is 
 placed from the sun. No habitable globe can fall into it, 
 and undergo the resolution involved. The sun itself 
 revolving has already thrown it forth. Destruction is pre- 
 vented in the very plan, and permanent construction ensured. 
 
THE HUMANE SUN. 265 
 
 The circumferences attest the pacific intention in the centre. 
 We may name our majestic luminary in itself Physical 
 Peace. 
 
 The sun is a plane of cessation : the Spiritual Sun pro- 
 ceeding through its degrees has at length ceased into it, and 
 nature, dead nature begins, the spiritual now accompanying 
 it from without. It begins from its peaceful womb. But 
 being a divine operation, equated to everlasting use, it is of 
 a substance and on a scale above human thought excepting 
 in bare general acknowledgment of an ardour betokening 
 the infinite and eternal. It is a shadow and correspondence 
 of the attributes of the Almighty, humane because God is 
 human. 
 
 This is not science ; it has theology pressing behind it, 
 and yet it is in its measure true of the sun. Better and 
 greater thoughts will come to the subject from spiritual 
 intuition and reverent natural consideration. I have set forth 
 my own imperfect view affirmatively, yet not dogmatically, 
 for I would have it to be amenable to all the fresh light 
 and heat of wisdom and love that can be given from time to 
 time. 
 
 The centre of the earth seems at first sight more inscrut- 
 able than the body of the sun, for it is buried deeply under 
 our feet ; crusts of matter wall it in ; it seems to be hidden 
 in darkness as the sun is hidden in light. But both sun and 
 earth centrally are beyond scientific thought. Speculation 
 about the earth's inmost region is of little account. Mytho- 
 logy has made it sometimes into a hell ; sometimes into the 
 abode of the disembodied to which the grave was an anti- 
 chamber. The temperature gradually increasing the deeper 
 the descent is made in mines may point to a central heat of 
 great intensity ; and volcanoes, and their connection with 
 each other in spaces of time, may induce the same conclu- 
 sion. The fire, like the sun's, may be either something we 
 know nothing of, or a relic of the first heat of the planet 
 when sent forth from the sun. But the only way through; 
 
266 SPA CES AND NUMBERS IN THE WORD. 
 
 the darkness seems to lie in the science of correspondences, 
 and in the revelation of man to himself. For he is a micro- 
 cosm, an earth in miniature. Without a revelation he does 
 not know his own centre. Without a mind having faith in 
 the revelation, he does not admit the concentric globe of his 
 faculties. His senses and his understanding and his animus, 
 which are his surfaces, he believes to be his substance. But 
 the order from within outwards is that his love, whether 
 good, or evil, is his centre, and that his other faculties are 
 circumferences animated by this amour propre or proprium, 
 and are active forms of it. The love here, unthought of and 
 unsuspected, is a central fire in the man. The earth by this 
 analogy is an obverse image of the sun ; a lowest centre of 
 terrene heat and self-combustion the opposite to the supreme 
 un wasting solar fire. It may suggest itself as a prison of 
 centres in chaotic conflict. But it is futile to pursue the 
 unknowable further. Not that we need despair of knowing 
 whenever such is useful for human regeneration. Intuition 
 can be given, with confirmations from the facts and analogies 
 of man and nature, and the earth may become transparent 
 to guided seership when the humble man of the Church 
 consents on any measureable scale to see into himself. 
 
 LVIL SPACES AND NUMBERS IN THE 
 WORD. 
 
 The measures of space signify according to extensions in 
 the heavens. Length in the Word denotes good : breadth, 
 truth ; and height, the degrees of these. A broad land is 
 the extension of truth in the Church. Length of days is 
 increase of good in the mind. Elongation or distance is 
 disagreement and aversion. Height is degree as to good 
 and then as to truth : what is high is what is internal : height 
 is the measure of inwardness. Heaven is high, and the 
 Kingdom of God is within you ; the highest kingdom the 
 deepest within. 
 
SPA CES AND NUMBERS IN THE WORD. 267 
 
 Also all numbers in the Word are correspondences, and 
 among the deepest in signification. Forty throughout, as 
 we have often had occasion to mention, signifies temptation : 
 forty years in the desert ; forty days in the wilderness. 
 Six is combat of good against evil, and of evil against good. 
 Six days shalt thou labour ; spiritual labour is such combat.. 
 Seven is the holy or the profane. The seventh day is the 
 Sabbath of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt do no- 
 manner of work. While it lasts do not revert to the past 
 labour of which it is the period ; the next six days is for 
 another labour. Rest in good and in its peace. The reason 
 why seven also signifies what is profane, is, " that the same 
 things which are doing in heaven, when they flow down into 
 hell are changed into opposites, and actually become oppo- 
 site : hence the sanctities signified by seven, in hell become 
 profanities." Thus in the Apocalypse the great red dragon 
 had seven heads, and upon his head seven diadems. The 
 beast which came out of the sea, had seven heads, and upon 
 his heads the name of blasphemy. The great harlot, with 
 whom the kings of the Earth have committed forni- 
 cation, sits upon a scarlet beast, full of names of 
 blasphemy, having seven heads. The number ten denotes 
 remains : so also tenths. Remains are goods and truths 
 stored up by the Lord in the interior man. Man receives 
 the remains of good from the Lord from infancy ; the 
 remains of truth afterwards, and without remains man could 
 not be man. They are let down into his natural mind during 
 his regeneration. They are memories from mothers, fathers, 
 and instructors in what is good and true, stored away in the 
 inmost nature, and they serve for the uses of conscience 
 when the opportunity bringing tenderness comes. All spiri- 
 tual life is from them, and by them man communicates with 
 heaven. From these two examples it may be seen that all 
 numbers in the Word signify things and states, and their 
 qualities. 
 
 Few themes in the Sacred Scripture have excited more 
 
268 SPA CES AND NUMBERS IN THE WORD. 
 
 derision from the sceptics than the attempts of reverent 
 commentators to assign a meaning and value to these which 
 are called mystical numbers. The coherency, however, of 
 the above explanations when they are carefully traced 
 through the Word, proves their truth ; although the subject 
 being so abstract and inward, is beyond the grasp of the 
 natural-rational mind. Might we say it is the higher 
 arithmetic and mathematics of the internal Word ? God is 
 said to have made all things in "number, weight and 
 measure " : in that case this applies to all spiritual things 
 especially. Spiritual things are real forms and organisms ; 
 more real than those of nature. In nature the facts of 
 number invade the thoughts of the sciences in many 
 directions. Chemical substances are engineered upon them 
 as bricks are made into architecture. r Atoms become 
 buildings according to them, and inhabiting properties flow 
 from them. Each compound is a polity of atoms, and the 
 action of it depends in its fitness upon their numerical 
 adaptation. Music and tone are ultimately grounded upon 
 number of vibrations. The reconditeness here is undeniable ; 
 nor could it be resolved into sensual explanation unless we 
 could see the atoms in their forms, and how they oppose, 
 marry, conjoin and interpenetrate. And even then the 
 dynamic end, and its influx into each several creature, upon 
 which all individuality and working depend, is inscrutable. 
 In the meantime the fact remains that natural science has 
 numbers among its bases ; and also that they do produce 
 the separate varieties of natural things and qualities : of 
 which crystallography is a large set of examples. So in like 
 manner it is that numbers in the Logos are very recondite, 
 and that the unaided mind seldom touches the true meaning 
 of them ; which is the substantial form. But here also the 
 fact remains that we have now a valid inductive explanation 
 of their meaning though no vision of their origin ; an 
 explanation proved to be correct by its consistent rendering 
 of the inner language into a sense that is luminous through- 
 
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 269 
 
 out. No other explanation than this is required to prove our 
 attainment of the Assyrian or the ancient Coptic tongues ; 
 and to the real student of Scripture, where the field from 
 which the induction is made is immense and unitary, Swed- 
 enborg's interpretation of these hieroglyphics is, for our 
 service and use, complete. 
 
 LVIILTHE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND THE 
 EARTHLY BODY. 
 
 When man once and for all, and first in his nurse's arms, 
 has made permanent obeisance to the law of gravitation, with 
 the compromise presently by the privilege of Freewill of 
 standing upright, his body and what is in it becomes an 
 earth unto itself, its attractions are its own, and are not 
 determined by the centripetal attraction of the planet. The 
 living body always rests for important ends on the bed-rock 
 of the earth-body, and material weight is in its physiology. 
 " Quot libras in duce summo inveniam ? " is the question 
 the earth asks of Hannibal : how many pounds weight shall 
 I find in the supreme leader ? 
 
 So the earth-body has the earth for its dominant centre. 
 The living body however has as many centres as it has organs, 
 and the organs again consist of nothing but atomic centres. 
 By the weight or importance of its use, each centre, great or 
 small, attracts what it requires from the health and wealth of 
 the system. Attraction, drawing to you, signifies love of 
 some kind, whether in stones, men and women, or angels. 
 And love signifies internal freewill. If then you desire to 
 think of any organ, how it can supply itself with what its 
 life needs, like a lamb seeking its mother's milk, or a lion at 
 dawn going to a well of waters, think of it as a self. Think 
 first that a love proper to it rules the organ ; then that the 
 body with the other organs is mutual, and that as the organ 
 sees and wants, so it gets what it loves, what it uses, and 
 
270 THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 
 
 what it is useful for ; that is to say, if the frame be in a 
 healthy state. 
 
 Thus the whole body gravitates to the earth first, because 
 it wants the earth to stand on for ever, and the earth attracts 
 and pulls it to itself, because the earth wants the organ and 
 union with it as its final cause, which is the human race. 
 These two wants satisfied from birth to death, and after- 
 wards, the heart thenceforward can bring its full freight to the 
 -door of each organ of the now independent automatic man. 
 In such case, the blood wanted hastens to the organ which 
 it knows is expecting it : the organ is a freewill and special 
 love of this very blood as its commerce of Use : it attracts 
 .and draws it in : and the work neither slumbers nor sleeps ; 
 for the organ breathes the ordered blood when the lungs 
 breathe the air ; expanding with each respiration to inspire 
 it, and contracting to close the momentaneous account, and 
 to make the work and the eating keep pace in the day's uses. 
 Such is the free commerce of the body ordained in the 
 projection of its Mercator, the soul. 
 
 As there is no interfering terrene gravitation within this 
 living monarchy, so neither are there any earthy or chemical 
 matters in its dominions. All undergoes a human change. 
 Effete fluids and solids and gases are degraded out of 
 -chemistry by judicial life. Corporeal building materials, 
 such as salt, flint, lime, phosphorus, potash, soda, iron, 
 oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, may be called bio- 
 chemical if you please, but they do not subsist within the 
 functions as they are known in nature or in the laboratory. 
 They have left chemistry as the organs have left terrestrial 
 .gravitation and attraction ; they yield up their affinities into 
 the higher bonds of affections. Freewill, Man, has touched 
 them ; they are chemical no longer until they are of no use 
 to man's properties ; and then they are virtually cast out. 
 But even so, they have caught life, and remember it as its 
 soil. The freewill that acts and elevates in the supernatural 
 daily metamorphoses, daring to stand upright by the balance 
 
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 271 
 
 of two-sidedness, confers the 'seals of kingly power through- 
 out the organic commonwealth and republic, by the 
 ordinance of inner and outer, higher and lower, more and 
 more excellent in service, from the head to the heels, and 
 from the brains to the toes. The rule is that the highest 
 is most excellent as the highest, and the lowest most 
 excellent as the lowest. 
 
