ences which separate one man from another, to our sight, sink into nothing in approaching God. Nothing can be either good or evil to Him, considered absolutely, because all things alike come from Him, and are therefore alike to Him. He is the same always, and His operation, consequently, is uniform.

Thus both the Divine and the Human natures, regarded in themselves, regarded as distinct one from the other, refuse to explain the actual differences which exist among men.

Our only resource, consequently, unless we deny the exist ence of these differences, is to accept the truth of Christianity, which affirms the actual unition of the divine and human natures, or, what is the same thing, the essential humanity of God.

But how does this explain the moral experience of mankind? The answer to this question, involving, as it does, an orderly apprehension of the divine end or object in creation, will also perfectly illustrate the truth of the Divine Humanity. What, then, is the divine end or object in creation?

God, says Swedenborg, is infinite or perfect love. Divine love, in other words, is utterly unlimited by self-love. For as God constitutes the BEING of all his creatures, as His selfhood is the absolute ground of all other selves, so there can be no possible antagonism in Him between the love of others and the love of Himself. The two loves in Him are absolutely one and indivisible. Thus divine love is not an emotion or passion; that is to say, it is not the quality of a subject in relation to an object, but the absolute unity of subject and object. It is thus a creative love. It does not exercise. itself in petting or rewarding its favorites, but in the actual creation of subjects who shall image or reproduce its own powers and delights. Thus God, says Swedenborg, is essentially communicative of Himself to others: in other words, is essentially creative. "The Creator," he proceeds, 66 CANNOT BUT BE IN OTHERS, created from Himself." His essential perfection, or the absolute indistinction in Him of self-love and universal love, necessitates this. Upon the perception of this truth, Swedenborg declares all right knowledge of creation to depend. And in exact consistency with it, he represents the whole end or object of creation to be " THE ETERNAL CONJUNCTION OF THE CREATOR WITH THE CREATURE."

But how shall this great end be practically accomplished? The creature has manifestly no absolute, but only a derived existence, and a derivative existence would appear to afford

no adequate basis for the divine conjunction with it. For how shall He who is emphatically the All in All, conjoin Himself with that which in itself is sheer nought? How shall the infinite come into such correspondence with the finite, as shall leave the reaction of the one proportionate to the action of the other? Absolutely, of course, the question is insoluble. In the absolute truth of things, as men say, there is no ratio between Creator and creature, or infinite and finite, and consequently the conjunction of Himself with the creature, which is God's end in creation, must be a purely practical conjunction, or a conjunction which stands in the exact correspondence of the created and creative activity. Now the grand distinction of the creative action is that it is self-prompted and self-sustained. And accordingly the action of the creature, in order to correspond with this, must be self-moved and self-sustained. But the creature is intrinsically finite or social; that is, he is dependent, in all that he is and does, upon the fellowship of others. Hence his actions can never be self-prompted until he becomes socially perfect; until all opposition between the universal and individual elements disappear, and society exhibit the unity of a man.

The fulfilment of the divine end in creation, then, requires the SOCIAL man, or the man in whose experience the universal life and the individual life are perfectly at one. In other words, the end of creative beneficence on earth, involves the construction of a perfect society, in which every member's love of himself shall be convertible with his love of all the rest; in which self-love and the love of others shall cordially join hands in the infinite aggrandizement of the associated life. The conjunction of the Creator with the creature, says Swedenborg, is wholly impracticable, "unless the latter be a subject in whom the former may dwell as in Himself." "These subjects, in order that they may be habitations and mansions of the Creator, must be recipients of His perfections as from themselves must be such as to elevate themselves to the Creator as from themselves, and join themselves to Him: without this reciprocation in the creature, no conjunction is possible." In plain English, the Creator must not be in the creature as a foreign power, but as the creature's self. The consciousness of the creature must be a productive consciousness; the consciousness of a power to generate his own activity. And a

*Divine Love and Wisdom, 170.

self-consciousness of this sort, as we have said, implies a perfect harmony between the public and private life of man. No man can attain to productive consciousness, or the consciousness of a power to generate his own activity, unless by the concurrence of all other men. If the interests of others be in any manner opposite to my own, then my activity shapes itself accordingly, and gives evidence of a constraint imposed by that opposition. It is an activity generated not of myself absolutely, but of myself as opposed to others. But if all other men's interests harmonize with my own, then my action exhibits no constraint, but appears to be generated of myself

alone.

