06. BY THE REV. AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD, M.A.,

FORMERLY OF KISTER COLLEGE, OXFORD.

No. V.

"Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should give Law and Order to the Spiritual no less than to the natural Creation?"—Professor Jewett on the Epistles of St. Paul. Vol. II., p. 483; art., Natural Religion.

1863.

"I HAVE read," says a writer to a modern periodical, "every one of the so-called Replies to Mr. Goodwin's Essay, and can state as the deliberate conviction of a man who has devoted his whole life and a great deal of his fortune to the study of physical science, that Mr. Goodwin has never been answered yet, and for the best of all reasons, viz., that to those practically competent to judge, his arguments are unanswerable."

"We do not seek," says another, "to disguise the greatness of the revolution in the Creed of Christendom, which even now is in the throes of parturition. The whole fabric of orthodoxy is founded on the first chapters of Genesis. Now if the first chapters of Genesis are proved to be of no authority, what becomes of this whole theory?"—namely, the theory concerning the Fall, Redemption, Regeneration, and so forth.

Persons who are familiar with the public press, must be familiar with sentiments of this kind; and there is every reason to believe in their wide diffusion. Even the most moderate estimate of the difficulty of reconciling Scripture and Geology is thus presented:—

"It should be freely admitted that we cannot, at

A 2 this present time, draw out a perfect reconciliation of Scripture and Geology as to the appearance of the living beings on the earth's surface. On the one hand, we are not quite sure how to read the record in the two opening chapters of Genesis; and on the other hand, Geology, in opening new truths, is at the same time ever disclosing new mysteries. But on the very face of the two records, the record on parchment and that on the stone, there is a general correspondence."—The correspondence, however, has not been sufficiently general to remove very serious doubts, and, as some think, fatal difficulties with respect to the narrative. Besides which dangers have arisen from another source, though in close connection with the system of Literalism:

"Supposing," says the Christian Remembrancer,* "the results of Criticism, which at present are confined to books, are scattered broadcast through the country and read by the people, the frightful consequence is not doubtful. The very earnestness and sincerity of the people of England will make matters worse."

In order to avert the evils which, it is said, threaten the Church and Kingdom upon this subject, the writer of the article proposes, that an effort be made "to uproot as speedily as possible from the public mind, the Calvinistic ideas with which it is stocked," viz., upon the subject of Inspiration; and to substitute for the Calvinistic doctrine of Dictation by the Holy Spirit, the ecclesiastical doctrine of Creation by the Church. "Recent experience," he observes,

* January, 1863: Relation of Calvinism to Modern Doubt.

"has abundantly shewn that an internal intuition of the truth is not to be depended upon." Considering, therefore, the difficulties arising from Geology and other sciences, the results of Criticism, the erratic tendency of our own intuitions, and the consequent discordance even among defenders of the faith, it is declared to be high time to revert to ancient principles, and facts—for "It was a fact no less than a principle in the old Theology, that the Church creates the Bible." If this principle be revived, then, it is said, the Church will not depend upon the Bible, but the Bible upon the Church; and the difficulty about "Inspiration will be only a speculative theological difficulty about which people need not trouble themselves." What prospect the Church has of recovering this supreme authority, is not stated; but so long as it was in possession of that authority, its language was that of the Jesuit Bozius*—"They (the Reformers) have dared to assert, that Divine Scripture is of greater authority than the Church."

On reviewing the present state of things we naturally ask, What is the cause of it? and we find that, whatever may have been the theories of Inspiration, Literalism has been universally predominant: it has attempted to interpret the early chapters of Genesis, and has failed: it has attempted to interpret the Mosaic Law to the Christian, and abolished it: it has attempted to interpret the Psalms, and has regarded the introduction of most of them into Christian worship as an unchristian practice: it has attempted to explain the prophecies, and has brought

* De Signis Ecclesiae, p. 423.

the whole subject into disrepute, if not derision. These things are notorious. The natural result, long anticipated, has now taken place: faith in the Bible has received a shock; and many begin to ask what this Bible is, the interpretations of which have so notoriously failed. A revolution of thought has commenced, indicating a great epoch in the history of the Bible and the Church, and great changes in the relations between the two: so that the Bible will be more opened, or else it will be more closed: either alternative will be attended with earthquakes in divers places. If, in apprehension of impending perils, the Church should attempt to make itself independent of the Bible, may not the result be that the Bible will be independent of the Church; and that then will come to pass that which is written—"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away?"

Although, however, Literalism has been everywhere predominant, yet exceptions prove the rule. Dr. Sewell in his Letter upon Inspiration, and in his Christian Vestiges of Creation has intimated that, beside the literal, there may be a spiritual sense in the early chapters of Genesis. Mr. Isaac Williams, in a devotional Commentary to which we have already referred, has especially drawn attention to this view of the subject. Mr. Burgon has boldly maintained it in his sermons on Inspiration. Dr. Balfour, in a work entitled All Nature a Symbol, and again in another, God's two Books, Nature and the Bible, has advocated similar principles. But the work to which the present Tract is most indebted is The Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, by Dr. M'Coah and Dr. Dickie, to which deeply interesting treatise I have referred chiefly for the scientific part of the subject. With the exception, however, of Mr. Isaac Williams, it is remarkable that authors who have maintained the abstract principles of spiritual interpretation, seem to have been afraid of actually applying them to the first chapter of Genesis; for they could not do so, however correctly, without incurring the popular charge of Mysticism. Indeed, the whole subject of spiritual interpretation as connected with the genuine literal sense, must be studied anew, or Literalism will place the Church in the same position in which it has already placed Prophecy. The laws of Correspondence must be thoroughly examined, and understood—a task which will scatter to the winds the popular error, that spiritual interpretation is one and the same with Mysticism—that it is all feeling and imagination—and as such has no basis in objective truth. The very contrary is the fact; for whereas Literalism, as in the case of “unfulfilled Prophecy,” is ever appealing to the most astounding miraculous interference, the laws of Correspondence require for their basis the known facts and laws of Nature. Hence the discoveries of Science never interfere with the doctrine of Correspondence, except for the purposes of illustration and confirmation. So large an amount of ignorance, however, prevails upon this subject, that before presenting the spiritual sense of the first chapter of Genesis, a considerable portion of the present Tract is devoted to an explanation of the great principle upon which the Science of Correspondence is founded; if this principle be untrue, the


whole Science must fall to the ground; if true, it will shew the coming, at this very day, of the Truth in the clouds of heaven, in power, and in great glory.

The introductory argument may be summed up as follows:—

1. That the first chapter of Genesis is a Theological, not a Geological narrative, and as such has its place in Christian Theology. 2. That there is a Correspondence between natural and spiritual things. 3. That Philosophy teaches that Man is the final cause of creation. 4. That the modern doctrine of Typical Forms and special Adaptations teaches the same truth, whence both are in harmony in this respect with Scripture. 5. The doctrine that Man, as the image and likeness of God, is the final cause not only of things upon earth but of things in heaven is the foundation of the correspondence between heaven and earth. 6. That this correspondence was known to the primæval race; that it is the principle upon which the first chapter of Genesis was written and that this chapter forms a part of the primæval relation. 7. The Interpretation of the chapter is the given, to which are added the concluding remarks

Trusting that the ensuing pages may contribute toward placing the whole question upon higher ground than that upon which it has been generally argued would conclude with hopefully asking,—

"Who can be so faithless as to doubt, that Spirit of God is brooding over the face of the world and that out of what may seem Chaos, He will be harmony, light, and power?"

Stoke Newington, London, April, 1863.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Is this a Revelation? If so, is it any part of the Christian Revelation? To this question have been returned two different answers, involving two different principles of Interpretation.

First; "Revelation," we are told,* "is of much wider signification than Christianity or the Christian religion. Revelation contains Christianity and the Christian religion; but it contains more; as for instance, the ceremonial and political laws of the Jews, the boastings of Sennacherib, the prophecies concerning Nineveh, Babylon, etc., etc. The Christian religion can only mean God's revelation of the way of salvation through Christ. Christianity may mean the same, but it may also mean a Christian's personal religion."

According to this account, Revelation contains Christianity and something more; something that is not Christianity, nor has any concern with the Christian religion. Is the first chapter of Genesis of this kind? This is one of the great questions of the

* Testimonies to the Divine Authority and Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. By the Rev. Alexander M'Caul, D.D., Prebendary of St. Paul's, etc. p. 6.

A 3 day. One answer is, that it is a part of the sacred records almost exclusively devoted to the relation of a series of physical* arrangements. The consequence is, that the narrative is regarded as more intimately concerned with Geology than with religion; and Geology, not Christianity, has been resorted to as the test of its truth. Christians are thus turned into Geologists, but not Geologists into Christians. Thus the narrative is laid open to all sorts of attacks. The more divines labor to prove the first chapter of Genesis to be strictly and Geologically true, the more sceptics they seem to make among Geologists; till at last the narrative, being from the first regarded as not theological, and being discovered to be not Geological, either resolves itself into a nonentity, or is dependent upon ecclesiastical authority.

There is, however, another answer to the original question; viz., that Christianity is not merely a part of Revelation, but is co-extensive with it; that merely physical facts properly form, as such, no part of theological science:† that in the first chapter of Genesis are contained prophecies and mysteries concerning the creation of the Christian Church: that as Christ created all things, so all things have a relation to Him: that the Creation was in, and for, and by Him who is the Incarnate Word of God: that it cannot be understood except in Christ: that it is representative of the new creation of man in Christ;

* Philosophy of the Mosaic Record of Creation. Delivered in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, by J. Kennedy, B.D., Donellan Lecturer for 1824. Vol. i., p. 7, postscript.

† See above, Tract IV., p. 14; I., p. 45; II., p. 22.

and that it was upon this principle that Papias,* a cotemporary of Polycarp, and Clement, with others of the Alexandrian school, gave a spiritual interpretation to the history of the Creation.

According to the first answer, Christianity is as much excluded from the first chapter of Genesis as from "the ceremonial law" or "the boastings of Sennacherib;" whence a spiritual interpretation of the narrative is regarded as absurd. According to the second, the first chapter of Genesis is concerned with the very first principle of Christianity itself; for it relates to the new creation of man, and the great end of the Gospel is the restoration of man to his primæval state. Hence there is a serious difference as to the first principles of Interpretation, consequently a serious difference as to the very character of the narrative itself. Has it any concern with religious truth, or has it not? If it has, what is the truth to which it relates? "What shall a man profit if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" If his own soul be of more value to him than the whole world, the truths which relate to the new creation of his soul should be of far more value to him than any physical facts relating to the creation of the material world; and if Geology itself be, as it is, so sublime and marvellous a science, how much more must be the truths which relate to the new creation! Is there, however, any relation between the old and the new creation?

* Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, p. 387. By B. F. Westcott, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

"All lovers of truth," as Dean Trench* observes when speaking of the harmonies between the natural and spiritual worlds, "acknowledge these mysterious harmonies, and the force of arguments derived from them. To them the things on earth are copies of the things in heaven. They know that the earthly Tabernacle is made after the pattern of things seen in the Mount; and the question suggested by the Angel in Milton is often forced upon their meditations,—

'What if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven; and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?"

"Many," says Dean Trench, "are the sayings of a like kind among the Jewish Cabbalists. Thus in the Book of Sohar—Quodcunque in terrá est, id etiam in cælo est; et nulla res tam exigua est in mundo, quæ non alii simili, quæ in cælo est, CORRESPONDEAT." Here assuredly is legitimate ground for the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis; here is announced the Science of Correspondence. Either the principle is untrue, and as such ought to be repudiated: or if true, its application to the first chapter of Genesis cannot be avoided; indeed in this case we only apply the same principle adopted in the interpretation of the ceremonial law, nay, in the whole of the Mosaic ritual. For, when speaking of the Tabernacle and ceremonial Law of the Jews, By those things, says Irenæus,† which were secondary, God called them to those which were primary; that

* Notes on the Parables, p. 13.

† Irenæus contra Hæreses, iv., 14, 3. See also on the subject of Correspondence, Swedenborg's Arcana Celestia, 2992.

is, by things typical to the things typified; by things temporal, to things eternal; by things carnal, to things spiritual; by things earthly, to things heavenly; according as it was said to Moses, 'See that thou make all things according to the pattern of the things thou hast seen in the Mount.' For forty days was he there learning, with a view to retain in his memory, the words of God, and the spiritual images and prefigurations of things to be; in like manner as St. Paul said, 'They drank of that Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ.' And again, speaking of the things foretold in the law, 'All these things happened unto them in a figure, and they are written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the world are come.'

Now, if in the outward Universe all things continue according to the Divine Ordinance; and are "ordered in measure and number and weight," it is of the first importance to know what is the first principle which originates this Order; what is the meaning of the one in the many, and the many in the one? We say, then, that the first principle of Order in Creation, whether natural or spiritual, must be sought in the Final Cause: that it is the Final Cause which is the essential principle of all arrangement, hence of unity; and therefore when it is said, "Thou hast created all things, and by thy will they are, and were created," we cannot avoid the question, For what end was the Divine will exercised? it being of the first importance for every Christian to know the ultimate end, or final cause of his being.

"To take away all final causes from the things of Nature,"

says Cudworth,* "as if nothing were done therein for ends intended by a higher mind, is the very spirit of Atheism and Infidelity."...

Again :—

"Neither can we banish all final, that is, all mental causality from philosophy or the consideration of Nature, without banishing at the same time reason and understanding from ourselves, and looking upon the things of Nature with no other eyes than brutes do."

Swedenborg regards final causes as properly of a spiritual nature, but he very rarely uses the expression:† the terms which he generally employs are end, principal end, and ultimate end; and one reason of his being supposed to lose himself in the regions of fancy, is to be found in the very fact of his treating of these ends, or ultimate ends, or, as called by others, final causes, of Creation; for how presumptuous must be the intellect which pretends to a knowledge of the ultimate ends designed by the Creator! Buffon, it seems, was one of the philosophers who reasoned in this manner: "We ought," says he, "to content ourselves with reasoning concerning things as they are. If we attempt to rise higher, we lose ourselves in the regions of fancy, and forget the narrow limits of our knowledge." On which Dr. Barclay remarks:‡—"Such is the usual and favorite cant of those physiologists, who, under an affec-

* Intellectual System, vol. iii., p. 301, 304.

† See our Appendix.

‡ An Enquiry into Opinions Ancient and Modern concerning Life and Organization. By John Barclay, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Fellow of the Royal Society, etc., etc. A.D. 1822. p. 206.

tation of modesty, repeat this stale and vulgar apology for not entering upon trains of reasoning which might lead them to a Deity or to final causes." . . . The consequence is, that all sorts of physical causes, most of them imaginary, have been appealed to as superseding the hypothesis of a Divinely intelligent agent, or of a future state of existence; the one being regarded as an unknown entity, the other as an unknown state; so that instead of a Divine agent we are referred to nature, fate, chance, necessity, invisible energies and powers, plastic virtues, formative appetencies, propensities, and so forth.

What then is the ultimate End, or Final Cause of Creation, as stated in the first chapter of Genesis? We answer, It is the creation of man in the image and likeness of God. This being the case, it is in relation to this end that we must seek for the arrangement, the order, and unity of Creation; and therefore, if we would understand Creation, we must first understand the principle of Order.

But here we are met with a statement which may be called a sign of the times; for we are told,*—"The principle of Order has been scientifically expounded only in modern times, and in regard to the animal and vegetable kingdoms only within these few years."

A very general idea of the true principle of Order had indeed existed from the Creation of the world among some of its great philosophers; but it had always been regarded as hypothesis or mysticism: now, however, it seems, Science has discovered its truth, but only within these few years; and has esta-

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 429.

blished the fact, that the Final Cause of Creation is MAN; and hence that it is in reference to Man that the Order of Creation is to be explained.

It will assist us to a clearer view of the subject if we take a brief review of the argument concerning Final Causes, as involving the principle of Order.

"The* ancient system of Atheism supposed the organs to come first before anything farther was thought of; which organs, being all of them formed fortuitously, some of them luckily answered an end, and others answered none: those that answered, for a while subsisted: those that failed, immediately perished."

The reason for this kind of argument was, that there was no such thing as seeing before eyes were made, nor hearing before the ears, nor tasting before the tongue; consequently, that the organs came first, and the use afterwards: Chance or Nature formed the organs, and the organs formed the use. Empedocles is said to have favored this opinion.

"Lucretius† advances the same doctrine, which was indeed suitable to his ideas of the world's production. The earth, he tells us in his account of Creation, aimed at the time to create many portentous beings, some with strange faces and members; others deficient, without either feet or hands; but the endeavors were fruitless, for Nature could not support and carry them on to maturity."

Accordingly it is in contradiction to the doctrine of Final Causes that—

"He holds that eyes were not made for seeing, nor feet for walking; that he calls such explanations a preposterous and

* Harris's Philosophical Arrangements, p. 122. Cudworth's Intellectual System, iii., 287. † Philosophical Arrangements, p. 123.

inverted order; the existence of the USE, according to him, not leading to the production of the thing, but the casual production of the thing leading to the existence of the USE."

According to this account, Final Causes have no existence: according, however, to more recent doctrines, they have an existence, but it is presumptuous to attempt to know them: thus, Des Cartes maintained that:*—

"Final Causes ought not to be of any regard to a philosopher, because we should not arrogate to ourselves to be as wise as God Almighty is, or to be privy to his secrets. Thus in the Metaphysical Meditations.—'And for this one reason alone, I think the whole class of causes which are wont to be derived from the end to be, in physical matters, of no use; because, I think, I cannot without rashness investigate the ends of the Deity.'"