 We speak here of the human body, but whatever is said of 
 mere life applies also, so far as independence of chemical 
 and physical law is concerned, to all animals ; and also to 
 vegetable life. Even the plant dominates the chemical. 
 
 The organs have their outward limits on their surfaces, and 
 their inward limits in their least organic forms. These latter 
 are the individualities of which they are composed ; their 
 persons. The liver in its inmost ends in least livers, the 
 tongue in least tongues, and the brain in least brains. It is 
 the old doctrine of homceomeria applied to living bodies, thus 
 an animate atomic theory. In this way the organ is demar- 
 cated from the common groundwork of the form, stands on 
 a separate identity, and is a population of centres of attraction 
 answering to tides of gravitation. 
 
 Physiology is better served through the wholes which con- 
 stitute the subject, than through the ultimate cell-work which 
 is universal under the frame, or through the products elicited 
 from the fluids or solids by analysis. The latter analysis is 
 nothing if it does not destroy the first integers which life 
 works to build and to construct. Death is the humane pro- 
 vince of chemistry ; life, of organization. Life in man has 
 swallowed up a measurable amount of death and made it 
 ghostly. So, thinking further, the career for physiology is 
 greater before modern chemistry entered it than since. It 
 is more amenable to insight belonging to the body itself ; 
 insight which stands upon the rock of doctrine that Man 
 himself is the presence of presences in all his parts, organs, 
 functions and uses. 
 
 Food departs into scientism, and becomes invisible to the 
 
272 THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 
 
 Higher Physiology, when we think of it as nitrogen, carbon, 
 oxygen and hydrogen. Air, which is superior food, 
 strengthens, invigorates and renews the body. We now learn 
 that its nitrogen contributes to our muscles, and its oxygen 
 to our blood ; for nitrogen is yielded to the chemist by 
 muscle, and oxygen combined with carbon by breath from 
 the lungs. But it has always been known that fresh air in 
 health braces muscle and makes muscle, and that fine air 
 makes breathing easy, and keeps health warm. Nothing 
 new is taught here by chemistry, but new substances out of 
 the body are handled by the chemist. I am not now thinking 
 of medical interests, but of those of the higher physiology. 
 In this humane branch of insight it is a loss of direction when 
 thought which should be organic demolishes instead of con- 
 structing. For instance, the greatest object in respiration is 
 respiration itself: it breathes the man's body into consciousness; 
 and afterwards into every conscious action, and every organic 
 function. But thinking of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, the 
 air is the first victim to chemistry : then the breath of life 
 from the lungs is forgotten ; then the office of breathing the 
 air in and out locally, obliterates the notice of the general 
 office, which extends to the whole man. This comes of the 
 first false step, which consists in accepting dead transitional 
 gases as guides through the spiritual labyrinth of the lungs. 
 Human Physiology by this showing can be more easily 
 based on integral air, and lungs breathing it in and out, 
 than an organic cell-work, the province of the microscope, 
 or on gases born of the retort. Large facts of outward 
 nature group themselves more willingly round this instructive 
 field of experience redeemed by common sense. 
 
 It is a law of scientific memory that limits are its food. 
 When they are obliterated by analysis, as sentences may be 
 destroyed by seeking the etymology of their words, records 
 and landmarks fade from the mind. A new importance 
 attaches to the next set of limits, accentuated as they will be 
 by novelty and the jealousy of innovation. So sciences can 
 
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 273 
 
 propagate themselves which are conditioned on undervaluing 
 and then forgetting the past; and a greedy oblivion soon 
 solaces the restless mind. In Epidemic Man and his Visita- 
 tions I treated at some length on a Doctrine of Oblivion, 
 and gave as an instance that Harvey, in his own mind first, 
 and for the scientific world following him, destroyed the 
 memory of what was rightly known of the heart's central 
 supreme functions of blood-making and blood-circulating by 
 which it corresponds to the love in man, by making hearts 
 to be mechanical pumps for only the lower circulation of 
 the blood through the body. 
 
 If the food which is out of the body, and the air drawn 
 from the atmosphere, are estranged from better thoughts by 
 being dissipated into chemicals, much more so are the living 
 things of and in ourselves. Blood and brains valued chemi- 
 cally and materially are troughs of scientist sensuality, and 
 inquisitions for hideous practice. Knowledge about these 
 sacred forms elicited by violence, is worse than destruction ; 
 it is devilish knowledge, and begets devilish stupidity, and 
 hatred of mental good. Such ' research ' is a final anta- 
 gonism to the Love which creates and to the mind which can 
 comprehend living creatures. 
 
 In studying physiology we again observe, that the forms 
 taken and accepted as they lie in the cold, impartial corpse 
 (honoured in being reverently approached for its secrets), are 
 the first field to enter. They are so much dead letter ; so 
 many dead languages to be pondered over as classic trea- 
 suries and monuments of a past history. Each organ is a 
 language. Then obviously the more loving, living and 
 spiritual the physiological genius who interprets, the more 
 his life can enter these void properties. But he must be 
 gifted from above. Not otherwise in the average human 
 image before him, itself once ensouled, can he see the 
 lineaments and instruments of his own soul. 
 
 The higher physiology will save the mind from the grace- 
 less oblivions here spoken of. It will gather up the remains 
 
 s 
 
274 MORAL PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 of the perceptive and intellectual past, and enthrone the truths 
 of the ancients upon the experience of the moderns. But 
 science follows the fortunes of good and evil. Truths lived 
 in become hereditary virtues with lasting places. Their 
 commands and charities disregarded, their importance is 
 obliterated. The plainest things to a good mind are pestilent 
 interferences to a bad one. Oblivion is sought as a relief from 
 the truths which have been rejected. Good remembers its 
 own evil, but evil must forget good, and must obliterate its 
 genius. So you can interpret our age by the truths it is for- 
 getting, and has forgotten. I have seen in my long life that 
 its physiology and medicine, though tricked out in terribly 
 red expensive facts, are both of them senile and appointed 
 to die, and that a sign of the end is that the better memory 
 maintains no way in them. 
 
 LIX.A PIECE OF MORAL PHYSIOLOGY. 
 
 As an example of the selective power of the organs over 
 the blood which they use, and of the supply of this power 
 everywhere by the brains and nerves, I select the case of two 
 organs which lie just above the kidneys, namely, the suprarenal 
 capsules. The reader will omit this section if he has no liking 
 for anatomy, or no anatomical plates. I dare to insert it 
 because it is weighted with what will generally be called a 
 moral correspondence. The use of the above organs is 
 obscure to physiologists. They are of large size before birth, 
 and continue large during early life, but wane afterwards. 
 They are both promoters and controllers in the field of 
 generation. For generation has two realms ; i, the generation 
 of the body itself, to which the foetus contributes proprio 
 marte^ developing as it were by its own force ; and 2, after birth, 
 the generation of the species. Thus in the earliest time of 
 all when they are largest, these kidney capsules call out the 
 best blood of the body, back its circulation, and stimulate 
 
MORAL PHYSIOLOGY. 275 
 
 the growth of the little embryonic body through its own 
 seminal virtue and courage. After birth, in a lesser degree, 
 owing to diminished size, they stand for some years over the 
 proper seminal organs, and by diverting their blood upwards, 
 they forestal premature sexuai development, which is a thing 
 possible to occur very earlyjin life as a wasteful state. They 
 reserve for subsequent purity, when they are smaller and 
 smaller in size, the true generative power, now, under the 
 love of the sex, about to be emancipated, and in which the 
 mind and body become not only productive in personal 
 vitality, but also reproductive. And true to themselves 
 throughout existence, they still have the offices of controlling 
 and promoting. Small, and subject to freewill, they select 
 and rescue some of the finest blood which is descending to 
 the sexual organs, and restore it, fertile and eager though it 
 be, unspent to the higher powers. Thus in the beginning of 
 their lives they control and promote the germ of individual 
 life ; and implant deeper than memory a suggestion of purity 
 and the design and good of it in the frame, whereby they 
 foreshadow manliness and womanliness as the two strengths 
 of life. This is a deep ante-natal endowment, fabulous of the 
 life after death, when the children that are born are the virtues 
 of love with wisdom added to the married pair. When 
 puberty is reached, these same organs plead their primeval 
 Vestal vow, with the lamp of life in their hands ; and are 
 virginal handmaids, in their pure blood looping imagination 
 upwards towards the higher places of conjugial thought. 
 None but a Seer could make the first journey in the body, 
 and see such spiritual ends and purposes for true life in its 
 organs. This happened because he saw without reasoning 
 that the body of supreme purpose is the loyal kingdom of 
 the soul. Therefore on this subject consult Swedenborg's 
 Animal Kingdom, n. 443-441, and Worcester's Book men- 
 tioned above. The whole subject of foetal existence in its 
 spiritual sense is a record of wonders, and is now committed 
 to the rational mind. 
 
276 BREATH. 
 
 LX. BREATH. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment not what breathing or res- 
 piration is but what breath is. It is not mere air, but air 
 humanized. It has travelled in the deep parts of man ; and 
 the breath of life is not the air breathed in, but the air 
 breathed out. The air breathed in is dead until it is associated 
 with life in the chest. But the air breathed out is our 
 breath. Now the Word makes breath canonical ; that is, 
 uses it with a spiritual sense, and we accept the instances of 
 bodily organs mentioned in the Word as involving inspired 
 declaration of their uses or meanings. The first instance 
 we mention is in Genesis, when precedent to the spiritual 
 creation of man, the spirit or breath of God moved upon the 
 faces of the waters. This is repeated in one uniform sense 
 throughout the Old Testament. We have a crowning 
 instance in the NewTestament when Christ breathed upon His 
 disciples and said, Receive ye the Holy Breath or Spirit. 
 His breath had His divine powers because it had undergone 
 contact with the virtue of His Divine Body. Descending 
 from this, as a principle of guidance, does not love breathe 
 upon the beloved, and is not such breathing the act of 
 inmost tenderness and yearning ? Does not pity breathe 
 upon the sinews of pain, and long to relieve them ? Does 
 not aspiration breathe upwards with a sublime breath, and 
 does not meanness breathe downwards ? These are examples 
 of different breaths of life, and come from the spirit within 
 outwards, and partake of it. And spirit is the name for 
 them, TO Trvev/za in Greek : a bodily word and a spiritual 
 at the same time. So we begin to see the contents 
 of breath after it has left the body; especially after it is 
 voluntarily breathed from the affections and their purposes. 
 It is a great subject, and demands volumes. Such breath 
 must be taken literally from the state of mind which is breath- 
 ing, and nothing lower be thought of : no air, no gas : but 
 
ASS YRIAN REASONINGS. 2 7 7 
 
 life communicated where received. Even the breath of cows 
 gives life away to sick human creatures. 
 
 This life in breath enables us to see what animal breath 
 does in the preparation of a climate for man to breathe in ; 
 and what a murder of climate it is to exterminate good and 
 wholesome life, however wild, on the planet. It also shows 
 the reason for the great embryonic animal kingdom which 
 preceded the creation of the first race of men. The veget- 
 able and animal breaths of these ungainly trees and creatures 
 who were the primeval inhabitants, captured the dead 
 material world into familiarity with the first possible breaths 
 of lives, introducing spiritual movement into it from without, 
 and impregnating it with the waves of natural animal affec- 
 tions. The natural man was thus created into a world 
 ancestral with breaths corresponding to his own, and the 
 Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and 
 he became a living soul. 
 
