being but the ruder representative and correspondent of the highereverywhere above and below is solidarity.

III. OF SPIRIT AND ITS ENVIRONMENT.

The creative power acts from above downward, never from below upward. The soul makes the body, not the body the soul. That is to be regarded as the best body which best answers all the needs of the soul which informs it. This principle Swedenborg develops farther. As the spirit builds its own structure, just so it makes its external surroundings. He would have us believe that the strong and free spirit organizes success out of the same circumstances which are a burden and anguish to the weak spirit sensually enslaved - what holds true of one state of existence, he tells us, holds true of all:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

Such are briefly the outlines of Swedenborg's system of philosophy. The chief points of his theology may be summed up in a few lines. God, Swedenborg taught, is of human form; by form he does not mean shape, but correspondence of function - God and man, creator and created, exist for the same end. God is one, not three. He is love and wisdom conjoined - from this divine marriage all things spring. Creation is continual outflow from Deity, and continual return to him- there never was a period when God was not energizing- never a period when he did nothing but deliberate in

vacuo.

Man, as we have seen, is simply a channel for the current of the Holy Spirit to pass through. In the future there is virtually no probation, each one goes voluntarily to his own place and forever keeps it. The soul's ruling motive determines its destiny. Character is fate. As for evil it is the necessary back-ground of good, it is inseparable from the finite. Without evil, virtue would have no positive nature. The devils delight in evils as the angels delight in excellence. In hell the faces of demons are seen to pucker with diabolical glee. Free-will Swedenborg really denied, yet he claims, with what consistency the reader may judge, that man possesses a kind of voluntary power of appropriation, which makes him select what is kindred to him, whether good or evil. In regard to Revelation, Swedenborg affirms that there can be no natural knowledge of divine things. Whatever man knows of the world of spirits he gains from miraculous interposition - the Hebrew Scriptures are a chief source of this knowledge, they have at least two, and often several distinct interior senses.

Swedenborg and his followers treat all gospel as a

sacred conundrum, whose true import the illuminated can alone divine.

From the time of his residence in London, Swedenborg tells us he gave himself up to spirit intercourse, and to the composition of his voluminous works. These he edited at his own expense. They make of themselves a respectable library. Like Comte, Swedenborg had to complain of "a conspiracy of silence." Notwithstanding his indefatigable efforts to circulate his writings, they failed of public attention. Few bought, fewer read, fewer still understood. But he had a consolation which the Great Positivist lacked, he found that angels read the "Arcana Celestia," if men neglected it, and the discovery very naturally proved comforting. Ardent as Swedenborg was in matters. of theological reform, he seems to have been almost wholly indifferent to social or political progress. By nature he was a conservative of conservatives. As Carlyle said of Goethe, it was only his Sunday shoes that were specked with dust. Outside of ecclesiastical limits he found hope in the Past, and there alone the golden age was the age of the Patriarchs to return to it was, or should be, the end of

sublunary desires.

With respect to women, Swedenborg would hardly agree with Mrs. Dall. His idea of marital rights seem to have been confined to the husband. Swedenborg gives a long list of reasons for permitting limited concubinage- the sum of all being, that if a married couple are "incompatible," as the Western Courts express it, then the husband has the liberty of taking a mistress-respecting the wife's privileges, he is discreetly silent. When Swedenborg was asked why he, and he alone, could have intercourse with spirits? He replied that the age was too sensual to be admitted to similar conference. Yet that age could boast a Fenelon, a prelate, who, whatever may have been his faults, certainly never defended incontinence, and never openly maintained a courtesan, as Swedenborg did at two periods of his life- the latter being when he had reached the mature age of fifty. But we forbear criticism. It would be easy to find inconsistencies in so comprehensive a scheme, and so long a life as Swedenborg's. The world gets over all difficulties in such cases by rendering the verdict—"mad.” Mad he may have been, judged simply by the standard of common sense sanity, but who would not rather be afflicted with the madness of Hamlet than with the prudence of Polonius? If Swedenborg was a fool, he was, as a wise man has said, "the fool of ideas," his vagaries were at least unselfish, they were characterized by sincerity and by courage; better such vagaries often than that mental and moral mediocrity which deals only with tangible facts and market values.

