each characterised by some distinct evil affection and its derivative false persuasions; and in direct opposition to some heavenly love and its corresponding perceptions of truth. The general sphere exhaling from the whole infernal world is, we are informed,* one of hatred to the Lord; and its combined effort is to destroy everything good and true. But special evils and falsities are excited and infused by distinct infernal communities, whose hatred is inflamed more particularly against the special good affection and the truths originating in it, to which it is immediately opposed. In the present instance, there is a considerable amount of evidence that would seem to indieate the specific infernal influence from which this curious contexture of falsehood may be supposed to arise. To this we will now direct our attention. One of the remarkable features in the subject before us is, the constancy with which it is maintained that the only healthy moral state is when good is done, not from precepts difficultly learned, and practised by self-constraint; but, unconsciously and impulsively; as, under the circumstances, "the thing wanted there." "The good man is he who works continually in well-doing; to whom well-doing is as his natural existence, awakening no astonishment, requiring no commentary; but there, like a thing of course, as if it could not but be so." "Without artificial medicament of philosophy, or tightlacing of creeds (always very questionable), the healthy soul discerns what is good, and adheres to it, and retains it; discerns what is bad, and spontaneously casts it off. An instinct from Nature herself, like that which guides the wild animals of the forest to their food, shows him what he shall do, what he shall abstain from. . . . . This thing thou canst work with and profit by, this thing is substantial and worthy; that other thing thou canst not work with, it is trivial and inapt; so speaks unerringly the inward monition of the man's whole nature."t This is, undoubtedly, a character of sound spiritual health; but one belonging to a celestial state; possible only in the Most Ancient Church, and except by attaining the highest-the third-degree of regeneration, when celestial order is restored, impossible to all men now; the condition of whose existence is, to receive good from the Lord, and to do good, in the exact degree in which they see their own evil tendencies, and resist them;-in the degree of their purification. The normal intellectual state, we are assured, corresponds to this. Logical demonstration, as a means of arriving at truth, is repudiated, and all processes of reasoning discouraged. "The healthy understanding, we * H. & H. n. 588. † Vol. iv. p. 6; v. p. 147. -- should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to know and believe." "So stands it, in short, with all the forms of Intellect, whether directed to the finding of truth, or to the fit imparting thereof; always the characteristic of right performance is a certain spontaneity and unconsciousness; the healthy know not of their health, but only the sick,' Hence this system never argues, but authoritatively affirms. It assails no man's faith, ancient or modern, christian or pagan, but accepts all religions, as having been true once,-when they were believed, for "Truth, says Horne Tooke, means simply the thing trowed, the thing believed;" but it equally undermines them all by denying the existence of any absolute truth;-for, "Truth, in the words of Schiller, never is, always is a-being." It affects to limit its communications to "yea, yea, nay, nay"-another characteristic of the celestial church, and impossible in the present state of the human mind, when natural intuitions are only falsities corresponding to hereditary evil; and when truth must of necessity be learned outwardly, before it can be seen inwardly. The impossibility of man's deriving wisdom from his own "insight," has been already demonstrated, but without adverting to the fact that the men of the Most Ancient Church actually possessed the faculty, not indeed of deriving light from their own souls, for all truth is the Lord's, and can be derived from Him alone; but of receiving it from Him by an internal way, through their own souls. And were man at the present day in a state of order, and untainted with hereditary evil, such would still be his prerogative. He would need no outward instruction, but his mind being open to the Lord and heaven, he would receive thence the wisdom, truth, and knowledge corresponding to the particular affection of good of which he was created to be a form.t Again: Mr. Carlyle claims for the human race that each individual has the Law of God written on the heart. This also was true of the Most Ancient Church, and true of it exclusively. "They had," we are informed, "the Law written in themselves, because they were principled in love to the Lord, and towards their neighbour; for whatever the law enjoins is agreeable to the perceptions arising from this love; and whatever the Law forbids is contrary thereto." The light of truth in the understanding emanates from the love of goodness in the will, is, indeed, that love in form and rendered visible. When the Lord was loved supremely, no prohibitory code was required, as every impulse was directed to the doing of His will, every effort to the attainment of resemblance to * Vol. iv. p. 4, 5. † 4. C. n. 1893, 1902. †A. C. n. 1121. .... Him. But when this heavenly affection was supplanted by an infernal one, the Divine Law written on the heart was obliterated. Since the termination of the Most Ancient Church no one has the law of God so written. Man, before regeneration, supremely loves himself and the world; his will being altogether corrupt and destroyed; consequently it is the law of those loves alone that are written on his heart; and his whole life's business is to have the law of God re-written there. It will also be recollected that "unity of mind," "sincerity," or the being outwardly such as he is inwardly, is enjoined, as the end towards which man is ever to strive. This "unity" is, indeed, represented as an essential property of the mind itself. For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. ...We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable.... That is a capital error. Then, again, we hear of a man's intellectual nature,' and of his 'moral nature,' as if these again were divisible and existed apart. . . . . We ought to know withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible." Another distinguishing characteristic of the Most Ancient Church is here suggested. In that Church this "unity" actually existed. The understanding was, at that epoch, so perfectly united to the will that the intellect could see only what the heart loved. But when that Church, in