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warded at the same time a pamplet by himself" The Punishment of Death Reviewed,"-which indeed demands a careful perusal.

E. F.

[These statistics prove that in England, France, Prussia, and Belgium, where the punishment of death for certain crimes has been abolished, those crimes have considerably decreased.]-EDITOR.

THOUGHTS ON THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICATION OF THE DRINK OFFERED TO OUR LORD AT THE CRUCIFIXION.

THE Rev. G. Townsend has shewn, in his chronological arrangement of the New Testament, that three potions were offered to our Lord: two on his arrival at Golgotha, and another some time after he had been on the cross. The first :-(See Matt. xxvii. 34.) "They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof he would not drink." This was no doubt given in mockery and derision of his sufferings, according to the prophecy in Psalm lxix. 21. The second recorded by Mark xv. 23:-" And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not."-This I conceive was the intoxicating draught which was customary with the Jews to give, in order to stupify the criminal, and so render him insensible to his tortures, and which probably originated from the precept given in Proverbs xxxi. 6:-" Give strong drink unto him that his ready to perish," i. e. to him who is condemned to death. The third potion, offered some time after our Lord had been on the cross, was the posca, or the common drink of the Roman soldiers, and of this he drank.

Hunger and thirst, though naturally endured by the infirm humanity, are predicated of our Lord in relation to Good and Truth, which he so beautifully shews us in the 4th chapter of John; and hence, according to Swedenborg, in the Ap. Ex. 64 and 195, by the Jews offering him vinegar mingled with gall in derision, and then wine mingled with myrrh, the intoxicating draught, they shewed what the quality of Divine Truth was with them, viz, altogether falsified and adulterated, even to externals signified by the myrrh; therefore he received it not :-but, after he had hung some time on the cross, he said "I thirst,"--this thirst of the infirm humanity did but pourtray the intense desire of the Divine Humanity for the salvation of the human race. The entire vastation of the professing

church as to Good and Truth, and its consequent utter desolation, were present to our Lord when this his last complaining cry fell from him :-then there was presented unto him vinegar in a sponge encompassed with hyssop:-this vinegar was the posca or common drink of the Roman soldiers, and, as with the Jews, signified the false principle, but such as it was among the well-disposed Gentiles, and which was grounded in ignorance, not in perversion of Truth, containing in it what was good and useful. Its purification was signified by the hyssop placed around. This was among the first fruits of the travail of the Redeemer's soul: he saw it and was satisfied. "When therefore Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished."

JOANNES.

ON THE FUTURE GROWTH OF THE MIND. (From the Boston New Jerusalem Magazine for December, 1847.)

Ir is probably doubted by hardly any, that the faculties and capacities of man in the future life will be greatly enlarged; but the causes of this enlargement may have been seldom reflected upon. It is evident, to those who have read Swedenborg, that freedom from the limitations of space and time, will be at least one of the most prominent causes. In this world, we find our wishes, our intentions, our efforts, confined on all sides. When we seek to do much, time fails us. When we wish to exert extensive influence, space interrupts the rapid propagation of our plans. And the weakness of our bodies often cramps the energies of the spirit, where time and space oppose no bar to its operations.

In the spiritual world, if I rightly apprehend its nature, these difficulties will only to a slight extent, at least, exist. The external being there only the projected shadow of the internal, the soul will find its means and its opportunities of action corresponding and equal to its desires; and its ability to execute will be at least in much nearer proportion to its inward energy. Its body will not be there a diseased encumbrance, but a ready instrument of its will; for it will be that will itself in form. Time can there never fail; for its state of action itself will be its time.

Now we all know that the growth and development of our faculties is only effected by use. Hence the removal of the obstacles to the full and free use of our faculties, which exist in the natural world, will of

course promote their development. But there is still another considera tion to be presented. Not only the accidents of time, place, and bodily health, but a thousand other circumstances, resulting from the nature of this world, operate to check the free growth of the mind. We are often confined to a sphere of operation which is entirely uncongenial to the genius of our minds, and brought into connection with persons from whom we can derive little or no aid in self-improvement; but who are rather hindrances to our advancement than otherwise. Misfortunes, and poverty too, often weigh us down with burdens under which we can at best proceed but slowly, and which take away all our ambition for exalted attainments.

But in the spiritual world, these obstacles will not exist. Its whole economy is directly calculated to bring out and develop the character. The associates with whom we shall there find ourselves, will be those in whom we shall find the most congenial sympathy, and the most hearty coöperation. In short, we shall be in the very atmosphere and soil best calculated to promote our spiritual growth.

I have not yet mentioned one circumstance to which we must, notwithstanding, look, as a reason why Providence permits us here to be thus thwarted in the development of our powers. Born with depraved inclinations, we should be so constantly disposed to extend our activities in wrong directions, and to teach ourselves what it were our best wisdom not to know, that He who looks to an eternal good, sees fit to interpose obstacles to our progress in every direction but the way towards heaven. Far better for us, that our faculties should for ever remain as unopened germs, than that they should blossom only to produce fruits of bitterness and evil.