Pope entertained a similar opinion: he acknowledges, in the argument to his Essay on Man, that throughout the whole visible world may be observed a universal order and gradation in the sensuous and mental faculties, which cause a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man; and yet he speaks of the absurdity and presumption of man conceiving himself to be the Final Cause of creation:—

"Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine;

Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine.'"

Similar was the opinion of Lord Bolinbroke:—

"That Man," says he,† "is the Final Cause of the Creation, and that the communication of happiness to him is the Final Cause of his creation, are propositions most certainly false. . . .

* Cudworth's Intellectual System, iii., 310.

† See his works, vii., 320, 310.

of this lower world be well said to have been made principally, though not only, for Man. For we ought not to monopolize the Divine goodness to ourselves, there being other animals superior to us that are not altogether unconcerned in this visible Creation; and it being reasonable to think, that even the lower animals likewise, and whatsoever has conscious life, were made partly also to enjoy themselves."

With respect to "other animals superior to us," if by these be meant the living creatures called Cherubim, even these are represented as supporting the throne* "upon the likeness of which was the likeness as the appearance of a Man above upon it." If angels are meant, they are universally represented in Scripture as in the form of a Man.

But are there not other animals superior to us, which may yet come upon the earth, and be instead of man the Final Cause of this world's creation? This question has been seriously asked; for, it is said :—

"Man† is the head of Creation in his present condition; but is that condition the final result and ultimate good of the progress of Creation in the plan of the Creator? As there was found and produced something so far beyond animals as man is, may there not also, in some course of the revolutions of the world, be produced something far beyond what man is? . . . Considering how vast the resources of creative power have been shewn to be, it is difficult to suppose that they are exhausted. Considering how great things have been done, in the progress of the work of creation, we naturally think that even greater things than these still remain to be done."

* Ezekiel i. 26.

† Plurality of Worlds, p. 307, 309, 318.

Accordingly, it is intimated, that if the analogy of Science proves anything, it proves that the Creator of man can make a creature as far superior to Man, as Man, when most intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual, is superior to the brutes. What kind of new creature this is to be, we are told no one can divine; for that as from the animal formations previous to man we could not have divined what man was to be, so from what man is we cannot divine what this new creature is to be. Be it so: one thing we know, is, that he could not be Man; for he would be as much superior to any being called man, as the animal creation is inferior.

Now, we are concerned with this opinion only in so far as relates to the doctrine of Final Causes, hence to the order of Creation, and, as we shall see, to the Science of Correspondence. Man, as we are told, was created in the image and likeness of God. Is there any possible order of being above this? If there be, it must be an order which transcends this image and likeness. No creature, however, can transcend the image and likeness of God, without transcending God incarnate, or God man. The series, therefore, can never go beyond man without providing a new object of worship. Nay, more; if the supposed new creature be an image and likeness of its Creator, then would there be another image and likeness as much transcending the image and likeness of God, as man transcends the brute creation—suppositions which savor of profanity and polytheism.

We are, therefore, obliged to return to the doctrine of Holy Scripture, that MAN is the Final Cause of

Creation; and this agrees with the discoveries of modern Science.

"It is evident," says Agassiz,* "that there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the vertebrata, especially in their increasing resemblance to MAN. But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Palaeozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the secondary age, nor does Man descend from the mammals which preceded him in the tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator Himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which Geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away, was to introduce MAN upon its surface. MAN is the end toward which all the animal creation has tended, from the first appearance of the Palaeozoic fishes."

Similar is the language of Professor Owen:†—

"The recognition of an ideal exemplar in the vertebrated animals, proves that the knowledge of such a being as MAN must have existed before man appeared; for the Divine Mind which planned the Archetype, also foreknew all its modifications." . . . "Nature, we learn from the part history of our globe, has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the vertebrate idea under its old ichthyic

* Agassiz and Gould's Comparative Physiology, p. 417. See also The Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 341.

† On Limbs, p. 86.

vestment, until it became arranged in the glorious garb of the human form."

Hugh Millar maintains the same doctrine:*—

"As the veil slowly rises, a new significancy seems to attach to all Creation. The Creator, in the first ages of His workings, appears to have been associated with what He wrought, simply as the producer or author of all things; but even in these ages, as scene after scene, and one dynasty of inferior animals succeeded another, there were strange typical indications, which pre-Adamic students of prophecy, among the spiritual existences of the universe, might possibly have aspired to read—symbolical indications to the effect, that the Creator was, in the future, to be more intimately connected with his material works than in those ages, through a glorious creature made in His own image and likeness. And to this semblance and portraiture of the Deity—the FIRST ADAM—all the merely natural symbols seem to refer."

The same doctrine is repeatedly maintained by Dr. M'Cosh:—

"All animal† bodies point to MAN as the apex of the earthly hierarchy. Professor Owen tells us that all the parts and organs of man had been sketched out in anticipation, so to speak, in the inferior animals. . . . The simplest organism points by its structure upwards to Man; and man's earthly frame points to his heavenly frame, and his heavenly frame to Christ's spiritual body,—and we see that all animated things on earth point onward to His Glorified Humanity as the grand Archetype of all that has life."

"The Supreme‡ could foresee that which was to come, and which he had pre-ordained; the revelations of Geology enable us to take a retrospective view. But they do more; they

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 531.

† Ibid., p. 545. ‡ Ibid., p. 340.

afford us the means of exercising a reflex faculty; we can examine the first figure in the vertebrate series, and from that point look down the long vistas which are opened, to the period when MAN appears as the final and foreseen product of the one mighty plan—the last in time, but the first in the contemplation of Him who called them all into being. Precedent vertebrata shadowed forth certain peculiarities of frame and of psychichal powers, which have their full and evidently intended, significance brought out and manifested only in MAN."

Hence it is that man has been called "the sum total of all the animals." The same general doctrine is maintained by Dr. Balfour,* who attributes to Swedenborg the merit of having prominently brought it forward, and having based upon it the Science of Correspondence. Thus, according to Swedenborg:†

..."Since Man is the principal end of Creation, it follows of consequence that all and everything was created for his sake; and therefore that all the properties of ORDER, both in general and in particular, were collected into him, and concentrated in him, to the intent that God by him might effect primary uses."

..."The end‡ of the creation of the universe is, that the angelic heaven may exist; and forasmuch as the angelic heaven is the end, so also is MAN or the human race, because heaven consists of the human

* Thus he says, with Emerson, that "Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never not seen." Typical Character of Nature; or, All Nature a Divine Symbol. By Thomas A. G. Balfour, M.D. p. 36.

† Swedenborg's True Christian Religion. Art. 67.

‡ Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom. Art. 329, 327, 324.

race. Hence all things which are created, are mediate ends, and uses in the order, degree, and respect in which they have relation to man, and by man to the Lord."

So again :—

"All things which are created from the Lord are uses; and they are uses in that order, degree, and respect in which they have relation to man, and by man to the Lord from whom they are."

... "There does not exist anything in the created Universe which has not correspondence with something pertaining to man; not only with his affections and thoughts, but also with the organs and viscera of his body—not with them as substances, but with them as uses. Hence it is, that in the Word, when the Church and its members are treated of, trees are so often mentioned; as olive-trees, vines, and cedars; also gardens, groves, and woods; as also beasts of the field, fowls of the air, and fishes of the sea. They are mentioned because they correspond, and by correspondence make one." ...

Accordingly we are told that Creation is in a series, and that there is a unity of plan running throughout the series. The mineral kingdom is a prophecy of the vegetable :—

"Look* at the more complicated crystals—look at the frostworks on our flagstones and windows, so like the tree in their ramifications—and you at once see that powers are operating there, which are to appear in a more advanced form in the plant. When the animal appears, it has something not in the plant—in particular, it has a power of sensation and

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 451.

voluntary motion; but still it retains all the power that is in the mineral, and is dependent for food on the vegetable; and so closely are the plant and the brute allied, that it is difficult to draw a line which will decidedly separate the higher forms of the one from the lower forms of the other. And when MAN walks forth to contemplate all these objects, it is evident that there is a higher principle in him, which is not in the mineral, nor in the plant, nor in the brute; but it is just as clear, that he has affinities with the lower creation, arising from the lower creation tending upwards towards him."

MAN, then, is the final cause of creation; and as it is the final cause which is the source of unity and order, so all creation, to be understood, must be interpreted in relation to him; and likewise, through him, to the Creator, the Eternal Logos, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the Ending, the First and the Last of Divine Order. Of this Eternal Logos man was the image and likeness; and therefore the Archetype of humanity is to be found in the Logos Himself as Creator, not merely as a prefiguration of what He was to become when Incarnate, but as a manifestation of what He then was as Creator of the world, viz., the Archetypal Man. Accordingly Dr. M'Caul observes:*—

... "The language of Scripture is such as to imply that God revealed Himself to the eyes of men in human form."

"The Old Testament Scriptures expressly declare, that God did appear in a visible shape, and that that shape was human."

"From these passages, selected from the Law, the histo-

* Lectures on the Prophecies proving the Divine Origin of Christianity. Being the Warburtonian Lectures, preached in the Chapel of the Hon. Society of Lincoln's Inn. pp. 35, 42, 47, 49, 54, 53, 56.

B rical books, and the Prophets, it is plain as a matter of fact, that God constantly revealed Himself in human form, and this fact fully justifies the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation of the Deity. . . . Whether the human form was real or unreal, the fact that God selected it in which to reveal Himself remains the same."

"The human form, therefore, as forming a part of the Divine revelation to Abraham and the prophets, must itself convey some knowledge of the Divine nature or will. It necessarily intimates either that God did then exist in human form, or that He purposed so to exist in the time to come. It shews, at the very least, that the human form is not inconsistent with the Divine perfections; and is directly opposed to the modern Jewish hypothesis, that God is not, and cannot be united with a human form; for if this were true, it would necessarily follow, that God has revealed that mode of revealing His nature which is most liable to mistake."

"From the translators of the Septuagint downwards, it appears that the Jews understood that the Old Testament language ascribed to God a human form."

"Abraham's God was therefore a being who revealed himself in human form and with human attributes. . . . The doctrine of the revelation of God in human form is the universal doctrine of the Old Testament."

Thus we trace all Creation from its first beginnings through the three kingdoms of nature up to MAN; and man himself created to God-man uncreated.

In perfect conformity with these principles, and in anticipation of the truths of modern Science, Swedenborg observes:—

"That all things* in the Universe were created from the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom of

* Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and Wisdom, art. 52.

GOD-MAN. The Universe in its greatest and smallest parts, as well as in its first and ultimate principles, is so full of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom that it may be said to be Divine Love and Divine Wisdom in an image. That this is the case is manifest from the correspondence of all things in the universe with all things in MAN. All and singular the things which exist in the created Universe, have such a correspondence with all and singular the things of MAN, that it may be said that MAN also is a kind of Universe. There is a correspondence of his affections and of his thoughts thence derived, with all things of the animal kingdom; a correspondence of his will and of his understanding thence derived with all things of the vegetable kingdom; and a correspondence of his ultimate life with all things of the mineral kingdom."

This author accordingly proceeds to establish the relation to man of all and everything in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms.

But if the Final Cause of Creation be MAN, how does this agree with the doctrine of Typical Forms? For we are told, that the principle of Order is to be found* in the Final Cause; and again, that it is the same with "the General Plan, Pattern, or Type to which every given object is made to conform with more or less precision." What is the relation, then, between the Typical Form and the Final Cause? "Every organic object," it is said, "is constructed after a type, and is, at the same time, made to accomplish a final cause τέλος."—The final cause is the end

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 5, 1.

for which it exists; but there is a series of ends, viz., an ascending series, having its termination in man; and in like manner there is an ascending* series of Typical Forms, which also terminates in man; so that both the form and the end have their consummation in man, as the image and likeness of God; and thus, the creation by God of His own image and likeness, hence the glory of God Himself as the Archetypal Man, is the Final Cause of Creation.

We thus see that the philosophy of Final Causes, the modern Science of Typology and Teleology, as also Scripture itself, agree in establishing the same fact—a fact the more important, because, as we shall find, it is the basis of the Science of Correspondence; and, as it comprehends within itself the principle of the unity and Order of Creation, it identifies the Science of Correspondence with the science of unity and order; it shews the laws of Correspondence to be laws of Creation, and thus places them far away out of the region of speculation or mysticism. It is a physical fact established by science, that the organism and functions of the human body are reflected more or less throughout creation in a series of correspondences. Shall this fact have any place or significance in our Theology? or shall we abandon it to the materialist? If so, let us see what is the use which the materialist makes of it. Let us take the case of a French physiologist,† whose system is thus described by Dr. Barclay:‡—

"From observing that several species of minerals and

Though not chronological. \(\dagger\) Robioet.

See his work on Life and Organization, p. 263.

plants resemble in their form particular organs of the human body; and that the species of the animal kingdom, from the zoophite upwards, make nearer and nearer approaches to man in form and in structure; he supposes that Nature, from the commencement of her operations, was solely intent upon making MAN; and that the regularly definite forms of minerals, plants, and the lower animals, are nothing more than the casual results of her experiments, while she was aiming at the accomplishment of, what he denominates, her chef d'œuvre; the formation of MAN from first to last being invariably the ultimate object of her ambition. What Nature itself is, he has not informed us; but so far as can be learned from his observations and modes of reasoning, it seems to be a certain tendency of matter to be organized, and to assume the human structure and form; in short, something which, like man, reasons and reflects, collects observations, and makes experiments, to improve itself in the arts and science."

"Yet* these are not the only hypotheses of Robinet. He supposes that MAN is the model or prototype of all organisms, and calls this prototype an intellectual principle: by which language, if he means anything, he must mean a substance perceptible only by the understanding, like an idea of Plato; and suppose that such a substance, or species of substance gives form to matter; or he must mean, what we sometimes express by the English word idea, a mental prototype; not properly a substance, but a plan or model conceived by the mind, agreeably to which Nature constructs a material organism; or, to adopt the language of Robinet, realizes the prototype by exhibiting it under a sensible form. Upon this hypothesis the visible world is only a type of what is invisible; and Nature, instead of being a blind tendency of matter, must be a principle of active intelligence. Besides, as the prototype on this hypothesis remains unaltered, and contains ex-

* Ibid., p. 272.

emplars of all the various species of forms in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, the mere conversion of these exemplars into material or sensible forms, could not possibly furnish her with new ideas; the sensible forms being only the types of the unchanged and invisible prototypes which had been previously existing in the mind. Further, if man were the only prototype; if that prototype contained exemplars of all other organisms; and if these exemplars were first conceived in relative position, connection, number, magnitude, and proportion; it should follow, that Nature first realized her idea of man as a perfect whole, and then constructed animals, and plants, and mineral bodies in imitation of the several exemplars of which her mental prototype was composed. Nay, this is the view which Robinet himself has occasionally taken; when, considering the prototype as an inexhaustible fund of variety, he supposes that Nature, in serving her apprenticeship, was not so much occupied in learning how to construct man, as how to exhibit his form and his structure under various semblances in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms."*

"Accustomed," he says, "to judge of realities from the appearances which strike our senses:—

"In this situation,†, we do not consider that the material or visible world is nothing but an assemblage of phenomena, and that there must also be necessarily some invisible world, the foundation or substratum of that which is visible, and to which we must ascribe whatever is real or substantial in Nature. This invisible world is the collection of all the forces which tend incessantly to ameliorate their existence; which they ameliorate by constantly extending and bringing toward a state of perfection their several energies, in that proportion which is suitable to each of them."

* See Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 104.

† Ibid., p. 268.

Here we have Nature in a human form, regarding herself as the prototype of all organisms, and modelling them according to her own exemplar; creating first an invisible world, and then a visible as the type of the invisible, the laws of which are those of amelioration or progress. The visible is indeed here the language of the invisible, but it is the language of invisible Nature; for all is Nature still, and nothing more.

We may reprobate this view as much as we please; but, if Theology refuses to find a place in her system for the discoveries of Science relative to the principle of Order, the only alternative will be their appropriation to Naturalism. Divine Goodness will be the impulse of Nature; Divine Wisdom, the laws of Nature; Divine power, the forces of Nature; Creation, in fine, will be its own Creator, and man his own God.

What, then, is the true place of these discoveries in Christian Theology? This question is of immense importance; as it will shew the advance which the Science of Correspondence has made since the times of the ancient ecclesiastical writers. Catholic Theology is thus most deeply involved in the question.

The doctrine of Typical Forms, then, as discovered by modern Science, has confirmed the fact, that throughout the vegetable and animal kingdoms, there is a series of organic correspondences pointing onwards from the lowest forms of vegetable and animal life to their highest consummation in MAN; so that the human organism and its functions are more or less reflected throughout every individual object of the three kingdoms, and furnish the Key to the order and unity of Creation.

"Researches* into the organic portions of Nature have furnished equally beautiful illustrations of the order, and the unity of order, in Creation. The observations of naturalists; the dissections of anatomists; the classifications of botanists and zoologists, shew that in every country, every plant and every animal, and every organ of every plant and every animal, is after a type or model, and that there is a mutual affinity and a harmony among organized beings, from the lowest lichen up to the highest quadruped, and to MAN himself. It has been shewn that the whole skeleton of the vertebrate animal is made up of a series of segments, which, with an infinite number of variations, are yet homotypal; that is, of the same general form. It has been shewn, that all the parts of the flower of the plant—sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils—are after the model of the leaf; and it can be shewn that there is a homotypal correspondence between the leaf with its veins or ribs, and the branch with its branchlets, and the whole tree with its ramifications. These discoveries make the animal and the plant a unity throughout."

