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clumsy machinery, dismissed his body guard of angels, closed the hatches firmly on his devils, and condescended to work entirely as a philosophic divine, he would have been one of our foremost Christian sages." That so competent a writer as Mr. Gilfillan should perceive value of this kind in Swedenborg is very gratifying; but we trust he will proceed in his study of the great Christian sage, and he will find him all the greater as a philosophic divine, because his philosophy is as wide as that of the Bible; and while it enters into the deep relations of man's spirit in this outer world, it also has a place for those angelic beings who ascend and descend between man and his Maker, and does not ignore the spiritual powers which experience and Revelation alike assure us will not altogether be kept "closed under hatches."

In reading the noble poem of "Night," we were struck with some lines which strongly reprove those who have deemed the little pocket book of dreams, and other memoranda supposed to have been written by Swedenborg in a few months of 1744, of transcendent importance. The allusion to Newton probably refers to the report of some papers of his, containing some dreams, being in the keeping of his college. Some wiseacres have, it is said, applied to the college authorities to let them see and publish these dreams of the great philosopher, but have been properly refused. If people are to be judged by their dreams, no mortal could be accounted sane. Gilfillan writes, book 5, p. 162 :

"Pale company of dreams, to you I come,—
Children ephemeral of sleeping brains,
Dancing amid their tangled tissue thick,
As motes of glory in the evening ray!

Dreams are the soul dissolving in wild showers;
They are the midnight mania of man;
For during night man's madness creepeth out,
Like wild beast from his forest or his cave,
And an asylum vast the world becomes.
Newton has finished his immortal book:

He sleepeth, and in dreams an idiot is.

The last word of his Lear Shakspere has writ:

He sleeps, and straightway, like Lear himself, he raves.
Thou shudderest at madness more than death,

And yet thy sleeping wife Ophelia is;

And in a moment worse than Hamlet thou!

Yet, beautiful this frenzy of the night,

And kindly, too, to thought-worn, care-tossed man ;—
An outlet safe to all that's wild and strange,
Fiercely fermenting in the human soul.

The madness of the night lessens the day's."

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Well would it be if Mr. White would lay these lines to heart, and never more attempt to prove his illustrious subject to have been deranged by bolstering up the flimsy story of Brockmer and Mathesius, by the still more flimsy evidence of a small MS. of some curious dreams.

Mr. White makes some extracts from the Diary of Swedenborg, respecting the Quakers, of a very intolerable character, extremely unbecoming to foist before unprofessional readers, and for this he has been much and very properly blamed. We beg to offer a few words upon the subject, because we know it has presented a stumbling-block to some honest minds who have contrasted what they know of the Society of Friends with some things learned by Swedenborg respecting the early Quakers of the first and second generations. The "Friends" of the last hundred years have had very little in common with the Quakers of the Commonwealth and the Second Charles. The "Friends" of later times have been orderly, exemplary, charitable; promoters beyond most others of education, freedom, the amelioration of prisons, and every good work. Backward in the fine arts, in the arts of mercy and peace they have long been in the van. Nothing, therefore, said by Swedenborg should be interpreted as applying to "Friends" such as they have been since they conformed themselves to the loving commandments of the Word, and left the wild frenzy of the early fanatics, who were guided by Spirits whom they deemed the Holy Spirit.

The early Quaker movement was in its first outburst, and for a considerable time, a "Spiritist" movement, like that of the Anabaptists at Munster, like the Irvingite unknown tongues, the revival energies among the Methodists, the Mormon movement of our own day, and like similar abnormal outbreaks from time to time noticed throughout all history. Swedenborg says "The enthusiastic Spirits cause a trembling of the body, and a certain motion in the left-side." ("Contin. Last Judg." n. 84.) He elsewhere says they are corporeal Spirits, and inspire the most impure dispositions and phantasies. We have known instances of the early Mormons who declared the Spirit shook them with great agitation, and we know what impurities have been inspired among that community. Seldom have any very violent energies been manifested among the Methodists without some scandals occurring which make the more sober and judicious grieve. These wild agitations occurred even before Christianity. Virgil writes

"Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit

Excusse Deum."

(With tremor wild, the prophetess

Groans to give forth the God.)-VIRG. VI. 78.

A contemporary writer, says Montanus had suddenly a seizure and ecstasy, and began to speak and utter in an unknown language. (Zenophonein.) Several sects have been attended by these kinds of violent and preternatural transports, as John of Leyden, Knipperdolling, and some later enthusiasts among ourselves, besides the Quakers. (Leslie's Works, vol. 5, p. 64.) Since his time, the Wesleyans furnish an instance of things not very dissimilar. "Many of those that heard," says Wesley, "began to call upon God with strong cries and tears; some sank down, and there remained no strength in them; others exceedingly trembled and quaked; some were torn with a kind of convulsive motion, and that so violently that often four or five persons could not hold one of them." (Southey's "Wesley," vol. 1, p. 27.) So of the French prophets. "When a female was excited," says Southey, "she leaned back in her chair, and had strong

Her head, her hands, affected with a con

workings in her breast, and uttered deep sighs. and by turns every part of the body, was vulsive motion." (Southey's "Wesley," p. 279.) Of an Irvingite prophetess Mr. Pilkington writes:-"The tongue burst forth with an astonishing and terrible crash, so suddenly, and in such short sentences, that I seldom recovered the shock before the English commenced. Her whole frame was in violent agitation, but principally the body, from the hips to the shoulders, which worked with a lateral motion." ("Unknown Tongues," pp. 5, 7.)