The truth is, that any development of mind which is not made in the direction of truth and virtue, is not a real and complete development; it is at best only a partial one, which refines the external and lower faculties, while it darkens and deadens the interior ones. The ways of sin and selfishness cannot, in the nature of things, afford scope for the free and orderly development of any of the faculties-much less, the higher and spiritual ones. The apparent checks to our progress which Providence interposes in this world, then, we should regard rather as landmarks and beacons set up to warn us of the obliquity of our paths, and to point us, while it is not too late, to true and living ways.

The paths of the transgressor will, in the spiritual world, be as little suited to mental development-except in wickedness-as in this. The fantasies of time and space will as much oppose and limit the sensual mind there as their realities do here. Mere entrance into the spiritual

world makes no one a spiritual man. He who has lived here in the love of appearances above realities, will there be constantly deceived and hemmed in by appearances. The spiritual world is within every one; it is to him what he makes it; and he may, by his free choice, make it a land of Cimmerian darkness, or of heavenly light and freedom. Only the good man learns to find and exercise his true freedom; because that freedom only exists in being good. Even while he lives in the natural world will he find space and time more and more accommodated to the extent of his need, if not of his desires; and he who seeks opportunities and means of doing good with a pure heart, will not fail to find them. In proportion as the love and practice of virtue have here enlarged his heart, will he find the world of spiritual existence more fully capable of satisfying his noblest aspirations; its realities will be more and more advantages which he can use, and its appearances less and less obstacles to the truthfulness of his sense and the freedom of his action.

D. H. H.

REVIEWS.

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REPLY TO THE REV. DR. WOODS' LECTURES ON SWEDENBORGIANISM," delivered in the Theological Seminary, Andover, Mass. By GEORGE BUSH. pp. 256. HODSON, and NEWBERY, London; KENWORTHY, Manchester.

SEVERAL notices of this very able and interesting "Reply" have appeared in one form or another in our periodical; but it has not yet been so forcibly impressed upon the notice of our readers as its importance demands. That the intellectual and theological system of the New Church should meet with much opposition in its progress, was, for many causes, to be expected. In accomplishing the divine prediction, "Behold, I make all things new," it is to be expected that "old things" will not yield to the new light and power now operating from the spiritual world, and objectively in the natural world, through the opening of the spiritual sense of the Word, upon the minds of men, without a severe struggle and much opposition. There has always been a great conflict between light and darkness; but in proportion as the darkness has become dense, owing to the falsification at the end of the church of the truths of the Word, this conflict has become arduous and deadly. Thus to every new truth that is opened to the mind, and generally to every new system of truth that is opened to the church, "it must needs be that offences come." These offences and scandals will be very various, according to the state and circumstances whence they arise. The birth of Moses was repre

sentative of the revelation of Divine Truth, which should effect a deliverance from the land of Egypt and the house of bondage,—from the fallen and perverted state into which the church had then fallen, and universally from the unregenerate and sinful states of the natural mind. Moses was no sooner born, than a deadly persecution was excited against him. Pharaoh and his servants endevoured to destroy him; all which was typical of the hostility to the new Truth opened and revealed to the church for its deliverance.

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When the Lord himself, at the consummation of the Jewish church, was born into the world, the same deadly hatred and persecution was manifest in the case of Herod, who, like another Pharaoh, endeavoured to destroy him. And lastly, when the divine prediction in the Apocalypse respecting the male child born of the woman clothed with the sun," should be fulfilled, it is declared that the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born." Here the same persecution is manifest. The man child has here a similar signification to that of the infant Moses, and to that of the Lord himself, when born at Bethlehem, with this distinction, that Moses and the man child of the Apocalypse denote the divine truth revealed by the Lord, whereas the birth of the Lord was the Divine Truth itself,-the Word made flesh.

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In tracing these parallelisms at the consummation of churches, we easily discover a universal law, which determines the relation between light and darkness, truth and falsity,-especially the falsity of doctrine and of evil,-as being hostility itself. And these parallelisms also further teach us that the circumstances at the consummation of churches are similar. Thus Moses was preserved "in an ark of bulrushes;" the Lord, as an infant, was carried into Egypt;" and the man child of the Apocalypse was preserved by being "carried into the wilderness." Hence the bulrushes, Egypt, and the wilderness are correlatives, and in the spiritual sense signify the state in which divine truth is, as to its first reception by the unregenerate mind, and in general as to its acknowledgment and reception at the consummation of the church. "The light shineth in darkness, but the darkness comprehendeth it not."

With this view in relation to the acknowledgment and reception of Revealed Truth, at the consummation of churches, as plainly described to us in the Word itself, we need not wonder that in every country where the fallen church extends, opposition and hostility should arise. And in reference to this subject the Lord points out also another law by which opposition to new truths must be expected. When He says,

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