"It may be maintained† that the lower animals are, in a sense, anticipations of humanity, and have appetites, instincts, attachments—as for offspring and home,—perceptions, and a sort of intelligence, which, though not identical with, are homologous to, certain of the lower endowments of man."

Another writer,‡ in his Memoirs of a Deist, shews

* The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural. By the Rev. J. M'Cosh, LL.D.; p. 19. † Ibid., p. 154.

‡ Memoirs of a Deist: being a narrative of the Life and Opinions of the writer until the period of his conversion to the Faith of Jesus Christ; which took place in the course of the developments of an Essay to prove that pure Deism was the only true Religion (A.D. 1793), p. 178. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly.

how he had long before been impressed with this view of the animal creation; and how, on his conversion to Christianity, he had been led to see—

... "That all the good and evil sentiments in the heart of man were strongly pourtrayed in them; not only in their peculiar dispositions and instincts, but also in the particular conformation of their bodies. That from observing their natures and actions, man might learn what was really good or bad, lovely or hateful in himself; because all these several qualities, actions, and forms had an appropriate voice, and made their proper impressions on their corresponding originals in the human heart, and excited concordant or discordant vibrations, like those of two violins in unison, or the reverse; so that all impressions of moral evil or deformity were immediately felt to be such, in the pure heart, by discordant vibrations, which, by causing uneasiness, or pain, self-evidently proved them to be such to its good natural sentiments, and the same inversely."

The same is the doctrine of Swedenborg:* who says,—"that all created things in a certain image represent MAN. This may appear from all and everything of the animal kingdom, and from all and everything of the vegetable kingdom, and from all and everything of the mineral kingdom."

But we must now proceed a step farther in this argument.

"I have sometimes thought," says Dr. M'Cosh,† "that the very rise in the natural from the lower to the higher, so constant, so regular, so systematic, so evidently ordained, may point to and almost guarantee, a rise from the natural

* Divine Love and Wisdom, art. 61.

† The Supernatural in relation to the Natural; p. 156.

B 3

This, it seems, is the principle of Order which Science in its latest advances is simply coming up to. Therefore,*—

"Plato," it is consequently admitted, "is right when he speaks of Ideas being in the Divine Mind prior to their exhibition in sensible objects. Plato is in the right, too, when he represented sensible objects, which are ephemeral, as being constituted after eternal models. Herein, too, Plato was further right when he talked of these ideas being, in a sense, in human intelligence, and requiring only to be brought forth."

The same general principle is involved in the following statements:—

"Nature, in a large sense," according to one author,† "is the expression of a DIVINE IDEA, the harmonious whole of this world of matter and life." According to another‡—"Scientific systems are in truth but translations into human language of the thoughts of the Creator." According to another§—"The laws of Nature are the thoughts of God." According to another||—"Nature, as being the creation of God, is, as it were, an embodiment of the DIVINE IDEA; and can we be going far from the original design in such circumstances, if we seek to elicit a spiritual idea from Nature?" In this case the spiritual idea is the intermediate between the Divine and the natural.

* Ibid., p. 479.

† Life on the Earth, its Origin and Succession. By John Phillips, M.A., etc., Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford. p. 3.

‡ Agassiz. § Professor Powell.

|| Dr. Balfour, on The Typical Character of Nature; or. All Nature a Divine Symbol; p. 32.

But what is the meaning of "the Divine Idea?" This is a philosophical expression of Plato: let us translate it into Scripture language. The Divine Truth and the "Divine Idea" of Truth are in God essentially the same; so likewise are Divine Truth and Divine Thought. In God it is Divine Truth which thinks; for He is Divine Truth itself; and the thoughts of God toward His creatures are only His Divine Truths proceeding from Him into the sphere of Creation.

The "Divine Idea," then, is essentially the same with the Divine Truth: the Divine Truth the same with the Divine Reason; the Divine Reason the same with the Logos: the Logos the same with the Word; and thus Nature, as an expression of the "Divine Idea," is no other than an expression of the Divine Word, or of those Divine Truths by which Nature was created.

God, says Swedenborg, distributed all things into genera and species in order to enable man to think. If Divine Truth did not flow forth in the order of genera and species, man would be unable to think of spiritual things, thus to be enlightened by the Spirit of Truth, and to be created anew. These genera and species of Divine Truths flow forth through the heavens into the inferior sphere of the visible creation, and create the genera and species of natural things, or the external order of Nature which in itself is dead. Therefore neither scientific systems, nor the laws of Nature can be in themselves the thoughts of God. They proceed from His thoughts, but they are not His thoughts; just as words are uttered by the thoughts, but are not the thoughts themselves.

"By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth"—all in their order. For all Order is in the Divine Archetypal Man, the Eternal Logos; and there are as many laws relating to this order* as there are truths in the Word of God, which amount not to thousands only, but to ten thousand times ten thousand. The universe of Nature is but an expression of these truths clothed in outward material forms. In this sense only can it be an expression of the "Divine Idea." For the "Divine Idea" is living: Nature is dead. The language of Nature, therefore, or the language of Creation, as an expression of Divine truths or truths of the Word of God, can be so only in the sense of its being a dead sign of living things, or the natural sign of things spiritual.

"Divine Truths," says Swedenborg,† "are nothing else but the laws of Order derived from the Lord's Divine Humanity; for all Order is from Him, thus all the laws of Order. The whole heaven, consequently also the universe, is according to those laws. The laws of Order, or the truths which proceed from the Lord, according to which the whole heaven and the universe are established and preserved, are what are called THE WORD by which all things are made: for the Word is the Divine Truth proceeding from the Divine Good of the Lord's Divine Humanity: hence it is that all things in the spiritual world, and

* Swedenborg's True Christian Religion, art. 72.

† Arcana Celestia, art. 7206.

also in the natural world, have reference to truth, as may be manifest to any reflecting person."

Plato, in his doctrine of Ideas or Types, beheld indeed these principles, but only in shadow. Vulgarly, this has been called Mysticism; but now it is high time to awake out of sleep! For the facts of Science have now established that*—"There is a great truth at the basis of the ancient theories, entertained in former ages by some of the deepest thinkers which our world has produced. This truth was not correctly seized, was very imperfectly, indeed, often erroneously represented, but still it is deep in the constitution of things."

To discover, then, traces of the "Divine Idea" or of "Divine Reason" in the constitution of things, is only to discover traces of the Divine Logos, or of the truths of the Word of God; and if so, it is only in this sense we can affirm that—

"We† have here a firm ground to stand on, in reasoning from what we know; and as there is a correspondence between Man's constitution and the scenes in which he is placed, we cannot be wrong in inferring, that God, by His nature and character, is led to accommodate the external world created by Him, to the intellectual nature of Man, also created by Him. There is a sense, then, and this a sense as grand as it is true, in which we are justified in representing these types as proceeding from the very ideas of God, from His eternal Wisdom, moved by His eternal Love."

Will any one here separate the intellectual from the spiritual nature of man, and say that the "Divine

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 435.

† Ibid., p. 443.

Idea" of Creation can be contemplated by the intellectual apart from the spiritual nature? If so, what will be the consequence? Natural Theology will be shut up within the narrow argument that design proves a designer; or "the Divine Idea" will mean only scientific systems; and the thoughts of God, the laws of Nature. Science alone will have the credit of dealing with facts, and any theology which would grapple with the facts, would be branded as mystical.

Let us, however, see how it is possible to bring the mind out of the land of Egypt into the land of Canaan, by the very course of thought which has been designated as mysticism.

A writer before mentioned, in his *Memoirs of a Deist*, thus states the convictions by which he had passed from Deism to Christianity :—

... "I saw and felt,"* says he, "that every man was a little world in himself, containing all nations spiritually in himself. I saw and felt that the history of the children of Israel, from first to last, was typical of what had been spiritually performed, and was still performing, in myself and all believers, who in like manner were brought out of Egypt or the bondage of the elements of this world, by the Almighty power.

"From this coincidence, which I now concluded must be general and total, between natural and spiritual things, it was again clearly confirmed to me, agreeably to the above evidence, that the whole external world, or natural Creation in our planet, was nothing more nor less than a great image of Man; and that all the things of it, of what kind soever, were only shadows of what was contained in the soul and body of Man. That the Deity in His infinite wisdom had so ordered the course of

* Memoirs of a Deist, p. 178.

external Nature, as to be perfectly descriptive of, and parallel to, the course of human life both natural and spiritual.

"By this means the whole world, both visible and invisible, including the soul and body of man, was neither more nor less than a grand magazine of testimony to the Divine truths of the Bible, divided into two distinct parts; whereof one was body, or shadow, or image, and the other was the spirit, the living substance; and that the whole course of these parallels together, with equal pace, had ever been, is now, and ever must be to the end, a continual demonstration of the truths of the Law and the Gospel, by literal matter of fact, as well as by the analogy of their forms."

Such were the spontaneous thoughts of a writer in the course of his transition from Deism to Christianity; and similar convictions are clearly entertained by a modern scientific author:—

"That* Adam must have seen in all nature," says Dr. Balfour, "distinct spiritual truths, seems to me apparent from the whole language employed in the beginning of Genesis, where material objects alone are mentioned—the garden, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the command, 'be fruitful and multiply,' etc.; and even when man fell, the curse seems exclusively (on any other supposition) to have been limited to temporal and earthly things; thus, the ground is to be barren, so is the woman, and the serpent is denounced. Surely, with such instances before us, we cannot for a moment believe that Adam did not most clearly read in these natural objects deep spiritual lessons."

Whatever may have been the case with the first Adam, we know what was the case with the Second, who always taught His disciples deep spiritual lessons

* The Typical Character of Nature; or, All Nature a Divine Symbol. By Thomas A. G. Balfour, M.D. p. 84. See our Appendix.

from out of the types of Nature; and therefore, in maintaining these principles, we are only ascribing to the first Adam the same principles of Interpretation which were recognized by the Second.

This interpretation of Nature, then, is no merely mystical fancy of Plato: it is as old as Adam; and the principle of Correspondence upon which it is founded, is confirmed by the modern discoveries of Science. There is a mystery in the visible Creation both of number and form which every day is continually unfolding. "Physical science shews that numbers have a place in every department of Nature;" and if they have a deep meaning in the works of God, shall we deny to them a deep meaning in the Word of God?

"Surely," says Dr. M'Cosh,* "it is presumptuous above all things in any one to condemn as mythic every part of the Bible narrative which retains a recurrent number. This principle, if followed out, would turn the discoveries of the most scientific men in modern times, the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, of Decandolle and Dalton, into myths."

As with numbers so with forms. An ordinary pine cone, says the same author, will reward the study for hours together of the very highest intellect.† An attentive study of the ratios and ordination of its spirals cannot but—

... "Tend to raise up profound reflections in the truly philosophical mind, and open glimpses to the religious mind of the deep things of God. They shew that the plant and all its members had been before the mind of God prior to

* Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, p. 534, 535.

† Ibid., p. 128, 133. See our Appendix.

the time when He said, 'Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so; and God saw that it was good.'"

We may now perceive how we may pass from the natural or animal degree to the spiritual, viz., through the medium of the rational, by means of which the natural is subordinated to the spiritual. In going on then from the natural to the spiritual interpretation of the visible creation, we only apply to spiritual things the same principle of correspondence which modern Science has shewn already to exist in natural things—a principle which is no mere speculation, no flight of imagination beyond the region of facts:—

"There* is an end served by the Order in our world of which we can speak with confidence; for it comes everywhere, and alluringly, and pressingly under our view. The Order has certainly and obviously a special respect to MAN."

This being, then, a fact established by the discoveries of modern Science, let us, with a view to bring out prominently the connection between natural and spiritual things, and the principle of transition from one to the other, carefully compare with each other the following statements:—

It is a truth now established by modern Science, but hitherto hidden from the world, that all the parts of the human body and everything contained therein have correspondence with such things as are upon earth; insomuch that there is not the smallest par-

* The Supernatural in relation to the Natural. By Dr. M'Cosh. p. 48.

ticle in the body which has not somewhat upon earth corresponding to it, according to the genera and species of things which exist upon earth: and this in such an order that all collectively represent MAN, and separately the constituent parts of man, so that the whole world is an image of man.

Compare this with the following from Swedenborg:—

"It* is a truth hitherto most deeply hidden from the world, that all the parts of the human body, and everything contained therein, have correspondence with such things as are in HEAVEN; insomuch that there is not the smallest particle in the body which has not somewhat in heaven corresponding to it, according to the genera and species of things in heaven; and this in such an order, that they all collectively represent one MAN, and separately the constituent parts of man, so that the whole HEAVEN is an image of man."

Take another statement:—

They who have not a just idea concerning natural things, are unable to conceive that the human form is the type and exemplar of their arrangement and conjunction.

Hear now the corresponding statement made by Swedenborg:—

"They† who have not a just idea of spiritual and celestial things, are unable to conceive that the human form is the type and exemplar of their arrangement and conjunction."

Take another statement:—

* Arcana Celestia, art. 2996.

† Heaven and Hell, art. 68.

It is to be observed, that all things which proceed from the Sun of the natural world, have some resemblance to MAN; and that consequently whatever things exist in that world have a general tendency to the human form, which, in their inmost essences, they exhibit; whence all the visible objects in that world are representatives of MAN.

Hear now the corresponding statement made by Swedenborg:—

"It* is to be observed, that all things which proceed from the Sun of the spiritual world, in the midst of which is Jehovah God, have some resemblance to MAN; and that consequently whatever things exist in that world have a general tendency to the human form, which, in their inmost essences, they exhibit; whence all the visible objects in that world are representatives of man."

Now we ask a plain question:

Are not the statements here made with regard to heaven and the spiritual man, the very same which modern Science has made with regard to earth and the natural man? Surely, in this case Theology is but availing itself of the facts of modern Science, so that the two may be in harmony; the invisible world with the visible.—Are these things so? or are they phantasy, mysticism, jargon? Come now and let us reason together. We are here only extending the law of correspondence from the visible world to the invisible: and regarding the Creator as acting not by a partial but by a universal law. If you believe the things upon† earth to be patterns of things in the

* True Christian Religion, art. 66.

† See our Appendix.

heavens; if you believe them to be correspondents with the body of man; how can you escape the conclusion, that all things in the heavens are themselves also in correspondence with the body of man? Think not that these are mere speculations with which you have no concern. You have at least as much concern with them as with the fact, that all things upon earth have correspondence with the human body; for this fact is the KEY to the order and unity of the visible creation, thus to the true knowledge of earthly things; and what if, in like manner, it be the KEY to the order and unity of the invisible creation, thus to the true knowledge of heavenly things!

Regarding MAN, then, as in himself a microcosm—the ultimate form and end of the natural world or visible creation, all natural Sciences may range themselves in their order and place in reference to him; so that all collectively may be called human science, not only because he may know it, but because it has more or less a relation to himself.

The same is the case with regard to the spiritual world; for both worlds meet together in him; and he may be called a microcosm in regard to the spiritual world, on the very same principle upon which he is called a microcosm in regard to the natural world.

"Since* MAN is a HEAVEN, and also a world in himself, therefore in him there are a spiritual world and a natural world. His interiors, which belong to his mind, and have reference to his understanding and will, constitute his spiritual world; but his exteriors, which belong to his body, and have reference to his

* Heaven and Hell, art. 90.

senses and actions, constitute his natural world. Whatsoever, therefore, exists in his natural world, or earthly body, that is, its senses and actions, are said to be correspondents of his understanding and will which belong to his mind or spiritual body."

Accordingly in heaven, as upon earth, all things have relation to man as the image and likeness of the Archetypal Man; for no created being can be anything higher: he may be more or less in that image and likeness, and ever in this respect going on to a perfection which he will never reach; but beyond Man he never can go, without going beyond what is Divine as well as Human, viz., the Divine Humanity. This being the case, it is certain that all the practical knowledge of man concerning spiritual or heavenly things must be a knowledge in reference to man as an image and likeness of God; thus to man himself as man; thus to the regeneration of himself as begotten by—the Word of Life, the Archetypal Man, God over all blessed for ever.

This is the whole mystery of the spiritual sense of the Word: thus of the words in the Apocalypse,* "He measured the wall thereof . . . according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel," who was himself a man. This admeasurement, moreover, is not represented as taking place in the time of that old heaven and earth which passed away, but under the dispensation of that new heaven and earth which succeeded.

We may now proceed to our last step in this preliminary argument; or to the origin of the doc

* Revelation, chap. xxi. 17; Ephesians, chap. ii. 15.

trine of Prototype, which involves the principal Order.

"There* is a Mundus Sensibilis and a Mundus Intilis; and the relation in which they stand to each seems to be as follows. To us there is first the Mundus sibilis, and this, when human intelligence contemplat becomes the Mundus Intelligibilis. But when thing considered in themselves, the order, as Aristotle shewed ago, is reversed;—to us there is first the particular then the general; in the order of things, however, th first the general and then the particular. There is fir Mundus Intelligibilis in the mind of the Eternal Logos; in the fulness of time, becomes the Mundus Sensibilis sense the Word becomes flesh), which is once more i duced as the Mundus Intelligibilis, in the mind of intel creation."

"If† the sensible World be an effect, of which the Ca a Sovereign Mind, all that we may discover in effects w fairly look for in their Causes, since here its prior existe in a manner necessary."

