Having given in the preceding number the teachings of Swedenborg relative to the true nature of the Soul as being in reality the man himself in his essential entity and his interior constitution, we are now prepared to enter upon his exposè of the state into which he first emerges upon the laying aside of the gross body of flesh. This it will be seen he represents as a kind of intermediate state between the earthly and corporeal on the one hand, and the celestial or internal on the other. If his disclosures are entitled to credence, man does not, as a general fact, pass instantaneously at death into Heaven or Hell, but abides for a time in what he terms the World of Spirits, in contradistinction from the Spiritual World, which, in his usage, includes both Heaven and Hell. This, however, is not the Purgatory of the Romish Church, although it is not improbable that that doctrine may have grown out of some obscure intimations of the truth, if Swedenborg's statements on this head are to be regarded as truth. The differences between them will appear in the sequel; and in order to exhibit the subject in a more fitting light, I will state what I believe to be the prevailing sentiments of the Christian world on this particular point.

As nothing is more obvious than that the best of men are, taken en masse, in the present life, imperfect-that they are of mixed character, their good, if good, being alloyed with evil, and their evil, if dominantly evil, being mitigated by good-and as yet the declarations of Scripture are explicit, that if a man has become truly regenerate he will infallibly be saved, it has been supposed that an eliminating process takes place at death of all the good man's good from all his evil, and of all the evil man's evil from all his good; and that in regard to the former the Most High himself, by some mysterious and miraculous process, effects this separation of the moral qualities, and at once transmits the disembodied soul, free from all defilement, into the presence of angels and the joys of Paradise. Death, therefore, on this view becomes a kind of spiritual alembic, in which his dross is evaporated from his gold, and nothing remains but the cleansed residuum, which, being the product of the new-creating Spirit of God, is at once prepared for the beatitudes of the heavenly mansions. With the wicked a similar process with opposite results takes place.

This, if I mistake not, is the general practical view entertained on this subject, and yet I believe it may be said to be a view which is usually adopted without any especial research into its rational grounds, or any distinct consideration of the just objections which may be urged against it. And in this respect it fares like the great mass of tenets pertaining to another life, which are prone to be received by an unreasoning faith from a traditional presentation founded upon the letter of Holy Writ, the sacredness of which is thought to be such as to preclude all investigation of its doctrines on the score of their intrinsic truth

or probability. Ask a Christian believer if he deems that death, by any inherent transforming virtue of its own, has the power of working this effect-the effect of precipitating one portion of a man's moral qualities from another-and he will probably say, No-that he resolves it into a miracle-that every thing is miraculous in regard to a future state-that the system of fixed laws which, for the most part, governs every thing in the present world, is doubtless suspended when man passes the bourne of mortality and enters upon the world beyond. On this principle he conceives also of the Resurrection as a purely miraculous event, consisting in the re-collection and the re-organization of the dispersed relics of the old material body. The idea of the development of a spiritual body by a natural law, makes upon him a sort of horrifying impression, as a virtual disparagement of Omnipotence.

Now the announcements of Swedenborg put entirely a new complexion upon this whole class of subjects. He makes every thing revealed to be, at the same time, rational; and in regard to the state of the soul after death, he makes it to correspond with the state of the soul at death. The mere circumstance of dying—the extrication of the spirit from its terrestrial tenement—is not, according to him, invested with any such transforming efficacy. If a man dies with a mixed character, he carries that character with him, and goes into a mixed state. This arises from the very necessity of the case, which no teaching of Holy Writ can contradict. However strange it may appear that there should exist, in the other life, a state which is neither Heaven nor Hell, but intermediate between both, yet the constitution of our nature and the whole train of experience enforces the belief of it. Such a state, in its germ and elements, evidently exists in this life, and it is predicable of the great mass of men composing what is termed the Christian world. Most men have an exterior character which does not accord with the interior. The exterior character is that which appears to others, and is often entirely assumed. Were we to judge simply from their outward air, deportment, and speech, we should imagine them to be patterns of every virtue, when yet time and providence frequently disclose the fact that all this is hollow pretence, and that the internal man is the seat of the foulest abominations. Now a person is what he is internally, and not what he is externally; and he is internally what his ruling love makes him. In order to the determination of his final lot, this ruling love must be disclosed, for the man is often ignorant of it himself; and it must be brought out in a way consistent with his moral freedom, and not by any miraculous process which suspends it. He must be made to see that his Heaven or Hell is but the realized result, by necessary law, of the interior life which his good or evil love has formed for him in the present world. The object, therefore, of his being first remitted into the World of Spirits is, that this discovery may be fully and freely made of the truth of his internal character, which is ever one with that of his life's love. And in order that this process may be more fully understood, it is to be remarked that Heaven, when strictly viewed, is an internal state-a developed consciousness-founded upon the conjunction of Good and Truth; whereas Hell, on the contrary, is an internal state founded on the conjunction of Evil and the False. Good has a natural affinity to Truth, and Evil to the False; and no man can be said to be fully in Heaven or in Hell till the Good within him has become perfectly united to the True, and the Evil to the False: But Goodness and Truth are correlative to the Will and the Understanding, or, in other words, to the Love-principle and the Intellect-principle, a classification familiarly indicated by the Heart and the Head. The appropriate object of the Will or the Love is Good, that of the Understanding, Truth. Swedenborg's disclosures relative to the Intermediate State of Spirits cannot be adequately understood apart from what he has taught respecting the mutual relation of these principles, and on this account I have determined to preface them by the insertion of two or three brief chapters from the Heavenly Doctrines of the New Jerusalem, in which these topics are formally treated.

An important point is gained if we can succeed in unfolding the rationale of the process by which the ends of the Intermediate State are to be attained. This is, in the main, by