 LXT. ASSYRIAN REASONINGS. 
 
 " And they digged another well, and disputed also over 
 it." This signifies the internal sense of the Word, and 
 whether there be such a sense. . . . Many disputes at this 
 day go no further than this. But so long as men remain in 
 debate whether a thing exist, and whether it be so, it is im- 
 possible to advance to anything of wisdom. For in the very 
 thing debated about, there are in numerable particulars which 
 cannot be seen so long as the thing itself is not acknow- 
 ledged ; all these in such case being unknown. Modern 
 learning scarcely advances beyond these limits of debate, 
 whether a thing exist, and whether it be so, and this excludes 
 the understanding of the truth. He who merely debates 
 whether an internal sense exists in the Word, cannot possibly 
 see the innumerable, the indefinite things contained in that 
 sense. He who disputes whether charity be anything in the 
 
2 78 ASS YRIAN REASONINGS. 
 
 Church, and whether the things of faith be not the all in it, 
 cannot possibly know the innumerable, the indefinite things 
 which are contained in charity, but remains in total ignorance 
 of what charity is. So also in regard to the life after death, 
 the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, heaven and 
 hell ; they who only dispute whether these things exist, stand 
 out of the doors of wisdom, like persons merely knocking at 
 the door, and cannot look into wisdom's magnificent palaces ; 
 and what is surprising, they fancy themselves wiser than 
 others, and wiser in exact proportion to their skill in debat- 
 ing whether a thing be so, and especially in confirming 
 themselves that it is not so. The simple, however, who 
 abide in good, and whom such disputants despise, can 
 perceive in a moment, without dispute, much more without 
 learned controversy, both the existence of the thing, and the 
 nature and quality of it. They have a general sense of the 
 perception of the truth where the learned have extinguished 
 this sense by habits which incline them first to determine 
 whether the things exist. The Lord speaks of these two 
 classes when He says : " I thank Thee, Father, that Thou 
 hast hid these things from the wise and intelligent, and hast 
 revealed them unto babes" (Matthew xi. 25 : Luke x. 21 ; 
 Arcana Ccelestia, n. 3428, on Gen. xxvi. 21). 
 
 Perhaps it arises from this ground, that the noble science 
 of the human mind is lost in the sands of metaphysical 
 and moral philosophy, and is useless, yielding no guide for 
 life. It consists now in great part of analyses and classi- 
 fications of the tools employed in the above intellectual 
 debates and discussions, and of how they exist in themselves 
 as abstractions from words. It omits the consideration 
 of uses and functions, and especially of religious uses and 
 functions, which show in act, the only way of showing what 
 all the faculties essentially are. On this subject Swedenborg 
 says : " The world in general, including the learned part of it, 
 is in utter ignorance as to the most common and obvious [men- 
 tal] propositions, as that the rational mind is distinct from the 
 
ASS YRIAN REASONINGS. 279 
 
 natural mind, and that it is good and truth which constitutes 
 the rational, and which also constitutes the natural. Still 
 less is it known that the rational flows into the natural to the 
 intent that man may be capable of thinking, and of willing 
 accordingly ; and as these propositions are unknown, this 
 influx must needs be of difficult apprehension " (Arcana, 3314). 
 In consequence of this, the order of the mind is unrecog- 
 nized, and the servants in it are admitted into its places of 
 rule ; the senses sit upon its thrones, handle its treasuries, 
 and spend them upon its useless curiosities, scientifics and 
 discussions. Yet the mind first and foremost is a hierarchy, 
 and all its good uses flow from its order and subordination. 
 Were the canons of its uses perceived, and established 
 monarchy accepted, the senses would be the basis and foot- 
 sole on which it rests and is supported, and then other senses 
 all the way upwards would be added to the loftier tiers of 
 faculties, realizing them all; for without senses they are 
 nothings : and man would perceive his mind substantially as 
 he perceives its outcome, his body and its organs. But 
 where the senses rule, all the rest is unrealized ; robbed of 
 its substance and consumed by their tyrannous greed. 
 After which, good and truth, love and wisdom, affection and 
 rationality, are but sensual scientifics and "become air." 
 The internal sense of the Word treats throughout of the 
 organic faculties of the mind as they are used and abused ; 
 of what is first in order ; of how this faculty should be 
 master in such a field, and how that faculty should be re- 
 duced to be its servant. It is not possible however to com- 
 prehend anything of the scope of that sense excepting as an 
 inspired Divine Philosophy commanding the priestly and 
 kingly uses which reign over and in the mind. 
 
 The Word also treats not only of the mind's faculties as 
 they are in their just order by creation, and thus appoints and 
 secures their places ready for use, and, preliminarily forbids 
 each from going beyond its sphere, but also reveals their 
 higher functions when they are regenerated by the influx of 
 
280 ASS YRIAN REASONINGS. 
 
 the superior faculties into them, by which they receive new 
 powers and capacities. It reveals what Egypt and Assyria 
 become when Israel flows into them, and is all in all with 
 them. For instance, the common rational mind dealing with 
 worldly and sensual things, the natural mind in its entirety 
 by the influx of an intellectual faculty above it from a 
 spiritual origin, becomes spiritual-rational, and enters by 
 divine acceptance on a realm of perceptions and judgments 
 to which in its former state it was incompetent : it becomes 
 the organ of the spiritual in the rational. When this takes 
 place throughout the adult lifetime, all the lower reasons, 
 ratiocinations and persuasions of the individual proprium, by 
 which it criticized and impugned holy things, are gradually 
 rejected and purged out of it ; as if the old peccant and 
 quarrelsome reason itself were swept away ; and what Mat- 
 thew Arnold handsomely calls "the sweetness of light" 
 illuminates it, and gives it new and truly reasonable eyes, of 
 humility, with its insights from the interior Word. And so 
 of all the other faculties ; and most of all of the rulers of all, 
 of love and the affections. These in their natural state are 
 wild cattle, and wild sheep ; regenerated by love to God and 
 the neighbour, they are the flocks and herds of which the 
 Psalm says : ' All the beasts of the field are mine, and the 
 cattle upon a thousand hills ' ; the hills of celestial and spiri- 
 tual elevation. There is a coming philosophy of the mind 
 in all this ; but it is purely practical though transcendent ; 
 and it is all based on order, on the opening of the lower to 
 admit the higher ; on the submission of the lower to the 
 informations of the higher ; on the gradual elimination of 
 natural objections and obstacles as at- length clear nothings ; 
 and in short on the unimpeded transflux of the Word through 
 faculty after faculty from love and chanty at the summit to 
 love and charity as the basis. 
 
 On this subject we have the following : " The end of crea- 
 tion being an angelic heaven out of the human race, thus the 
 human race, therefore all other things which have been created 
 
ASSYRIAN REASONINGS. 281 
 
 are mediate ends, which, because they relate to man, look to 
 these three things of him, his Body, his Rational faculty, and 
 for the sake of conjunction with the Lord, his Spiritual faculty. 
 For man is not able to be conjoined to the Lord unless he 
 be spiritual ; nor is he able to be spiritual unless he be 
 rational : nor is he able to be rational unless his body be in 
 a sound state. These things are as a house. The body is 
 as the foundation, the rational is as the house built upon it : 
 the spiritual represents those things which are in the house ; 
 and conjunction with the Lord is being at home in it" 
 (Divine Love, n. 330). 
 
 While on the subject of this order and influx, it may be 
 well to point out also that all the faculties should be inviolate 
 throughout, for a special freewill belongs to each of them. 
 The senses, when good servants, have their inalienable rights, 
 and are justified as purveying the wide informations of the 
 kingdom of first appearances. They enjoy home-rule if they 
 are a peaceful home of natural good, and in their domesticity 
 observe their own order, subject to the order of the whole 
 mind. The sensual imagination rules by influence in them, 
 being as a faculty close above them : it sharpens them beyond 
 themselves, and by its delights gives them life. The mind 
 proper, the beginning and centre of man, the rational mind, 
 the organ of common sense and its judgments and deter- 
 minations, is still above ; and preserves its own sphere in 
 the order ; but influences by no force of violence the imagi- 
 nation, controlling it to its just limits, and making it an 
 initial way of truth, a rational imagination, the mother of 
 good views and allowable theories and guesses ; and above 
 all a seeing and observing eye in the perpetual acts and 
 habits of life. The senses with sound strong reason and 
 imagination and facile fancy in them are treble senses, and 
 see what the five of themselves, be they called poets, never 
 felt or saw. The intellectual mind ranges wider, for the 
 spiritual world is with it ; regarding as primary the uses of 
 the lower minds, and entering into the immeasurable 
 
282 HEREDITIES. 
 
 commerce of which use is the field. The service of man is 
 the best ground of its perceptions. The spiritual mind 
 regards spiritual ends in uses ; regeneration of the individual 
 and eternal life. The celestial mind reigns in the perception 
 and practice that love united with wisdom is the end of ends; 
 and it influences the spiritual mind to carry its truths to 
 good, and to impregnate its uses with love. This rule of 
 mind over mind, each freely submitting to its superior, is 
 the human form, the image and likeness of God, Who is the 
 creator of the order of the organs, and Who endows them 
 beyond themselves, by perpetual planes and inductions of 
 free fellowship from above. This, however, is as the mind 
 should be, not as it is. Each faculty has the power of 
 obstructing and stopping the influx, and limiting the man to 
 all above its proprium or self. A man may be sensual with- 
 out being rational, and rational without being intellectual, 
 and also intellectual without being spiritual ; he can love 
 truth more than good ; and in each such case the gifts 
 descending from above come from the lower source. 
 
 LXIL HEREDITIES. 
 
 The inheritances of character and disposition from parents 
 to children have been studied with some diligence in this 
 scientific age, but from the natural and not from the spiritual 
 side. I am not aware that any writer but Swedenborg has 
 traced the important bearing of the subject in religious 
 beliefs or states. It is the groundwork of the history of 
 man as a personal agent. 
 
 The human family at no time and in no place has been a 
 mass of merely aggregated individuals ; but from the begin- 
 ning has existed in Churches, and in the outlying remainders 
 of Churches commonly called heathenisms. 
 
 These religious bodies or churches, divinely instituted 
 and organized, have been subject to the inevitable condi- 
 
HEREDITIES. 283 
 
 tions of inheritance from fathers to sons. We have seen 
 already in frequent detail what the succession of churches 
 was. Each of them declined from its first Word, its first 
 communicated Revelation and its first innocence, as it were 
 from infancy to old age and death, by the development of 
 hereditary seeds of evil and falsity. As Swedenborg 
 observes : "The church decreases and degenerates by de- 
 parture from its primeval integrity; and this chiefly in 
 consequence of the increase of hereditary evil, every succeed- 
 ing parent adding some new evil to what he himself in- 
 herited. Every evil actually committed by parents induces 
 a new aspect on their nature, and when often repeated 
 becomes natural, is added to what was hereditary, is planted 
 over into their children, and through them into their posterity, 
 and gives birth to an immense increase of evil in the course 
 of generations. This must appear plainly to those who 
 attend to the evil dispositions of children, and trace their 
 resemblance to their parents and forefathers. It is a great 
 error to suppose that there is no hereditary evil but what 
 was implanted by Adam, when in fact each individual by 
 his own actual sin produces hereditary evil, making addition 
 to what he received from his parents, and accumulating the 
 new sum in all his posterity, which is in no degree moder- 
 ated save in those alone who are regenerated by the Lord. 
 This is the primary cause of the degeneration of every 
 church " (Arcana, n. 494). 
 
