DELIVERED AT THE NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH, IN CROSS STREET, HATTON BY THE REV. S. NOBLE, AUTHOR OF "THE PLENARY INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES ASSERTED," &c.;, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY GEORGE BUSH. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY JOHN ALLEN, No. 139 NASSAU-STREET. 1848. INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. Ir is usually a matter of no small surprise to those who are not deterred by the force of prejudice from a candid examination of the works of Swedenborg, to find in them, not merely a mass of alleged disclosures of the various phenomena of the other life, but a clear, consistent, and well argued system of religious doctrines. To one who has hitherto been led to regard him simply in the character which the christian world seems to have agreed to ascribe to him,-that of an amiable but deluded visionary, who dealt solely in the vagaries of a disordered imagination,—it opens a world of fresh wonder to perceive, as he advances in his inquiry, that a new and most impressive view of the grand doctrines of Christianity is continually unfolding before him, one that appeals with such power and demonstration to his calmest reason, that before he is aware he finds himself questioning, not the sanity of Swedenborg, but the sanity of those who have gravely impeached his. He is at a loss to conceive of any standard of soundness and sobriety of mind tried by which the Swedish sage shall be found wanting. That his enunciations are often new, strange, and startling, he is indeed forced to admit, but the more they are pondered, the more clearly does he perceive their verisimilitude, their logical legitimacy, and the superiority of their claims to belief over the positions of the prevailing theology which array themselves against them. It is mainly perhaps in this antithetic survey of the old and the new dogmas that he becomes aware of the higher claims of the latter on the score of their congruity with reason and revelation. The first dawn of conviction that steals upon his mind, assuring him that he has at length met with a theology which is at the same time a philosophy, and that he is proffered a faith which does not require him to forego in any respect the decisions of his intellect, which 79136 |