"In‡ the Scriptural account of Creation, Light prev to existence, is commanded to exist: 'And God said there be light, and there was light.' So also vegetable animals, previously to their existing are commanded to Now whether by these commands we suppose certain orders, or, what seems far more probable, only a Divine tion, respect must needs have been had to certain Pre-as Forms, or else such words or such volitions must have devoid of all meaning."

"But what account then," says Cudworth,§ "ca

* Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 480.

† Harris's Philosophical Arrangements, p. 342.

‡ Ibid., p. 114.

§ Intellectual System, iii., p. 406.

possibly give of knowledge and understanding, their nature and original? since there must be νοητόν, that which is intelligible—in order of nature, before νόησις, or intellection.”

“Certainly,” says he, “no other than this—that the first original knowledge is that of a perfect Being, infinitely good and powerful, comprehending . . . the possibilities of all things, their ideas with their several relations to one another; all necessary and immutable truths. Here, therefore, is there a knowledge before the world and all sensible things, that was Archetypal and paradigmatical to the same.”

“Mind or God,” says Plotinus,* “was before the world; not as if it existed before it in time, but because the world proceeded from it, and because it was in order of nature first, as the cause thereof and its archetype or paradigm; the world also always subsisting by it and from it.”

Here, then, was mind before matter, the signification before the sign, the thing typified before the type; “no ectypal thing,” says Cudworth,† or that which existed after the archetypal, but itself archetypal, a kind of intellectual world which comprehended in it the paradigm or exemplar according to which this sensible world was made. The genuine spiritual significations of things, then, are not and cannot be of arbitrary origin. The type and the thing typified belong to each other by an inward necessity.‡ They were linked to each other by the very process of Creation. The earthly relation is but a lower form of the heavenly, on which, indeed, the heavenly rests, and of which it is the utterance. The relations of husband and wife existed above before they existed below; the laws of natural birth had their origin in

* Ibid., vol. i., p. 517. † Ibid., iii., p. 408, 294.

‡ See Notes on the Parables. By Dean Trench. p. 13, 14.

C those of spiritual birth; male and female distinctions were of heavenly, not of earthly origin. The characters of Nature are not a common but a sacred writing: they are the hieroglyphics of God, intended to be a ladder leading man up to the contemplation of heavenly truth, and thus to make known to him the invisible things of God.

Thus it is, that "all we see is upon a plan,* and that the Archetype is in the Godhead." Not that the relation between the earthly type and the Archetype is immediate, as some appear to think; but that there is an intervening or spiritual world, through which all things on earth have a relation to the Creator.

Did God say, "Let there be light?"—Whence came the light, but through the heavens from the Light everlasting? Did He say, "Let there be a firmament?"†—Above the heads of the living creatures there was beheld a firmament. Did He say, "Let the waters be gathered together?"‡ There are living fountains of waters to which God will lead us. Did He say, "Let the dry land appear?" There was a heavenly Canaan prior to the earthly,§ and trees of life which should be for the healing of the nations. Did He say, "Let there be lights in the firmament?"|| There was a Sun of righteousness which to the blessed in heaven shall never go down. Were a moon and stars set in the firmament?¶ There was

* Professor Sedgwick's Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge. Preface to Fifth Edition; p. 242.

† Ezekiel i. 22. ‡ Revelation vii. 17. § Ibid. xxii. 2.

|| Isaiah lx. 20. ¶ Revelation xii. 1.

seen in heaven a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and her head crowned with twelve stars. Did He say, "Let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath life, and fowl to fly above the firmament?"* There are flying eagles in the spiritual world, and living souls in the rivers and the sea. Did He say, "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind?"†

Living creatures are represented as sustaining the throne of God. There are‡ winds in the Spiritual

World, and thunders, and lightnings, of which those upon the earth are only the lower manifestations.

Thus the invisible creation is prior to the visible;

and therefore when it is said, "We cannot argue from the seen to the unseen, unless we previously know their relation to each other," we now at length know the relation between them.

For the objective forms of which we read as existing in heaven, were not originally derived from earth;

nor is it as being derived from earth that the heavenly is expressed by the earthly; for the heavenly was not derived from the earthly, but the earthly from the heavenly, as was the heavenly from the Divine.

Earthly forms therefore are not their own prototypes;

they are derivatives, and derivatives by correspondence; and thus correspondence expresses the very process of derivation from the Divine, that is, of

Creation by God; all having reference to MAN.

Such then are the principles which we are about to apply to the interpretation of the first chapter of

* Revelation iv. 7.

† Ezekiel i. 26.

‡ Revelation xi. 19; Psalm xviii. 10; civ. 3.

c 2

Genesis. In the words of a modern writer,* "They are not the visionary dreams of a poet or mystic, clothing nature in forms devised by his own fantasy; they are the results reached by the profoundest inductive science of our times."

Our times! it will be objected; and for that very reason in the present argument worthless; for what we want to know is not the philosophy or science of our times, but how the narrative concerning the Creation would have been understood in the times of the primeval man, who, we have no reason to believe, was learned either in philosophy or inductive Science.

This brings us to the question concerning the moral and intellectual condition of the primeval race, hence to the question concerning a primeval revelation. All our knowledge upon this subject, we are told, can be derived only from the history of language and of ancient mythologies. And what do these teach us? The answer is thus given by Professor Jowett; and we draw attention to it, because it is the turning-point of our argument:†—

"Human beings in that pre-historic age seem to have had only a kind of limited intelligence; they were the slaves, as we should say, of association. They were rooted in particular spots, or wandered up and down upon the earth, confusing themselves and God and nature, gazing timidly on the

* Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, p. 521. Here Dr. M'Cosh leaves the argument; but here we take it up, and proceed to apply the principles to the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis.

† The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, with critical notes and dissertations. Vol. ii., pp. 461, 462. The italics are mine, with a view to the argument in the sequel.

world around, starting at their very shadows, and seeing in all things a superhuman power at the mercy of which they were. They had no distinction of body and soul, mind and matter, physical and moral. Their conceptions were neither here nor there; neither sensible objects, nor symbols of the unseen. Their gods were very near; the neighboring hill or passing stream, brute matter as we regard it, to them a divinity, because it seemed inspired with a life like their own. They could not have formed an idea of the whole earth, much less of the God who made it. Their mixed modes of thought, their figures of speech, which are not figures, their personifications of Nature, their reflections of the individual upon the world, and of the world upon the individual, the omnipresence to them of the sensuous and the visible, indicate an intellectual state which it is impossible for us, with our regular divisions of thought, even to conceive. We must raze from the table of the mind their language, ere they could become capable of a universal religion."

"But although we find no vestiges of a primeval revelation, and cannot imagine how such a revelation could have been possible, consistently with those indications of the state of man which language and mythology supply, it is true, nevertheless, that the primitive peoples of mankind have a religious principle common to all. Religion, rather than reason, is the faculty of man in the earliest stage of his existence."

In this case, then, our first parents enjoyed a primeval religion but not a primeval revelation; and this primeval religion is thus described:—

"Probably,* at a much earlier period than we are able to trace them, religions, like languages, had their distinctive characters with corresponding differences in the first rude

* Ibid., p. 463.

constitution of society. As in the case of languages, it is a fair subject of enquiry, whether they do not all mount up to some elementary type in which they were more nearly allied to sense, a primeval religion, in which we may imagine the influence of Nature was analogous to the first impressions of the outward world on the infant's wandering eyesight; and the earliest worship may be compared with the first use of signs or stammering of speech. Such a religion we may conceive as springing from simple instinct; yet an instinct higher even in its lowest degree than the instinct of the animal creation; in which the fear of Nature combined with the assertion of sway over it, which had already a law of progress, and was beginning to set bounds to the SPIRITUAL CHAOS. Of this aboriginal state we can only entertain conjecture: it is beyond the horizon even when the eye is strained to the uttermost."

True: it is only conjecture, but the most probable conjecture, as derived from the study of language and ancient mythology: a probability, therefore, which so far witnesses, as it is thought, against the truth of the first chapter of Genesis. There was, it seems, no primeval revelation; but there was a primeval religion, arising out of a primeval religious instinct, with which the rational faculties (which in this infant state of being were only potential) could not be concerned. We are therefore led to regard the primeval man as a creature of sense, endowed with religious instincts, but having no real knowledge of God; confounding himself and God and nature one with the other; capable of no distinctions between body and soul, mind and matter, physical and moral; and the subject of none of those regular divisions of thought, especially the distinctive one between the natural and the spiritual, which the New Testament so clearly points out. "Nature,"* says Cudworth, "is ratio mersa et confusa, reason immersed and plunged into matter, and as it were fuddled in it, and confounded with it:" wisdom in the mind of God being a certain separate and distinct thing. Here, then, as applied to the natural man, is presented to us the confusion—the Spiritual Chaos.

Granting, then, that the primeval man was, in his original state, a creature of the senses, we are told that, in early ages,† religion, like language, takes the form of sense; but that this form of sense is likewise the embodiment of thought. How does it become the embodiment of thought?‡—"Man thinks primarily by mental symbols; by pictures remembered, or created by the image-forming capacity of the mind. So far from oral or written signs being primarily the object of thought, the first artificial signs are commonly outward pictures of the inward image. The earliest words and writings coined by man were hieroglyphic." . . . When man was first created, there could have been no conventional language; and if he had to think then in the same manner in which he is said by some to think now, viz., from conventional signs, he could not have thought at all. There were then only two sources of thought which were open to him, the outward and the inward; what Nature presented to him from without, and God said to him

* Intellectual System, vol. i., p. 336.

† Professor Jowett on The Epistles, vol. ii., article Natural Religion, p. 466.

‡ Typical Forms and Special Ends of Creation, p. 459.

from within. Before God, however, is represented as speaking to him from within, there was to him nothing but Nature without; in this case the aboriginal state of man was an external state, such as in Scripture is commonly called the psychical, animal, or natural. The question is, how he shall be brought out of the selfhood of the animal man into the selfhood of the spiritual?

In answering this question, it must be remembered that the aboriginal state was, as Professor Jowett justly denominates it, a SPIRITUAL CHAOS. But Chaos and Cosmos are correlative terms. If the Chaos be spiritual, so must the Cosmos; and if the Cosmos, then the Heaven and Earth. Consequently both the Chaos and the Cosmos have relation to Man; nay, to the very mind of Man: so that the heaven and earth are the heaven and earth of the human mind; in other words, its internal and external microcosms. Surely, then, in this case we may ask with Mr. Jowett, "Why should it be thought a thing incredible, that God should give law and order to the spiritual no less than to the natural Creation?"—"If the world had not been sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, there would have been no need of the light." So far from this primeval Chaos, therefore, being an argument against a primeval revelation, it is the very condition which such a revelation supposes. For if man had been created perfect all at once by the will of God, he would have been without a personality; the virtues he possessed would be no more his own, than any naturally good qualities into which men are born. Virtue, to be virtue, must be chosen, must be an object of the will. What does not belong to the will, does not belong to the man; nor can the man be free to choose where there is no choice. In being born into the merely natural or animal state, there is no choice; but in passing out of it, there is; and the narrative of the first chapter of Genesis is only a description of the process by which, in the exercise of freedom, man was brought out of disorder into order, out of Chaos into Paradise.

"Volumes have been written on the connection of Geology with the Mosaic account of the Creation."

True: but even if there were a material Chaos as well as a spiritual,* a Chaos of matter as well as of mind, which of the two is the proper subject of Theology? which the most worthy of the Word of God? Is it more important for the Church to know how the Almighty gave law and order to the material Creation, than how He gave and still gives them to the spiritual? how out of the sensuous mind He creates the intellectual; out of the intellectual He creates the voluntary; out of the animal He creates the image and likeness of God? If this be the subject matter of the first chapter of Genesis, then has the whole chapter, from beginning to end, relation to MAN—to the human animal in his infantine state, progressing gradually, according to Divine law and order, to his state of consummation as MAN, or an image and likeness of God.

This order of God, in proceeding from the lower

* See our Appendix.

c 3 to the higher in the spiritual creation, has its correspondence in the natural creation.

"Comparative* anatomists have traced a curious general correspondence between the growth of the animal in the womb, and the advance of animated beings in the Geological ages,--there being a progression in both cases from the lower to the higher, from the more simple and general to the more complex and special. I suppose that this correspondence arises from there being, in both cases, a like living agency acting in like circumstances. However this may be, it is certain that there is an analogy between the system of grace in the heart of the individual and the system of grace in the world. This correspondence arises from the life in the Church being like the life in the heart, a spiritual power in the midst of carnal materials."

Now what is signified by these "carnal materials" in the case of the aboriginal state of man? They signify a state in which, so far from the mind being expanded with a knowledge of heavenly things, it confounds together things earthly and heavenly, itself, God, and nature; it makes no distinctions between body and soul, mind and matter, moral and physical; there being as yet no regular divisions of thought, or distinct regions of the human mind. It is 'a land of darkness, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.'

In the ancient mythologies, the idea of Chaos and Night, we are told, divested of poetical imagery, is simply that of unformed matter, existing as the passive principle whence all forms are produced; apply this

* The Supernatural in relation to the Natural. By Dr. M'Cook. p. 278.

to the human mind, and Chaos and Night are representative of *unformed mind*, existing nevertheless in a state of passivity, out of which all moral and spiritual developments have to be produced.

In passing out of this formless state, the first process of the mind is to acquire knowledge, and to commit it to memory. But as the principles of distinction, order, and arrangement are not yet acquired, the very memory itself is in a state of Chaos. It is like the stomach, in which all things are mixed one with the other, and out of which the real aliments of the body have to be eliminated, in their proper order, by the process of digestion, etc. What then is the first state of the mind in regard to knowledge?

"The* first state of man who is regenerated," says Swedenborg, "or with whom truth is conjoined to good, is, that first of all in the natural man, or in its storehouse which is called the memory, there are heaped up together doctrinals of truth without any determinate *Order*. The doctrinals which are thus heaped up, may be compared to any heap of materials undigested and uncompounded, and, as it were, to a kind of *Chaos*. But this is done to the end that they may be reduced to *Order*; for whatsoever is to be reduced to *Order* is at first in this state of *confusion*. These doctrinals are not of themselves reduced to *Order*, but by the good which flows into them; and according to the quantity and quality of the good which acts upon them, such is the quantity and quality to which they are reduced. When *good* first *longs after* and *desires* these doctrinals, to the end

* Arcana Calestia, 3316.

that it may conjoin them to itself, it appears under a species of affection of truth."

This influx of good, as we shall afterwards see, is produced by "the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters." In the meantime, this spiritual Chaos is described in a somewhat similar manner by the author of Ancient Metaphysics;—

"The* beginning of all things," says he, "is the most difficult; and it is particularly so in this case, if we consider that all our ideas are formed from Nature. Now, what does Nature present to us? It is what may be called a Chaos, where everything is mixed with everything; animals, vegetables and minerals, the elements of earth, water, air, and fire; the heavens above, and the earth below. These are all perceived by our senses, which are our only inlets to knowledge in this state of our existence. But the senses perceive them altogether in the lump, and as they exist in Nature; but in order to form ideas of them, we must arrange them, and perceive their several relations and connections. This is done by the two great faculties of the human intellect, abstraction and generalization; that is, by dividing and uniting. As the face of Nature presents to us all things mixed with all, in which way they are perceived by our senses, it is of absolute necessity that they should be divided and considered separately; otherwise it is impossible that we should form that distinct notion of them which we call an idea."

We have here presented to us the first state of the human mind, even at this day, as a state of Chaos; but the difference between its present and primeval state, is, that primevally there was no hereditary evil, no tendency to actual sin derived from any antecedents. Whereas, in the present day, in addi-

* Lord Monboddo, vol. iv., p. 65.

tion to the first Chaos of the human mind, there is an hereditary tendency to evil in consequence of the Fall; and, therefore, the Chaos which now is, must be more disorderly than the primeval. At the same time, the aboriginal state of man, being such as we have described, must have been that of the animal nature. In this case, the argument for the Divine Authorship* of the Cosmogony in the first chapter, is not the least affected by the fact, that Geology shews that there were creatures of God that destroyed and devoured one another long before the time of which we are now treating; and were furnished with the natural means of so doing; for creation was not as yet pronounced good, and much less very good.

It is indeed a popular error to suppose that, in the earliest times, all animals were of a tame and gentle disposition, such as is described in the words of Isaiah, "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;" but this arises from confounding the aboriginal state of man with his state in Paradise; whereas the aboriginal state was to Paradise what the wilderness afterwards was to Canaan, and what the natural man is to the spiritual. It was only in the Paradisaical state that man was truly lord of the creation.

Therefore when the ancients supposed, that the primordial Chaos was a struggle between the four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water; and that when out of this Chaos this world was created, this

* Creation in Plan and Progress, being an Essay on the First Chapter of Genesis. By the Rev. James Challis, Plumian Professor of Astronomy, etc., Cambridge; p. 92.

state of confusion subsisted no longer,—"I will shew," says Bayle,* "that, be this how it will, they ought to have excepted man out of their general rule; since he is subject to the most dreadful confusion and contrarieties that could have deformed the Chaos." This author denies, therefore, that Chaos has ceased, whether in regard to man or to the elements :—

"As to the elements, 'tis their combat that renders Nature fruitful; their concord would make it barren, and were it not for the implacable war waged by them wherever they meet, there would be no generation. The production of one thing is always the destruction of another."

And this is the state which some suppose is destined to cease when the time arrives alluded to by the Apostle,—"For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God; for the whole creation travaileth and groaneth together in pain until now."