In all these cases the same shuddering, shaking, wild extravagance appears; and such are the effects produced, Swedenborg says, from enthusiastic spirits, whom elsewhere he describes as corporeal, wishing to communicate with the earth, but stupid, hypocritical, and unclean. They begin with piety: they end with impurity. Nothing is too foul for their abominable inspirations. (A.E. 1182, 1183; A.C. 1967, 1968; D.P. 134, 249.)

(To be continued.)

THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH.

(Concluded from December No.)

FAITH which is not inspired by the life of love may, like Peter, be ready to follow the Lord in time of peace, when no danger threatens, but will halt in the way, or retreat before the foe in the hour of battle. It will boast its fidelity in the daytime of sa ety; but before the night of evil and danger have fully passed it will deny Him thrice.

Peter, confessing the Lord, who is only accepted as King when He rules in heart, mind, and life, does not represent a merely intellectual

faith, but is the rock upon which the church shall be built. Still less does he stand for that traditionary faith which is not so much a faith in truth as in men, synods, councils, and ecclesiastical organisations. Nor have we anything to do here with that ignorant enthusiasm which declares that genuine faith exis': when superstitious feelings have been aroused by artificial excitements. Neither the faith which is merely the creature of the reason, nor that which comes of respect for men, traditions, and ecclesiastical organisations, nor that which is the ebullition of a temporary insanity, is the rock apon which the church can be built up.

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For all these can co-exist with a nature wholly unchanged. The faith which is here meant is that which confesses the Lord, not from 'flesh and blood," not from a nature still in close alliance with self, the world, and the senses, but from the Father who is in heaven, from that love which dwells in the inmost heart. But what is it to confess the Lord as Christ, the Anointed One, from love? Will the lips suffice to express the feelings of the full heart? Will the repetition of a creed be the total outcome of that honest faith? He who confesses the Lord to be King, and accords to His truth all regal right and power to rule over him, will do it not with the lips only, but with the energies of his nature also. Words will not be wanting, but his life will be his best confession of faith. Rebels in heart who, when their interests or fears do not oppose, rush outward into every breach of the laws which the Anointed One has given, can they confess the Lord to be Christ? What mere mockery are the words which their parrot tongues have learned to utter !

The faith that alone lives and honestly confesses the Lord, including in that confession the acceptance of Him as sole King over heart and mind, is the faith that is at one with goodness. Every truth in our system of faith, when that is animated by a desire to do God's will and to seek the well-being of man, is alive with a new vigour. Faith is no longer inactive and useless for want of motive power. It becomes the means, in the hands of goodness, for achieving its high purposes. All we know and believe of God, man, redemption, salvation, heaven, and hell, gets a value for us it never had before. When we love to do what He wills, and what will make for the well-being of our fellows, all truth gets a new lustre and distinctness, for it is regarded as the means whereby love to God and man get their issues into action. If we investigate the high truths that tell of the Divine Nature, it is no longer with the vain curiosity of a speculative metaphysician, but with the

humble and sincere desire to know of God, that we may grow like Him. If we look by the light of faith into our own spiritual nature, we strive to understand what God has so fearfully and wonderfully made, that we may better apply the remedy to its ills, and so hasten its restoration to His image and likeness. If we study the Divine Word, it is not for the purposes of vain disputation, or any merely intellectual end, but that it may be, amid the darkness and dangers of the world, a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. Redemption, when faith gets life from love, is a lesson to us, as well as a work; and we see in what He did and suffered, the infinite expression of what we must do and suffer if we would work out that regeneration, which is the individual redemption from the bondage of evil. The way of salvation is learned, that the path may be trodden. Thus all the tenets of our faith are made alive with the energy of that goodness which prompts us to apply each truth to its purpose. Faith itself grows solid, real, and does not totter in the hour of trial. The flood may come, the rain descend, the winds blow, and beat upon that house, but it will not fall, for it is founded upon a rock. The truths of faith are like those shining crystals that form the material of the primeval rocks, but love is the igneous force that fuses these elements of faith, and converts them into the solid granitic mass that cannot be shaken. Faith, seeing clearly the principles of life and conduct, indicating what should be avoided, what done, and how, united with that charity which, seeking earnestly the neighbour's good, gives cohesion, strength, and impulse to all the truths we know, this faith is the rock upon which the church shall be built up. The Lord Himself is called a Rock in the Scriptures, because He is Love itself, or the One only Substance, and Wisdom itself, or the One only Form, and is thus the Upholder of all things, "the Everlasting Rock."

Upon this foundation, then, which can be laid only in the spiritual nature of the individual man, the church is to be built up. Nor can the church so founded be included within the limits of any special sect. Nay, it permeates them all, and gives what of true life they have to each of the contending ecclesiasticisms of Christendom. It is where goodness is, as the fruit of a life at one with truth. Wherever they are who have sided with the truth against their baser selves,— have broken down the barriers of evil that stop the entrance of Him who knocketh at the door of every heart, there the church is founded on its immoveable basis. Those chosen natures among all sects, and under all forms of faith or none, who have established close affinities between

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