DAVID. H. MONTGOMERY.

481

SCME RADICAL IDEAS ABOUT PHYSICAL CULTURE.

HE old time philosophers and religious teachers, groping, some

That blindly, though often vigorously, after truth, are responsi

ble for the introduction of much error into the human mind. There is one idea concerning the physical body which, whether it originated with Plato, John Calvin, the monks who wore shirts of rasping hair to mortify the flesh, or was a natural outgrowth of man in his undeveloped condition, is false to the core, and should be torn up by the roots, and allowed to wither and die in the sunlight of present intelligence. It is born of old religions, contracted in scope, and demoralizing in their tendencies. It is the belief that the human body is an unworthy temple for the indwelling spirit; that the physical is to be crucified in order that the spiritual may rise to mastery over the flesh. The world, the flesh, and the devil, in Orthodox belief, have been a trinity of monsters, warring against God and the welfare of humanity. Forsake the world; crucify the flesh; resist the devil; this has been and is the injunction of Orthodox doctrinal Christianity. The modern Radical would up-root this ancient error, declaring it a libel against the Infinite Good. What are the physical world and the physical bodies of men but the blossoming forms of God's perfect germinal thought?

I am moved to this expression by the perusal, in the Radical for January, of the editorial paragraph on "The Gospel of Muscle." While you have there a kernel of truth, I fear that the husk of error which encloses it is so prominent, that those who have given little thought to the subject may fail to read it aright. We have too long held in contempt the living temple wherein, for a time, our souls must worship, through untrammelled thought and strong endeavor, the Truth, the Light, the all-perfect Deity. Sick with physical health? An impossibility. Yet here is your kernel of truth. We would not exalt the mere animal within man. We would not make him a mere groveller on the earth, but would raise him to that realm of higher freedom where soul is sovereign over sense. And this we shall never do by ignoring or despising the physical body. There are no real inharmonies in nature. If our conceptions are narrow, we may perceive only jarring chords, but when we rise to broader planes of thought and life, the seeming discords melt and blend into celestial harmony. There is no necessary inharmony between the body and the indwelling spirit. Neither is to be crucified that the other may live. The Gospel of Muscle? No. But the Gospel of action

equal, harmonious, co-operative action for body as well as mind. Live for the sake of the body? No. The body, purified, strengthened, harmoniously developed for the sake of a true life.

We have lived too long in a dyspeptic age. Our art, our culture, our religion all are tinged with the weak, dyspeptic, semi-invalid life of our people. Proper action for the body as well as the mind is essential to clearness of mental vision. Great truths can never be attained by the human mind while it acts through a weak and diseased brain. We cannot separate brain from body. It is a part of the physical body, harmoniously related to it in health, or acting imperfectly when the body is diseased. The clearest water becomes impure when passing through a muddy ditch. Let us be no longer content to be the intellectual scavengers or filth-carriers of past imperfect thought or present disease. Let us purify the channels, open wide the outlets, and let the clear stream flow onward as it will. Freedom is the word for this hour. well as physical. Away with it!

Disease is slavery — mental as

There is a physical culture for man as well as for the animal. It goes hand in hand with the culture of intellect and heart, not waging battle against them. True health for human beings is not wholly an affair of the body; nor do we desire the body to get beyond the spirit. But the body should be an aid, not an obstruction, to the growth of the spirit. Physical laws are laws of God no less than mental laws. Both are parts of the great law of human progress. When we violate a single part we strike a blow against the whole economy of being. Man is a commonwealth, and admits of no secession, either of body or mind. Deprive the least of his members of the right of suffrage, of the free and healthy exercise of its functions, and you strike a blow at the general welfare.

"Every man," says Thoreau, "is the builder of a temple called his body, to the God he worships after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead; we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." Let us act in harmony with all law, that the work may be an honor to the artist, and that the temple may be worthy of the indwelling Deity.

You do well to assault the " Gospel of Muscle." Let body and mind work in harmony, with view to the ultimate perfection of every part. Co-operative action is the law of progress, physically as well as mentally. Special culture can result only in deformity. Just here our advocates of physical culture, as well as our doctors have failed. Like our soul-doctors, they would "save" man by some special pill or partial exercise of muscle. The new doctrine proclaims that the