not found among the mere litterateurs. He defies criticism. and disdains admiration from such a source. He will surely interest and probably stimulate, while he may also perplex, all who sincerely seek light on the eternal riddle of Man and Man's relations to nature and the Infinite.

Briefly summarized his theology is as follows: The universe is of a dual nature, composed of an internal and an external. The internal is not dependent on the external for its existence, but is temporarily connected with it and operates through it. Everything in either world has its correspondence in the other, and the two worlds interflow, as it were, and mutually interpret each other. To the natural man this interpretation is one-sided, but it has been vouchsafed to the seer to enter the spiritual realm and thus furuish a master key to the universe as a whole.

Man has no life of his own, but is a mere receptacle of life. He lives by influx from the Lord. Because of this influx, which is in good and bad alike, no man can die. The soul is not a mere cogitative principle, but an organized spiritual substance, the internal man. When freed from the body it is called a spirit and appears to the spiritual eye in the human form. The life after death is a continuation of the life in the world. Death and the Resurrection are one and the same event. The Lord himself is in this spiritualized human form. All good and truth have their foundation in love to the Lord and toward the neighbor; all evils and falsities in love of self and the world. The entire Scripture is nothing else than the manifold enunciation of this doctrine.

Man before the fall lived in love toward God and his neighbor. The spiritual world was then open to the natural, and angels could converse with men. Modern governments and articulate speech are marks of decline. The fall was not sudden, but gradual. It continues to the present day, and suffers no check or diminution except in those who are regenerated. External faith becomes internal only when the man wills and loves what he knows and perceives. This appropriation of a new will implants the germ of salvation in the man and must take place in this life. Religion and morality are inseparable. Divine Providence has reference to spiritual good and happiness without reference to the means.

The true church is in the individual.

Conscience is a growth. Its formation in a man depends not upon his religious doctrines, but upon their reception within himself.

Man's Book of Life is his interior or spiritual memory, which forever retains all that he has thought, said, or done in all his life. The opening of this Book is a future self-revelation of his spiritual character. The Last Judgment is not a great assize which takes place for all spirits at the same time, but consists in the operation of the laws of spiritual affinity, which determine for each spirit its own proper associations and destiny.

Remission of sins is the being kept from their commission by the Lord.

Regeneration is not instantaneous but gradual. It begins with the implantation of the Divine germ, is continued as a process throughout the life-time, and after death goes on to even greater perfection.

The work of Redemption consists in the subjugation of the hells, the arrangement of the heavens, and the establishment. of a new church on earth. Without these processes which must follow in this order, no one could be saved. The life and passion of the Lord have accomplished this work, and his elevation and glorification preserve and maintain it.

Atonement is not the pacification of the Father, but has a two-fold operation,-redemptive or preparatory, as just described, and influential or moral in bringing individual men into conformity with the new order of things.

Baptism is a sign and a memorial;-a sign that the man belongs to the church, a memorial (!) that he is to be regenerated. Therefore infant baptism is commendable.

The Lord's Supper is a symbol of spiritual conjunction with the Lord.

The foundation of fellowship is the quality of love, not doctrinal agreement. The only essentials of belief are the Lord, eternal life, and the Word. To keep the commandments of the Decalogue is all that is necessary in addition.

The Trinity does not consist in persons but in functions. The Divine Trinity in one person is to be understood as the

soul, or Father, the body, or Christ, and the proceeding operation, or Holy Ghost; which together constitute one essence. There is a similar trinity in every individual man, which together constitute one person; but in man this trinity is finite, for man is only an organ of life, whereas in the Lord the Trinity is infinite, for the Lord is life itself.

The Father is invisible, even to the angels, and is perceived in Christ, who is the Divinely Human, the Visible of God. The Holy Spirit is only a spiritual influence, or procedure from the Lord in the souls of men. Thus the Deity is seen to be the Maximus Homo, or the Infinite Man.

Freedom of Inquiry is the privilege and duty of every man, and every one, of whatever religion, may be saved, if he have only respected the good of life as an end.

In the prediction of the Lord's Second Coming (Matt. xxiv. 29-31), the "Clouds of Heaven" mean the literal sense of the Word, while "Power and Great Glory" mean its spiritual sense. The Logos (John i. 1) is not the person of Christ, but Divine Truth. Hence the Second Coming is not personal, but spiritually dynamic.

