to make a man, and is perpetually changing him after he has made him. He required thousands of years to make a civilized man, counting from the starting point of the race.

There is no enmity between God and the devil. In fact, they are one and the same. The devil is God in disguise, then and always wise and good, though men perceive it not. The early Hebrew monotheists had clearer vision than their successors. More modern writers would have made it the work of the devil to harden Pharaoh's heart. The near-sighted writer of the Chronicles sees only Satan instigating David to number his subjects. The earlier and clearer-sighted writer of the books of Samuel sees only God in the same event.* When men could no longer retain an undivided deity in their conceptions, they invented his counterpart and his component personalities. Satan was the elder brother of the Son and Holy Ghost.

I have been asked, "If you had a son fifteen years of age who had never sinned, when would you advise him to begin? More particularly, when would you counsel him to tell his first lie?" I answered, "Physical suffering has its inestimable advantages. If a man has never been sick, his education is far from complete. It is good for one to have been afflicted. But if you had a son fifteen years of age, who had never received through experience the simplest idea of pain, when would you advise him to hurt himself? When would you counsel him first to burn his fingers? Why consider what to do in contingencies that will certainly never occur? Experience of both pain. and sin is so valuable, so indispensable, that God takes as much care that every man shall have it as that he shall have a stomach or heart. It is God's way that all resistance to pain shall be born from experience of pain, and all resistance to sin from experience of sin. Whenever any one finds a better way than God's for doing anything, by all means let him follow that better way. Always choose the best, whoever may be its author. God himself will rejoice at any improvement upon his methods. But I am confident that his ways are the best, and that his paths, all paved with sin and pain as they are, are truly far better than the sinless and painless roads which you might lay out if you were going to make a world.”

I wish to blunt no man's conscience. I would encourage no man in wrong-doing. On the contrary, I regard sin as most of all things to be avoided; more than any form of pain or even death. What agriculturalist will diminish his industry because he implicitly believes that God made the earth the natural mother of weeds? No lack of dili

*II Sam. xxiv. 1.- I Chron. xxi. 1.

gence in self-culture can be ex our sinful nature. Indeed, the well as us for our work, is an en

If the imputation of guilt and man instincts and not eternal ve infer that they are therefore nothin human instincts are among the r is impossible for me to conceive o of direction upward and downwa ive and by no means an eterna tellectual constitution. The astr tric coördinates of every planet must continue to revolve daily ar man and not God, I must see wi omniscience. Fallible as is my c law; and if I disobey it, I shall f remorse. God, who foresees the cerns through partial discord th ashamed of me but he wisely ga makes me ashamed of myself; a pressed. Within limits, which I co termine, it may be a wholesome i when other men offend. Yet I re instinct when a prison is converte a moral hospital and school of ref

Nor is it necessary to regard the a matter of created instinct, corres doubt not there is an Eternal Righ arbitrary will, even that of God hin wrong that he does not make right so precious. There is conceivable v cation. The so-called orthodox d nishes a ready example. Among ment of the universe, it would have but the best.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.*

TRIED by the dictum of M. Renan, Mr. White possesses one of

the chief qualifications of an impartial Biographer - he was once an implicit believer in the Swedish Philosopher and seer; he is so no longer. Following the advice of Theodore Parker, he picks out for himself and for his readers the choice bits and leaves the indigesta moles to such of the "new Jerusalem," as have stomach for it. Nor are Mr. White's selections either scanty or capricious; on the contrary we are helped bountifully to each course, from the "Principia” to the Apocalyptic "White Horse" from the "Arcana Celestia," to the Treatise on Longitude, in a word, to drop metaphor, we are permitted to read Swedenborg's life as he himself wrote it in his works. Nor is this all, for in addition to this interior introduction we are treated to every anecdote and scrap of information that can by any possibility be made to throw a ray of light upon the form and features, the attitude and manners of this latter-day Scandinavian giant. We are told everything creditable and discreditable - everything "wise and otherwise," until we come to feel that we know him in the flesh almost as well perhaps as he knew, or thought he knew, those ghostly visitants who had put off the flesh. We see him when a child at home, falling into partial trance while his father is conducting family prayers-possibly something not wholly uncommon with other children, Again we hear of him while yet of tender years, as discoursing with angelic wisdom. Still later, he appears as a somewhat vain and foppish student of divinity. Later still, as a writer on properties of metals † and practical arts, and then through the Bishop's, his father's influence as assessor in the royal mines, and one of the nobility.

But he is no

Half a century after this, Swedenborg is in London. longer the same person - he has entered on a new life, his subterranean researches are over, his supernatural ones have begun. From this time he is like Spinoza a "God intoxicated man." His first sight of spiritual verities opens with ecstasy if not actual lunacy. By day he raves, rolls naked in London mire, calls himself Messiah, and has to have a keeper. By night he dreams dreams, alternately awful and ridiculous. The heavens and the hells unbar their portals to

* His Life and Writings. By William White. London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1867. 2 Vol.

