commerce of which use is the field. The service of man is the best ground of its perceptions. The spiritual mind regards spiritual ends in uses; regeneration of the individual and eternal life. The celestial mind reigns in the perception and practice that love united with wisdom is the end of ends; and it influences the spiritual mind to carry its truths to good, and to impregnate its uses with love. This rule of mind over mind, each freely submitting to its superior, is the human form, the image and likeness of God, Who is the creator of the order of the organs, and Who endows them beyond themselves, by perpetual planes and inductions of free fellowship from above. This, however, is as the mind should be, not as it is. Each faculty has the power of obstructing and stopping the influx, and limiting the man to all above its proprium or self. A man may be sensual without being rational, and rational without being intellectual, and also intellectual without being spiritual; he can love truth more than good; and in each such case the gifts descending from above come from the lower source.

LXII.-HEREDITIES.

The inheritances of character and disposition from parents to children have been studied with some diligence in this scientific age, but from the natural and not from the spiritual side. I am not aware that any writer but Swedenborg has traced the important bearing of the subject in religious. beliefs or states. It is the groundwork of the history of man as a personal agent.

The human family at no time and in no place has been a mass of merely aggregated individuals; but from the beginning has existed in Churches, and in the outlying remainders of Churches commonly called heathenisms.

These religious bodies or churches, divinely instituted and organized, have been subject to the inevitable condi

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tions of inheritance from fathers to sons. We have seen already in frequent detail what the succession of churches Each of them declined from its first Word, its first communicated Revelation and its first innocence, as it were from infancy to old age and death, by the development of hereditary seeds of evil and falsity. As Swedenborg observes: "The church decreases and degenerates by departure from its primeval integrity; and this chiefly in consequence of the increase of hereditary evil, every succeeding parent adding some new evil to what he himself inherited. Every evil actually committed by parents induces a new aspect on their nature, and when often repeated becomes natural, is added to what was hereditary, is planted over into their children, and through them into their posterity, and gives birth to an immense increase of evil in the course of generations. This must appear plainly to those who attend to the evil dispositions of children, and trace their resemblance to their parents and forefathers. It is a great error to suppose that there is no hereditary evil but what was implanted by Adam, when in fact each individual by his own actual sin produces hereditary evil, making addition to what he received from his parents, and accumulating the new sum in all his posterity, which is in no degree moderated save in those alone who are regenerated by the Lord. This is the primary cause of the degeneration of every church" (Arcana, n. 494).

Also further: "The good into which a man is born, is derived to him from his parents, either father or mother; for whatever parents have contracted by frequent use and habit, or are tinctured with by actual life, so as to render it familiar to them until it has the appearance of being natural, is carried down to their children, and becomes hereditary. Where parents have lived in the virtue of the love of good, and in so living have perceived their proper delight and blessedness, supposing them to conceive children in such a state of life, the children then receive an inclination to

similar good. Where parents have lived in the virtue of the love of truth, and in so living have perceived their proper delight, if they conceive children in such a state of life, the children then receive an inclination to similar virtue (Arcana, n. 3469).

These are the desirable goods of nature or birth; but not of the will or the understanding in one sense they may be called, with an extension of the common meaning, good nature. But Swedenborg again remarks: "Natural good is such that of itself it is not willing to obey and serve rational good as a servant serves a master, but it is desirous to have command. It requires to be reduced to compliance and service" (Arcana, n. 3470).

These considerations, if pondered, lift the subject of heredity from family proclivities into the sphere of the highest and lowest history of mankind, and confirm on psychological grounds the doctrine of the church, that man now, considered in himself, is nothing but evil and its ever convenient falsity. There is no escape from this conclusion. And the better a religious man is, the more he must be conscious of it as a rational experience. Also his unceasing knowledge and conscience of it is the condition of his advancement in the regenerate life.

The religions of the world, and their decline, are therefore the grounds of all the studies we have attempted in tracing the process from above downwards, from revelations to mythologies, from divine churches to fetish worship on the one side, and to atheism on the other. They involve not civil and moral states, but the direct relations of man to God. And the passage traversed hitherto reaches from Jehovah to graven and molten images, and from the inspired Word to the human philosophy which denies and supplants it. The outward destinies of nations, unconsciously to themselves, depend, now even rapidly, on the "downrush' of their heredities; their characters grow heavier from being more charged with evil; and they tend, unless they alter, to the

doom which has already befallen the corresponding nations of the past. Every fresh outward power they possess and call their own, hastens the end, just as enormity of wealth and genius in wicked hands, inwardly, and at length outwardly, consigns the man to a sure place in the estimation of even a corrupt society. For evil is at last the accuser and doom of evil. Therefore decaying churches enact themselves ultimately as social, political, and national history; and inheritance of spiritual evil acted out into sin from generation to generation is still at the root.

Observe however that inherited evil is not sin unless you love it and make it into deeds, and that inherited good is not good for you unless you enter its formless gift with mature principles of wisdom, and lift and detail it from natural towards spiritual good.

The inheritances of the past, including the love of power, and the love of money, have therefore been the essential disendowment and disestablishment of all the churches to the present day. The capacity of standing as open doors for the divine light to enter has been withdrawn from their priesthoods, which are in serried opposition to its instructions; and as in the past, the remote laity remains for the new revelation and the new city. The Christian and more outlying heathens will be summoned to receive the endowment and to constitute the establishment. Of course we are now speaking of divine and not of national or parliamentary churches, which latter especially have the advantage of being for the most part benignly secular, and of being unconsciously in the influx and current of a new church and its new ages. By disendowment we understand the loss of the goods and truths of heaven from the Word, and by disestablishment, the consummation of a church, and its supersession by a new dispensation.

LXIII.-DREAMS AND VISIONS.

The Word, the heathen mythologies, and the course of life, supply a store of materials for enlightened thought on the subject of this chapter. Sleep is one part; the passivity and abeyance of the sensual and bodily life, and the emancipation of the inner mind for a time, is the other. The latter is the awakening of higher faculties, the opening of some spiritual sight, and the perception of objects which the corporeal senses are not adequate to receive. It is not sleep, because the interior man is in increased wakefulness during such sight or vision.

From what has been said of the perceptive Man, the celestial or Most Ancient Church, named Adam, before "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept," it may be evident that his normal sleep partook wholly of his character, and that it was a state which does not exist at the present day. No evil heredities marred it. No resistance to divine influx and its immeasurable gifts obscured or distorted it. The soberness, temperance and chastity of the industrious day were consummated in it; and accordingly it was the floor and groundwork of celestial dreams. These dreams consisted of representatives of heavenly things, and this because of the law that angelic discourse when it flows down to man clothes itself in correspondences, which became an understood biblical hieroglyph in those primitive ages. The discourse in itself was ineffable to even these first men on the earth, no vocal or perceived language to them; but the representatives and correspondences created by it as dreams on the tablets of sleep, were intelligible as generalizations or common perceptions, and were attended with delights and instructions. What the intellectual heaven of the day did not give, the affectionate heaven of the night supplied. The day was inspired by the night, and the night was committed to use by the day.