liken the state of their life to wakefulness."—Coronis, n. 19.

In reading these extracts, bear in mind that there are no angels created such from the beginning, but that all in the heavens have been men and women and children on some planet-earth. The spiritual world in the complex is the gathered sum and census from all worlds and ages of these populations.

The

The necessity of a Church finds a parallel necessity in government and subordination in order that citizenship may exist. We have no examples of the existence of civil society under any other conditions than that of power and force organized and legalized from above downwards. Church also is as visible as the State, and, when it is not perishing, more potent. While the man in civil society is organic through human agents of his own kind, under the Providence which cares for political states, the man in religious society is organic through ecclesiastical and angelic -powers under God-Man, whose kingdom on earth is the Church.

XXXI.—THE WORD, THE CONJOINING

MEDIUM.

The word which was spoken by the Lord through Moses and the Prophets and through the Evangelists, descends through the heavens, and in each heaven is clothed with a sense adequate to the Angels there. In the celestial degree or the highest heaven where love to the Lord begets wisdom and the faculties of this degree, the word is celestial; in the spiritual degree or the second heaven, the Word is spiritual. Below these senses the natural heaven has a pure natural sense adequate to the understanding of the third degree of heaven, the celestial-natural and spiritual-natural; in which the other degrees are represented in a lower and more external form.

With this coheres the Letter of the Word, which is the presence of the Lord in the true church and its worshippers on earth.

The Word is thus one as the Lord is one, but becomes various as the Divine Person addresses Himself to each Heaven, to every angel in each, and to every man in the Church. The variety flows out of the method of correspondences whereby all creation is effected. The spiritual Sun, the Sun of Righteousness, which warms and illuminates the Angelic Heavens, is the source of creation; Jehovah God resides in it, and through its righteous heat and light, the Word which is with God is spoken forth as the alone reality of love and power. It is spoken into forms, appearances of the Being who is ineffable, but who presents Himself to us as His Images, by an Image of Himself as the Son of Man in the Word. The forms are according to the heavens, more and more ineffable and inconceivable, and imperceptible to man in their ascent. But the highest plane corresponds to the second, the second to the lower, and the lowest. This lowest is our Written Word, the Old and the New Testaments.

It flows from this account that correspondences of outward things to inward states are transmutable in an upward series into meanings after meanings as they ascend. Our Word, Jewish, and Christian, is written in our realm of nature, in which space and time and person are present everywhere to our faculties. These three real natural omnipresences have no existence in the spiritual world. Everlasting appearances of them have existence there instead of the fixations themselves. In the spiritual world the objects may be called fluid fixations. So all the objects of nature are reproduced and represented there, and indefinitely more and more on the higher mountains of love and light. Objects are created in a moment according to signification; for they are all parts of the language of the Word. The Lord converses with His heavens from these His Divine Manuscripts, these floral and faunal scrolls of living lands and skies.

So He does talk with us in His Bible, the Word, and it is the trysting-place in which He is present to the Christian. World. The Word contains all the prayers and praises that the contrite and troubled heart, or the joyful mind, can offer to His throne. And in reading it with sacred attention, a hierarchy is reading it with us. By induction of the Word itself, our wants of love and life are supplied in the reading. The natural images of the letter suggest their spiritual likenesses, and another letter is gradually given in us as a higher Bible. Next, the spiritual kingdom is in the same Word with us in the Church on Earth; but with a penetration before which the letter of the Church has again disappeared, and truth leading to good is made objective in resplendent mental narratives of form. Higher still the celestial heaven is in direct perception of good itself as central; the flaming light of which is the highest perpetual self-evidence of the Divinity of the Word.

All is effected by CORRESPONDENCES. Science, which as yet knows nothing of this term, may illustrate it by Sir William Grove's teaching of the "Conversion of Forces." According to this doctrine, energy is stored in nature, and by suitable mechanical contrivances, and the motion of these producing friction, and interior relations in substance, new kinds of force are developed. So that motion, heat, light, magnetism, electricity, and no doubt many other forces, are all modes of motion; each one being a new power, and given out to a new contrivance which can receive it, and reactively manifest it. All this is within nature, and so to speak in one plane; but the products in the series appear very different. Now before motion put Will as correspondent to energy; and will is humanly alive, and life uses all these powers and forces for definite ends; and distributes them according to Uses or Functions. And so the Divine Will by the Word in prepared minds makes the heat and light of men. The heat here

is love, and the light is wisdom.

"The sense of the Letter of the Word," says Swedenborg,

"is that through which there is conjunction with the Lord, and Consociation with the Angels. The conjunction is not apparent to man; but it lies in the affection for truth, and in the perception of it; thus in the love of the Divine truth, and the belief in it, in the man himself. Consociation with the angels of heaven takes place through the sense of the letter, because there is a spiritual and a celestial sense in the literal sense; and the angels are in the above two senses. They are evolved from the natural sense of the Word, or the sense of the letter, while a true man is in that sense. The Evolution is instantaneous; consequently also the Consociation. By much experience it has been given me to perceive that when I read the word in the sense of the letter, a communication was made with the heavens; now with one of their societies, now with another; and that those things which I understood according to the natural sense, the spiritual angels understood according to the spiritual sense, and the celestial angels according to the celestial sense; and this in an instant. As this communication has been perceived so many thousands of times, not a particle of doubt remains to me about it. . . . The spiritual angel evokes the spiritual, and the celestial angel the celestial. They can do no other; for the things are homogeneous to them and consentaneous to their nature and essence."

"Let this be first illustrated by comparisons with the three kingdoms of nature. In the Animal Kingdom.-Out of the food when it is made into chyle the veins drink and evoke their blood; the nervous fibres their juice; and the substances which are the origins of the fibres, their animal spirit. In the Vegetable Kingdom.-A tree with trunk, branches, leaves and fruits stands upon its root, and out of the soil through the root extracts and evokes a more crass juice for the trunk, branches, and leaves, a purer juice for the flesh of the fruits, and the purest for the seeds inside or within the fruits. In the Mineral Kingdom.—In the bosom of the earth in certain places there are minerals impregnated with gold, silver and

iron. Out of exhalations treasured away in the earth, the gold draws its own element, the silver its own, and in like manner the iron."

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Now by an example let it be illustrated how the spiritual angels extract their sense, and the celestial angels theirs, from the natural sense in which the Word dwells with man."

"Commandment, Honour thy Father and thy Mother' Man by father and mother understands the father and mother on earth, as well as all who are in the place of father and mother and by honouring he understands holding them in honour and obeying them. A spiritual angel by father understands the Lord, and by mother, the Church; and by honouring he understands loving. But a celestial angel by father understands the Lord's Divine Love, and by mother, His Divine Wisdom; and by honouring, doing good from him."

"Commandment, Thou shalt not steal. Man by stealing, understands literal theft, defrauding, taking his neighbour's goods away from him on any pretence. A spiritual angel by stealing understands depriving others of the truths of their faith and of the good things of charity by falses and evils. But a celestial angel understands by stealing, attributing to himself the things which are the Lord's, and claiming to himself His Justice and Merit."-Holy Scripture, n. 62-67.

XXXII.—THE DIVINE VALUE OF THE
LETTER.

The internal sense is established as a fact of divine language beyond all doubt for those who study it reverently and with competent open minds. Those who are not able to see it for themselves should take it on trust from others, as we accept astronomy, mathematics and dynamics from their professors. First let them consider that the Word of the Lord must have a divine life and soul in it. And then