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was thus immanent in the names Abraham and Sarah. Again the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre ; where three men stood beside him; and he said, My Lord, If now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant. The three men turned their faces towards Sodom, but Abraham stood yet before the Lord. . . . The Lord conversed with Abraham, who entreated his mercy respecting Sodom. Lot received two angels in Sodom whom the Lord had sent to destroy it. The Angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee? Fear not, . . . I will make thy son, a great nation. God tempted Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham's desire of ancient sacrifice came upon him, and through the substituted Ram, burnt-offerings, to prevent human sacrifices, were inevitable for the coming Dispensation. The Angel of Jehovah, not the Tempter, but the Divine Truth in an angelic personality, cried to him out of heaven, and forbade him to lay his hand upon the lad. He was literally obedient in heart to the God who tempted him, and to the angel of the Lord who forbade him to obey the temptation; and the Angel of Jehovah called out of heaven the second time, and blest all his obedience in both sorts. For obedience was of the essence of his service.

This manifest Divine Government and Help, extended to the Father of the Faithful and head and heart of the Patriarchs, like the seed of a tree grows and ramifies through the Jewish and Israelitish history. The nations so long as they were under the theocracy, were led by Jehovah in all their wanderings, fed by Him in the desert, their thirst quenched by Him out of the flint which became a fountain of waters. Their ways were mere hourly open providences. Their victories were not their own, but the Lord's: number did not count in their battles, but a panic from immediate God overtook their enemies, and while the men of Israel obeyed, they had an influx with them which made them as the armies of Jehovah. Nature and human cunning yielded

before them. The Red Sea and Jordan were streets with walls of water for their hosts. The walls of Jericho fell down before their trumpets. The miracles in Egypt dealt with man and nature as the ways of right and wrong deal ultimately with the mind and body of a man. Egyptian humanity and its world while Israel was kept servile, evilly treated, and held captive, were a hell of punishment and torment: and, in the end, of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth for Pharaoh and his people. If the children of Israel had kept the commandments, and obeyed the laws and ordinances of Jehovah, they would have been even as natural children of the lowest heaven, walking rightly to each appointed end; time, space and person obedient to them, the forty years of wandering, a real dream soon over, and the promised land entered by the very men and women who had been led, with the pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day, from the bondage of Egypt to the land flowing with milk and honey. But miracle had two sides with them; for obedience, miracle of prosperity, of harvest, of increase of flocks and herds, and of propagation of their human race as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the sea; and for wickedness, miracle of destruction, as after the worship of the golden calf; of defeat, as of Saul's army by the Philistines; of pestilence, as when David numbered the people; of disaster from the wickedness of their kings; of captivity to Babylon, and of ultimate national extinction when from the temple at Jerusalem a voice was heard, God has departed. In the case of the Jews these events were miraculous on both sides, the good and the evil; for the Dispensation was a miracle; and not a man, woman or child of the chosen race from Abraham was beyond its sphere. We take the Word literally as it stands; and eliminate atheism and theism, denial, doubt, and criticism. This then is what may be called the Immanence of Jehovah.

The dispensation of Miracle which held the Jewish mind. and nature in order to compel an external presence of God

on earth, which for miracle was a necessity, was so indifferent a thing to the Jews, that they easily were seduced by the superstitions of the nations which promised gratification of their propensities. Miracle of Jehovah was indeed providential, but it was also providential that they should understand nothing of its spiritual import; in which case it ranks only with the desire which it promises to fulfil, or with the terror which it creates ; and it is not separable, except by mere obedience, and the strong direction which this brings, from miraculous manifestations magically produced from the hells.

In this age we see an analogous coincidence. The spiritual world is now made known by open communication, and its wonders revealed, and to those who do not receive the true information, a way opens for their own inventions of many kinds, and spirits are invoked, and not the Lord, and have deceived many.

While often discussing difficult questions which arise in reading the Old Testament; such, for instance, as the destruction of the Priests of Baal by Elijah,—from the humanitarian point of view, a ruthless slaughter,-I have found that the correspondence of idolaters to infernal evils, the obedience to a command to extirpate the men which were the personifications of them; the miraculous power given to the Jews in the transaction, and the equally miraculous weakness with which these Priests, for instance, were smitten, are all, or in part, judged from the point of view of ordinary history. In this case the Jewish Theocracy is not consistently held as a fact; but the reader is a critic, happily without intending it, of the ways of God to man; which, however, are now justified as in no former age. This Theocracy, as it is our object to show, was a fatal divine necessity,* and as such was in the very atmosphere of Jewish Life.

The Divine institution and conduct of Judaism seems to be the most plainly revealed evidence of God in nature which we possess in Holy Scripture. The influx into a

* See especially Swedenborg's Divine Providence and Arcana Calestia.

whole external mind; into nature and sky and atmosphere; into the ground; the physical plagues of Egypt; the Lord on Sinai; the supernatural harvests; the flocks and herds according to obedience; the panics in hosts of enemies; all these divine-natural circumstances are indeed immanence of Jehovah very close above and within the material sphere. The Lord bowed His heavens and came down. Heaven was under Him with all its angels ministering. He altered the atoms of His previous creation by adding fresh providences and powers to them. The Incarnation seems nearer to accomplishment by this immediacy of God in the mental, natural and physical world, when He was about to descend in Virgin Mary not as a thought or idea, but as the most substantial of beings, the Divine Truth in Heaven.

XXVIII.—THE MESSIANIC PROMISES.

For what reasons were the Jewish and Israelitish nation allowed to delude themselves into the persuasion that Jehovah had chosen them, and that He would come and personally lead them to supremacy? There were, as we read, several causes. "One was that by having to name and remember Him, they might be held together in His Worship in a brotherhood; without which Jehovah would have no entry to any of them, and none of them would have had any access to Jehovah. It was then as it is to-day, no one has seen the Father at any time. The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. John i. 18; v. 37. No one comes to the Father but by Me. The second Cause why so frequent a prediction of the Lord's Coming was made, was, that the representative types of their Church, all of which had regard to our Lord, and the Church to be inaugurated by Him after the Advent, might serve them as so many pointings and symbols of their worship; so that when He came, they should acknowledge

Him; and permit themselves to be introduced into the internal things of His Worship; and together with the nations which were around them, become Christians. The third Cause was, that by the recollection of His Advent, some glimmering notion or idea concerning the resurrection and eternal life might enter their thoughts. Otherwise, in their hearts they would say, What interest have we in the Messiah when we are dead, unless we are to return, and see His glory, and reign with Him? From this their religious invention (religiosum) poured forth a belief that at the time of His Advent they were to rise again, each from his sepulchre, and to return into the land of Canaan. The fourth Cause was, that in their states of vastation and oppression, when they were in trials and afflictions, they should be supported and healed, as their fathers and brethren were in the desert; for without such support and healing they would have loaded Jehovah with reproaches, and would have gone astray in multitudes from the representative worship of Him into idolatrous worship. For these causes the Advent of the Lord is so often predicted in the old Prophetic Word. For the same causes in the New Evangelical and Apostolic Word, the Lord is preached, and His Second Coming is predicted."-Coronis, n. 59.

We repeat here the reasons before alleged for the capacity of the Jews to become the subjects of an ultimate theocracy or material dispensation. They were above all the nations then extant capable of assuming and keeping up a holy external at the same time with a profane internal. Internal truth was thus precluded to them, and they could not profane it and make the holy external impossible, which latter would have taken place if the mind had recognized the higher divine light in an adequate conscience, and had abused it. Lack of interest in such truth, as irrelevant to their business and bosoms,-deadness to it,-prevented this. The theatric holiness thus had its field in the external nature.