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to worship external things as holy and divine apart from anything internal: for instance, to adore their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and afterwards Moses and David, as deities; and also to hold as holy and divine every piece of stone and wood which had been inaugurated into their divine worship; as the ark, the tables there, the lamp, the altar, the garments of Aaron, the Urim and Thummim, and afterwards the Temple. By such things the communication of angels with man was brought to pass. It was effected thus. Their external worship was communicated to angelic spirits of simple character, who do not reflect upon internal things, but who are interiorly good. Such are those who correspond to the layers of the skin in the Maximus Homo. In these simple spirits the interior Angels of Heaven saw the things which were represented, consequently the heavenly and divine things which corresponded. So the Holy of worship was miraculously elevated into heaven, leaving the Jews outside in the process" (Arcana Cœlestia, n. 8588).

Again, Swedenborg says: "As the representative of the celestial kingdom began to perish when the Jews asked for a king, therefore in order that the representation of the Lord's kingdom in the heavens might still be continued on earth, the Jews were separated from the Israelites; and the Lord's celestial kingdom was represented by the Jewish kingdom, and His spiritual kingdom by the Israelitish kingdom" (Ibid. n. 8770).

What a marrow of divine-human history, from the beginning of the world to the ends of it, these revelations open in thus opening the Word.

XIV.-HOW A REPRESENTATIVE CAN

ASCEND.

Before proceeding further, an easy instance may help writer and reader to begin to understand this difficult matter,

of spirits receiving the representatives of Jewish Worship, and leaving out the unholy Jewish interpretation of them, and thus rendering them fit to be presences in the heavens ; so ensuring a sure communication of heaven with man from the basis of impure expressions, which become unnoticed dregs. Childhood sometimes shames grown men with this kind of angelry. Now regard Psalm cix. It is chiefly occupied in the Jewish letter with a prayer against the wicked who have spoken against the Psalmist with a lying tongue; have rewarded him evil for good, and hatred for love. If a Christian prayed it in the Jewish sense, it were an evil prayer. "Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand. Let his prayers become sin. As he clothed himself with cursing as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones. Let it be unto him as the garment covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually." The whole Psalm of which this is a small part is a prayer for curses upon an adversary, upon his children and posterity, upon his fathers, and upon his mother. It is a complete commination. To the Psalmist it was a series of ardent wishes addressed as prayers to the Lord. Good simple Christians dislike the Psalm, do not read it, and so are rid of the Jewish nature in it. But those who understand the spiritual sense of it all, know that the adversary against whom we pray is our own selfishness, and no person or persons outside of us; that the curses are specific prayers against those evils which curse us, and which are our deadly enemies; and also which stand in all the relationships which are correspondentially signified by the adversary himself, by his children, his fathers, and his mother. So in praying this prayer, it goes to heaven with no memory of Jewish meaning; it undergoes an apotheosis, and refuses to have external enemies. So also when it is said of the daughter of Babylon, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock" (Psalm cxxxvii. 9), the Jewish sense dies into the Angelic sense; the daughter

of Babylon is the affection of our own love of dominion over the counsels of heaven; and the little ones are the intimate desires born of that affection; the rock of Divine truth recognized is that which these affections assail, and by which they perish. So the Jewish sense remains with the Jews, is ignored by the Christians, and is perceived as the road to heaven in the New Jerusalem.

XV.—THE JEWISH CHARACTER WAS NOT ALTERED BUT MADE REPRESENTATIVE.

The severe ritual given through Moses in no way infringed the Jewish Character; the commanded sacrifices prevented the sacrifices of sons and daughters which were practised among the nations. The idea of human sacrifice was so ingrained in the world in the ruin of the Ancient or Noahtic Church, and descended so lustfully upon the Jews, that they continually fell back into the practice; and they were permitted to sacrifice cattle, sheep, lambs, goats, kids, pigeons and doves, to divert their propensity, and also, from the correspondence of the animals, to present and represent the approach to heaven by good affections, the fruits of selfsacrifice, and by worship from these. A cruel nation had appetite for cruelty, as the Romans for gladiatorial murders, and lions and tigers at play with human life. The Jewish cruelty, ready to hand, was laid hold of by Him Who was to come in the Redeemer, and made into a link in the chain that bound mankind to heaven. We may say that the butcher's craft was consecrated. If Jehovah had made the Jews, unlimited sacrifice would have been in character, but the Jews, like all obdurately natural men, made themselves; and He curtailed them, and made Divine use of them.

If we grant as a fundamental postulate the mere Drama or Representation of a Church, in which the Characters were in costume, and in artistry other than the Realities they

stood or spoke for; and in which their implicit obedience to their parts and prompters was inexorably necessary; and if we always remember that a divine Church commanded the situation, and that its existence was imperative, we then find that every circumstance recorded of the Jews in the Word puts on a new Justice and Judgment. The events of Jewish history are spiritual things: the forty years in the wilderness are the long trials and circuits of self-love, doubling upon itself, and getting no nearer to the promised land. Yet every day, notwithstanding its sins and punishments, the vague moving host is exactly guided to a representative end. The representation of a Church still subsists in spite of the actors. The Battles of the Jews, and the extermination of the nations before Canaan was reached, and in Caanan, if I do not mistake are always provoked, often by some excusable cause on the part of the nations. The massacres which followed Jewish victories, or Jehovah victories, the slaughters of men, women and children, were a part of the regime of the then world. Cæsar did thus in Belgium and Gaul, and Vercingetorix, like Agag in his country, was murdered in Cæsar's triumph, after the Gallic victories, in Rome. There was nothing remarkable in these events; they were ordinary human ways and games. Two things may strike us. The Jewish Warrior minus Jehovah does not seem a redoubtable man. But the wonder is that Jehovah commanded the massacres after Victory. That Samuel, the good high Priest, hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. That Saul appeared to be more merciful than Jehovah: that on the vote of his people, which he dared not disobey, for he feared the people and obeyed their voice, he allowed them to take to themselves the best of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the chief of the things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice unto the Lord his God in Gilgal. And then Samuel said, "Hath the Lord delight in burntofferings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than

the fat of rams. For rebellion is the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee as King." Here obedience to literal command is declared as the keynote of the Jewish dispensation, and disobedience as fatal to it, and to those who disobeyed. The Amalekites represented sinners, while the Jews represented the righteous rejecting their sins, and in terrible drama they had to kill those whom Jehovah had vanquished. In this series, with its awful logic, the Lord of hosts had commanded Saul to go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. This was because all the personalty and property of Amalek partook of his representation: his women stood for mothers of evil, his infants and sucklings for evil seed and its increase, his oxen for bad affections, his sheep for shameless pleas of innocence, his camels for general ways of wickedness, and his asses for every man's private inventions. Exactly the opposite of what the precious beasts signify in a series which begins with a good dominant. In the real life of a regenerate community the slaughter of the women and children were obviously heinous; in the representation of such a life by the Divine Dramatist, where the reality takes the lowest form of actuality, the slaughter of these perhaps innocent women, and most innocent babes and sucklings, oxen and sheep, was done on earth that it might be translated in heaven as the victory of good, and the extermination of evil. It is indeed a difficult train to keep steadily in the mind, and will convince but few; but the Scripture facts are there to be explained; and the compulsory Representation of a Church where there was no Church, not in the ideas and imaginations, but in the flesh and blood and bones and bowels of the Jews and the Nations and Peoples extant from Abraham to Christ,-this is the Keynote of a consistent solution of this class of difficulties in the Old Testament.

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