for their KA, and about Paul's Last Trump, and the resurrection of the body. The folk you are thinking of have gone on before, and are every one in the spiritual world; also have been virtually judged already according to their characters; will go to home, or to finality: and whenever a great Æon is accomplished may be rearranged in new mercies, or exactions, of divine order, as God pleases. So the individual judgment and general judgment, both of them always in the spiritual world, and only casually represented in courts of law and diseases and calamities and catastrophes in the natural world, have truth with them both. Understanding this, and believing in God, and a life after death, and that spirits eschew churchyards, you easily see that the state of the spiritual world, in a given age, is a knowable problem for the willing mind: a problem of emigration, and as it were colonization. You know who have emigrated. In a tumbling epoch it is a death-rate and death-life-rate of teeming magnitudes of evil, sensual, dishonest men and women fabricating new states and places whereby and wherein to gratify and propagate their realms of lust and falsity and ceremony. Mere Census is alone sufficient to show what sort of nations and peoples are proximately above us and below us now under these conditions; what they will all vote for, what sort of Parliaments they will have, what governments will be sweet to them, and what atheist priests, what Word, what god will be found in their churches or charnel-houses. Το comprehend anything of spiritual history, which now is widely opened for us, it is first necessary to know that every woman and man is a permanent creature; goes as a spirit three days after death into another world, being drawn out of the dead body by the Lord; and there awaits either the second death, which is the life alien to God, or enters by the first resurrection on the road and way that leads to the home in heaven, and to the unfailing marriage in the home.

We come back to the question, How did Christ save the Spiritual. First, by assuming the Divine Natural in Himself.

By this means, which did not exist until His incarnation, a natural basis of virtue was added to the Divine Spiritual which existed from eternity, and then the whole Creation became Christ's. Man's Freewill, which is the whole man himself, was the only thing that outlay the Redeemer. In His Life from His birth to His death on the Cross, He gathered round Him the Remains of the Church from Abraham downwards; the fishermen who could become disciples, the women who would be ministers, and the Magdalenes who would be humiliations. He built them up in His intercourse, penetrated them by His wonders of mercy, and instructed them by His Word. They were all natural men and women; He too was a natural man, Ixovs, and became the Divine Natural Man. They were new natural men and women, and as His Divine Natural communicated with and corresponded to His Divine Spiritual, so their natural could be regenerated or made spiritual; not at once, but throughout their lives, and in their descendants. Their innocent and honest naturalism is plain throughout the Gospels: they expected the day of judgment in their own lifetime: they were eager to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel: they took the Master's words in a literal sense with no spiritual reserve behind it. They did not heed what He said of His Resurrection. They were not only fishermen but fishes and fond of eating spiritual fish: they were natural And this, nothwithstanding that He taught them that He always spoke in Parables.

men.

The restored capacity of regeneration, the power through their freewill of controlling the natural, and so bringing the spiritual into it, so that it became spiritual-natural, and leaving the natural basis, became spiritual after death,—made this world again into a Nursery of Heaven, fulfilled the divine law that heaven can never be full, but increases by fresh angelic populations, and the mundane divine law that regeneration of individuals fills the earth with inheritances of good men and women, who here are a basis to the Ancient

Edifices of God, and who now subsist in safety in the Divine Natural assumed by Christ.

The former natural capable of all this is represented in the Fourth Gospel by the two who were crucified with Christ; these being the entire remains of the Natural Man which could serve as the "Tabernacle of the Son, which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. There is nothing hid from the heat thereof. In that heat the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple." This is an account of the capacity now first restored to the heavens and firmament of the Remains of the natural man consenting to share in the Crucifixion, and so to enter the path that leads to the spiritual man; and that leads the spiritual man when adequate to contribute again to the fulness of the spiritual heaven.

These things become self-evident in the revealed doctrine of the Churches. The incapacity of the natural man to become unselfish and heavenly-minded during the Jewish Dispensation, and the restoration of man's freewill by the Lord's Incarnation, have been treated of throughout in this work.

We have now gone through the various Words of the Crucifixion in the Four Gospels, attempting to draw out from each a few crumbs of its own spiritual sense.

In Matthew and Mark the Jewish Church is crucified with and rejected by Christ on the cross, and perishes. In Luke a Messianic remnant is received, which if it will, can have an inheritance by and by. In John the Crucifixion is extended to the coming Church, its whole natural man is measured on the cross, which becomes the sign and banner of regeneration and salvation. The series is maintained.

The spiritual sense is the harmony of the Gospels for those who accept it: it proves that no finite man wrote these portions of the Word. They asseverate to subsequent mankind that the Lord controls His own records. The generation in the Lord's time attests Christ, and His life, death,

resurrection, and ascension. The first Christian Church is the tree from the seed planted by Christ in the first disciples. The Second Christian Church as given to man fulfils the Scriptures completed in the First.

John, the evangelist, he whom Jesus loved, is the only disciple mentioned who witnessed the Crucifixion. The letter of his Word was dictated to him as Holy Scripture. The omission of detail as to those who were crucified with Christ is therefore not his omission. It has a divine purpose. And in this as the final and highest Gospel the signification covers the universal and general meaning in which the cross leads and will forever lead the generations on. The dictation to the four evangelists seems to culminate here.

There are some other things which are prerogatively brought forward in the Fourth Gospel.

"Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also the 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" (xix. 23, 24).

His gar

To approach the spiritual sense of this scripture, remember that the person on the cross was the Lord God Almighty in the last act and hours of redeeming the human race. ments and the coat cannot but ascend to a Logos commensurate with Himself. The Scripture sounding from Æon to Eon is fulfilled by what is done with these coverings belonging to the Lord's Body. The soldiers did what they did that the fulfilment should take place: therefore they did it.

The Lord's garments represented truth in the external form, and His vesture truth in the internal. The vesture is the spiritual sense of the Word; the garments are the literal sense, which is parted among the disputants. The spiritual

sense, the coat is woven without seam from the top throughout. The top of the divine garment is the origin of that sense from Him who wears it, and from whom it descends through the heavens. Coming downwards it is Divine Truth Spiritual from the Divine Celestial. The coat being not divided signifies that such divine truth could not be dissipated because it is the internal truth of the Word. Casting lots for it signifies indifference of utter incapacity. It is not said that it had an owner among those who diced it away. The seamless coat is now with the New Church wherever the life represented by John, namely, good works, or good in act, is found. Observe that this "coat without seam woven from the top throughout" is a revelation only found in John's Gospel.

The reader, astonished that the Lord's coat without seam has such things in it, and such Scriptures heralding it a thousand years before the Crucifixion, will remember the exact clothing of Aaron that he might represent High Priesthood in the Church with the Jews: also that it is said in the Psalms, cii. 26, 27, "the heavens shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them and they shall be changed." We also read of garments of holiness, and that fine linen is the righteousness of the saints. In the Apocalypse it is written, "He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, and His name is called the Word of God," where the divine truth in the letter to which violence has been done is signified. A vesture there is truth investing good, and when predicated of the Word, the sense of the Letter. Again it is written, "And the armies in heaven followed Him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. . . . He hath on His vesture and on His thigh a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords." This signifies that the Lord teaches in the Word what He is, namely, the Divine Truth of the Divine Wisdom, and the Divine Good of the Divine Love; therefore, the God of the Universe. The vestment signifies the Word as to Divine Truth, the thigh as to Divine Good.

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