So likewise Kirby in the Bridgewater Treatises :†—

"When we take a first view of Nature, we are struck by a scene which seems to be one of universal conflict, for the very heavens appear not clear from the charge: the philosopher who studies them tells us of antagonist powers, that are perpetually striving with each other, the one to absorb all things in a common centre, the other to dissever them and scatter them in illimitable space."...

Whatever be our theories of force or motion, we can never dispense with the laws of action and passion, or action and reaction.

* See his Dictionary; art., Ovid.

† Vol. i., p. 142.

It is, then, a mistake to suppose that contraries belong to the chaotic state only. The laws of action and reaction, which are laws of Nature, are laws of Order, not of disorder:—

"The* Scripture tells us that the earth, 'in the beginning, was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.' After this it became enlightened as well as replenished; replenished with various forms both vegetable and animal; enlightened by the sublime command, "Let there be light and there was light.' In the whole of this progress we may remark CONTRARIETY; formless opposed to form; void, to replenished; and darkness, to light."

In the contrariety of darkness to light, it is to be observed, that this very darkness may be expressed by the term lumen, namely, the light of reason actuated by the senses: not necessarily implying guilt, but rather that infantine state of the faculties, which distinguishes children, and is replete with fallacies which, however gross, are yet innocent. This is not reason perverted, but reason undeveloped.

Moreover, the contrariety here is not of evil to evil, but of good to evil; it is not the struggle of hostile elements remaining within the Chaos, but a struggle to escape out of Chaos. This is, therefore, a very different kind of contrariety from that which exists between evil and evil, or which arises from the mutual hostility of animal passions. Where there is activity there must be passivity; in one sense these are opposites one to the other; and yet if they act and react reciprocally, and thus correspond the one to the other, the result is harmony and not disorder.

* Harris' Philosophical Arrangements, p. 43.

Motion, action, agitation, are requisite for health of mind as well as of body. A constant repetition of the same uniformities would end in inertness. Changes there must be, and the principle of mutation is to be found in contraries, such as the contrary of order to disorder.

Bearing this in mind, we may illustrate the nature of the Chaos arising out of moral evil as follows:—

"Observe," says Bayle, "that I have considered the Chaos with regard to man, only with regard to the intestine war which every man feels individually in himself. Had I considered the dissensions which reigned between one nation and another, and even between neighbors, with all the hypocritical, fraudful, and forcible things, etc., practised among them, I should have a very extensive and most fruitful field to confirm what I proposed to prove."

Again: when destitute of the light of Revelation:—

"In this state, is it possible for us not to conclude that the horrors of the Chaos still subsist with respect to MAN? For to waive the perpetual struggle between the elementary qualities which prevail something more in this the human frame than in most other material beings, is there not a furious war between his body and soul, his reason and his senses, his sensitive and reasonable soul? Reason ought to suppress and calm this disorder, and pacify these intestine struggles; but it is both judge and party, its decrees are not executed, and only increase the evil."

It has been said, that there is a very close connection between the soul and the body, and yet that they are always clashing; that they are two enemies who can never part, and two friends who can never agree; that we are composed of two enemies who are ever at variance; the sublime part of the human soul being ever at war with the inferior part of it. "We will go farther, says Bayle, "man is composed of a God and of a beast fastened together." In illustration of this contest he refers to the words of the Apostle—"That which I do I allow not; for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate that I do. Oh! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

"View but an army at the sacking of a town," says Locke,* "and see what observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. Have there not been whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the exposing their children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by want or wild beasts, has been the practice, as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting them? Do they not still, in some countries, put them into the same grave with their mothers if they die in childbirth; or dispatch them, if a pretended astrologer declares them to have unhappy stars? And are there not places where at a certain age, they kill and expose their parents without any remorse at all?" etc.

I will say nothing of the abandonment of the sick to starvation and death; of theft, revenge, adulteries, whoredoms, regarded as virtues; of cannibalism, of the worship of gods of brass and iron, nay, even of the insane as divinely inspired, with endless other perversions and inversions of humanity; but will any one regard these beings as MEN? or the world in

* Essay on the Human Understanding, vol. i., chap. iii., p. 9.

such cases as any other than a Chaos? What a scene for the contemplation of the Divine and the Missionary! Yet what else did the face of the earth present, when darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people?

"'I beheld the earth,' says the prophet, 'and lo it was without form and void; and the heavens and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and lo there was NO MAN, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.'* For the earth is void, when it is without men endued with virtue, of whom the land should be composed. When therefore we everywhere meet with haughty lions, tenacious harpies, ravening wolves instead of veritable men, does not the earth seem to be void and empty? for, as Epictetus says, 'He is not worthy of the name of man who is not studious of virtue.' Hence says Jeremiah, 'I beheld, and there was NO MAN.' Diogenes, the Cynic at Athens, when walking into the forum at midday with a lamp before him, was asked what he was about: 'I am looking for a MAN,' says he, 'and I cannot find one.' He therefore is the true man who is described in Ecclesiastes: 'Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the all of man, or, as the Septuagint render it, in this consists the whole man. He therefore who fears God is he alone who is truly MAN; others, who are sots and intemperate, are but shams who wear the external mask of humanity.'"

As, however, there are struggles in Chaos, so are there struggles to escape out of Chaos. The former takes place when the Spirit of God has not yet moved upon the face of the waters; the latter because the Spirit of God has begun to do so. It is in consequence of the movement of the Spirit of God,

* Jeremiah iv. 23; A Lapide, in loc.

"SPIRIT OF GOD."

that a moral or spiritual Chaos is often a prelude to a change for the better. Where a love of the world or personal feelings are strong, beliefs erroneous, prejudices blind, there is no access to the intellect or the will except by a reduction of the mind to a state, in which not one stone is left upon another of its former persuasions. These are indeed states of deep temptation and consequent prostration; but the use to which in the Divine counsels they are subservient, is thus described by Swedenborg:—

"Before* anything is reduced to Order, it is most commonly provided that there should be a general reduction thereof into a kind of confused mass, or, as it were, a Chaos, whereby the things that do not well cohere together are disunited; and when they are disunited, then the Lord disposes them into Order. This may be compared with what is observable in Nature, where all things, both in general and in particular, are first reduced to a kind of confused mass before they are disposed or arranged into Order. Thus, for instance, unless there were storms in the atmosphere to dissipate whatever is heterogeneous, the air would never become clear and serene, but there would be a fatal accumulation of unwholesome and deadly substances therein. In like manner in the human body, unless all parts of the blood, as well those that are heterogeneous as those which are homogeneous, did constantly and by turns flow together into one heart, and were mixed together in a confused mass, there would ensue a fatal conglutination of the liquids, and it would be impossible that

* Arcana Celestia, art. 842.

the particular component parts should be distinctly disposed to their respective uses. The case is the same with man in the course of regeneration."

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

That which is here called "the Spirit of God" is in the New Testament called the Spirit of Truth, and the Holy Spirit. God being the Supreme Good, it is the Spirit of Truth which makes known to us his Goodness. We here perceive, then, the beginning of the Divine process in bringing the mind out of its state of Chaos or disorder. How is this effected? Obviously by a communication of the Truth, i.e., of Order. For, "thy law is the Truth," says the Psalmist; and both Law and Truth have, as we have seen, a reference to Order. But how is the truth to be communicated? Obviously by love. And how is an affection or love of the Truth to be inspired? By a process corresponding to incubation or infusion of heat, by which a new warmth is produced, hence new affections, or, as it has been called in a general way, religious instincts, above and indeed opposite to the animal instincts already possessed. Hence is manifested the first appetency, desire, or affection of truth; thus the first tendency to a new disposition of things in the animal or natural mind. For unless there be produced first an affection or love of the Truth, the Truth if revealed would not be received, and the revelation would be of no use. "The light would shine in darkness and the darkness comprehend it not."—"Light, Light, more Light"—must first be the prayer of the heart before there is a revelation of

"SPIRIT OF GOD."

t. The Spirit of God then first begins to move the face of the waters, when man is first made conscious of his privation or want of light; thus of temptiness, darkness, and disorder.

Now this consciousness is produced by the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, we profurther to explain.

We have said that God is revealed to us as the truly image of man; which He can be only as the truly image of man, of whom the creature man was the truly image and likeness. For this reason, also, he is the truly image of Order, and hence the Archetypal Truth.

Truth has reference to Order:* "invert the terms of the simple proposition, and instead of saying that the man is an animal, say that every animal is a man, and what becomes of the truth which the proposition contained?" In any theorem derange the propositions, put the last first and the first last, and becomes of the demonstration?—What then we say to "that marvellous arrangement existwithin the Divine Mind; where the whole of Being never present in perfect Order, and to which no the truth is ever latent and unrevealed?" He is

Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.

the Beginning in regard to God is not the same the Beginning in regard to man. Man only is to be, but God is Himself the Beginning of the End. Nay, man begins to be man, only when out of state of disorder God has wrought a beginning in him. Nor is man truly man, until the end been accomplished, of making man an image and

* Harris' Philosophical Arrangements, p. 342, 343.

likeness of the Divine Order (namely, of Him who is the Beginning and the Ending, the First and the Last)—thus the sum of creation. Therefore all the ancient doctrines concerning Order springing from Disorder, Beauty from Confusion; Night and Chaos being the oldest of beings; the perfect and actual arising from the imperfect and potential, are all true in regard to the creature man; but morally false in any other sense; for Order existed before Disorder, Light before Darkness, a Divine Pleroma before void and emptiness, the Spirit of God before Chaos.

But we are told that—"the Spirit of God moved."

Life and motion, or life and action, are as inseparably connected as death, and inertness or inactivity. Even the ancients spoke of two kinds of motion, Physical and Metaphysical. Physical motion is local, and is not that of the Spirit of Truth. Metaphysical motion is said to be either of the will or of the reason. In respect of the will, it is the transition from one state to another; in respect of the reason, it is the transition from one conclusion to another, or from one truth to another. Thus in respect of the will, we speak, even in common language, of emotions, motions, or motives, by which we mean certain first principles of thought and action; reasoning itself also being called discursus. Accordingly the Spirit of God is said to move us, when we pass into a new perception—a perception of what is presented to the mind as a new good; hence into the consciousness that, in relation to that good, we are in a state of privation; whence also the appetency or desire of it, for what we esteem a good we cannot but desire, and

"MOVED."

whatever favors its possession we regard as true: thus according to the ancients,* the cause of spontaneous impulse is the perception of absent good, either real or apparent. This is the first manifestation of the religious instinct. The Chaotic state, therefore, in so far as it implies emptiness, privation, or absence of a good, serves as the very basis of the Divine movements, without which the Spirit of God cannot operate; and thus the first result of His operations is the consciousness or perception wrought within us, that by nature, or of ourselves, we are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.

Hence, also, we see the agreement of this teaching with that of a sound philosophy†—"MOTIONIS enim appetentia causa est; appetentiæ, privatio." It is in religious as in civil affairs: for it is to a consciousness of privation or want, that the wisdom of all ages has imputed industry, perseverance, and the invention of arts and sciences.

We now see what is meant by "the Spirit of God brooding or moving upon the face of the waters;" for the first result of incubation is the production of the motion of life by the infusion of heat into the waters; and the Spirit of God is said to move, when He produces motion in us, just as God is said to speak to us when conscience in us is awakened.

We are not, indeed, by the expression, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," to suppose an immediate operation upon the human mind, without the intervention of second causes. For aught

* Ibid., p. 424.

† Ibid., p. 445.

we know, there may have been some Angel of the Divine Presence, some angelic host, or Shechinah, serving as intermediate or secondary agents in bringing the natural mind out of darkness into light; for that there was present at the creation some heavenly host, God Himself is represented as teaching—

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, . . . when the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy?"

When therefore it is said, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," the general interpretation we have given of these words, is thus confirmed by the Glossa Ordinaria:—

"In this chapter is described the creation of the world, by which is aptly designated the (new) creation of man, inasmuch as man is described by philosophers, and even by the saints, as a little world. . . 'In the beginning God created the heaven,' namely, the spirit of man, which is called a heaven because God gave it from heaven. 'And the earth,' that is, the flesh of man which is called earth because it is under the dominion of earth. But the flesh of fallen man has not of itself any good thing. 'In me,' says the Apostle, 'i.e., in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.' Therefore it is added, 'the earth was void,' i.e., of moral good. 'And darkness was upon the face of the deep.' By the term deep may be signified by reason of its profundity, the human soul. Whence Jeremiah, 'The heart of man is corrupt and inscrutable.' According to another translation, 'the heart of man is deep;' nor is it any objection to this meaning that the spirit of man, which is the same with his soul, is sometimes signified by heaven; for one and the same thing by reason of its diverse properties, may be figured by diverse things. For the soul, at its creation, is destitute of the light of know-

"FACE OF THE WATERS."

ledges; for which reason it is afterwards well said of it, 'And darkness was upon the face of the deep.' By 'the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,' is signified that the soul was naturally desirous of knowledges, which were designated by the term waters."

Matthew Henry furnishes a general interpretation to the same effect:—

"If the work of grace in the soul is a new creature, this Chaos represents the state of an unregenerated graceless soul: there is disorder, confusion, and every evil work: it is empty of all good, for it is without God: it is dark, it is darkness itself: this is our condition by nature till Almighty grace effects a blessed change."

We now see why it is that the brooding of the Spirit is represented as taking place upon the waters. For these waters are the knowledges (scientæ) of the natural mind, which before were dead, but are now vitalized by new affections; the consequence is, they are dissociated from the senses, and disposed in a new series with a view to the discovery and attainment of higher ends, viz., of good, such as the man is capable of, from the Supreme Good. As yet, however, the mind is in a state unformed, for it is "without form," i. e., without ideas of good and evil: it is void, for in it there dwells no good thing: it is dark, but it is the darkness of ignorance: it is a deep, for all its knowledge, as being sensuous, lies beneath or below. On the face of these waters the Spirit of God moved itself; for, as we shall see in the sequel, primevally the face was more expressive of the affections than in the present day; so that the face of the waters (i. e., of natural knowledges, scientæ) signi-

D fied the first and as yet unregenerated affections from which these scientiæ derived their life, and which became visible, in their external form, in the face itself.

Here, then, we perceive the Divine preparation made by the Spirit of God for the first dawn of a primeval revelation; and are now in a condition to contemplate, from a right point of view, the origin and nature of certain mythological and metaphysical doctrines.

The ancient mythologies, we are told, discountenance the fact of a primeval revelation. But in order to prove this, how many assumptions are required! Sometimes the first chapter of Genesis is assumed to be written by Moses, and therefore its date to be later than the ancient mythologies; and since Moses was the legislator of a very ignorant, unphilosophic, and unscientific people, the narrative he wrote for their benefit is assumed to be of the same kind, borrowed rather from ancient mythologies, than ancient mythologies from it. Sometimes the narrative is referred to a later period; sometimes to an earlier, as when it is assumed to have been written in a primeval state of ignorance and superstition, many ages before the dawn either of science or philosophy. In all these cases, however, it is only the literal sense of the narrative that is received—the literal sense only that is adduced as a proof of its having been written in some infantine state of human knowledge. This is the natural consequence of a rejection of the spiritual sense; for if we regard the spiritual as the primeval sense of the narrative, written at a time

"FACE OF THE WATERS."

when the human mind expressed itself by symbols, we shall find that the narrative is full of Divine wisdom, and that the most ancient mythologies and systems of philosophy bear testimony to the remains of that wisdom.

Thus we are told that the world arose from Chaos and Eros;* that Eros first descended from heaven and separated the struggling elements of Chaos; that the chaotic waters were inspired; that they contained the semina rerum; and hence that out of these waters were all things generated.

The idea of the incubation of the Spirit, says Kirby,† of its being the principle of love that was in action, and that it produced the first motion, prevails more or less in all the cosmogonies; accordingly in that of Aristophanes, in which Love is introduced, he observes, that this is the motion infused by the Spirit into the Chaos, which is followed by light and expansion; that hence the expression, "He who mixed with Chaos winged and dark," is a description of Love, or motion entering into Chaos and beginning to produce Order. Hence also certain ancient cosmogonists‡ were of opinion that Love was originally the active cause or principle of motion; and that the Deity moved the visible heavens in virtue of His being loved by them; love in them being the first principle of their motion.

Who does not here see the parallel between the myth and the truth? Now if these ancient mytho-

* Cadworth's Intellectual System, i., 511.

† Bridgewater Treatises, vol. i., pp. 367, 368.

‡ Cadworth's Intellectual System, vol. i., pp. 367, 512.

B 2 logies are compared with the spiritual sense of the narrative in Genesis, we are supplied with a much more satisfactory account of their origin than if compared simply with the literal sense.

The same is the case with the Phœnician Theology:

"'Aquam* dixit Thales esse initium rerum (saith Cicero) Deum autem eam mentem quæ ex aqua cuncta fingeret.' Thales said that water was the first principle of all corporeal things, but that God was that mind which formed all things out of water;—for Thales was a Phœnician by extraction, and accordingly seemed to have received his two principles from thence; water, and the Divine Spirit moving upon the waters. The first whereof is thus expressed by Sanchoniathon, in his description of the Phœnician Theology, χάος θολερὸν, ἐρεβῶδες, a turbid and dark chaos; and the second is intimated in these words, ἠράσθη τὸ πνεῦμα τῶν ἰδίων ἀρχῶν, the Spirit was affected with love towards its own principles;—perhaps expressing the force of the Hebrew word, Merachepheth, and both of them implying an understanding pro-lifical goodness, forming and hatching the corporeal world into this perfection; or else a plastic power subordinate to it. Zeno (who was also originally a Phœnician) tells us that Hesiod's chaos was water; and that the material heaven as well as earth was made out of water (according to the judgment of the best interpreters), is the genuine sense of Scripture (2 Peter iii. 5); by which water some perhaps would under-stand a Chaos of atoms confusedly moved."