 Also further : " The good into which a man is born, is 
 derived to him from his parents, either father or mother ; 
 for whatever parents have contracted by frequent use and 
 habit, or are tinctured with by actual life, so as to render it 
 familiar to them until it has the appearance of being natural, 
 is carried down to their children, and becomes hereditary. 
 Where parents have lived in the virtue of the love of good, 
 and in so living have perceived their proper delight and 
 blessedness, supposing them to conceive children in such a 
 state of life, the children then receive an inclination to 
 
284 HEREDITIES. 
 
 similar good. Where parents have lived in the virtue of the 
 love of truth, and in so living have perceived their proper 
 delight, if they conceive children in such a state of life, the 
 children then receive an inclination to similar virtue " 
 (Arcana, n. 3469). 
 
 These are the desirable goods of nature or birth ; but not 
 of the will or the understanding : in one sense they may 
 be called, with an extension of the common meaning, good 
 nature. But Swedenborg again remarks : " Natural good 
 is such that of itself it is not willing to obey and serve 
 rational good as a servant serves a master, but it is desirous 
 to have command. It requires to be reduced to compliance 
 and service " (Arcana, n. 3470). 
 
 These considerations, if pondered, lift the subject of 
 heredity from family proclivities into the sphere of the 
 highest and lowest history of mankind, and confirm on 
 psychological grounds the doctrine of the church, that man 
 now, considered in himself, is nothing but evil and its ever 
 convenient falsity. There is no escape from this conclusion. 
 And the better a religious man is, the more he must be con- 
 scious of it as a rational experience. Also his unceasing 
 knowledge and conscience of it is the condition of his 
 advancement in the regenerate life. 
 
 The religions of the world, and their decline, are therefore 
 the grounds of all the studies we have attempted in tracing 
 the process from above downwards, from revelations to 
 mythologies, from divine churches to fetish worship on the 
 one side, and to atheism on the other. They involve not civil 
 and moral states, but the direct relations of man to God. 
 And the passage traversed hitherto reaches from Jehovah to 
 graven and molten images, and from the inspired Word to 
 the human philosophy which denies and supplants it. The 
 outward destinies of nations, unconsciously to themselves, 
 depend, now even rapidly, on the " downrush " of their 
 heredities ; their characters grow heavier from being more 
 charged with evil ; and they tend, unless they alter, to the 
 
HEREDITIES. 285 
 
 doom which has already befallen the corresponding nations 
 of the past. Every fresh outward power they possess and 
 call their own, hastens the end, just as enormity of wealth 
 and genius in wicked hands, inwardly, and at length out- 
 wardly, consigns the man to a sure place in the estimation 
 of even a corrupt society. For evil is at last the accuser and 
 doom of evil. Therefore decaying churches enact them- 
 selves ultimately as social, political, and national history ; and 
 inheritance of spiritual evil acted out into sin from generation 
 to generation is still at the root. 
 
 Observe however that inherited evil is not sin unless you 
 love it and make it into deeds, and that inherited good is 
 not good for you unless you enter its formless gift with 
 mature principles of wisdom, and lift and detail it from 
 natural towards spiritual good. 
 
 The inheritances of the past, including the love of power, 
 and the love of money, have therefore been the essential dis- 
 endowment and disestablishment of all the churches to the 
 present day. The capacity of standing as open doors for 
 the divine light to enter has been withdrawn from their 
 priesthoods, which are in serried opposition to its instruc- 
 tions ; and as in the past, the remote laity remains for the 
 new revelation and the new city. The Christian and more 
 outlying heathens will be summoned to receive the endow- 
 ment and to constitute the establishment. Of course we are 
 now speaking of divine and not of national or parliamentary 
 churches, which latter especially have the advantage of 
 being for the most part benignly secular, and of being un- 
 consciously in the influx and current of a new church and 
 its new ages. By disendowment we understand the loss of 
 the goods and truths of heaven from the Word, and by 
 disestablishment, the consummation of a church, and its 
 supersession by a new dispensation. 
 
a86 DREAMS AND VISIONS. 
 
 LXIIL DREAMS AND VISIONS. 
 
 The Word, the heathen mythologies, and the course of 
 life, supply a store of materials for enlightened thought on 
 the subject of this chapter. Sleep is one part ; the passivity 
 and abeyance of the sensual and bodily life, and the eman- 
 cipation of the inner mind for a time, is the other. The 
 latter is the awakening of higher faculties, the opening of 
 some spiritual sight, and the perception of objects which the 
 corporeal senses are not adequate to receive. It is not 
 sleep, because the interior man is in increased wakefulness 
 during such sight or vision. 
 
 From what has been said of the perceptive Man, the 
 celestial or Most Ancient Church, named Adam, before 
 " the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, 
 and he slept," it may be evident that his normal sleep par- 
 took wholly of his character, and that it was a state which 
 does not exist at the present day. No evil heredities marred 
 it. No resistance to divine influx and its immeasurable gifts 
 obscured or distorted it. The soberness, temperance and 
 chastity of the industrious day were consummated in it ; and 
 accordingly it was the floor and groundwork of celestial 
 dreams. These dreams consisted of representatives of 
 heavenly things, and this because of the law that angelic dis- 
 course when it flows down to man clothes itself in corre- 
 spondences, which became an understood biblical hieroglyph 
 in those primitive ages. The discourse in itself was ineffable 
 to even these first men on the earth, no vocal or perceived 
 language to them ; but the representatives and correspon- 
 dences created by it as dreams on the tablets of sleep, were 
 intelligible as generalizations or common perceptions, and 
 were attended with delights and instructions. What the in- 
 tellectual heaven of the day did not give, the affectionate 
 heaven of the night supplied. The day was inspired by the 
 night, and the night was committed to use by the day. 
 
DREAMS AND VISIONS. 287 
 
 Swedenborg was led through providential personal experi- 
 ences, which are the only ways of leading, to attest this 
 primeval state by dreams, and by what happened thereafter 
 and thereupon. He says: " It has often been given me after 
 certain dreams to discourse with the spirits and angels who 
 introduced them ; they relating what they had introduced, 
 and I, what I had seen. . . . After awaking and relating 
 what I had seen in sleep, and this in a long series, the angelic 
 spirits said that what I related coincided exactly, and was 
 the same, with what they had been discoursing about ; and 
 differed in nowise excepting only as representatives differ 
 from the things represented. . . . And they said further that 
 the same discourse was capable of being turned into other 
 representatives into similar and dissimilar ones in indefinite 
 variety ; and that they had been turned into those I had 
 experienced because they were agreeable to the state of the 
 spirits about me, and hence to my own state at the time. 
 That in fact several dissimilar dreams may descend and be 
 presented from the same discourse or from a single origin, 
 because the things in man's memory are recipient vessels in 
 which ideas are varied and received representatively accord- 
 ing to the varieties of their form and the changes of their 
 state" (Arcana, 1979, 1980). 
 
 Here the upper partlof the drama is intimately phonetic for 
 those who can so receive it, but becomes hieroglyphic, or 
 as we may say, telegraphic, using the syllables "graphic" 
 in the sense of giving forth pictures, figures and forms, at 
 the lower end. 
 
 To show how the contents of the memory are employed 
 in this teledemic influx, Swedenborg says : " I had formed 
 the idea of a certain person that his forte was natural truth, 
 gathering this from the actions of his life. Now the angels 
 were discoursing of natural truth : and therefore this person 
 was represented to me ; and what he said to me and what 
 he did in my dream, followed in an orderly way of represen- 
 tation and correspondence from the discourse of the angels 
 
288 DREAMS AND VISIONS. 
 
 with each other. But [between the discourse and the 
 representation] there was altogether no similarity " (Arcana, 
 1981). Here we have an insight into the conversion of the 
 memory into spiritual cyphers ; a clear origin of the meaning 
 of ideographic hieroglyphs ; and some guide for the indi- 
 vidual mind to the meaning of certain of its dreams. We 
 may also recur to what was said respecting the diversities of 
 statement about the Lord in the Four Gospels ; as that the 
 Divine Inspiration was given to four minds for various 
 application to the thought-imagination of the universe of 
 men addressed in the Word. 
 
 The state of dream-influx was universal in the earliest men, 
 and by virtue of their perceptive genius they understood 
 their dreams, which were a divine schooling other than their 
 waking lives. Every one at this day recognizes what a power 
 and ecstasy a happy dream is ; and how it seems to bless the 
 day, and many days. Speaking personally, I have had three 
 or four such dreams in my life, and they have been of cities 
 in this world. Why I knew not, but they uplifted me. 
 Cities correspond to the doctrinals of truth. I may hope 
 that such dreams were a forecast of some affection for such 
 doctrinals. Also I have repeated a part of Swedenborg's 
 experience respecting individuals who stood for my mind as 
 types of certain qualities ; and have found on waking that 
 those qualities from my memory were bodied forth in the 
 apparition of these people who thus represented the qualities 
 in the dream-language. For it may be discernible from this 
 ground of thought, that the life of this natural world, its 
 places, events and persons, are taken upwards into inner 
 faculties, into another memory subject to and possessed by 
 another reason ; and that there they are used as representa- 
 tives and hieroglyphs in an inner series of ideas pertaining 
 to each individual mind. 
 
 It is submitted therefore to the reader that the origin of 
 such representatives as are found in Egypt and in general in the 
 monuments of the ancient nations, is elucidated by Sweden- 
 
DREAMS AND VISIONS. 289 
 
 borg on spiritual principles consonant to reason, and which 
 the learned may accept if they elevate their minds to com- 
 prehend them. Let it be observed however that the dreams 
 here in consideration are in no analogy to the ordinary 
 experiences of the night, which are mostly phantasies 
 depending upon the unrest and unhealth of the day. Even 
 these have a spirit-origin, but the uneasy body is the plane 
 on which a lower influx operates. 
 
 Sleep is a type of the state in which genius, which is 
 rational influx from within, and inspiration which is spiritual 
 influx from without, can be given. It is in one sense a 
 compulsory gift, though welcome to weary man. Submission 
 of the mind and the body takes place in it. The vigilant 
 selfhood is no longer in the front ; and consciousness, when 
 dreams occur, happens beyond personal help or management. 
 You cannot banish dreams. In this respect it is like the 
 ground of the higher moments or felicities of genius, and of the 
 infallibilities of inspiration, in which the outer man is passive, 
 and does not interfere with the tide in the mind, or attribute 
 it to himself. This rare passivity to influx is also represented 
 in what sleep does for the body and the mind. It pours 
 new life into their vessels, fatigued by the sordes and strifes 
 of the day ; and a reason obviously is, that though the man's 
 nature is all there, his wasteful personal self does not actively 
 resist the beneficent " restorer." 
 
 And dream-states also, for the thoughtful man, supply 
 some facility for a belief in a spiritual existence. Whilst we 
 are in them, we are a part of them, and believe in them ; or 
 do not generally question them. They present to us some- 
 thing of a world full of objects such as we see in the waking 
 state : a kind of Berkleyan universe, which is substantial as 
 this world for the dreamer. This experience can easily be 
 set aside, and dismissed as a dream, by those who please ; 
 but it seems to furnish a suggestion towards the mind having 
 a universe of its own attached to it, independent of the 
 fixity of external things. It makes it easier to conceive that 
 
 T 
 
290 DREAMS AND VISIONS. 
 
 space and time and death which seem to be everything, may. 
 when we die, be nothing ; and yet that we may then enter 
 upon a world of states to which no sense of reality from out- 
 ward objects is lacking. 
 