What, then, is the precise condition of this harmony? What is that thing without which all harmony between the race and the individual is actually impossible? It is that Man, both universally and particularly, be, in Swedenborg's phrase, “a form of use," be, in other words, reciprocally productive. If the relation which I am under to my kind, supply me the gratification of all my natural wants, if there be no opposition between my individual interests and those of any other man, then my self-consciousness will ipso facto become creative, or attest the full divine conjunction with me, and all my activity exhibit the fruits of such conjunction. But if this relation do not supply me the gratification of my natural appetites; if these appetites cannot be gratified without injustice to other men; then it is manifest that I am by no means as yet a subject of the Divine, but a bond-slave of nature, and all my activity conse quently attests this bondage. Before the will of Divine Love, then, can be accomplished in humanity, before man can exhibit this exclusive subjection to the Divine, it is absolutely neces sary that a perfect fellowship of man with man be established, such a fellowship as shall make the interest of every individual man entirely accordant with that of all other men. And the condition of this fellowship, we repeat, is, that the universal man and the individual man be reciprocally beneficent or productive; that the universal man on his part relieve the individual man of his otherwise invincible servitude to nature, and that the individual man, thus emancipated and delivered over to the sole subjection of God, bring forth the exclusive fruits of such subjection in every varied form of divine art or productiveness.

ART, then, or the use accomplished by man as of himself, and not of natural or accidental constraint, is, according to the

new theology, the divine end in humanity; and the evolution of this end is exclusively social. Art is thus the distinctive glory of man. It is what defines the Creator's abode within him, and gives him the lordship of the lower creation. Every animal form, indeed, as well as all other forms, is a form of use, because, as Swedenborg affirms, God cannot possibly create any thing but use: but then it is an involuntary form, and thus incapable of conjunction with the divine. Neither the animal, the vegetable, nor the mineral performs its proper uses as of itself, but only by constraint of its own or some other nature. It cannot help performing them. But the uses which characterize true or distinctive humanity are voluntary uses, uses which do not flow from any constraint of nature or position, but exclusively from the will of the subject. The Creator, says Swedenborg, would be in the created subject as in Himself, and this is possible only in so far as the creature acts as of himself, or freely. Thus, true divine uses in man are not those which grow out of our natural relations, or are imposed by our natural affections, but those which grow out of our social relations, or our relations to all mankind. My parent, my brother, my child, stand in a diviner relation to me than any which these names import― the relation of human fellowship, which divests my natural sentiment towards them of all its intrinsic narrowness and injustice, and clothes it instead with a truly divine grace. The uses which our natural relations impose, are all involuntary, and therefore, although of an indisputable dignity in their proper sphere, do not attest the divine conjunction with us. Our affection for ourselves or our offspring, may equal the animal's in fervor, but can hardly exceed it, though our superior intelligence affords us vastly superior methods of gratifying it. And clearly our endow ments should differ not merely in measure, but in kind, from those of the animal. Man, indeed, embraces in himself the animal and all lower natures, but it is only that he may glorify them all with the crown and diadem of his own regal humanity, and so lift them into the mediate splendors of the Divine.

The family or domestic relation, then, although it beautifully typifies, yet by no means constitutes the true divine achievement in humanity. The finished work of God is to be seen only in the social relations of man, those relations which conjoin the individual and the race, or the universal family of man with every individual member of it. And now we are prepared for the upshot of the whole matter.

For why, will it be asked, should this divine work necessitate the moral experience of mankind? Why should it not be accomplished at once, so to speak, and without involving in the creature any knowledge of good and evil?

This question proceeds upon a misconception of the whole matter in discussion. It proceeds upon the assumption that the divine end in creation was to make an essential or absolute conjunction of himself with the creature, which of course is absurd, for it would be to make the creature the Creator. Essentially or absolutely the creature is of necessity embraced in the Creator, and therefore to talk of the Creator effecting a conjunction in this point of view between himself and the creature, effecting an essential or absolute conjunction, would be to use words without understanding. What is essential or absolute cannot be effected, or disclaims all actual genesis, for the simple reason that it is itself the basis of all effects or actuality. The divine end in creation, then, imports no such conjunction as this, but wholly a formal conjunction, or a conjunction to the creature's consciousness.

But how shall this conjunction take place while the creature is without a consciousness or selfhood? For absolutely, of course, the creature is without a selfhood, or is not, God being the only absolute selfhood. How, then, shall the conjunction in question take place? Manifestly the first condition is, that the creature possess, if not an absolute, yet a quasi, or apparent, selfhood, a phenomenal self-consciousness, which shall furnish the requisite basis of conjunction.

But here again a difficulty occurs. For how shall this quasi or apparent selfhood become pronounced, become possible? How shall this phenomenal self-consciousness become developed? For God is essentially creative, and His creature, therefore, cannot be a mere illusion; he must be a real and actual verity. If all this be undeniable, then it results of absolute necessity, that this selfhood of the creature become pronounced only by the descent of the Divine to natural conditions, by His manifestation in the principles of natural order. It results, in other words, that the absolute or infinite reveal himself in the conditional and finite, that the Creator manifest himself in the creature.

Creation, then, considered objectively, as a divine achievement or finished work, is the reproduction of the Divine perfections in the laws of natural order.

But creation considered subjectively, considered as the ac