We leave to Geologists the theory concerning a Chaos of atoms, etc.: we profess to treat only of the spiritual Chaos, the spiritual heaven and earth, the spiritual waters, and the spiritual man; and we have seen how, in this point of view, man is born of water

* Cudworth's Intellectual System, i., 108.

"FACE OF THE WATERS."

and of the Spirit, that is, of the truths of doctrine, into a spiritual life imparted by them, as signified by the sacrament of Baptism. Now the spiritual Chaos we have referred to, is the reign of the senses over reason; as, for instance, "According* to the Democratic and Epicurean Atheists, all knowledge and understanding is really the same thing with sense; the difference between these two, to some of them, being only this, that what is commonly called sense, is primary and original knowledge; and knowledge, but secondary or fading and decaying sense;"—so that understanding and knowledge will be but a weaker sense. This is the state of the natural mind before regeneration, and thus does life begin in death.

In ascending above these dead waters of Chaos we may notice the doctrine of Plato, as represented by Tertullian. For, says he,† Plato conceived that there were certain substances, supermundane, divine, eternal, which he calls ideas, that is, forms, exemplars, and causes of all natural and sensible things; "they being the truths, but the other the images." In this case, what are the immutable ideas or forms of Plato, but the Divine creative truths flowing forth from the Word which created and sustains all things? And again, what the animating forms of Aristotle but the same?

"It‡ is to the diversity of powers in these animating forms," says Mr. Harris, "that the diversities in the organizations of the corporeal world have reference. . . . It is here we behold the harmony between the visible world and the

* Codworth's Intellectual System, iv., 117. † Ibid., iii., 66.

‡ Philosophical Arrangements, p. 98, 106. See our Appendix.


invisible; between the passive and the active; between the lifeless and the living. The whole variety in bodies, as we natural as artificial, is solely referable to the previous variety in these their animating forms. . . . The animating forms of a natural body is neither its organization, nor its figure, nor any other of those inferior forms which make up the system of its visible qualities; but it is the power, which, not being that organization, nor that figure, nor those qualities, is yet able to produce, to preserve, and to employ them. It is, therefore, the power which first moves and then conducts that latent process by which the acorn becomes an oak, the embryo becomes a man. . . . With man it is that superior and more noble faculty, which by its own divine vigor . . . makes and denominates him a being intellective and rational."

How it is that man from being an animal is made intellective and rational, or from beginning in sense is made to end in reason, it is the object of the spiritual interpretation of this chapter to shew; consequently the modus agendi or way in which this is effected by the Spirit of God. It is in this respect that Christian Anthropology differs from every other science philosophy of the human mind. The time will or when the subject will be thought to be practy though it is not apt to be considered so now. Christian life in the present day has no philosophy sudden changes, whether effected by an ext ceremonial, or an internal incomprehensible p have contributed to supersede the idea of law, and order; and to place the modus agendi Spirit of Truth in elevating man from the to the reason, beyond the reach of investi; nay more, to class the whole process with m

"FACE OF THE WATERS."

imagination. Hence the influences of the Holy it are regarded in the light of miracle, transcendall ideas of order or law. Such is the degradaanto which has fallen the most exalted and pracsubject that can possibly engage the human

. The consequences have shown themselves in trials on the one hand, and every form of Doubt infidelity on the other.

it let us proceed:

That* is it that degrades man, and causes him to ap-

- toward the brute? Setting up sense above reason ntellect; sight above faith; this world above the next.

ience teaches us, that those faculties of our nature that ost cultivated, become most acute: if intellectual purure neglected, the intellect itself becomes weakened: in rtion as the senses are exercised, they are strengthened;

portion as the pleasures they afford us stand high or our estimation, we graduate toward the brute which no pleasures but those of sense, or toward the angel nows no pleasures but what are spiritual. There is a ing principle in man, originally enthroned in him by eator, and to whose sway the senses were originally in ete subjection. But when man fell, a struggle was sted, the lower or sensual part of his nature striving to he rule over him, and to dethrone the higher or intel-

. This is the 'law in our members warring against the our mind,' mentioned by the Apostle. Now, we know the same individual, at different periods of life, may ected in his actions first by one and then by the other se laws: he may begin in sense, and end in spirit, or ers. If the former takes place in him, his nature and ter are elevated, and he is become more intellectual:

* Kirby's Bridgewater Treatises, vol. i., p. 82.

if the latter, they are degraded, and he is become more unusual and nearer to a brute; and yet in both cases he remains the same man as before: his species is not altered."

Now what is here meant by "the governing principle in man originally enthroned in him by a Creator?" Clearly the same with the "animations form" or "animating power" of the ancient philosophy:* and what is this, when expressed in Scripture language, but the same with the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters: truth or reason operating upon sense, or upon the knowledges derived from sense? How this is effected, we have already seen. First, there is the perception of a higher good or a perception that the good already possessed not a good, which is often effected in the present day by the loss of that good which we esteemed to be such; then follows the perception of a want, or of the state of void or emptiness; then the appetency, onward tendency to that good which we are conscious we do not possess. The highest form of good to the rational faculty, in this state, is truth.

"'Tis† here then we behold the meaning of an ancient and important doctrine, that the primary objects of perception and volition are the same. 'Tis hence also we may learn that in only all GOOD is TRUTH, but also that all TRUTH is GOOD as it is the sole pursuit of the contemplative, the natural object of their wants, equally as honors are to the ambition or as banquets to the luxurious."

We may here, too, understand the true meaning that ancient adage, Nihil in intellectu quod non primis

* See our Appendix.

† Philosophical Arrangements, p. 430.

"FACE OF THE WATERS."

in sense; for unquestionably man is in the sensuous state before he is in the rational. He passes into the rational not by allowing the senses to take possession of the reason; but by the perception of a good which the senses cannot perceive, and hence of a want which they cannot supply. Truth and good are to the rational faculties of the mind, what the objects of Nature are to the senses; and if the perception of these objects depends upon the organic structure of the bodily organs, so do the perceptions of good and truth, upon the organic structure of the mind. And indeed vice versa; for if there were no light, the eye would grow too weak to behold it; and it would be all the same to the man as if he had no eyes: and, if there were no truth or nothing which he could believe to be truth, the rational sight would see nothing, and the organ of mental vision be useless, and ultimately disappear, having no function.

To place, therefore, "religious instincts" on the same ground with natural instincts, and then to say that natural instincts are beyond the reach of investigation; consequently, that both are to be regarded as axioms* or as ultimate facts which constitute the boundaries of enquiry and intelligence: that with respect to man they are hypotheses on which he is compelled to act and compelled to reason, the Deity having willed it, from as blind an instinct as any that actuates the lower animals, and that this it is to walk by faith and not by sight: this, I say, is very natural for those who believe this chapter to be a Geological record, and have no sight by which to discern the

* Barclay on Life and Organization, p. 285.

D 3 meaning of "the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters."

In the primevally sensuous state, we cannot, indeed, say there was any persistent attempt to set up sense above reason; for reason had not as yet been distinguished from the senses. The aboriginals were so far therefore in a state of innocence; but it was the innocency of children in whom the rational powers had not yet been developed; and though we cannot conceive how the reason, when developed, could gain the ascendancy over the senses without a struggle, and this a severe one, yet there was nothing in the result to indicate a retrogade motion. Whatever took place was in the line of progression from death to life, from a lower life to a higher, from evening to morning; a progressiveness which is manifest upon the face of the narrative. It is only in the third chapter that retrogression begins.

3. "And God said"—An expression which indicates language, spoken too not by the creature, but by the Creator. Are we to presume that a language already existed, and that the Creator himself employed it in giving his commands? The expression certainly implies a spoken language; but what are we to understand by a language spoken by the Creator? It has been said, that thought is internal speech, and speech the external of thought. "To* think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate." And in like manner as the Eternal Word existed as the Word before being incarnate, so in man the Word may exist as thought

* Science of Language. By Professor Max Müller. p. 391.

"AND GOD SAID"— without being incarnate. In this case, the word spoken signifies the word thought; and hence when man thinks from God, God is represented as speaking to him, or as speaking within him, as the Angel did who spake in Zachariah; and as God is represented as speaking in the present day, when conscience is represented as the voice of God in the soul.

As then, in the previous verse, the Spirit of God was described as moving upon the face of the waters, when he was effecting motions in the mind, and thus originating new motives; so, in the present case, when these interior motives become the moving or animating forms of the knowledge acquired, God is said to speak to man, because man himself thinks from God, and thought is internal speech. This is the meaning, even in the present day, of the Spirit of God communing with man, and of man communing with the Spirit of God in prayer.

There is, then, internal language as well as external; and what is communicated from God to man by this internal language, is what is signified by the expression, "and God said." This internal language becomes external when it selects the objects of the senses, conveyed to the imagination, as external symbols. In this case, if the man thinks from symbols, it is only in the sense of his first beholding the objects of Nature, and these objects then serving as a basis for corresponding spiritual thoughts; as in the case of our Lord himself. Thus there is an internal speech in an external speech; an internal language in an external language; an internal meaning in the external symbol; for the external symbol is the external language.

But if this explains the language of God to man, how does it explain the language of man to man? Must not this language at least have been either phonetic, or written, or both? We answer: There is (or was rather) another language besides these two, neither written, nor phonetic, but more expressive than either.—"We,* having language at our command, have neglected the art of speaking without words; but in the South of Europe that art is still preserved. If it be true that one look may speak volumes, it is clear that we might save ourselves much of the trouble entailed by the use of discursive speech." Accordingly, in the primeval race, the face was made the mirror of the celestial fire and light of interior life; and thus the language of the face was the primeval language.

The question, therefore, concerning the origin of language, which, in consequence of modern scientific investigations, has been the cause of so much perplexity in the minds of the learned, is thus satisfactorily answered by Swedenborg:†—

"What has heretofore been unknown to the world, and will perhaps appear incredible, the man of the Most Ancient Church (the Adamic) had internal respiration, and none external but what was tacit and imperceptible; wherefore they did not converse so much by expressions of speech, as was the case afterwards and at this day, but by ideas, like the angels,

* Science of Language. By Professor Max Müller. p. 375.

† Arcana Celestia, art. 607.

"AND GOD SAID"— which ideas they were able to express by numberless changes of the countenance and face, and especially of the lips, in which there are innumerable series of muscular fibres, at this day not extricated or unfolded, but which at that time being free and unfolded, served them as means to suggest, signify, and represent their ideas in such a manner, that they could express in a minute of time what at this day could not be expressed by articulate sounds and words under an hour; and such expression was much more full, and conveyed to the apprehension and understanding a more clear idea, than it is possible can be conveyed by language and a series of combined words. This perhaps is incredible, but nevertheless it is true."

We may thus more clearly understand the remark of Professor Max Muller, when he says that "if one look may speak volumes, it is clear that we might save ourselves much of the trouble entailed by the use of discursive speech." Indeed, historic traces of this primeval language are obvious throughout the pages both of the Old and New Testament. "A man's wisdom," says the Preacher,* "maketh his face to shine;" hence, in the case of Moses, the skin of his face is said to have shone. Hence also the invitation, "Seek ye my face," and the response, "Thy face Lord will I seek."—"Turn not away the face of thine anointed."—"The Lord will not turn away his face from you."—"I entreated thy face with

* Eccl. viii. 1; Psalm xxvii. 8; 2 Chron. xxx. 9; Psalm exix. 58; Proverbs xxi. 29; Jer. v. 3; xviii. 17; Psalm xiii. 1; xxxiv. 16; Joel ii. 6; Psalm xiii. 8; lxxx. 3; Dan. v. 9; iii. 19.

my whole heart."—"A wicked man hardeneth his face."—"They have made their faces harder than a rock."—"I will shew them the back and not the face."—"How long wilt thou hide thy face from me."—"The face of the Lord is against them the do evil."—"All faces shall gather blackness."—"Their faces shall be as flames."—"Cause thy face to shine and we shall be saved:" with other expressions of a similar nature, amounting indeed to some hundreds. The reason is, says Cruden, because in the face our inward motions are made known to others—Love and hatred, desire and dislike, joy and grief, confidence and despair, courage and cowardice, admiration and contempt, pride and humility, cruelty and compassion; and when the thoughts arise from the affections, then the face assumes a corresponding expression.—"Then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury and the form of his visage was changed."—"There was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him."—"As many were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man." In the face of Jesus was pourtrayed his ineffable pity and compassion when the Lord looked upon Peter, and he went out and wept bitterly and the beauty of holiness in the face of Stephen, when his face was seen as it had been the face of an angel.

This language of the face partakes of natural conditions only in so far as the interior forces of Nature are employed by the thoughts in disposing the features. And we need not be told, that the nervous aura which moves the muscles, and modifies the

"LET THERE BE LIGHT."

blood, is not the common atmosphere the vibration of which produces sound, and the articulation of sound, language; but it is an aura silent but more subtle, and more immediately connected with the process of thought, obeying laws altogether different from those of the common atmosphere. In the present day thought moves the lips, thus only one part of the face; and a part is employed often to hide the meaning of the whole. As man came to prefer evil to good, he would naturally love darkness rather than light; and, when pervaded by a sense of either shame or fear, would naturally be disposed to hide his thoughts from man as well as from God. In this case the facial fire and light would gradually die out; and as the language of life disappeared, the necessity would arise for another, artificial, and comparatively dead, suited to his other and more external state; namely, external hieroglyphical symbols and phonetic language.

The human mind, having fallen away from the original knowledge of God and the corresponding interpretation of Nature, would thus have to begin as it were anew from the senses, and to proceed, not as before by the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, but by itself under its own guidance, to the development of its own rational powers, hence to new and self-discovered principles of knowledge and religion. Comparatively few traces would remain of the former primeval revelation or heavenly wisdom; and these only so far as that revelation had been handed down by tradition in corrupted forms in history, mythology, and poetry; and so both primitive languages and religion would exhibit the appearances which they now do.

It will be seen, therefore, that even if we supposed that external and dead signs of thought, viz., both phonetic and written language, had their origin before the Fall, there would have been, in the paradisaical state of mankind, but little use for them. In this case they would have been but little cultivated, and their rudimentary state would be no evidence of the absence of spiritual truth. Their testimony, therefore, cannot affect the question of a primeval revelation, except in so far as a rudimentary language might record traces of former and more enlightened thoughts. We can, therefore, with perfect consistency maintain the doctrine of a primeval revelation, and yet admit, if required, that—

"Theologians* who claim for language a divine origin, drift into the most dangerous anthropomorphism, when they enter into any details as to the manner in which they suppose the Deity to have compiled a dictionary and grammar in order to teach them to the first man, as a schoolmaster teaches the deaf and dumb. And they do not see that, even if all their premises were granted, they would have explained no more than how the first man might have learnt a language, IF there were a language ready made for him."

In fine, from what has been said, we are enabled easily to explain the paradox, that "Man† is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man."

* The Science of Language. By Professor Max Müller. Third Edition. p. 351.

† Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. By Sir Charles Lyell. p. 468.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT."

"Let there be light, and there was light."

First, as to the command.

If the command, "Let there be light," means only that God called the light into existence, by what law does it perpetually subsist? If things exist only in virtue of the Word of God, and conservation be perpetual creation, then in order to this perpetual creation, there must be a perpetual utterance of the Divine command. But what is the meaning of a Divine command?

"The commandments* of God," says Swedenborg, "or the things which God hath commanded, have all and each relation to Divine Order; insomuch that Divine Order is nothing but a perpetual commandment of God. Wherefore, also, to live according to the commandments of God and in the commandments of God, is to live according to Divine Order and in Divine Order. Hence by God's commanding is signified that which is according to Divine Order."

Divine command then is the communication of Divine thought; and he to whom it is communicated, if he lives in accordance with it, i.e., in Divine Order, acts willingly in obedience to it. God wills in man, and man wills from God, when man obeys the will of God. Moreover God speaks to man, and man hears His voice, when the thoughts of God or His truths are communicated to man, and man thinks from them. Accordingly both Augustin and the Glossa observe: "This expression God said, does not import any audible voice, but the practical intellect of God; for it includes the divine volition also, be-

* Arcana Celestia, art. 2634.

cause the effect follows according to the form of the disposition or will."

"He spake and it was done: he commanded and it stood fast:" "by which words," says a commentator, "we are to understand not only that all things were created by God, but also that by Him they persist and are governed;" where the persistence of all things is as much attributed to a command as their original existence; in accordance with what the Psalmist says, "For ever, O Lord, Thy word is established in the heavens: Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: Thou hast established the earth and it abideth: They continue this day according to Thine ordinances."

It was, then, by a Divine volition that Light came into manifestation, and by a Divine volition that it continues to this day.

But if this be the case, are we to presume that there are no secondary causes?

"Though it be true," says Cudworth,* "that the works of Nature are dispensed by a Divine law and command, yet this is not to be understood in a vulgar sense, as if they were all effected by the mere force of a verbal law or outward command; because inanimate things are not commandable nor governable by such a law. And, therefore, besides the Divine will and pleasure, there must needs be some other immediate agent and executioner provided, for the producing of every effect; since not so much as a stone or other heavy body could at any time fall downward merely by the force of a verbal law, without any other efficient cause; but either God himself must immediately impel it, or else there must

* Intellectual System, i., 317.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT."

be some other subordinate cause in nature for that motion. Wherefore, the Divine law and command, by which the things of Nature are administered, must be conceived to be the real appointment of some energetic, effectual, and operative cause for the production of every effect."

