and their individual members, and even to the lower orders of organised and unorganised being. Substance and Form, he argued, imply one another. God is the absolute substance, and the absolute form. Angels and Men are made after the image of God, which is that of a perfect Man. We thus arrive at the germinating principle of his whole system-the idea of God, as the Sovereign, Universal Man. By this idea he got rid at once of the vague term Nature, which was a mere cover for unbelief, obtained a living, real entity, as an object of faith, and laid, as he conceived, a foundation in the eternal order of things, for that doctrine of correspondences between the Divine and the Natural, which became the support and the warrant of his Theology.

For instance, he regarded the Sun, which is the animating and sustaining power of our planetary system, as but the type of a brighter Sun in the Heavens, where Jehovah manifests his immediate presence, and imparts to the Angels in unceasing streams, the love and the wisdom which have their correspondences in the heat and light of our material day.*

It was an obvious deduction from this fundamental idea, that the preservation of the Universe, especially the moral and intelligent portion of it, from ruin-depended on maintaining unbroken the connexion of the Receptacle with the Influx. In Paradise the union of Man with God was complete. Men understood the language of Angelsimperfectly transmitted to later times in the science of correspondences-and lived in habitual communion with Heaven. All this was destroyed by the Fall.-And this brings us to the author's doctrine of human free-agency. All good comes from Jehovah through influx; but man has the power of accepting or rejecting this divine influence, and thus of becoming the voluntary author of his own sin and consequent ruin. It is an axiom in Swedenborg's system, that all Influx is according to Reception; in other words, the human will converts it into evil or good. When

*The reader who is at all acquainted with the history of ancient opinion, will at once discern in the Grand or Archetypal Man of Swedenborg, a close affinity with the Adam-Kadmon of the Cabalists; who held moreover (a further resemblance) that the everlasting Sun-the infinite Source of Light to the Universe-was Jehovah himself.

man accepts the divine operation, God meets and takes up the tendency of his will, and carries it on step by step to the higher degrees of spiritual perfection and blessedness. The substance, then, of the doctrine is this: that all active goodness is an effect of the divine inspiration, while to man is left a negative power, sufficient to throw on himself alone the responsibility and guilt of moral evil :--an intermediate view, that rather evades, than fairly grapples with, the real difficulties at issue between the Free-willer and the Necessarian.

To counteract the effects of the Fall, and keep up some communication between the Natural and Heavenly worlds, God interposed in successive dispensations. Under one of these dispensations, introduced by Moses, the people were instructed by types and signs alone; spiritual truths were hidden in the letter of the Law; and they who were faithful and obedient lived, as it were prospectively, in virtue of a revelation that was yet to be made known. Before the Advent of Christ, spiritual light was almost wholly obscured, and scarce any intercourse subsisted between Heaven and Earth; for the Spiritual World-a middle region between Heaven and Hell, to which the souls of men are carried immediately after death-was so filled with ignorant and wicked spirits, that the truth and love of God could hardly penetrate through it to this human earth; and without speedy and effectual interposition, all mankind must have perished. Hence the necessity for the incarnation of Jehovah.

A peculiarity in Swedenborg's system, is its conception of the Trinity-the mutual relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This distinction was declared by him not to affect the interior nature of Deity, nor to involve a distinction of persons: for the Three constitute only One Person, Jehovah. The distinction arose with the new relations called into existence by the creation of the Universe. Before the creation there was no Trinity. origin is coincident with the commencement of Time and the foreseen necessities of the human race. According to Swedenborg, a threefold division-discreet degrees, as he calls them, in triple succession-pervades all things, and assigns the governing order of Creation. The Father is the hidden Love or inmost essence of the Godhead;

Its

Christ is the informing principle which shapes it into definite relations towards the Finite; and the Spirit is the virtue or operation, which results from the union of the Two. These Three are the three essentials of God, and make a One, like Soul, Body and Operation, or Will, Intellect and Act, in Man. They represent a trinity of attributes - Creation, Redemption, Regeneration. God from eternity is the Creator, in time the Redeemer, and to eternity the Regenerator. With the Athanasian trinity, Swedenborg in every part of his system, wages implacable war. His antipathy to it follows him into the Spiritual World, and even disturbs his peace, when conversing with the inhabitants of the fixed stars in the remotest depths of space.

