things by Magic. Magic was not a false pretence but a false performance. The Egyptian Magicians had its powers. We have attestation of the spiritual lore of the Egyptians in the saying that Moses was learned in all their wisdom; and the tradition of this wisdom was preserved in the legend that Greek philosophers resorted to Egypt as to a fountain of the truths of old. Herodotus also says that the gods once ruled there. It had been and was a real power as we see from Genesis, and continued to be such until the Ancient Church was consummated and judged, and the coincidence of its vastation in Egypt enacted in the overwhelming of Pharaoh and his host. The refuse of the religion, the survival of the dregs, which are always what can bear the degradation of surviving, dwindled into the perversions signalized in the temples and tombs, into the hieroglyphics concerning the glory of dynasties, but with remains of Ancient Truth, Justice and Judgment, in the book of the dead and their long-drawn destinies. Effective Magic, such as the Magicians opposed to the miracles of Jehovah through Moses, ceased, but still has left traces in all the centuries; and witchcraft was dealt with in penal statutes till a late age in England and the United States. We also recal Lapland and Africa. A form of it consists in the arrangement of some mechanism meant to coincide with a future event, and thus to bring that event, whether death, or health, good or ill fortune, to pass, and so to control the stars. Rebellion is witchcraft, said Samuel to Saul. Superseding the Word of the Lord, and attempting to command the cosmos by your own invention, is spiritual rebellion.

When the Ancient Church was consummated and judged, and ceased to be a Church, a severe and limited system of correspondences was ordained, and magic and its symbols were forbidden. It is this iron discipline that we now meet with, and which we may reverently call Divine Magic in the stern walk of the Jewish Dispensation. There is continuity of the Revelations from Adam to Christ, and the might of Corres

pondences bares its arm in each, but with a different determination, because each several Church is two-fold, a Church in heaven and a Church on earth, and a Word written in correspondences is the uniting medium in every case between. the upper and lower Churches.

XX.-JEWISH FREEDOM AND BONDAGE.

It does not appear that the Jews were condignly judged for cruelties other than those which were forbidden by the Lord in commandments, or through priests and prophets in the events of the history. The terrible processes of David were included in the general Israelitish mission of the extermination of the nations. The details belonged to the individuals, and to their several characters, and would be judged individually after death, and also committed to the bulk and record of the Jewish nature in the great Assize of the Consummation. So the Jews too had a comparatively free hand in a higher sense than Judaism permitted. They were not machines. But in regard to particular laws as symbols in the Divine Drama obedience was stringent, and life and death were at stake. This was exemplified when David numbered the people. We read the following:"Now these be the last words of David, David the Son of Jesse saith, and the man who was raised on high saith, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and pleasant in the Psalms of Israel: The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His Word was upon my tongue. The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, he that rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. As the light of the morning when the sun riseth, a morning without clouds; the tender grass out of the earth through clear shining after rain. Although my house be not so with God, yet He hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure, for it is all my salvation and all my desire, although He maketh it not

Then follow the names of exploits of his chiefs, the

to grow" (2 Samuel xxiii. 1-5). David's thirty captains, and the chiefs of the threes who were eminent over the thirty, making thirty and seven in all. Uriah the Hittite is the last enumerated. "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah." Why was this anger kindled? The inventory of David's mighty men, and their exploits, and the summum bonum in Uriah the Hittite, is noteworthy. The only mention of the Lord in the chapter is where David would not drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem because it had value as the blood of the men that went for it in jeopardy of their lives. These were not actions commanded by Jehovah, or representative correspondences in the Dispensation. But David exulted in his own treasury of valour as its pieces were enumerated, and this led on to an infraction of a Divine command. The anger of Jehovah,—in the spiritual sense,-is David's manifested self-love. The avarice and lust were continued onwards now in numbering the people from Dan to Beersheba, that he might know the sum of the people. He first counts his guineas and then his farthings that he may be quite sure of his resources. He was warned by Joab and the captains of the host against counting the people, but his word prevailed against theirs. In consequence of David's disobedience, the destroying angel— spiritually, the crime of David-in voiding his representative veracity sent a pestilence upon Israel, and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men. Jehovah sends no pestilences, but EPIDEMIC MAN falls from his own evil spirit upon his body, and kills himself.

"To number signifies to arrange and dispose; and as it belongs to the Lord alone to arrange in order and dispose the truths and goods of faith and of love with everyone in the Church and in Heaven; therefore when this is done by man, as it was done by David through Joab, it signifies the ordering and disposition of such things by man and not

D

by the Lord; which is not to order and dispose, but to destroy."—Arcana Cœlestia, n. 10217.

If this be well considered, it explains why counting his armies, taking a military census, which all chiefs do to-day, was forbidden to David, because the Lord was his army, and seventy thousand deaths by pestilence were the spiritual measure of the offence whereby David denied that they were Jehovah's men and counted them as his own. Remembering all the previous deeds of the children of Israel in their battles, and believing the same literally, and that the power and terror of God was on these men against their enemies so that handfuls of them routed hosts; we may then know that the conditions of Israel's warfare were miraculous; and that whatever rebellion against command broke the obedience upon which the perpetual miracle of the Dispensation depended, in the act destroyed the foundations, and left Israel an easy prey to nations naturally mightier than themselves.

The avarice of personal glory, the deepest Miser and Hoarder of all, was dramatically or representatively stricken here in bodily deaths. For everything in the Jewish Economy was bodily and carnal, an outbirth of the Jews. The same things outborn from Christians are, mentally as well as bodily, propagated in modern states. The devastation of countries and waste of armies takes place under destroying angels, which are godless lusts of power; attributes of glory to nations themselves. Cupidities prowling after other lands, brooding revenges centuries long, schemes for universal dominion, mutual national hatreds and friendships of hatred all round; these and the parliaments of Atheistic Man make Christianity worse than Judaism.

It is noteworthy that the Jews of these late ages are not in the front in the conduct of wars, and that the worst part of their nature as it was displayed when Jehovah was their Ruler is dormant. Avarice is their hereditary passion, and financial ability the use of honest Jews to the community.

This latter is their best conversion towards Christianity; and it is a sufficient and considerable fact. While they wail for their temple and their lost place in the Divine Drama, they may thank God that they are emancipated from its Letter, and that they sit politically and socially in so many countries under their own vines and fig-trees. We have succeeded to their Cross, but think to escape from the responsibilities which weighed upon the chosen people.

XXI.-SAUL AND SAMUEL.

An instance illustrative of the Jewish Dispensation occurs in the Word where Samuel presented Saul, the son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, to all the people as king, and said, See ye him whom the Lord hath chosen, and all the people shouted and said, [God save the king] Let the king live. And Samuel said, Come, and let us go to Gilgal, and renew the kingdom there. Then recounting the Lord's doings from the days of Moses and Aaron to his own Priesthood, he thus rebuked the children of Israel for their wickedness: "When ye saw that Nahash the king of the children of Ammon came against you, ye said unto me, Nay, but a king shall reign over us; when the Lord your God was your King. If ye will fear the Lord, and serve Him, and hearken unto His voice, and not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall both ye and also the king that reigneth over you be followers of the Lord your God. But if ye will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you as it was against your fathers." -1 Samuel x. 25, xi. 15, xii. 12–16. "Then Saul, finding that the people were scattered from him, though he had been made king, and being afraid of the Philistines who were assembled to fight against Israel, did not wait for Samuel, who had appointed to meet him in Gilgal, there