 Visions stand somewhat in the same category as dreams 
 from being representative. Like the successive Churches 
 they are in a series. They existed normally as laws of its 
 nature in the Most Ancient Church ; and the representa- 
 tives then communicated were the golden currency of 
 celestial thought, the pieces of which in their divine value 
 are still maintained in the Word we now possess. The 
 standard is invariable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for- 
 ever. They existed in the Ancient Church in its prophetic 
 books which are now lost. They reappear in the Israelitish 
 and Jewish Church in the Prophets, and plainly foretell the 
 Coming of the Lord. They stand forth in the Christian 
 Church in the Apocalypse, which is a prophetic vision of 
 the consummation of that Church, and of the descent, 
 endowment and establishment of the New Jerusalem. 
 They are adequately, yea intellectually, completed now in 
 an open vision of the spiritual world through Emanuel 
 Swedenborg. The things "heard and seen" by him are, 
 however, " not visions properly so called, but things beheld " 
 as he testifies, "in the most perfect state of bodily 
 wakefulness." 
 
 The word, visionary, is mischievous to the mischievous 
 natural man when it is applied to spiritual sight, being 
 easily extended by him to all high informations beyond the 
 lines of the corporeal senses. The Poets are some aid here, 
 and Shakespeare speaks of " the vision and faculty divine." 
 And Milton is full of a perception of the sublime nature and 
 use of this faculty in the Word. In it we read, "where 
 there is no vision the people perish." To discard vision 
 because we cannot attest it in our own experience, is to 
 immerse ourselves in our negative understandings. By 
 this we agglutinate one of " the high capacious powers folded 
 
THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 291 
 
 up in man," and which can be unfolded now for our enlarge- 
 ment and guidance, or rebuke. For all the visions of the 
 Word have descended for our daily use ; and the very 
 obscurity of them apart from the light of their spiritual 
 sense, has kept the Church in the attitude and endeavour 
 to discover the mystery which has at length been revealed. 
 " I saw in the visions of the night one like the Son of Man 
 coming in the clouds of heaven." In this vision dark and 
 obscure to the natural man, and therefore said to be "in 
 the night," the "clouds of heaven" are the literal sense 
 of the Word, which, when it is opened, reveals the glory of 
 the Lord, the Divine Humanity, in the spiritual sense. 
 
 LXIV.THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 The countries described in the Word are as we have seen 
 in the internal sense spiritual countries, distinct regions or 
 faculties of the human mind, which itself in the spiritual world 
 is the only map that is known. Regarded in this light it is 
 simply on the one hand an ouranography of goodness and 
 truth, and on the other a gehennagraphy of evil and falsity. 
 These two opposite realms of mental states are each in a 
 divine order of immeasurable detail, in genera and species, 
 embracing all spiritual, and all infernal life. The human 
 form is necessarily the expression of them, with a cosmos of 
 inferior correspondences surrounding and representing it in 
 both cases. The human form is the substance and reality ; 
 the world around it is of appearances answering to it. The 
 appearances are realities because they correspond. The 
 countries in the Word have each their signification from this 
 ruling correspondence. 
 
 From this it is obvious that all the things in each country, 
 the persons, places, rivers, mountains, and all the animals 
 and trees and plants, partake of the general signification of 
 the land described. They are its particulars. And each 
 variously follows the country in which it mentally lives. The 
 
292 THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 horses of Egypt are sensual scientifics ; the horses of Assyria 
 are discussions whether good be good, and whether truth be 
 true. The horses of Israel are divine doctrinals, and their 
 understandings. The mind or humanity involved is the only 
 place of them : the mind as an immortal man-form. 
 
 Bearing this in rnind the willing reader will not be surprised 
 to find that in the internal sense the calves of Egypt are not 
 calves, but denote a particular state of the scientific faculty 
 in the natural man : for if Egypt is science, its calves are also 
 of science. Moreover the plagues of Egypt signified the 
 insurrection of scientific knowledges belonging to the Church 
 against its spiritual truths and goods represented by the 
 Children of Israel, and the oppression exercised upon them 
 by Pharaoh. The waters turned into blood ; the fish dying 
 in the river and polluting it ; the frogs brought forth by the 
 river, and coming up on Pharaoh and the people, and cover- 
 ing the land ; and then gathered together in heaps so that 
 the land stank : the dust of the land becoming lice in man 
 and in beast ; the swarms of flies covering and corrupting 
 the land ; the murrain on all domestic beasts ; the ashes 
 sprinkled towards heaven by Moses before Pharaoh, and 
 become a boil and blains upon man and beast, upon the 
 magicians, and upon all the Egyptians ; the hail mingled with 
 fire throughout the land that smote all that was in the field, 
 both man and beast, and every herb of the field, and brake 
 every tree of the field ; excepting in the land of Goshen, where 
 the children of Israel were. The locusts that went up over 
 all the land and darkened it, and ate every herb of the land, 
 and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left. The 
 darkness that could be felt in which they saw not one another; 
 neither rose any from his place for three days ; but all the 
 Children of Israel had light in their dwellings. After which 
 Pharaoh rejected Moses, and saw his face no more. Then 
 at midnight the death of the first-born in the land of Egypt, 
 from the first-born of Pharaoh on his throne to the first-born 
 of the captive in the dungeon ; and all the first-born of cattle. 
 
THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 293 
 
 These events in the internal sense are an intelligible series 
 strictly pertaining to Egypt in its relation to Israel ; that is 
 to say, to the natural mind oppressing and subjugating the 
 spiritual ; and they happen in the world to-day as they 
 happened representatively in the time of Moses and Pharaoh. 
 For a detailed illustration of them point by point see the 
 Arcana Ccelestia. For Egypt here signifies the destruction 
 of religion and the Church by sensual scientifics, attempting 
 in every degree of the mind, by intelligence gathered out of 
 self-love and the love of the world, to root out the Divine 
 Being from the affections and the intellect, and out of all 
 knowledges which plainly teach the simple man the existence 
 and goodness of his Father. The Lord said unto Moses, 
 " See, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh." And at last 
 Pharaoh said to Moses, " Get thee from me, take heed to 
 thyself, see my face no more; for in the day thou seest 
 my face thou shalt die." Here the sensual scientific 
 man rejects and makes an end in himself of the spiritual 
 man. To see his face then, day = state, is to be in hell 
 with him. 
 
 From this it may be plain that perverse Egypt, as once an 
 initiating body in the Ancient Church, now, at the end of 
 that Church, denotes the insane attempt to rule by scientifics 
 over the mysteries of faith, and failing in this, to deny all 
 that overlies and outlies the natural senses, and to betake 
 itself to its own magical persuasions and idolatries : for there 
 are idols of the heart and mind as well as of wood and stone, 
 and the innermost idol in the scientist shrine is always the 
 glory of the selfhood. 
 
 It is to be observed that Egypt especially signified religious 
 scientifics pertaining to the rituals of the Church, and not the 
 knowledges of science as we understand the term. The 
 Egyptians had physical and astronomical science and learn- 
 ing ; but they valued these from a religious ground, and did 
 not advance in them from the curiosity which prompts their 
 magnitudes to-day. Their ritual and ceremonial sciences, 
 
294 THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 however, were powers in their hands such as do not exist 
 now ; and their magic, then a most real infernality, by miracles 
 which followed the miracles of Moses, hardened Pharaoh's 
 heart and placed him between two gods. These sciences 
 were not therefore of the rituals which form the order of the 
 present Church. It may further be said that modern 
 scientism, I use the term to distinguish it from true science, 
 also has its abundant rituals, but which belong to the 
 egotistical intellect, and to no church. These are careful 
 educations and trainings that the body and the senses are 
 the whole man, as it were catechisms for noviciates ; glories 
 and exaltations and apotheoses of violent and trivial know- 
 ledges, as it were barkings and howlings, the liturgies of the 
 self-worshipping selfhood ; anticipations of omniscience and 
 omnipotence in the materialist future, as it were prophetic 
 enunciations of the messiahship of self ; and at length utter 
 apocalypse and persuasion that " the kingdom of man " 
 is at hand, and that the collective scientist is God. 
 
 What then do the calves of Egypt signify specifically? 
 On this subject Swedenborg says : " The sons of Israel made 
 to themselves a golden calf, and worshipped it instead of 
 Jehovah, because Egyptian idolatry remained in their hearts, 
 although with the mouth they confessed Jehovah. Among 
 the idols of Egypt the principal were she-calves and he- 
 calves of gold ; for a she-calf signified scientific truth which 
 is the truth of the natural man, and a he-calf the good of 
 that truth, which is the good of the natural man ; and gold 
 also signified good. This good and this truth they effigied 
 by he-calves and she-calves of gold. But when the repre- 
 sentatives of celestial things were turned into idolatries, and 
 into magic, then in Egypt, as elsewhere, the representative 
 effigies themselves were made into idols, and began to be 
 worshipped. Hence the idolatries of the ancients, and the 
 magical arts of the Egyptians." 
 
 This assertion of Swedenborg that golden calves, male and 
 female, were among the prevalent idols of Egypt, seems, as 
 
THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 295 
 
 a general statement, to be hardly borne out by the researches 
 of Egyptologists. Kitto in his Cydopcedia of Biblical Litera- 
 ture figures an " Egyptian calf-idol," which he copied from 
 Cairo, but which was not made of gold. The Israelites, 
 Kitto says, during their sojourn in Egypt, were accustomed 
 to the image of a sacred calf carried at the head of marching 
 armies, "as may be still seen in the processions of Rameses 
 the great." Swedenborg's remark is evidently based upon the 
 Word, and not upon the monuments. A conjectural explana- 
 tion of the discrepancy, if it exist, may be, that Egypt dealt 
 with Israel in its own coin by golden lures to idolatry. We 
 know that the bull was dedicated to Osiris and the cow to 
 Isis, and that Apis was represented as a young bull a he- 
 calf. The Israelites were a shepherd-people, and it is at 
 least likely that the Egyptians approached their minds with 
 that part of symbols which would delight them, and that the 
 jackal-headed, ibis-headed and hawk-headed deities were not 
 among these presentations. And that the Israelites at that time 
 loved gold may be evident from their " borrowing the gold 
 and silver vessels of the Egyptians " when they went out of 
 Egypt, and when after the death of the first-born, the people 
 of the land were eager to be rid of them at any cost. Then 
 as now the Israelites had their price. 
 
 With respect to the golden calf made by Aaron at the 
 request of the people out of their ear-rings, the ears in a 
 good sense signify obedience and hearkening, the rings 
 conjunction with good, which is gold : in the present case, 
 disobedience and lust to idolatry, and its evils. When the 
 molten calf was made and fashioned with a graving tool, 
 the making of it by fire is the corruption of the will, the 
 fashioning with a tool the falsification of the understanding, 
 Aaron said, "These be thy Gods, O Israel, which brought 
 thee up out of the land of Egypt." Here the commen- 
 tators, with Swedenborg, cannot err in asserting that this 
 special idolatry came out of the lessons easily learned by 
 the people in that land. 
 