The immediate object of the Lord's incarnation was to subjugate the Hells, which had acquired a frightful ascendancy during the prevalence of Heathenism and Judaism, and pouring out their pestiferous influence over the Spiritual World, darkened and closed up the access to Heaven, and almost prevented any intercourse between God and Man. To accomplish this great purpose, Jehovah descended through the Heavens, assumed Humanity, and for a time, in the peculiar phraseology of Swedenborg, dwelt in ultimates. This is to be understood from his notion respecting the several degrees of the Divine Manifestation:-in the Celestial Heaven, corresponding to Love; -in the Spiritual Heaven, corresponding to Wisdom;and in the Natural or visible World, a joint effect of the former two, exhibiting an union of Love and Wisdom in its formation. This ternary order of things pervades (as we have before remarked) his theory of the Universeexisting either successively or synchronically. When the Lord became flesh, he did not leave the Celestial behind him on entering into the Spiritual, but brought it with Him into that lower Heaven, and carried the two thus united into the Ultimate or Natural, so that the three grades, the Celestial, the Spiritual and the Natural coexist in his incarnation. This was conceived and represented as the condition of effectual redemption from the power of the Hells, and of a perfect re-establishment of the union between God and Man.

The theology of Swedenborg at this point becomes

exceedingly mystical and difficult of apprehension. Conflicting ideas are at work in it, and do not come to a clear and harmonious self-adjustment. Vehemently opposed to the orthodox dogmas of Satisfaction, Atonement and Justification by Faith alone, as embodied in the Lutheran Formula Concordiæ, he was still, it is obvious, very strongly under the influence of modes of expression which were traditional in the Church, and which, though not equally offensive to the moral feelings with those which he had rejected, it is just as impossible to realise to the understanding, either as historical or as spiritual facts. The idea of Humanity, it must be remembered, he regarded as the governing type of all existence. Jehovah," to use his own words," is a Man, as in first principles, so also in ultimates."* But his Divine Humanity he laid aside, when he assumed the flesh conceived of the Virgin by the operation of the Holy Spirit. This was his period of humiliation or exinanition, necessary to be gone through to give him access to the Devils, whom he could not have approached in his state of celestial glory. His short manifestation on earth was a process of gradually recovering the Divine Human, and of dropping in the same degree the Lower Human which he had temporarily put on. Every temptation that he overcame, effected more and more of this substitution of the Divine for the Earthly, so that before he re-ascended to Heaven after the resurrection, he had parted by successive triumphs over the Hells, with every carnal particle derived from the Virgin's womb:-his glorification was perfect;-and the union of God and Man complete. In Heaven, Swedenborg assures us he had seen Mary herself, who told him, Christ had been, but was now no longer, her Son;-for he had put off the humanity which she had lent him for his earthly sojourn, and was worshipped by her as God. In this view, therefore, the passion of the Cross was in no other sense the special means of human redemption, than as it was the last of Christ's victories over the infernal powers, and completed the triumph and glorification of the Divine Human. Two benefits resulted to men from this incarnation of Jehovah by overpowering the Hells and

:

True Christian Religion,' 102.

bringing the Spiritual World into order, he again opened a free communication between Heaven and Earth to all who sought it in faith; and by assuming the nature and encountering the temptations peculiar to man, he left an example of the Divine Life by which Heaven was to be attained. His merits, however, were not imputed, as the established Orthodoxy taught, to mere Faith, but must be voluntarily appropriated by an union of Faith and Charity in the heart and life of the believer.*

Had Jehovah gone back to Heaven without leaving any visible token behind Him, the conjunction between Heaven and Earth would again have been wanting; but this was effected and rendered permanent, by the lasting presence of the Word among men. In the doctrine of the Word, the mysticism of Swedenborg's theology re-appears in all its peculiarity. He goes far beyond the twofold meaning of the Greek Aóyos, expressing both a mental conception and its vocal utterance. By the Word, in one and the same application, he seems to understand the living substance of Jehovah, who is Love indeed and Wisdom indeed, and also the embodying of his Mind or Spirit in the Hebrew and Greek Scripture-as if the two ideas were identical. There is a strange mixture, in this view, of the plain and figurative sense of language—which it is impossible to disentangle into intelligibility. Yet it was by the adoption of this view, that Swedenborg attempted to explain how Christ after his return to Heaven, had still immediate conjunction with his Church. In the three Senses of the Word, the Celestial, the Spiritual and the Natural manifestations of the Lord were respectively present, co-existing as the Divine Truth, in its fulness, its sanctity and its power in the Ultimate, the simple Letter. On the Letter the higher Senses of the Word were supposed to rest, and it was therefore called the Basis, Continens or Firmamentum of the former two. Every simple Christian who honestly received the Natural

* In the exposition of this general idea, Swedenborg has elaborated a complete system of Human Duty from the Ten Commandments. They are a perfect Summary, according to him, of Faith and Charity-of all Truth and all Good. God is ever present in them, only waiting for Man to open the door of his Will and Affections, in order to enter into union with him. See True Christian Religion,' ch. v.