What, then, is the subordinate or secondary cause which operates in the production and continuance of light in the present day? The same with the prototype; Light as it is in heaven. And what is the cause of this light? Surely no other than the Light Archetypal.

God spake and it was light; for the words of God are light because they are the truth. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." He "layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters;" for his chambers are the heavenly mansions which are all his own; the mind of every angel being itself a mansion, a chamber for the Divine Light. In the present case the chambers or receptacles of light are the waters—the scientiæ or knowledges of the external mind. This is the reason for which the waters which covered the earth are represented as becoming self-luminous, or as transparent; which they do when we see through them, or look from Nature up to Nature's God. Till then they are opaque, or in such a state of internal disarrangement that they do not serve as a medium for the transmission of light, whose rays they pervert, absorb, and suffocate.

Now* without some arrangement, "the mind is so far from increasing in knowledge by the acquisition

* Harris's Philosophical Arrangements. p. 454.

of new ideas, that while it increases the number these, it does but increase its own perplexity." :

like manner if we derange the moral order of the mind; if we place self first and God and our neighbour last, the world first and heaven last; if thus the mundus sensibilis be placed over the mundus intiligibilis, what is this but Chaotic disorder? which nevertheless, in such a state, the rational faculties does not perceive, because it is in darkness; and is in darkness because it is in disorder. It is the

Chaotic state that is referred to by the prophet

"Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil that put darkness for light and light for darkness that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." No the true order of things must ever depend upon the nature and quality; and such as is our perception these, such will be their consequent order or disorder in our minds. If those perceptions are perverted the true order of thought will be perverted: and therefore, it is necessary to distinguish well between good and evil, between light and darkness, because in a state of darkness no distinctions can be made.

Now this state of darkness and disorder is that infancy.

The* embryotic life is but that of a plant; the infant life that of an animal; it is only with the entrance of light from above that the distinction human life commences, and thus that with light from

God man first begins to be formed into the image and likeness of God. Indeed, as the ancient philosophy tells us, in our method of teaching we must

* Nicolas de Lyra, Gen. i. 3.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT."

begin from the most general or elementary principles; just as children do at first who call all men their fathers and all women their mothers, but afterwards learn to make a distinction between them. This distinction cannot be made except by the manifestation of the light; "all things are made manifest by the light," and, therefore, distinction can commence only with the light.

"Hence," observes the Glossa, "God said let there be light, namely, the light of natural reason, which is a certain impression made by the Divine light in us."—In the present case it was the light of the Word within man, as received by the rational faculty. For if God alone be Light, then from Him alone can all true light proceed; not from any angel speaking in man or to man, although it may be through an angel or angelic host to man, as was commonly the case in the Old Testament; and as is generally admitted to have been the case in the Adamic dispensation. When, therefore, it is said, "And God said let there be light," it was a communication to man, that as he was now prepared by the Spirit and desired the Light, so also he should be enlightened, and man should acknowledge that he had now received light from God, from whom alone it could proceed. And as it is light that enables the bodily eye to see, so it is light that enables the rational faculty to see. In darkness all objects are blended into one: it is light alone that enables us to discriminate, to distinguish one object from another, and to see them in their proper places. In virtue of this light, the mind is enabled to make discriminations, and arrange its thoughts in such a succession as to reason correctly.

"The* Scripture affirms Light to be superior, absolutely separate from and antecedent to darkness. When God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light,' no change happened to Eternal Light itself, nor did any light then begin to be. But the darkness of this world began to receive a power, or operation of the Eternal Light upon it which it had not before; or Eternity then began to open some resemblance to its own glory, in the dark elements and shadows of time.

"The Scripture says, that 'God dwelleth in the light which no man can approach;' therefore the Scripture teaches that Light in itself is and must be invisible to man; that it cannot be approached or made manifest to him but in and by something that is not light, and that which is not light is darkness.

"Light, as it is in itself, is only in the supernatural Deity; and this is the reason why no man nor any created being can approach to it, or have any sensibility of it as it is in itself. And yet no light can come into this world but that in which God dwelt before any world was created. No light can be in time but that which was the light of Eternity. If, therefore, the supernatural light is to manifest something of its incomprehensible glory, and make itself in some degree sensible and visible to the creature, this supernatural light must enter into Nature, it must put on materiality.

"The incomprehensible Deity can make no outward Revelation of His Will, Wisdom, and Goodness, but by articulate sounds, voices, or letters written on tables of stone, or such like materiality. Just so the invisible, inaccessible, supernatural Light can make no outward visibility of itself, but through such darkness of materiality as is capable of

* Works of Edmund Law, vol. viii. Spirit of Love: part ii, p. 184, 186, 189.

"LET THERE BE LIGHT."

receiving its illumination.—All light that is natural and visible to the creature, whether in heaven or on earth, is nothing else but so much darkness illuminated: and that which is called the materiality of light, is only the materiality of darkness, in which the light incorporates itself."

In reference to the human mind, the dark ground is the lumen of the natural man before he has received light (lux) from the Spirit of God; and this lumen is received from what some have called material ideas, as involving conditions proper to matter, such as those of Space and Time.

That a dark ground is requisite for the exhibition of light, and that light is thus illuminated darkness, is both a scientific fact and a moral truth.

Even* Democritus acknowledged that "There are two species of knowledge, the one genuine the other dark and obscure. The dark and obscure knowledge is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. But the genuine knowledge is another more hidden and recondite."

"Philosophy or true wisdom," says Plato, "is the return of the mind from out of that dark life, which is rather to be called night than life, to the true light of being. Wherefore he everywhere exhorts those who are seeking after wisdom, that, trampling under foot the concupiscences of the flesh, they might be at leisure to enquire into and contemplate truth alone, and the Divine light. For God is being itself, beauty itself, life itself."

Here, then, the true distinction is made between night and day: God called the light day, and the darkness called he night.

* Cadworth's Intellectual System, iii., 214.

"The naming," says Augustin, "was not effected by any language; because with God there is pure intellect without any utterance of the tongue. But He called, i.e., caused to be called, because He Himself had made the distinction; so that the two could be discerned one from the other, and receive their separate names or designations."

The dark waters then, on which descended light from above, were the sensuous knowledges of the natural man; for these, as we have seen, were the waters of the deep or abyss; for in that state of darkness heaven and heavenly things are to him the Chaos: the life hereafter is "a land of darkness and of the shadow of death." A land of darkness and darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.

When, therefore, God said "Let there be light," it implied that the external mind had been brought by the Spirit of God into that state in which it could perceive spiritual truth from God, or genuine light; and not mistake light for darkness or darkness for light. This preparation had already been effected by the Spirit of God, which had been moving upon the face of the waters, infusing into them the heat and warmth of new affections and desires, thus disposing them to the reception of corresponding light from above; for otherwise the light might have shone in darkness, and the darkness have comprehended it not.

The sum is this: Divine thought is communicated to the angelic hosts, that the light of wisdom which illuminates their heavens should now descend, according to its gradations, and illuminate the dark waters.

"THERE WAS LIGHT."

of the earthly mind. The secondary causes are, therefore, the angelic heavens which are brought into nearer communication with man. Light upon the dark waters upon earth, being but light from the bright waters in heaven. For waters in heaven have the same signification as upon earth, namely, that of scientiæ or knowledges of spiritual truths; and these spiritual truths illuminating the faces and the forms of angels, are represented as apparently an aqueous element, sometimes "mingled with fire," namely, the fire of Divine Love. "Before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal." Hence the language of the Psalmist: "The waters saw thee, oh God! the waters saw thee! they were afraid: the depths also were troubled:" for such to the angels appear the changes of human thought, when "the people that walked in darkness have beheld a great light, and they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined."

"And God called the light day; and the darkness called he night." "For," says the Glossa, "Knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness."—"When* sophists assail us, says Mr. Harris, and either exhibit one thing for another, or two things for one and the same; to what surer weapon can we recur for defence, than to that of precise and well established distinction?"—In this state of the mind there is no ground for doubt, or opinion; no controversy as to whether a thing be, or be not, in accordance with the Word of God: there is the absolute conviction in the mind which arises from

* Philosophical Arrangements, p. 378.

E a perception of the light as light—there was light, for God was the cause of it: “God said”—“God saw”—“God divided”—“God called”—all was the word of God and the work of God. It was only afterwards when the doubt began to arise, “Yea hath God said,” that the foundations of doubt were laid for all future ages, hence also of unbelief. True distinctions began to be unperceived, Chaos came back again, and the authority and wisdom of man came to be substituted for those of God. Thus—“Democritus* held that there was nothing absolutely true; but because he thought knowledge or understanding to be sense, therefore did he conclude that whatsoever seemed according to sense, must of necessity be true (not absolutely but relatively) to whom it so seemed.” All rational knowledge he resolved into opinion.

“If a Christian,” says Locke,† “who has the view of happiness and misery in another life be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason; because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us.”—He has a perception that it is a moral duty commanded by God; and this conviction of a divine origin is the ground of all moral law in the mind, all moral duty, and hence all moral responsibility. Let the duty be ascribed to any other origin, and certainty and assurance cease. Thus, some philosophers say, that man ought to be faithful to his covenant, not because God has said so, but because the public require it; some, because it is below the dignity of a man to act otherwise;

* Cudworth’s Intellectual System, iv., 120.

† Essay on the Human Understanding, i., 36.

"LET THERE BE AN EXPANSE"— others, as Paley who repudiates the doctrine of a moral sense, would refer it to custom and public opinion. In all cases of this kind, it is not God that speaks, but man: the origin of the moral sense is no longer ascribed to God but to man. The light which once distinguished good from evil, right from wrong, has become obscure; and moral and spiritual truths become a matter of debate and human opinion, instead of being regarded with the certainty implied in the words—"God said."

6. "And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." In the midst of the waters—"that is," says the Glossa, "in the midst of knowledges, some of which are under the firmament, as being deduced from first principles; others above, as being given by revelation from God."—"The Sacred Scripture," says Augustin, "may be called the firmament; as may also the doctrine and discipline which divide the spiritual waters from the carnal."—In these cases, the term firmament is taken to express the first principles of knowledge which are firmly established. It is now however well known, that the original signifies an expanse. In this case the expanse is a region of the mind; as when we speak of an expansion of the mind, expanded thoughts and ideas, an enlarged mind in opposition to a narrow, contracted, and limited mind. A narrow mind is a mind possessing few ideas: an expanded mind one possessing many, or enlarged ideas. In this case expansion is the same with development; faculties, like flowers, when developed are expanded. Locke

E 2 observes, that it* "is near as hard to conceive existence, or to have an idea of any real being a perfect negation of all manner of expansion, is to have the idea of any real existence with a p negation of all manner of duration." But the e sion of mind and the expansion of matter i different from each other as mind is from m When it is said that the kingdom of heaven is us, it does not mean the expansion of the si heaven, but of the angelic; where distance is sured by state and is according to state, as wh speak of persons who are distant from each ot their minds, while yet they may be near in r to their bodies. The creation then of an ea between the waters is the perception of a dis hence also of a difference, between the waters and the waters below, that is, between spiritual ledge derived from within, and natural kno derived from without; thus a distinction is per between the natural man and the spiritual ma external man and the internal man, and this i sequence of a region of intervening ideas, or sp truths.

For, as Swedenborg observes, "Man,† he is regenerated, does not even know that a ternal man exists, much less does he know the i and quality thereof. In consequence of his i sion in corporeal and worldly things, he canno ceive there is any distinction between the in and external man; and the things in the in

* Essay on the Human Understanding, i. 187.

† Arcana Celestia, art. 24.

"LET THERE BE AN EXPANSE"— man being lost in the same immersion, he forms one obscure confused mass out of two substances that are totally distinct." Thus, as an ancient writer observes, "There are those who do not make a good division between the waters; they cherish vice within under a semblance of virtue."

This view of the subject answers to that description of Chaos which we have already given. For if a state of nature be represented as "ratio mersa et confusa," in which reason and the senses lie commingled with each other, and there is no due distinction between sensuous appearances and rational truths, between physical and moral, God and nature, but all things are confounded with all: the only way of leading the mind out of this state is by enabling it to make distinctions; and as objects become more distinguished, so the mind becomes more spacious and expanded; and thus also the field of its contemplation. The telescope, by enabling the eye to behold new regions of worlds, and to encrease its powers of distinction, expanded the heavens and expanded the mind at the same time; by creating an expanse between the earth and the stars, thus being as it were a creator of space; and by being a creator of new ideas, thus of new heights and depths of human thought.

When the mind is thus expanded, the distinction is more clearly perceived between above and below, between heaven and earth. The truths which descend into the higher or heavenly region of the mind, are the waters which are above the heavens; and those which pertain to the external memory, are the waters which are below. To commingle these waters is to return to the Chaotic state, to confound heaven earth.

"The* knowledge of man," says Lord Bacon, "in waters, some descending from above, and some springing beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the inspired by Divine revelation. The light of nature con in the notions of the mind and the reports of the sense as for knowledge which man receiveth by teaching cumulative and not original; as in a water that, best own spring head, is fed with other springs and stream then, according to these two differing illuminations or or knowledge is first of all divided into Divinity and Philos

If this distinction holds good, surely they c rightly divide between the waters, who confound tural science with spiritual truth; or who make a tinction between the literal and the spiritual sex the Word of God. Yet how common is this w distinction in the present day! there are no seen above the expanse, nor indeed any expanse all above that of merely natural thought. They flat in the deep below; and any light in virtue of any distinction may be made between the v is regarded not as light from God but as an fatuus. The Spirit of God indeed is acknowledged to move upon the face of the waters, and this is

Inspiration; but the process does not continue wards to the production of light, much less distinction between the waters; and so darkness lies upon the face of the Scripture. "We† ma

* De Augmentis Scientiarum—The Proficience and Advance

Learning Divine and Human, p. 124. Montagu's Ed. Vol. i

† The Sacred Record of Creation Vindicated and Explain p. 74.

"LET THERE BE AN EXPANSE"— clude," says Archdeacon Huxtable, "that the first section of the Bible, as well as its concluding portion, is a parable, and that the purpose of the Parable, in the one case as well as in the other, is, in conformity with the whole scope of Revelation, to convey to us information not relating to physical facts, but simply to religious."

Here then is an attempt to distinguish between the waters, between natural truth and religious truth; between external truth and internal truth; but the advocates of Chaos are many, and seem to be more in number than the gods which were said to be born of Chaos and Night.

It is remarkable, however, that some of the heathens both acknowledged and yet confounded the distinction: for even Julian taught, that—

"We* ought not to view and contemplate the heaven and the world, with the same eyes that oxen and horses do, but so as from that which is visible to their outward senses, to discern and discover another invisible nature under it."— "That is," says Cudworth, "they professed to behold all things with religious eyes, and to see God in everything, not only as pervading all things, and diffused through all things, but also as being in a manner all things."

Thus did these heathens acknowledge and at the same time confound the distinction between God and Nature, heaven and earth. In the spiritual sense, therefore, of the sixth and seventh verses, these fundamental distinctions of the human mind, namely, between natural and spiritual, are practically treated of, and the origin shewn of all Pantheism and Atheism.

* Cudworth's Intellectual System, ii. 522.

For even some Christian writers have not observed this distinction; but have regarded the world as "Deum explicatum,* God expanded or unfolded—and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, radios Deitatis, the rays of Deity."

Now the waters which are above the heavens are those which proceed from the throne of God, as described in the Apocalypse; and they are waters of life, or living waters, which descend from above into the minds of the angels; and therefore when it is said, "Praise him ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens," it is said by an ancient writer, that the waters which are above, are those which flow from divine and celestial motives, and which purify the soul: in which case the appeal in the Psalm is made to Divine Truth, to descend and enable the mind to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. In† profane writings, says Swedenborg, the appeal to the stars, the sun and moon, water and whales, fire and hail, mountains, trees, beasts and cattle, would be regarded as merely hyperbolical; "but in the Word of the Lord nothing is hyperbolical but everything is significative and representative." Accordingly Dean Treuch‡ also observes, that the entire moral and visible world is from beginning and a mighty parable, a great teaching of super-sensuous truth, a help at once to our faith and to our understanding. Here again is a recognition of principle which distinguishes between the waters.

And who is it that first distinguished betw

* Ibid., ii., 100.

† Arcana Celestia, art. 776.

‡ Notes on the Parables, p. 16.

"WATERS ABOVE THE EXPANSE."

them?—The WORD OF GOD who created them; that very WORD which said, "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst." When therefore the Word of God distinguished between the waters, did he omit from the "Divine Idea" the spiritual waters, and think only of the natural, of which whosoever drinketh shall thirst again? Did he mean to tell us in the first Chapter of Genesis, that the natural waters were first to be sought; and in the fourth chapter of John, not the natural but the spiritual? Or, if we admit that when He distinguished between the waters, He retained in His own Divine mind the idea of spiritual waters, did He so create and distinguish between the waters as to overlook the distinction between the spiritual and the natural, and thus exclude the spiritual altogether? If not, why shall we exclude it, under the pretext, that if we do not, we are substituting a mystical Creation for a physical, and indulging in mere imaginations? If, on the other hand, He did combine the two in His own Divine mind, why may we not do the same, when reading the Word written?