296 THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 
 
 The Word itself testifies to a close connection in the in- 
 ternal sense between the calf and scientific and magical 
 Egypt. It is said in Jeremiah, " Egypt is a very beautiful 
 she-calf, destruction cometh from the north, and her hire- 
 lings in the midst of her are as fatted he-calves " : where a 
 she-calf denotes the scientific truth of the natural man ; the 
 hirelings, who are he-calves, are those who do good for the 
 sake of gain ; which in itself is not good, but is the delight 
 of the natural man separate from the spiritual. This is the 
 delight in which the sons of Jacob were, which is in itself 
 idolatrous ; and therefore it was permitted them to make it 
 known and to testify it by the adoration of a calf (Arcana, 
 n. 9391). The prophets abound in passages in which a calf 
 has a good and bad signification in the sense described. 
 
 " They made a calf in Horeb, and bowed themselves to 
 what is molten, and changed glory into the effigy of an ox 
 that eateth herbs " (Psalm cvi. 19, 20). "They add to sin, 
 and make to themselves a molten thing of their silver, idols 
 in their intelligence, the whole work of artificers, saying to 
 them, they sacrifice a man, they kiss calves " (Hosea xiii. 2). 
 " The unicorns shall come down with them, and the calves 
 with the strong, and their land shall be made drunk with 
 blood, and their dust shall be made fat with fatness " (Isaiah 
 xxxiv. 7). "The fortified city shall be solitary, a habitation 
 let down and forsaken, there the calf shall feed, and there 
 shall he lie down and shall consume the branches thereof, 
 and the harvest thereof shall wither" (Isaiah xxvii. 20). 
 " Rebuke the wild beast of the reed, the congregation of the 
 strong, among the calves of the people : treading down the 
 payments of silver, he hath dispersed the people" (Psalm 
 Ixviii. 30). " They have made a king and not from Me, they 
 have made princes, and I have not known ; their silver and 
 gold they have made idols, that it may be cut off; thy calf 
 hath forsaken, O Samaria, for it also was from Israel, the 
 smith hath made it, and he is not a god, because the calf of 
 Samaria shall be made into pieces " (Hosea viii. 4, 5, 6). 
 
THE PLAGUES OF SCIENTISM. 297 
 
 What may again be noted is, that this biblical language in 
 the internal sense is as definite and immutable as any of 
 the languages which the learned spend their lives in studying. 
 And further, that although everything in Egypt denotes 
 scientifics, yet there is no sameness or confusion in the 
 terms, but each symbol or ideograph carries a distinct signi- 
 fication in the series according to the subject treated of. 
 All things in the spiritual Egypt of the Word are wanted to 
 make up the entire Egypt. The scientific faculty which is 
 the mind of the natural man, the clear beginning of him, is 
 a realm or universe, peopled with all external and internal 
 objects, and the management of that realm has countless 
 exact issues for good and for evil. The science-man is a 
 whole man with every organ in him, from the crown of the 
 head to the soles of the feet. The Word, if we may use the 
 thought, looks at Egypt through Israel, at the natural through 
 the spiritual man ; and hence it contains things concerning 
 Egypt which are not written, and scarcely hinted at, in the 
 hieroglyphic remains. The Word contains the real history of 
 Egypt : its full inheritance of representatives and ceremonials 
 from the Ancient Church ; and then its perversion of these 
 Church-powers through long dynasties of idolatries and 
 enchantments until Egypt is no more. 
 
 From the signification of Egypt as science, a presumption 
 is raised that it was indeed the earliest of the cultivated 
 nations. For scientifics ending in knowledges are the 
 proper beginning of the spiritual mind, which without them 
 we may say has no basis, no bones, and no definite human 
 form. And a people that specially represented religious 
 scientifics would stand as the primitive schoolroom of the 
 Ancient Church which as a divine ^Eon followed the extinc- 
 tion of the Most Ancient Church. 
 
 Finally, if you desire to understand Egypt, study its true 
 hierology in the spiritual sense of the inspired Word. It is 
 necessarily and inevitably a religious study. 
 
298 FUTURITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY. 
 
 LXV. FUTURITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY. 
 
 The spiritual world makes history because every nation 
 has its ancestors connected with it, and either above it or 
 below it ; and from its own free determination, it receives its 
 life from these invisible but immense kingdoms. Were their 
 pressure estopped, the human will and understanding would 
 be at an end, and the race would be extinct. God rules 
 man indeed from Himself, but angels, spirits, and demons 
 are also His ministers and administrators. An irrelevant 
 word occurs to me here. A school of materialists holds that 
 there is something selfish and shocking to morality in the 
 desire of heavenly happiness for the individual ; that he 
 ought to work for the good of future generations, and not 
 otherwise for his own good. The same of course applies to 
 an age ; it ought to work for the next age ; and so forth. 
 And the most future age of course has the greatest claim of 
 all. Somewhat as a great man still among us, holds that 
 numerical voting-power should increase the further the poor 
 people are from the centres and opportunities of instruction 
 and intelligence. Let us not thus have our "eyes in the ends 
 of the earth." The people directly and remotely above us are 
 the future ages at which we have to aim, to go towards them 
 here, and join them at last, and increase the joy of their 
 power. They are or should be our future ages. The people 
 beyond us in the coming time are not our future at all. 
 They will have their own lives given, and the battle of them 
 given. And if by the regeneration of our hearts, which is 
 our salvation by the Lord, we transmit to them a new and 
 virtuous heredity, we have done the veriest best for them by 
 our useful lives, and in this one essential embracing two 
 points, the present and two futurities, we can safely leave 
 our descendants to take care of themselves ; having our little 
 historical example also before them. If on the other hand, 
 we take the downward road, each of us makes one demon 
 
FUTURITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY. 299 
 
 the more to tempt and injure the family heredity frail in us 
 all. Thus no one can work selfishly for his own salvation, 
 but in battling for it and attaining it, he clears and purges 
 human nature, and like his Master, Christ, inevitably works 
 towards the saving of the whole race of man. 
 
 It is possible that the materialist tenderness to posterity 
 has in it a large self-love, the very quality which is the 
 serpent-egg of all known immorality. As thus : It is intended 
 to compensate for the annihilation of the individual. To 
 transmit this latter falsehood to human beings is to bind them 
 in our special chains of disbelief; to dominate discovery 
 and experience in their highest meaning and possibility. It 
 is to dictate " the way, the truth, and the life " to those who 
 are to come after us, out of our own present pates. The 
 fruit must be immobility, the sameness of ages ; the sap of 
 time stagnating in the branches of the world-tree. Ultimately 
 the death of all new knowledges and sciences in particular. 
 For the very spirit of knowing is killed by it. We are the 
 men, and wisdom dies with us. Posterity lives only upon 
 .us. To eat our flesh and drink our blood is its meat and 
 drink. On the other hand the knowledge of God creating 
 the conscience, and hourly purging the individual life, 
 enables us to die daily ; in the inner sense to have no care 
 for the morrow, but to let its things care for themselves ; and 
 to leave posterity unbound by heredities which it is our con- 
 stant business to abjure and eliminate. There is no self- 
 love in this, but freedom from our dead oddities, from 
 ourselves, Freedom transmitted to our children's children. 
 
 For our dear posterity, which the positivists would bind 
 us to endow and establish, we have a typical lesson to learn 
 in the land of Egypt which inherits the sepulchres of its past. 
 By grace of dryness, a notable quality, its Pharaohs, dead 
 and gone, have delivered their wealth of monuments, mum- 
 mies, and selfhoods, to the future, and that future an Egypt 
 which has no existence. And following this example, the 
 inventors of our own dead dogmas, of which the pervert 
 
300 BEGINNINGS. 
 
 Egypt of the Word is a standing representative, bequeath 
 their monuments to the life of a posterity of which whoso 
 dreams, let him dream. If we are wise we shall visit these 
 simulacra carefully, as insalubrious, and as the abodes and 
 breaths of doleful creatures. If we are foolish, we shall in- 
 habit them, and aim to consign our next generations to their 
 valleys of tombs, their sands and their wildernesses. 
 
 LX VI. BEGINNINGS. 
 
 Everything has a beginning, and that beginning a ground 1 
 before it ; but no beginning has an irrelevant or inadequate 
 ground. The arts and sciences of life all commence from 
 small germs, and proceed often to surprising maturities. 
 We must not conclude from this slender initiament that they 
 grow in savage soil ; but rather that the ground is tender,, 
 and has been long preparing for them, though not aware of 
 them. They are not developments but implanted lives, not 
 accidents but organisms, not protoplasms but square seeds. 
 No new beginning is a development, though it seems to 
 develop itself from circumstances. It always develops itself 
 according to circumstances, but never from them. Real 
 initiation is not in the nature of things. Originality has long 
 and exact lines of ancestors above and behind, and also 
 below ; and it is original in conscious people because they 
 feel and think themselves origins, and the claim is allowed 
 by the supreme Giver, and contentedly endorsed all round- 
 Yet the beginning is not in them excepting as the beginning. 
 of a child is unconsciously in the father, who knows nothing 
 of the organism which proceeds by him. 
 
 The same is the case with the development of important 
 nations, which seem at a certain time to put off a rude or 
 barbarous state, and to enter upon a historical career of 
 greatness. They were not decaying when they were un- 
 noticed or seemingly unimportant, but slumbering and to be 
 
BEGINNINGS. 301 
 
 awakened. They had in them the stuff or matrix which 
 was fitted to receive a new impregnation. A condition of 
 their infancy was that they knew nothing of the career which 
 was to come to them. When Abram was led out of Ur of 
 the Chaldees as one of the heads of a pastoral clan, and 
 became the Patriarch Abraham, he was chosen for a quality 
 in which the Jewish Dispensation could be implanted, a 
 quality of reverence for external rituals which was unique, 
 and which no men of the surrounding nations possessed. 
 They were better than he ; but they had not this needful 
 quality ; and so, as a ritual church was to be established, 
 Abraham and his descendants, for that purpose of use, were 
 the chosen people. But they themselves, with their father 
 Abraham, originated nothing, but were only the fitting 
 ground in which the Jewish future could become a seed, be 
 vitalized and be enacted. 
 
 This is a typical instance, but it is also true of the modern 
 nations. They similarly have emerged from rudeness, and 
 as we call it from its grossness, barbarism ; but the barbarism 
 was full of industry, even of the industry of war. It was 
 instinct with active will and understanding, and so far was 
 not in the lines of decay. It wanted- nothing but impregna- 
 tions, square seeds of the future, and they always, if good, 
 come from above, and beget an advancing race : and if pre- 
 dominant, ensure it a long, or what is the same thing, a useful 
 future. Their inheritances as they proceed become larger, 
 more honest and more polite. When the crude races from 
 which we have sprung naturally were born as nations, there 
 was nothing in them of the history through which they have 
 lived, but it is given to them year by year, according to their 
 faculty of reception, as an unintermitting life. Our analogy 
 of the seed flatly contradicts this in appearance, for does not 
 the seed contain its future plant, and evolve itself into stalk, 
 flower, fruit, and seeds by the heat and light of the suns of 
 spring and summer ? We reply, there is an end behind it 
 which does it all, and is the current and present ancestor of 
 
302 BEGINNINGS. 
 
 its specific stages. The spiritual force, call it the unknown 
 or what you please, we call it Providence acting through 
 the spiritual world, is the agent, and were it subtracted in 
 any step of the process, the plant would cease to be. It is 
 indeed never subtracted, though circumstances may render 
 its operation nil. And so it is with nations and races of 
 themselves, they are as grounds. Good seed is sown in 
 them, and they are as gardens ; but not of themselves. They 
 are their own gardeners, but not of themselves. Ages give 
 them new seeds leading to new fruits or uses, but not of 
 themselves. The original bareness of their ground may thus 
 be covered and forgotten in their fruitfulness and beauty ; 
 their ages may bloom in panoramic variety .; but there is a 
 supreme Husbandman sowing each stage of origins and 
 beginnings, Who is the end and the cause. 
 