the course of long ages, gradually declined, and instead of having the Lord and His will as the supreme objects of regard, sunk into self-love as a ruling principle, this unity became the seal of its utter depravity. No man could then love evil, and see the truth that showed it to be evil and condemned it. He could see only some derivative false persuasion in harmony with it, and, to his darkened intellect, demonstrating the evil to be good. All capacity for the reception of spiritual life, which consists in the love of goodness and the perception of truth, being thus destroyed, a change, without which mankind must utterly have perished, was, by Divine mercy, effected in the mental constitution. This consisted in the abolition of "unity of mind," in the separation of the understanding from the depraved will, so as to render it capable of elevation above it; capable, that is, of seeing and understanding the truths that rebuked and condemned its raging lusts and evil affections. Man was thus, henceforth, to be prepared for a heavenly inheritance, not immediately, as before, by the love of goodness, but, by the understanding of truth.‡ Hence arose the necessity for external instruction, and for a written * A. C. n. 933, Vol. vi. p. 204. A. C. n. 310, 597, 640. Word, whence might be learned the truths necessary for regeneration; that by obedience to them, by resisting in intention and act the evils they condemn, man might anew become receptive of the love of goodness, and thus again attain "unity of mind." No otherwise can the union of the love of goodness in the heart, with the perception of truth in the understanding, be now effected. We pause, with a sense of wonder, at being presented from a source having no affinity with the New Church, with ideas on many points apparently resembling hers, and suggestive of truths they in reality fail to express. Let them not, however, be mistaken for the lessons she teaches to her children. They are not truths, but only shadows of truths;-false at heart-rotten at the core;-and of similar quality to much that emanates from this writer, which at first sight seems to contain true and useful sentiments, but is vitiated, or nullified, by having man's proprium at the centre, self instead of the Lord. They are, in fact, but repetitions of the precept: Develop your self; and when duly weighed, are all seen, whatever their immediate object, and apparent tendency, to promote the exaltation of self as their ultimate result. wwww It is difficult to witness these assumptions of some of the peculiar qualities of those who lived under the first of the dispensations by which the Lord, in His mercy, has been pleased to connect His children with Himself, the Most Ancient, or Adamic Church,—and not be led to speculate whether they may not be traceable to the ancient people who lived at that remote period of the world's history. It must, however, be recollected, that the pretensions put forth are not only wholly false, devoid of any foundation in fact, and impossible in the actual condition of humanity; but, also, are all elaborated from the central principle that man is himself divine, that "our Me is the only reality." Now, this circumstance furnishes a direct clue for our guidance; for on turning to the only Writings whence information on this subject can be derived, we learn that, at the end of that dispensation, the human race had become so absolutely corrupt, so immersed in dreadful falsities originating in self-love, and self-exaltation, as to imbibe and cherish the persuasion that they themselves were gods, the Divine Being having infused and transcribed Himself into men, so as to have no existence separate from them; and "that whatever entered their thoughts was divine."* Here then is clear evidence of affinity. The interior ideas of the "New Era" are identical with the false persuasions which, previous to the termination of the Most Ancient Church, had usurped the * A. C. n. 560, 562, 563, 1268. T. C. R. n. 470. Coronis, n. 38. place of truths in the hearts and minds of its members; which were by them seen by the light of self-love, and held with all the strength of conviction. But the acknowledgment of God as the source both of natural and spiritual life, aud of man's entire dependence upon Him, are the very principles by which a church exists; and when these were rejected, its dissolution necessarily followed; and was effected by the event described, in the symbolic language of the Sacred Volume, as “a flood of waters;"-its communication with the Source of life being severed by an inundation of deadly false persuasions. But not only did the church-that peculiar organization of human beings, by which, as by a heart and lungs, the elements of spiritual vitality were to be kept in circulation throughout the whole human race-come to an end; but the individuals died who constituted it, having become mediums only of what was deadly and infernal. But after death man remains such as he has been during life; and retains in the spiritual world, which indeed is his spirit's home even during his natural existence, all the principles and persuasions he has so practically adopted here, as to assimilate them and identify them with himself. Among the miserable inhabitants of the infernal world, are the spirits of those who held these direful persuasions, and who hold them still. Considering, then, the identity of their interior principles, the denial of a God out of themselves, and the pretensions of the "New Era" to the distinctive characteristics of a celestial state; will it be deemed too rash a conjecture, if we hazard the inquiry whether the latter may not originate in an influx from the hells formed from those who constituted the Most Ancient Church in its state of utter perversion? But how far is this supposition warranted and sustained by the few facts bearing upon it of which we are in possession? Opening again the Authentic Documents already referred to, we are informed that the "nation which lived before the flood, is such that they kill and suffocate all spirits to such a degree by their most dreadful phantasies, which, as a poisoned and suffocative sphere, exhale from them, that the spirits are deprived of the power of thinking, and reduced to a state bordering on apparent death; and unless the Lord, by His coming into the world, had freed the world of spirits from that poisonous crew, it would have been impossible for any to have existed therein, and consequently mankind must have perished, who are ruled by spirits from the Lord; wherefore they are now confined in hell, under a sort of misty and dense rock, whence they dare not attempt to emerge, and thus the world of spirits is free from their influence."* To this is added: "It is provided by * A. C. n. 581. NO. XLVIII.-VOL. IV. 40 |