a shield to future Epochs or Æons. It is simply the body of the letter accepted utterly, whether its stated facts jar with our denominational minds, or not, and a revealed soul of truth and love from Christ Himself informing and glorifying it. If you do not agree to this, you discard the letter, and make it fraudulent: if you strike out what you do not like, for instance, the supernatural, from the narrative, you claim a right of intellect which puts yourself in question. The whole Word together is supernatural, and miracle is its means. Accept it if you will with no ecclesiastical glosses or words of Councils. The spiritual sense revealed by the Lord through a man, in no way enslaves you in Verba Magistri, or as imprisoned in Swedenborg in the way in which the orthodox are imprisoned in the dogmas of the old churches. It is indeed learnt from Swedenborg and stored in the rational mind; but it reveals itself to the reverent reader from that stem in wonderful clusters on the vine of life, and in harvests of fruit on the Mount of Olives. The language of Correspondence in which the Word is written is given to us by the same good Servant as in a dictionary. We refer to the dictionary to read the language when we require its aid. But the dictionary is not our Master or our Aristotle, but the Lord is our Master, and teaches us daily proficiency as we read His Word. As well be charged with undue minority under Rawlinson or Norris, Champollion or Sayce, in studying Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform, or Accadian, because we make use of their knowledge to continue our own, as with abolishing our minds in favour of the dicta of Swedenborg. The dogmas of the old Church which have no spiritual life or sense in them are indeed infringements of the rule, "Call no man your Father upon the earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven. Neither be ye called Masters, for one is your Master, even the Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your Servant." Swedenborg, Emanuel, prepared to reveal the spiritual sense, as the greatest among us is our servant, and

while dogmas close the Word and imprison us, the true doctrines which he has brought make us free.

VIII.—FALSITIES CAST OUT AND TRUTHS IMPLANTED.

In the Revelation here made we have a divine Trinity in Unity, One God and Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are the divine love, the divine wisdom, and the divine providence, all in the person of Christ. The three Gods of Christendom vanish as polytheism from a New Church and a true Christian Religion. The Atonement disappears with the Tripersonality in the identity of the Son and the Father. The cross disappears as payment for the sins of the world: but it is seen in our intellectual sky as the last temptation and the crowning victory over the hells; the "It is finished" of a Life of Divine Victories. Justification by Faith vanishes before Christ to whom Judgment belongs; for by fulfilling the Word He became Divine Justice; and He exacts life according to His Commandments, and admits no justification for man; but demands repentance, and a new life according to it, and then grants remission of sins. If we consider the dogma of three Persons, or three Gods, it is remarkable how their attributes are apportioned. The Father represents wrath implacable save by a divine and infinite sacrifice for human and finite sin: whereas Christ says, the Father Himself loveth you. Christ on the other hand is put as the God of soft mercy, whereas He Himself says, The Father has committed all judgment to the Son. With regard to the Holy Spirit, the sphere of Christ, the Gospel says "it was not yet, because Christ was not yet glorified." The Spirit of God in the Old Testament is the divine spiritual sphere proceeding from Jehovah through the heavens. The Holy Spirit is the divine natural sphere pervading the true Church wherever it is, and is the Paraclete or Comforter pro

ceeding from the divine humanity. It had no existence until Christ's Coming; nor actually till His Glorification.

The spiritual sense of the Word within the Letter contains, or rather consists in, the true doctrines here shadowed forth, -contains them in infinite detail and expansion; for indeed they are virtue and they are heaven. That sense may also be called scientifically the theory of the Letter. In another statement it is the Second Coming of Christ in which He comes as the One only God and Lord. It heralds the Second Coming of mankind when from age to age they come as individuals, as Sons of God in Regeneration. Such considerations grow in the mind when the climate of the Divine Overshadowing and the maternal Conception is around us.

