there, and the Word with God and being God in John here.

These particulars prepare the mind for a different dictation and inspiration of the letter in the Fourth Gospel. In Matthew and Mark the natural side is more represented, in Luke the spiritual side, in John the celestial side.

Let us attend diligently to the Divine letter now in especial reference to the circumstances of the fourth crucifixion.

"And it was the preparation of the Passover, and about the sixth hour: and he (Pilate) saith unto the Jews, Behold your King! But they cried out, Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him. Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The Chief Priests answered, We have no king but Cæsar. Then delivered he Him therefore unto them to be crucified. And they took Jesus and led away. And He bearing His cross went forth into a place called from a skull, which is in the Hebrew, Golgotha. Where they crucified Him, and two other with Him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst. Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also His coat. Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did. Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus, His mother, and His mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple standing by whom He loved, He saith unto His mother, Woman, behold thy son. Then saith He to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own" (xix. 13-18, 23-27.)

In the natural sense the first malignity of the Jewish rulers and people gives place in this Gospel to charges of blasphemy in making Himself the Son of God, and of treason in not

denying that He was their King. The rage of the Jews against Him is more represented here than in the other Evangelists; and Pilate's conscience, his expostulation with the Chief Priests, and his longing to save Jesus, are strongly written down.

The Jews crucified Him and two other with Him, on either side one.

All that Christ underwent was representative of the state of the Jewish Church. The crucifixion represented in bodily cruelty the hatred of the Jews to the Divine Truth, which their evils murdered in themselves. He, the Lord, suffered all things and the passion of the cross at their hands. Herein He resisted not evil. On the other hand His assertion of His own power and kingdom over His own people, and over the sick, the poor, the needy, the dying, and the dead, was absolute. The miracles which He did were of this omnipotence. Because He had come into the Jewish race, nation, and Church, He Himself took on Him both characters; of representing Jewish evil and wrong by suffering their inflictions and not resisting, and also of manifesting divine authority in the Judea and world which He had made, and which knew Him not. His own natural mind, which was as one of ours at first, underwent states of humiliation in which His Godhead was obscured to His humanity; and then states of glorification when some word of the Father in Him was made flesh by His virtue, and became a divine nature. These remembrances may help the reader to expect that the internal sense of the Word, especially where the tragedy and judgment of the human universe are spoken forth, contains unexpected revealings.

Observe therefore first that the robbers of Matthew and Mark, and the malefactors of Luke, are not extant in John's Gospel. If we were dealing with history written by man without being also inspired and dictated by God, we should justly say at once that of course what one Gospel has said is clearly implied in the series of the same events, whether it be

stated or not, in the others. And therefore that the two crucified with the Lord are identical throughout. But the internal sense which lives only within the verbal and iotal literal sense forbids any historical treatment of the kind. John's Gospel has no malefactors here, such as those of the first Gospels, and this for spiritual reasons. The difference of the robbers of Matthew and Mark from the malefactors of Luke, proves that rules of circumstantial evidence from Gospel to Gospel are inadmissible in dealing with the Word.

As Jesus took up His cross that His divine natural humanity might be purged of all inherited Jewish nature, that He might die to it; and as we also are to submit to the same discipline in our finite degree, in order that our characters may be subdued into consonance with heavenly order, so this our crucifixion beside Him cannot fail to be represented in all the Gospels. Crosses are in the path of life: calamities for the wicked, afflictions helping regeneration for the good. The soul who knows Christ, and follows Him, must undergo His cross; not only bear it in the sense of carrying it to the place of a skull and then going his way in the day's life; but also in measuring His affections and thoughts, His works or hands, His ways or feet upon it; and by binding or nailing these to its confines, make them conform to the two commands of love to God and the neighbour, until their old nature is remote and their apparent death gives new life to the soul. This process, easy to write about, is seldom carried out far into life its word is not often made flesh. But at least we see where the Divine exaction lies.

In the case of the band of men and women who were the first followers and disciples, the natural agony of all they felt and saw gives them in the internal historical sense, which is one degree above the Letter, a full title to be regarded as those who chiefly were crucified with Jesus. Mary perhaps on the left hand: the iron entered into her soul; and John on the right hand. The dawning Church represented by blessed Mary was here made part and partaker of the great

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sacrifice; and it became the sole property of John whom Jesus loved. John Good Works, the Good of Life. Other leading affections of the Church underwent the same agony from the cross; and Mary Magdalene came last, as in her the gates of hell had been sealed when the seven devils of profanation were cast out of her by Christ.

"Jesus saw" signifies divine perception for ordination of the faculties that were below Him in the Jewish nature, and which could belong to His Religion: the four women represent the affections of good which constitute the Church, and Mary Magdalene their devout adoption.

In recapitulation, the robbers in Matthew and Mark, as the condemned ultimate of those who railed on the Lord, were the sum and conclusion of the Jewish Church. The whole hierarchy was represented by the robbers, and that the end of its crimes had come upon it.

In Luke, the lowest remains of the Jewish nature and Church are represented; meaning by the remains the same as "the remnant of all nations which shall be saved." On the cross. itself, Christ is acknowledged as the inheritor of the Kingdom, as the Messiah, by the one malefactor; and faith in a future spoken of by him in the words, When thou comes into thy kingdom, is answered by Jesus, This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

A Roman declaration of kingship, which in its sense of kingdom in this world Christ had refused, was put upon the cross by Pilate: Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews. Remembering Christ's refusal, succession to the Jewish Babylon was here crucified in the first disciples, and forbidden to the coming Church. A Roman governor in temporal power had the declaration and accusation written. Rome has not heeded this part of the furniture of the crucifixion. Nor the fact that John = good works. Good in act is the possessor and owner of the Church, which was given to John on the cross by Jesus. Peter had been the rock under the Church, the faith that "Thou art the Christ the Son of the living

God." John as Love is in the first succession: both representatively, but not as persons.

From Noah as the initiation of the first spiritual Church which succeeded the lost celestial Church called Adam, the human will and understanding underwent successive declensions, until at length in the children of Israel these faculties were extant only as depravities. They had ceased from spiritual capacity, and were used by Jehovah God for interested obedience to a superstitious and sensual religion ; that is, for the representation of a Church. This will and understanding covering thousands of years, and extant over the East in nominal churches, was crucified and rejected on the cross by the Divine Man who had borne it, and subdued it in Himself. A new heart and a new mind was given to the race of man in all universes by an event seemingly local, but which yet had such extension within it.

Some further explanation of divine history seems requisite here. Swedenborg has been made to furnish it. "The Lord," says he, "came into the world to save the spiritual." Before the declension spoken of above, in the ages when man, by obeying his newly-given conscience was still so far uplifted from selfishness and sensuality as to be capable of heaven, the natural world, as its function is, fed the spiritual world, and then the heavens, with good and true men and women, children of the conscience, and fathers and mothers of dutiful daily lives, and so the divine purpose was carried on. That purpose is, in the creation of the worlds of nature, to form of their men and women, of which this world is the nursery, an everlasting heaven where love and wisdom and their happiness can have a home. This end is accomplished so long as the river of new-comers from the earth, the thoracic duct of the Maximus Homo, as Swedenborg, the spiritual Psychologist, names it, contains a preponderance of regenerated lives in its ever-flowing current.

Here, Reader, reject all fallacies about churchyards as containing your dead; about expectant Mummies waiting