† Respecting Swedenborg's rank as a physicist, Mr. White makes light of Emerson's claim for him, but afterwards, virtually admits it by conceding that he did anticipate the Nebular Hypothesis, the Correlation of Heat, Light, etc., the reduc tion of Atoms to centres of Force, and Goethe's theory of colors.

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him. He talks with angels and with devils face to face. Every vision has meaning. If he sees fat coach horses it signifies that he is to finish his book on the Cerebrum, if the soles of his feet turn white it denotes that his sins are forgiven. But his intercourse with the world of Spirits extends, Jesus appears to him. On the first occasion he asks Swedenborg for a health certificate, on the second he borrows money of him, on the third he rebukes him with the words "eat not so much! These may seem rather prosaic revelations, but Swedenborg discerned a mystical import in them - the reader also has like privilege.

From this period until his death he claims in constant communication with spirits. He tells us frankly however that he could not discover anything in other modes of being of which he had not first received some idea here either through experience or history. Thus he saw nothing which he had not seen before. To Swedenborg's eyes the spiritual world has a strict analogy to this one. Out of this grew his famous doctrine of correspondences with its Philosophical and theological sequences.

As Mr. White well remarks, the supernatural has no lesson which the natural cannot also teach beyond the grave as here, there are atheists who dispute the existence of God, and Sadducees who argue that they have never died. We find in Swedenborg's own case, that this held true. If he had a favorite — no matter what his faults, he translates him to heaven; if he had a prejudice against one, straightway he sent that one to perdition not figuratively as the profane do, but literally and actually. Thus he tells us that he met the dissolute Elizabeth of Russia, and brutish George II. of England, in glory; on the other hand Paul is consigned along with the Quakers to the lowest pit, the sight of the former giving Swedenborg the toothache! Those who differed from him, theologically, fared little better. Calvin is dwelling in a cave because of his doctrine of Predestination, Melancthon has his quarters in a work-house, because of his Solfidian teachings, and even Luther himself, just barely escaped by prompt recantation and equally prompt conversion to Swedenborgian tenets.

But charity demands of us that we judge no man by his shortcomings, but that we take him at his best and highest. Thus judged, Swedenborg merits no ordinary niche in the history of those who have advanced the cause of free thought and rational insight. His philosophy is worthy of more faithful study than it has yet received, even from those most inclined to examine impartially. As for his theology, there is no danger but what that will have readers so long as the "new church" continues to find proselytes whose patience is equalled by

their docility, and who bow to an infallible Swedenborg, as other proselytes bow to infallible Scriptures. Of his philosophy the three cardinal principles may be said to be—

I. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD.

II. THE UNITY OF NATURE.

III. SPIRIT THE CREATOR OF ITS OWN ENVIRONMENT.

According to the first, Swedenborg taught that the principle of life is confined solely to Deity. In themselves, man and nature are alike dead. Whatever vitality they seem to possess is by divine influx. The material universe, and the universe of souls are rooted in God as a tree is rooted in the earth. From this it follows that there is no real personality, no true character or independent self-hood in any created being, either in man, angel, or devil. As all thought, feeling, and determination, are derived, the soul really has no accountability. Hence God imputes to man either in righteousness or sin. He is neither pleased nor angry with human purposes and acts, neither rewards nor punishes, but simply permits each soul to reap what it sows—a harvest of joy to the good, a harvest of tears to the evil. Man, it is true, seems all the while to himself to be responsible, but this feeling Swedenborg assures us is a divine fiction, imposed upon him as an inevitable condition of his finite nature.

Carrying this idea to its logical result, Swedenborg tells us that all created forms are symbols, nature is an illusion. It appears a solid and stubborn fact, whereas in truth, it is evanescent and meaningless, except as it serves as the shifting scenery of the Creative Drama. Left to itself, matter would reduce itself by virtue of inherent gravitationto a vanishing point, to nonentity. Spirit alone exists on its own account, and as spirit is one, it follows that all creative form and life depend constantly and immediately on that one-on God.

II. UNITY OF NATURE.

Nature, Swedenborg informs us, is of one piece. It is unity of constitution expressed in variety. Rock, plant, animal, and man, are animated by a common principle of life, differing only in degree. Man is at once the summit and measure of all things. His body epitomizes earth, mineral, and vegetable existences - his mind is instinct and brute intelligence ennobled - his spirit through religion becomes conscious of its unity with the whole, and of the whole with God. Taken together, all mankind form the grand man below, as collectively all spirits form the grand man in heaven. The lower