The Lord's presence is perpetual with every man, both wicked and good, for without his presence no man lives; but his advent takes place only with those who believe in him and obey his commandments.

Since the Lord cannot manifest himself in person, and yet has foretold that he would come and establish a new church, the new Jerusalem, it follows that he will do so by means of a man who can not only receive these doctrines in his understanding, but also publish them by the press. All these truths have hitherto remained hidden. The man who was destined to make them known, who was to correct Paul's misapprehensions concerning the Second Coming, and set all future generations right on this whole subject, was, in his own opinion, no other than Emanuel Swedenborg. Hence the Second Advent, in the belief of the members of the New Jerusalem Church, dates from the beginning of what we may call the Swedenborgian era.

How firmly grounded and generally received is this doctrine among Swedenborgians may be inferred from a paragraph con

tained in a Memorial presented to the last General Convention of the New Church in America, and signed by a large number of the most liberal adherents of that faith: "We believe that, since the time of the Last Judgment (1757), the New Church, signified by the New Jerusalem, has been and continues to be the only church on earth."

This Memorial was really the petition of a minority "that the attitude of the organized New Church may no longer continue to be one of seeming antagonism or conscious superiority to other religious bodies, but rather one of modest self-appreciation, and kindly, fraternal recognition of other Christians." The paragraph mentioned is an accepted tenet of the New Church, and seems to have been introduced through motives of policy and with the view of conciliating the convention toward a favorable reception of the memorial as a whole. The memorial was not, however, favorably received.

It will be apparent from the above resumé of Swedenborg's principal doctrines, that, whether essentially true or false, they cannot be said to have originated with him. Indeed it seems certain that, if all which is merely fanciful or else wholly dependent on Swedenborg's unsupported statements were omitted from his voluminous writings, little would be left that could be called peculiarly his own. Some of his doctrines savor of the earliest heterodoxies. That of the Resurrection was held by the Gnostics, who, however, unlike Swedenborg, held the body in contempt. That of the Sacraments dates back at least as far as Origen and the Alexandriaus. If the teaching concerning the Trinity differs from Sabellianism, the difference would appear to lie in the fact that Swedenborg regards the whole Deity as the Maximus Homo, the Divine Humanity, which we call Christ, but which he everywhere speaks of as the Lord. According to Sabellius, the Father was "the μová, the fundamental subject, hidden within Himself as the o, and revealing His divine essence in different phases, as Son and Holy Ghost."

Others of these doctrines will be easily recognized by all orthodox theologians, such, for example, as that concerning Redemption, which is hardly distinguishable from the view which prevailed among the early church fathers, thus defined

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by Neander: "The doctrine of redemption has a negative and a positive moment: the former relates to the removing of the disturbance in the moral order of the universe, the raising-up of humanity out of its schism with God; the second, to the glorifying or rendering godlike of human nature when delivered from this schism."

Still others of these so-called angelic communications are the most commonplace truths, reappearing continually in the ethical literature of to-day. For example, Swedenborg's oftrepeated statement that "Wisdom comes through heaven from the Lord" we find better expressed in James iii. 17. His 'Heavenly Doctrine of Uses," on which his disciples lay such stress, has always been regarded as the characteristic teaching of the same practical-minded apostle. Again, when he declares that "A false faith plays the harlot with every truth in the Word and falsifies it," we are reminded of similar expressions in very un-Swedenborgian sermons, founded on the words, "If therefore the Light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness !"

Other passages, the largest and most catholic, the most heartsearching and profound of all that the seer has written, are mere developments of the most familiar sayings of Christ and his apostles. He writes finely in many places on the subject of Christian charity, but he never reaches the elevation of Paul's prose-poem in the thirteenth of I. Corinthians.

And to affirm that Swedenborg was in advance of his own, or the present day, on these and other subjects, is in effect to say that Jesus and Paul and every great teacher and reformer has been in advance of the majority of mankind. The world is a notorious straggler, and is always vainly endeavoring to catch up with its leaders. The great Swede says, indeed, so many good things, and says them so well, that it is hard to find fault with him even where he grows absurd. For him to discern, as he does, some hidden meaning even in the commonest material object and most trivial incident of biblical history, or to invent a material symbol for the simplest truism, is perhaps more incongruous than harmful. But when he goes so far as to insist that "No one has hitherto even conjectured that there is any spiritual sense in the Word," and that "The