attests his Work complete in John. It is a direct voice from above.

“And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen." The Redemptive acts by which the Lord overcame the hells, and reduced the spiritual world to order, by which He glorified His Humanity and made it divine, and by which He became the Saviour of mankind, are in these four small books. The divine Author and Artist has written them from the ground of infinite Use which selects all truths as they are wanted. That use is indefinitely various, and the differences of its administration are not discrepancies which have to be reconciled by ingenious commentators, but wisdom to be seen and perceived from love of the spiritual and celestial senses which are intended. Each Gospel Word as a truth for application has infinite contents. Infinite things are compressed into the letter, that the world may have room for honest secular men. Take an example. "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee." Seen spiritually, the right eye which offends is the intellect charged by the corrupt will, and insinuating and dictating act. Here in the mind it is the organ of the vision of lusts. In these few words, human life is traversed from end to end, and books which would fill the world might be the history of the carrying out of it. All greed, evil mastery, and delight of self-love, are the lusts in the ban of this excommunication. The immensity of the work commended to us by our Saviour finds few echoes in our literature. And yet the work is imminent; for after death, when the tree lies, and the mind's habits in what little is left of the mind are immortal, the evil eye cannot be plucked out or cast away: it sees its love, and nothing else it sees, and drones on in its dead desires for ever.

In John there is no account of the Lord's Ascension. The Divine Natural Man proclaims His union with the

Father only in a special Gospel of Love. He disappears in witnessing to John.

So in endeavouring to elucidate the Four Gospels spiritually, we have first gone down into Egypt for the facts and knowledges of the Letter which has divine natural contents in it. We have then taken the pathway to Assyria, and found there the rational certainty that all things of the Lord, even His coat without seam, must be divine and infinite: Assyria, Reason, says must be. And then Israel is the third, the all in all, with Egypt and with Assyria; is the spiritual sense of the Gospels and of the entire Word; even a blessing in the midst of the land.

I conclude this section with the following extract from the PARABLE OF CREATION, by the late Rev. John Doughty: an exposition of the First Chapter of Genesis, which makes its spiritual sense self-evident, and prepares the reader to receive a similar sense in Holy Scripture throughout :

"The Word of God cannot be a book of natural history or science. It must contain, in its essence, only spiritual truth. As history, it must give only a history of the spiritual states of church or man. If, therefore, their surface appearances indicate that it is something else, those appearances must be false. The child might imagine that Æsop's Fables were given for the mere purpose of relating curious stories of the conversations of birds and beasts which took place in the long ago, but that does not prove the child to be correct. A belief in error never makes error true. But the wellinstructed man knows better. He is fully aware that the real design of those fables is to teach a lofty moral by means of a written story.

"Much more is this true of the Word of God, of which the fables of Æsop are a faint imitation. History is here used not for the history's sake, but for the sake of the spiritual lesson which lies concealed within it. Geography is used, not to give any lessons concerning the relative situations of the seas, rivers or lakes, cities, countries or moun

tains of olden times, but because of their adaptability to expressing the relative spiritual situations or states of men. An account of creation is given, not with the idea of furnishing man with an epitome of geological science, but because. it forms a fitting dress for the portrayal of the regeneration of man. As all Scripture is given in parables and for the sake of its spiritual teaching, a history of creation must be, in its essential meaning, a description of the creation and development of the spiritual nature within us. This is called by our Lord, the rebirth, or regeneration," pp. 34-36.

XLIII-MARY MAGDALENE.

John's Gospel contains the following concerning Mary Magdalene which does not occur in the other Gospels :"She turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne Him hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto Him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God. Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and He had spoken these things unto her" (xx. 14-18).

This passage is full of Mary's kind affection: she craves Christ's dead body, and longs to take it away with her. She would not lose sight of it. She is a devout natural woman, through Christ in possession of herself. She is present at the crucifixion; first at the sepulchre on the morning of the resurrection; the first to see Jesus after He rose from the dead, and showed Himself unto her.

Jesus calls her Mary; she calls Him, Master. To which

he rejoins, Touch Me not.

May we break this bread, and

see a spiritual sense in it?

Mary Magdalene represents ardent natural affection for Jesus; natural devotion; a necessary accompaniment of the first Christian Church, founded as it was upon personal intercourse with the Saviour, and upon loving memory of brotherhood with Him, and of His wondrous words and works. Her history represents an uncontrolled spirit redeemed by Him: for out of her He had cast seven devils. All her behaviour when she supposed Christ to be the gardener, evidences her strong, unsuspecting natural affection. While this was dominant, He could be to her no more than a grand natural man. Touching Him then means loving Him from her proprium. He forbids her to touch Him as He has not yet ascended to His Father: her love has not yet apprehended Him as her God. She has her old familiar recognition of Him as He was before His death and resurrection in His infirm Humanity. Yet this ardent natural affection rebuked as it was, being a good love, is made the medium of a revelation from the Lord to the minds of His brethren, to whom Mary is told by Him to say, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God. The abashed natural love becomes the means to instruction and revelation concerning the Lord's Divinity in His Divine Humanity. The Lord's brethren are those who hear the Word of God and do it: and He here spoke the Word to such. This is for the New Church, and belongs to the spiritual sense now revealed to it. Merely human affection for Christ, except with little children and simple minds, has detracted, and detracts, from the recognition of His Divinity; and has made it more obvious to think of Him in His Humiliation and infirm Jewish humanity than in His Godhead; to pity the Lord rather than to adore Him; to think of His flesh not as divine good, and of His blood not as divine truth, but as carnal and sanguinary real presence from His dead body on the cross; and so of the

merits not of His life, but of His agony and death. The three great Churches have had their Via Dolorosa, and have dwelt minutely upon Christ's sufferings, having no knowledge of His victories over the Hells and over spiritual death. They have wailed over Him as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Yet He said, just before His crucifixion, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. The natural affection for Him who took our flesh upon Him, and lived a divine life in it, making His humanity divine, can indeed never be abolished: it should live as a lamb in every little child : and wherever the Gospel is read or known, be it here on earth, or in the worlds of the spiritual firmament in the vast communion after death, this affection, from personal experience, or pious memory, should always rest as a reserve to our thoughts and feelings about our Saviour. But age by age as we know His Godhead by the process of our own regeneration, our love will be transmuted into a spiritual affection to which the Lord will appear in His Kingdom, Power and Glory. Rituals commemorating His suffering, fixed seasons of humiliation, relics authentic or not authentic, whenever the simple can be weaned from them, will disappear into relative unimportance. The New Church will be emancipated from the Crucifixion as a natural agony upon which the Lord after His resurrection ceased to dwell. It will live to ages of ages on account of the Spiritual sense which alone makes all Scripture divine: the Crucifixion now of our own evil and false proclivities will be the heaven and the blessing of it. For the sake of this we read in Luke, "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His Glory ?"

XLIV.-RESIST NOT THE EVIL ONE.

Bear in mind that we speak from appearance when we say that the Lord rejected the Jewish Church. The converse is He did not resist evil. He came into the world into

true.