IX. THE VIRGIN MARY.

In continuation of the same thoughts, we may ask ourselves how the Incarnation took place in the worst nation on our planet, that Christ by nativity might be exposed to all the assaults and contagions of evil in order to conquer them, and yet that He was born of Blessed Mary. Was she then vile in this sinful race? The question was crucial to Pius IX., and caused him to decree the immaculate conception of the Virgin, who according to Roman Catholic and also Anglican Theogony is the Mother of God. The Infallibility of His Holiness was at the same Council placed on the like certainty with the immaculateness of Mary. He admitted the depravity of the Jewish nature in thus breaking with it. But he made the Incarnation of none effect in decreeing that Christ did not take upon Himself our infirm Humanity. The good Pius IX. has the credit of seeing that some explanation was needed, and he, being self-made infallible, could vote one. Stet pro ratione voluntas is a gagging power. To the Romanist, even to Cardinal Newman, nothing more can be said. But Protestantism has made thinking allowable,

and made truth ashamed of being decreed. The bringing the Word out of its sepulchre was the chief use of the Reformation, and supplied the opportunity for a new foundation of heavenly doctrine. What then might be an alternative thought with regard to the Virgin? I write in all humility here, for I cannot quote literal authority, but draw conclusions as inferences from admitted verities. For convenience, however, I put the case so far as I see it positively.

Now the alternative is that Blessed Mary was not the worst but the divinely accommodate correspondent best of the Jewish nation. Pius IX. might have been satisfied with this if he had read the divine letter as the Word in supreme authority over every Church. This fitness of Mary meets the case of Jehovah assuming through her a Humanity open to the temptations of all the hells, of all the earths, and of all the heavens. Had she been immaculate, she had been a fourth person in the Christian Mythology, in fact, a Goddess, and could have conceived no son with an infirm humanity to be tempted. Had she been among the vilest of her race, her progeny of the body could have furnished no plane for deep temptations. A debased humanity could not be mother to one who was to be tempted by the most superb ecclesiastical and imperial ambitions, who was offered when the Devil transported Him to the pinnacle of the Temple, the Popedom of the future Church; and from the top of an exceeding high mountain to which Satan raised Him, the sovereignty and glory of the kingdoms of the world. A selflove supreme must have been innate in the material heredity which could be exposed to such temptations. Think also of his Fast of Forty Days in the Wilderness. Nothing of this openness to evil spirits appeared in Mary. She knew nothing of His Temptations, and was not capable of them. Whatever we read of her reveals a character beautiful in natural love. Humility under divine Proposition and condescension, faith in its Angelic Annunciation, obedience to the motherhood of her future Redeemer, heart-service to Him from the

manger to the cross, and one of the first to be told of His Resurrection. We may well say in our human parlance that Mary was an immaculate mother. But the Jewish nature was in her, and to be revealed by the future Event, by the Birth of Christ, and His exposure to the Devil and Satan. We know by common experience, and by striking instances in history, what powers and great qualities men owe to good and true mothers who have to our eyes none of the characteristics of such greatness. The ground does not know what the seed will grow to. And almost all greatness is susceptible of abuse and temptation and heavy fall until regeneration surpasses it. So the letter shows, and we accept verbally, literally, implicitly, that the Lord inherited the greatest Jewish qualities from Blessed Mary, and that they were all of them when first given, untried, unregenerate; as inherited qualities, genius, talents, ambitions, loves, hopes, aspirations, likes and dislikes, are in every man.

And to speak now psychologically, inasmuch as conception on the Mother's part is called forth by seed from the Father, and inasmuch as the Father chose Mary; and also as the Divine Truth as the body of the Lord Who is Heaven descended into Mary, so the nature of the Child born must have been stupendous in faculties; in fact equal and able to be co-extensive, and ultimately in conflict, with all created mind, in the ancient Churches and in the Jewish Church, in the heavens over them and in the hells underneath them. There was, however, no evil in any of these merely natural faculties, for evil comes from prostituting the faculties by the abuse of free-will. Still they were of Jewish nature, with its tendencies to evil, but which like every nature is at first neutral before will has wrought in it. But in the Lord the mother faculties remained sinless, because He resisted all temptations to sin, and glorifying His natural faculties thereby, put on the Divine in them. The vast faculties inherited, and the tendencies to evil, are the openness of Jesus Christ to temptation; and at the same time suggest,