 And consider gardens from another point of view. All 
 our modern garden-flowers are from wild stocks : perhaps 
 we ought to say, almost all ; for there may be among them, 
 still illustrious, " most ancient " flowers which we do not 
 appreciate. But for the others, manifestly they are what they 
 are " not of themselves." Man is interpolated as the 
 beginning of them as garden-series. He is with fruits also 
 as a new originator. His will and understanding are put 
 into the unconscious plants, flocks and herds, and they are 
 raised to a level answering now to his annual expectations 
 and desires. Still not of themselves. The gardener is a 
 spiritual being; and the influx of his affections into skill and 
 science is a new creation for the plants. It is a great fact 
 and a great metaphor in one. Use to Man is at the bottom 
 of it. The existence of gardening is thus a parable of what 
 one good man in a kingdom may be, and of what One 
 Divine Man is in the world. 
 
 Each life to a spiritually-minded man furnishes proofs 
 that in the gifts of the mind every man. is a receiver and 
 not an originator, a steward and not a proprietor. To the 
 earliest days in which life was merely an inspiration and an 
 
BEGINNINGS. 303, 
 
 expiration, baby words came as a tiny seed from without. 
 After that, words were divided into knowledges and the 
 expression of them, and then first things were named and 
 summoned, and baby affections were opened. The young 
 child had this done for him, and did not do it for himself. 
 If he could have attempted to effect it he would have spoilt 
 the process, by interfering with the consummate agent, and 
 foiling the mortal instrument. By and by some early bent 
 discovers itself in the child, some doll with an unknown 
 future state is nursed. The future state, though it be a line 
 of kings, is nothing, but the doll is the beloved and the all. 
 If the issues of this were foreseen, known, and attempted to 
 be manipulated and managed, the doll would be ruined and 
 cast aside. But the ruler of childhood gives ignorance of 
 the future as shield for the delights of the present. The 
 genius that makes the doll alive, and the affection that 
 embraces it, are both of them gifts, and as such are watched 
 and protected with sacred tenderness by the mother, to 
 whom also this tenderness is from the first a gift, new, self- 
 evident, unaccountable. At a later stage life-purposes begin, 
 and a special opening of the understanding is given for 
 each : the purpose and the understanding together consti- 
 tute a new genius. Some science flows from it, nourishes 
 it, and strengthens it ; and works embody it. All these are 
 superadded gifts to an organism made and prepared to 
 receive them. Looking back upon them, you discern now, 
 even from the dim past, that they were consciously pro- 
 phesied and prepared for. But you also discern, that 
 whenever the issues were happy, they were not your own, 
 and that the more impersonal and unappropriated they were, 
 the happier they were ; and the more inspired by a power 
 not your own that made for their joyful usufruct. Accidents 
 often seem to be in the origination of the gifts : but these 
 are not accidents, but rapid moments of impregnation, 
 pleasurable or painful. 
 
 What are called conversions, when they are real, or when 
 
304 SPIRITUAL RULERS. 
 
 you do not make them magically out of yourself, are among 
 surprising gifts ; altering gradually a whole life, and subor- 
 dinating the series of it to a new Order and Ruler. The 
 constant cry they utter, and the claim they make is, that 
 they are not from the man himself. " Non nobis Domine ! " 
 The conclusion is that Life is Influx; that all epochs, 
 accidents and chances are in the contemplation and play of 
 it ; that man is the responsible receiver and not the origin 
 or proprietor of it ; and that the more devoutly this truth is 
 acknowledged, the greater is the personal individuality of 
 the man, and the greater the security for him of large affections 
 and inspired understandings. 
 
 LXVIL SPIRITUAL RULERS. 
 
 It may be noted for the natural mind to which such con- 
 siderations are new, that love, wisdom, goodness, truth, 
 charity, faith, though usually reckoned as mere attributes of 
 human beings, are substances and forms, namely in the 
 Hives of those human beings ; and determine the characters 
 and deeds of men and their entire humanities. Conscience 
 is the recipient organ and commanding agent of them : a 
 gradually warming and enlightening conscience ; ultimately a 
 spiritual conscience. Life on the one hand embraces all the 
 details of our daily existence ; so many and so concrete, so 
 ^filling every hour with varieties of works, that the mind at 
 first resents the supereminent singleness of its own only 
 principles upon which life should proceed. They are regarded 
 .as nothings, though heavenwise they overhang and mate 
 the'mselves to everything, and whether for good or evil 
 become everything. To take an instance. War is a solid 
 fact with its armies and strategists, its battles, successes and 
 defeats. But the only essence it is at last confronted with, 
 lies in the righteous judgment, Whether it is a just and 
 absolutely necessary war. Almsgiving, commonly mistaken 
 
GOLD AS SOCIAL SUBSTANCE. 305 
 
 for charity, is a common occurrence, but charity, the truth and 
 good of charity, supervises it, and judges in each particular 
 gift whether it is wisely given, and whether it will do good, 
 or harm. Successful speculation and business in general are 
 another field of instances, and these affairs are judged as 
 honest or dishonest ; moral principle being of their essence. 
 Love and hatred are both supervised by mere goodness 
 and truth : as, do we love and hate persons, or do we love 
 their good and what is good in them, or do we hate or love 
 their evil and what is evil in them ? All these three things 
 are possible, indeed common : but the good and the true 
 decide upon the quale of our love and its inevitable actions. 
 Do we eat too much, or drink too much, for our conscience 
 to approve ? These random instances are sufficient to show 
 that love and wisdom, good and truth, charity and faith are, 
 or can be, daily life ; and that as judgments and justices they 
 are co-extensive in immeasurable detail with all the things of 
 life : that they are a supereminent universe made in the 
 image and likeness of God and man, and that a heaven 
 corresponding to the educational earth, with all its details 
 in a higher life, is their final name. They, or their opposites, 
 are all the deeds done in the body. 
 
 LXVIILGOLD AS SOCIAL SUBSTANCE. 
 
 A word on the precious metals by one who does not 
 follow the national and international dynamics which lie in 
 the adoption and alteration of standards of value. Is there 
 not a Divine Providence in the creation of gold for the 
 service of human society ? The mere name and fame of it 
 is a birth of men in stony places, and a builder of cities and 
 inhabited provinces in far continents. And of itself it is a 
 noble metal beyond the wear and tear of the chemistry of 
 time. It is beautiful. It is amenable to amalgam with 
 other metals, and easily recoverable from the condescension 
 
 u 
 
306 GOLD AS SOCIAL SUBSTANCE. 
 
 of embracing them : they can be called off to other unions : 
 gold remains unblemished. It is bred in rocks and revealed 
 in atoms in watercourses ; and the believer in the atoms is 
 led by them through faith to the mines. It is always good. 
 I know not whether there are different kinds of gold, but some 
 is yellow and some is red. If there are varieties, they are 
 rather loves and amities of variety than differences. Genesis 
 says of Havilah, " the gold of that land is good." It is the 
 first word of gold in the Word, and echoes the declaration 
 of the sixth day, that " God saw everything that He had 
 made, and behold it was very good." In that Adamic ^Eon 
 there was auri sacra fames, a sacred hunger for the good 
 of gold, and an innocence unconscious of the evil. 
 
 Gold is rare, and the appetite for it unbounded, and its 
 scarceness combined with its other qualities crowns it with 
 value of use. There is perhaps just enough of it to be the 
 handiest of representative values, while it has also real value 
 from imperishability, beauty, tradition of gifts from love and 
 friendship, tradition of religious gifts and services ; tradition 
 of royal crowns and noble coronets. It represents the 
 human mind in its best affections and worst passions from all 
 ages. The seal and die of God and Caesar are both upon it. 
 And its practical utility is as much clearly providential as its 
 other prerogatives. By its scarcity it drives value home. If 
 it existed for us more easily or in other quantities than it 
 does, it would either by its deficiency be only a jewel and 
 ornament, or by its redundance make food and raiment and 
 habitation compete with it in representative power, and so to 
 speak outweigh its purchases in barter. As it stands it is 
 the last blow in cancelling debts, and a perpetual readjust- 
 ment in the interest of honesty and equality. At the same 
 time it admits to the extent of proved and settled public 
 credit, supplements, such as other metals, notes and all paper 
 bonds, for its own convenience, until it can travel ; and re- 
 stricts or refuses these whenever it is itself in straits. It is 
 therefore the universal solvent of promises to pay ; and the 
 
THE DIVINE CYCLE. 307 
 
 more honest the people are, the promises themselves become 
 more good or golden. Discount is the measure of 
 uncertainty, dishonesty, distance, or other inconvenience. 
 
 No other substance but gold can minister thus. Diamonds 
 are too rare, and destructive of value in division. Silver is 
 too abundant, and silver kings if they could would swamp the 
 treasuries of the world, and make them bankrupt in the moral 
 and spiritual arts of purchase. And mere notes endorsed by 
 men or companies with no answerable gold behind them, 
 would require universal honesty ; nor only that, but universal 
 wisdom, to undertake no works that will be found ruinous 
 and unjustifiable ; and a foresight that would amount to a 
 supernatural prevision. 
 
 So gold, like a merciless and merciful ruler comes to the 
 front by its divine right ; and calls us up, as no other hungry 
 divinity can, to show our property in it as the gauge of our 
 existence in the body and in society. Have not our good 
 Jews a relation to this precious gold, this love of theirs, 
 something like what they have to the Old Testament ? They 
 are perchance the bottom and basis of an insistance upon 
 gold as ultimate value. So-called Christians indeed love the 
 same metal well, but they believe in paper longer than the 
 Jew does ; and would carry on larger business in it alone 
 were it not for the Rothschilds and others to whom gold is 
 the ultima ratio of transactions, and the key to the kingdom 
 of solvency. 
 
 LXIX.THE DIVINE CYCLE. 
 
 " Our Saviour Jesus Christ," says Paul to Timothy, " has 
 brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." 
 This opens up, in strict connection with the subjects now 
 treated of, the question of immortality ; for question is made 
 of it by many of the learned. The Lord brought it to 
 light, for it was not in light when He came. He gave it life ; 
 
308 THE DIVINE CYCLE. 
 
 for His life was the light of men. He is the resurrection 
 and the life. 
 
 Had the world then been without the belief in a life after 
 death before His coming ? It is an opinion in the Church 
 that the Jewish Scriptures contain no recognition of the immor- 
 tality of man before the Babylonish Captivity, and that the 
 Jews brought the notion of it from Babylon. It may indeed be 
 that the Jews themselves read nothing of a future state in 
 their inspired writings, but applied them wholly to this world ; 
 but to the Christian reader in the light of the gospel there 
 are thousands of passages in the Psalms and the Prophets 
 which transparently announce the perpetuity of the life of 
 man, and the existence of a heaven and a hell. Judaism in 
 the Church can indeed degrade them into promises of 
 prosperity, and threatenings of adversity, limited to the 
 world and the body ; but they can fairly be read quite 
 otherwise. 
 
 There is however a meaning in the presumption that the 
 Jews brought the idea of a future life from Babylon. All 
 the ancient nations had a greater purview of some immortal 
 condition than the children of Israel, to whom the present 
 life with its good things was the summum bonum. The 
 genius of this people above all the world was secular- 
 religious. That genius marked them out for obedience to 
 ritual, in barter for length of days, inheritance in Canaan 
 for all generations, plentiful harvests, election as God's 
 peculiar people, and in the end universal Messianic 
 dominion. Such satisfaction with the blessings as they 
 held them of the present life, closed their perceptions against 
 spiritual things which became nothing to them, and made 
 the deathbeds of Patriarchs more into last wills and testa- 
 ments to their descendants who were gathered round them, 
 than into pious voices from the first steps of the ladder 
 which reaches from earth to heaven. For the Jews were 
 secularists///^ a secular Jehovah. With the other nations 
 it was not so, but with all their later idolatries they had a 
 
THE DIVINE CYCLE. 309 
 
 belief in the life to come dependent upon the life man leads 
 here, and it is impossible that that belief, self-made and un- 
 verifiable as it was, did not influence them to something of 
 good. The Egyptians had explicit ideas of this mortal life 
 weighed in the balances of divine justice, and doom accord- 
 ing to the state and preponderance of virtue : no arbitrary 
 judgment, but a portion allotted according |to acquired cha- 
 racter. Osiris did not judge the man, but the man's life 
 judged itself. (Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 256.) This 
 fact stands out even through the confusion of metempsy- 
 chosis, which also has a spiritual side to it. The other 
 nations known to the Jews, perhaps excepting Babylon, from 
 which the Jews were least likely to bring the notion of a 
 future state, had survivals of belief differently from the Jews, 
 who also, until they had finally secularized themselves, were 
 incapable of being made the vehicle and subject of the mere 
 ritual of a church. Abraham, as we shall see presently, had 
 to pass clean through idolatry, and to accept Jehovah as a 
 local and national god, one, and the most mighty, of many, 
 before he stood as the chieftain of the Jewish Dispensation. 
 Jehovah for him was his warrior, in successful conflict with 
 the gods of the Canaanitish nations. 
 
 The view held by learned biblicists, and accredited gener- 
 ally to Bishop Warburton, that the Jews first heard tell of 
 immortality from beyond the pale of their own religion, is in 
 evidence that that creed existed in the world before their 
 time ; and the question occurs, how did it take its rise ? 
 We have seen that the condition of the world from Adam to 
 Moses was no bare theism or monotheism in which the 
 Father and Creator had left man to acknowledge a god as 
 an abstraction of his own mind ; but that a series of Revela- 
 tions and consequent vessels or Churches extended through 
 those ages, and were the connections of God with man. 
 Also that all the nations after Noah or the Flood were 
 branches of the Ancient or Spiritual Church, which 
 succeeded the destroyed Adam or Celestial Church. The 
 
3io THE DIVINE CYCLE. 
 
 most ancient tradition and the new organ, conscience, worked 
 together to impart and confirm a belief in personal immor- 
 tality in opposition to the sensual fact of the mortality of the 
 individual and the race. From these two sources of real 
 information, each regenerate man knew in his best hours, 
 and acknowledged always, that his life here was a natural 
 preparation for a spiritual life ; that mortality, or birth at the 
 bottom of the scale, must precede immortality. The Greek 
 axiom, that whatever has a beginning must have an end, was 
 with him a godly and not a physical, scientific or logical 
 truth. The end the beginning has is its purpose, of serving 
 as a basis for the never-ending stages or imperfections of 
 an unending life. This, not in the beasts, but in all souls 
 that have the capacity of knowing the Creator. Immortality 
 'lies therein both for those who are in good, and for those 
 who are in evil. 
 
 " It was usual with the ancients to say when anyone died, 
 that he was gathered to his fathers, or to his people, and they 
 meant thereby that he actually came to his parents, to his 
 relations and kinsfolk in the other life. They got this form 
 of expression from the most ancient people who were celes- 
 tial men, and who during their abode on earth, were at the 
 same time with the angels in heaven, and thus knew how 
 the real case was. They knew that all who were in the same 
 good meet and are together in the other life, and likewise all who 
 are in the same truth. Of the former they said that they 
 were gathered to their fathers ; but of the latter that they 
 were gathered to their people ; for father with them signified 
 good, and people signified truth " (Arcana, n. 3255). 
 
 But in the Most Ancient Church, Heaven present was a 
 perceived fact. The ministry of angels, open vision and 
 every-day seership, were implanted in the natural life. 
 There were not two worlds in the sense of disconnection, 
 but in the sense of order necessary for promotion. Com- 
 munion between the two was as between parent and child, 
 the Lord being the parent in and through all in the higher 
 
THE DIVINE CYCLE. 311 
 
 degree, and the child in and through all in the lower. The 
 sense of death was eliminated, save as a putting off one state 
 in order to be clothed upon with another. This primeval 
 state of revelation, communion and personal inspiration, is 
 the root of all that was known and thought of a future state 
 until the coming of the Lord. The Ancient Church 
 inherited the memory of it from the Most Ancient ; and the 
 ancient nations, so long as they had any human remains, 
 carried it down as a fading tradition. In Greece it was an 
 argument and a decoration of discourse. In Rome a 
 governmental, political, and oratorical copy. 
 
 The belief however was kept casually alive and latent by 
 dreams and visions, whether productions of literary imagina- 
 tion, or of real experience; Homer and Virgil both took 
 their heroes to the shades, and reported of destinies there. 
 And Cicero, in the Somnium Sripionis, has given a noble 
 view of the destiny of patriotism in the skies. Moreover 
 the ghostly experiences of all races in all ages, superstitions 
 .as they are called, and facts as they are, have kept belief in 
 that other life from which the phantoms hail, alive in the 
 fears and awe of all people, savage and civilized. 
 
 At the beginning therefore Revelation was the only source 
 of the knowledge of a spiritual world ; namely, by that world 
 actually revealed as a current fact, and factor for life, and 
 for the conduct of life. The race was then known not to 
 be naturally but conditionally immortal. It was saved from 
 its own suicide by the raising up of successive Churches by 
 which a new life was given from on high. So futile is the 
 modern thought that the individuals can all die, and the race 
 survive. Both would perish if there were not a Saviour fore- 
 seen from the first for both. And the race here would 
 probably expire first before the so-called ghosts above. 
 
 Revelation in Christ is again the source of all our faith, 
 charity and knowledge touching a future state. Apart from 
 His revelation no man can have any certainty of his own sur- 
 vival after death. He can balance the sides of his advocacy 
 
3 i2 THE DIVINE CYCLE. 
 
 pro and con, and find no end, " in wandering mazes lost."" 
 Abandon the Christian religion for information of faith, and 
 there is none to hand. Accordingly our much esteemed 
 Emeritus Professor F. W. Newman, with a candour irreproach- 
 able, says : " As soon as I ceased to trust the Scriptures of the 
 New Testament as a divine revelation, my acceptance of a 
 Future Life as a dogma at once fell away. But knowing 
 that so many holy souls had devoutly believed it and that 
 ostensibly it had ennobled their devoted lives, I held to it with 
 a loose hand, feeling assured that if the Supreme Lord 
 judged it better for them and for me, He would bestow a 
 second life, as freely as He had bestowed a first life, without 
 our asking ; but if on the contrary for good reasons of His 
 own He did not grant it, then I was sure that that was best 
 for us." My friend here, without ceding his doubt, refers 
 touchingly to the Communion of Saints on earth, as he under- 
 stands it. I cannot but agree with him that no man can 
 solidly find out a future state for himself without an express 
 revelation on the subject ; and my wonder is that such a 
 mind as the Professor's should not see that the Supreme Lord 
 in whom he so implicitly believes, is able and sure to furnish 
 such a revelation to His children not only to instruct them 
 about a future state if it exists, but about Himself and His 
 perfections, which no searching can find out ; a revelation 
 which He can make by a condescending Word, as easily as 
 He can create man and the universe. To me a speechless 
 God is an incredible god ; and a God who commits himself 
 to be manufactured by human faculties is a vote-made 
 parliamentary god : one being or a thousand, the hysteroplasm 
 of universal suffrage. Atheism is a not unreasonable escape 
 from such a ridiculous issue, though the cure is worse than- 
 the disorder. 
 
 Of course the immediate answer to this is, that the Word 
 alleged to be the voice of God is full of contradictions, and 
 inhumane and unsatisfactory. It attributes to God acts and 
 qualities undivine ; and therefore disproves its pretensions,. 
 
THE DIVINE CYCLE. 313 
 
 or the claims men make for it. We have already discussed 
 this question, and do not re-open it. But let the reader who 
 is able study the spiritual sense and its modification of 
 " the letter which killeth." Few can do this as yet. But 
 the number will increase ; and will be sufficient in a time of 
 waiting to be a light on the hills for those who are in the 
 valleys. If I may use the phrase reverently when I think 
 of this lover of so many great truths, it is a " suspicious 
 circumstance " against the Theist, seeing that an authentic 
 Word would be a divine proof of love from the Allfather to 
 His offspring, as a father's voice is a human proof of love to 
 the young and inexperienced, that there is what professes to 
 be a revelation at present in command in the world ; in short, 
 what calls itself The Word ; and that it is not investigated 
 in the new light brought by Swedenborg. It would seem 
 that it ought to be a subject of much painstaking, nay of 
 devout theist prayer, to consider whether under any of the 
 new conditions it fills the gap between God and Man ; and 
 in reality, against some appearances, can have God for its 
 Author. 
 
 But the Lord has not only vouchsafed a Word with a 
 future state omnipresent as a visible doctrine in the New 
 Testament ; but He has commissioned the same Emanuel 
 Swedenborg to make known the future state of that Word 
 itself, in the world and in the heavens, by revealing through 
 him the spiritual sense which is for the New Jerusalem. 
 And furthermore, by the same instrumentality, he has fur- 
 nished to mankind a complete and therefore a rational 
 account, of the life after death ; adding full experience of 
 all that is needful to be known for the dwellers upon earth. 
 He has also again revealed Himself and His perfections, 
 unknowable otherwise, to all coming generations. He has 
 brought his Heaven of Angels to the doors of knowledge, 
 and made it evident that they are not without a function, 
 but like the good men they were on earth, they are active, 
 working, industrial angels, and our brethren more than ever ; 
 
314 THE DIVINE CYCLE. 
 
 and that they carry the human form with all its marriages 
 and supremest functions ; and moreover that as " the 
 heavens are not pure in His sight," and " He charges them 
 with folly," that they are under the correction of divine 
 judicial light, and obedient to this that they are ever 
 advancing and perfecting. See on these subjects Sweden- 
 borg's Heaven and Hell before cited. 
 
 The subject of a spiritual world and a future state is there- 
 fore in a series. It was communion of angels with men, in 
 the Most Ancient Church ; universal personal experience. 
 It was taught in the Ancient Word to the Ancient Church, and 
 the memory and tradition of the most ancient days were 
 also preserved in it. Doubtless spiritual openings and com- 
 munications where needed and possible concurred for the 
 strengthening of faith. It was covert in the Jews, and this 
 world was enough for them when they rightly used it. In 
 both the lives of Christ, natural and divine natural, it was 
 His commanding doctrine and most comfortable assurance. 
 In these days, of the initiation of His New Christian 
 Church, it is a revealed unique personal fact. And thus a 
 divine cycle is completed from Revelation to Revelation, 
 and from experience to experience. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 ROHKKT R. SUTHERLAND, PRINTER, EDINBURGH. 
 
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