7. "And it was so:" the distinction was made by God himself, however that distinction might be afterwards confounded or obliterated. There was at first no more doubt of the work itself than of the Word. "And God said—and it was so:" it was the responsive Amen of the perceptive faculty, the moral certainty that the mind of man was then empowered by Divine Truth to make the distinction, that rendered man responsible for ever after for the use of that faculty; for which he could be justly called before a Divine

E 3 tribunal, and on which depended his everlasting condition.

8. "And God called the expanse Heaven." It is said of God, that "He calleth all the stars by their names," and this is generally admitted to signify that He knew their respective natures and qualities. What then is the quality signified by Heaven? The visible heaven is the sphere of the active forces of Nature. These forces are the disposers or the ordinators of all that is below, which is relatively passive; and therefore heaven implies what is active and interior, in relation to what is passive and exterior. In this point of view, therefore, heaven in the human mind is the region of the activities of interior thought and will; which in Scripture is always called "the kingdom of God within us," or "the kingdom of heaven;" because heaven or the spiritual mind rules the earth or the natural. And so important is this distinction between heavenly and earthly, that to confound it is the greatest possible of sins, viz., profanation—the very term holy signifying that which is set apart. Heaven therefore signifies the mundus intelligibilis in man as distinguished from the mundus sensibilis: and by God calling this region of the mind heaven, is signified the perception within the mind of a higher region distinct from the lower: and hence the necessity of assigning to it a distinct name, signifying that it is interior, spiritual, heavenly, and that to it are all rule and government committed. God calls the expanse heaven to signify that it was supreme, hence His own dwelling place in the human mind, from which he would dispose into order the natural mind

"DIVIDED THE WATERS"— below. The expression therefore has an especial relation to the first principles of Divine Order.

This view of the subject is confirmed by Kirby in his Bridgewater Treatise;*

"What are the Heavens? This is a query which at first every one thinks he can answer; but yet when the term comes to be sifted, it will be found that few have any definite idea of its real meaning. Generally speaking, the expanse over our heads, and the bodies it contains, are understood by the word Heavens; but when analyzed, it will be found to indicate chiefly powers in action contained in that expanse, and which act upon these bodies; powers that in the various systems of the Universe have various centres dispersed throughout space, each having a local or partial action upon its own system, and all derived originally, and still maintained, from and by one parent fountain, the centre of all irradiation, of all light, of all life and energy."

"Heaven or the heavens—in the Hebrew language is derived from a root, which signifies to dispose, or place with skill, care, and order, as say the lexicographers; so that literally the common plural term would be the disposers or placers."

Hence the deities of the Greeks were called θέοι, disposers or placers, i.e., of all things in the world, and to them were assigned their distribution and ordination.† The term therefore has an especial reference to the previous state of Chaos; God having established in the human mind an expanse or region

* Introduction, p. 77, 78.

† This derivation of the term harmonizes with the fact: but another has been given, viz., from θέω to run—in reference to the courses of the stars, which also were supposed, in their circuits, to govern all things. Cudworth's Intellectual System, ii. 400.


of thoughts and affections, which were thence to flow down into the mental Chaos or natural mind, and thus reduce it to order. To call the expanse heaven is, therefore, to endue that region of the mind with that nature and quality which heaven signifies. This distinction began to be lost sight of at the Fall; and the consequence has been Naturalism and Pantheism. The deities, who have been the disposers and placers, have been the senses; or else the sciences as founded upon observation and experiment. In these, and by these, have been built up the human mind, that is to say, its inverted self-hood. "The* knowledge of truth, you will find," says Lucretius, "is derived from the senses as its origin, and you will own that the senses cannot be refuted... That therefore which at any time whatsoever seemed to be true to them, is true."

Now the faculty of discerning truth from falsehood, good from evil, is the distinguishing faculty of the human mind; and the question of Pilate—"What is truth" shewed at once that this faculty was lost or that the region of the mind, originally called heaven, had been closed. Hence, when our Lord said "Hereafter shall ye see heaven opened," it implies that he had come to open that region of the mind which pertained the faculty of perceiving truth, thus create the expanse anew. Therefore He said so of "the kingdom of heaven—of the new expanse—in hand"—that inward region in which truth is perceived, into which it was received, and from which sovereignty over the natural mind was to be exercised. It was in this way that Stephen saw heaven of

* Lucretius, book iv., 479.

"THE DRY LAND"— and the truth in its reality—"Jesus—standing at the right hand of God;" because first of all the heavens had been opened within Jesus Himself, when He saw the spirit of God (i.e., of Truth) descending upon Him like a dove. And He it was who opened the kingdom of heaven, thus of truth, to all believers. To a large portion of mankind this expanse, or kingdom of heaven, has been closed, and has become a lost region of the human mind. The question is still asked—"What is truth?"

9. "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear." The process of distinction is still carried on. "All knowledges," says the Glossa, "are within the understanding; and thus the flesh" (or the sensuous sphere of the mind, the mundus sensibilis) "is seen to be without them; but as in this case it is ruled from heaven, i.e., the spirit, it makes proficiency in good works, wherefore it is added, 'let the earth bring forth,'" etc. The interpretation given by Swedenborg teaches that all rational knowledges constitute a distinct and superior sphere of the mind, in which they have their place, order, and arrangement; and as such that the animal or corporeal man is seen to be in an inferior place or region. The two regions ultimately receive distinct names, because they are distinct things; the distinction being made by the Creator Himself, and thus implying a Divine order of things introduced into the original constitution of the human mind. Thus, for instance, we have the internal man called heaven, as distinguished from the external man; and now at length the external man is distinguished into seas and earth, or knowledge and will; the will here spoken of being that by which external actions are performed. If we consider, says a writer,*—

"The order of things in the frame of the world, we find the body of the earth situated first and lowest in order, over which the water is spread as being lighter and more moveable; next above the water is the air or atmosphere; and above that a purer region, to which they (viz., the ancients) gave the name of fire.

In respect to their weight, says he, they naturally dispose themselves into this order; earth takes its place below water, water below air, air below the more subtle and active elements of the heavens. Now the order observable in the outward universe, is not more accurate than that observable in the inward. The regions of the mind are arranged one above the other with the utmost exactitude; and all this that external things might not rule over internal—the natural mind over the spiritual; for in this inversion of order, as we shall afterwards perceive, consisted the Fall.

"Let the dry land appear:" "My soul thirsteth for thee," says the Psalmist, "my flesh longeth for thee in a barren and dry land, where no water is," i.e., no waters of life, or living waters, no truths of the Word of God. The dry or dry land, is that which receives the waters; and here represents the heart or affections thirsting after divine truth, thus it represents a soil in the effort to bring forth herbage—i.e., a soil which is good ground. In the present

* Works of the Rev. W. Jones, Nayland. Vol. ix. p. 174.

"THE DRY LAND"— case, the dry land is distinguished from the waters: the person is conscious of the distinction between the desire of knowledge for its own sake, and the desire of knowledge with a view to bring forth first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Hence God called the dry land earth; and it is immediately afterwards added, "And God said, Let the earth bring forth, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind."

Earth possessing these qualities is interpreted by our Lord as signifying an honest and good heart, fitted to receive and nourish the seed of the Word; hence also its denomination as matter from mater, as denoting its uses in receiving, nourishing, and bringing forth; hence also the term Nature, as signifying the offspring of matter, or germinations from the earth: in the present case the earth yielding seed.

10. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas." The general name of Seas is here given to all kinds of external scientiæ, called by our older writers knowledges. In the prophecy of Jacob concerning Joseph it is said,* The God of thy fathers "shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under," etc., signifying truth in the superior region of the mind, or heavenly truth; and truth in the inferior region of the mind, or external knowledges. So again, "He hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods." The floods here spoken of are rivers which flow from their

* Genesis xlix. 25; so also Deuteronomy xxxiii. 13. This interpretation is taken from the Arcana Celestia, art. 6431.

springs down into the sea, the sea being in this case the boundary of the rivers on the one side as the springs are on the other. It is in the sense of the seas being thus the ultimate limit or boundary of the waters, where they are gathered together, that the name of seas is here given; earth having relation to the affections, and seas to external knowledge; for literally speaking, neither the earth nor the world are established or founded upon water. Similar distinctions are implied in the Apocalypse,—"Worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters."—"And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters."—"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters." And further, we are told of one beast arising out of the earth, and another out of the sea. The interpretations we have given of these terms are essentially the same with those which have been given by a whole catena of interpreters of the Apocalypse, from the earliest ages of the Christian Church.

Earth, taken in a good sense, as receiving the seed of the Word, and thus bringing forth fruit to perfection, signifies for this reason the Church.

In this favorable sense we find the symbol made use of in the Apocalypse:* "I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree;" in which

* Chap. vii. 1.

"THE DRY LAND"— case is signified, that no injury was to be permitted to the honest and good heart, to the external or inferior truths of which it was in possession, nor yet to truths of a higher order signified by trees; for trees, in the scale of vegetable life, are of a higher order than the herb or the grass.

So again:* "The first angel sounded and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth; and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." By green grass is signified the incipient or rudimentary truths of the Word of God, which had been received in stony places, and when the sun was risen, having no root they were scorched and withered up: and by the trees are meant truths of a higher order, which were scorched and withered up for the same reason. The burning up of grass and trees, says a commentator, is to express the decay of spiritual life and moisture in all true Christianity, and that not only in weak ones as grass, but in the strong as trees.

Again: "It was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, nor any tree;" where grass signifies the external truths of faith which first spring up in man; any green thing, whatsoever has any spiritual life; and tree, the perceptions of truth which lead to the fruits of a good life.

So again in Isaiah:† "The grass faileth, there is no green thing;" and again in Zechariah,‡ "The Lord shall make bright clouds, and give them showers

* Chap. viii. 7; ix. 4.

† Chap. xv. 6.

‡ Chap. x. 1.

the good ground in which the Creator sows of virtue.

Correspondences have indeed been popular metaphors or figures of speech; whereas figures of things. We have already observed in natural science the relation of the vegetation to the animal, and of the animal kite man is not metaphorical, but founded upon relations of structure and function: were we wise, there could be no such sciences as the Native Anatomy and Comparative Physiology on the ground of these organic correspondence that there has been established, what has been nominated, a unity between the plant, the land and man.

It is on this ground that, in the Mosaic like religious rite was predicated with the trees as with respect to men. "When ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit as uncircumcised: three years shall it be uncircumcised to you; it shall not be eaten of the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be praise the Lord withal." It is obvious in that pruning was to the tree what circumcised

* Rewards and Punishments, art. 2.

† Leviticus

"LET THERE BE LIGHTS"— to man, and that, consequently, pruning, regarded as circumcision, had a signification beyond the external act: namely, that as the land was to be regarded as profaned by the former idolatries, so was the fruit of the tree, as being the produce of the land, to be regarded as unholy; that as the land was now to be dedicated to Jehovah, so was also the fruit of the tree—a dedication represented by the pruning or circumcision of the trees. In this case the tree was regarded, at first, as being such only as the unhallowed earth could bring forth; and such as was the earth, such, in this case, was the vegetation.

Now, in the first chapter of Genesis, the earth was not yet in the paradisiacal state; therefore neither was the vegetation: hence, as we shall see in its proper place, it is altogether different from that which is mentioned in the second chapter. The two narratives therefore do not clash, because they relate to different things, i.e., to two different states of the human mind; the earth having a relation to the first efforts of the will toward good from those new motives which arise after the mind has been led to distinguish heavenly things from earthly, and to suffer itself to be ruled by influences from heaven. The state therefore of the will, as here described, is parallel to that of which our Saviour speaks when He says, "If any man will do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God."

We are now describing actual stages of progression in the regenerate life: and have seen that the state before the commencement of this life was what is commonly called the state of Nature, and is represented by Chaos, in which no distinction is perceived between things natural and spiritual: this is a state of darkness. The first step out of this state is illustration by the Spirit of God, or an entrance of light from above into the external knowledges (scientæ) of the mind: hence a progression from evening to morning, from ignorance to knowledge. The second step is, consequently, a perception of the distinction between things natural and things spiritual. The third step is another distinction, but in the natural mind only, namely, between water (scientæ) and earth; or between knowledge and the first efforts of the will to bring forth the lowest forms of life. We now proceed to the fourth step.

14. "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years."

15. "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth: and it was so."

"Well is it said that first of all," says the Glosse, "the earth brought forth grass and herb, and that the luminaries were made afterwards; because after good works are wrought then comes illumination, by which is signified the appearance of truth from above. On the fourth day on which, in the firmament above mentioned, the mind originates spiritual perceptions, and distinguishes between them, it sees what is unchangeable Truth, which shines as a Sun in the soul; and how the soul is made partaker of it, and communicates order and beauty to the body as the moon illuminates the night.

"LET THERE BE LIGHTS"— la which firmament also all the stars, i.e., all spiritual perceptions, shine in the darkness of this life, as in the night."

In the Wisdom* of Solomon those who had persecuted the righteous man are represented as saying, "Therefore have we erred from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness hath not shined unto us, and the Sun of righteousness rose not upon us." And in Malachi—"Unto† you that fear my name, shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings."

When God said, "Let there be light," the waters became the medium of the light, and thus appeared to be self-luminous, or as if the light proceeded from them. So we speak of the light of natural reason, as if natural reason were self-luminous; and though we may say that it is not so, but that it proceeds from the Spirit of God giving light to the scientiæ acquired by natural reason, yet there is at first no perception that this is the case, because no perception of higher truths, hence of that expanse or higher region of the mind where spiritual truth is perceived as distinct from merely natural.

This expanse is created by the acquisition of spiritual or heavenly truths: and, consequently, being of an order superior to that of the natural mind, the apparent source of light is transferred from one region of the mind to another, thus, from earth to heaven; for as, at first, it was the waters (scientiæ) of the earth or natural mind that gave light, so now it is the expanse above the earth, in which are fixed and settled principles of truth and love, from which light

* Chap. v. 6.

† Malachi iv. 2.

and heat flow down to the natural mind. And not only so, but the mind is brought into the perception that it is so.

We thus see the force of the expression, "Let there be lights in the expanse;" i.e., not in the waters or scientiæ below the expanse, but in the region above the natural mind, in which are contained those truths which are to operate as the living, active forces, disposing, ordering, and energizing all that is in the passive region of the natural faculties below. When these sources of light are closed to the mind, its state is thus described: "I beheld* the heavens, and they had no light."—"When† I shall put thee out I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark: I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light. All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee; and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord God."—"It shall‡ be dark to you that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them."

These are not poetical expressions, as commonly supposed, but signs made use of to describe the moral and spiritual state of the mind. God did not say, Let them be for metaphors, but for signs. And in like manner as when the bright lights of heaven are put out, the expanse of heaven disappears; so when the light of spiritual truth is put out, men deny the existence in the human mind of the expanse, thus of any capacity for knowing the things of heaven. Hence the denial of the Science of Corre-

* Jeremiah iv. 23.

† Ezekiel xxxii. 7.

‡ Micah iii. 6.

" LET THERE BE LIGHTS"— spondence; for there can be no correspondence between the things of heaven and the things of earth, if no expanse of heaven has yet been created; because the correspondence cannot be perceived before it exists. The state of illumination, however, here referred to, is not that of the vision of God; for the Christian, in the present case, does not behold the Sun, but the objects upon earth illuminated by the Sun, that is, truths in the natural mind illuminated by Spiritual truths from above. It is light from the objects that he beholds, not the light as distinguished from the objects seen in the light; for it is expressly said, that the end in view was "to give light upon earth," i.e., to the region of the natural mind. It was by the state of these lights that the whole state of the human mind was to be judged; and therefore it is that they were to serve as signs of all the various phases of the Church. Such as was the state of these luminaries, such was the state of the Church. If this Sun were darkened, the Church was darkened; if the Moon were turned into blood, the truth of the Church was corrupted; if the Stars fell from heaven, the Church had lost possession of the spiritual knowledges which God had once set up in her expanse. If, therefore, we would judge of the state of mankind, thus of the Church, we must judge of her by the state of these lights. And, indeed, this we see acknowledged in the Homilies of the Church of England, where it is said,—

"But* indeed God would signify by the darkness of the Sun, into what darkness and blindness of ignorance and

* Second Part of the Sermon against Peril of Idolatry.

idolatry, Christendom should fall by the occasion of images. The bright Sun of His eternal Truth, and light of His holy Word, by the mists and black clouds of men's traditions being blemished and darkened," etc., etc.

It is in the same sense that Isaiah says, "The Stars of heaven* and the constellations thereof shall not give their light, the Sun shall be darkened in his going forth and the Moon shall not cause her light to shine;" for Wisdom itself, as the brightness of the everlasting light, is that Sun whose beams are intercepted in their going forth; the Moon, the truths of faith and charity received from that Sun; and the Stars, the spiritual knowledges of the Word of God; so that if in a dark state of the Church a person should say—"Love and wisdom no longer animate and enlighten the Church; faith and charity have departed; there is no knowledge of the truths salvation:" supposing such an one to be caught up into heaven like St. John, he would see the same truths in representative forms; Stars with their light being extinguished; and a Sun and Moon undergoing eclipse. Hence we read that—"The† fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the Sun was smitten, and the third part of the Moon, and the third part of the Stars, so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for the third part of it, and the night likewise." In this case the Sun, Moon, and Stars were fulfilling their office as signs.

So again in Zechariah:‡ "And it shall come to pass in that day that the light shall not be clear nor

* Isaiah xiii. 10. † Apocalypse viii. 12. ‡ Chap. xiv. 6.

"LET THERE BE LIGHTS"— dark; but it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord: not day nor night; but it shall come to pass that at evening time it shall be light."

"In that day, under the Christian dispensation," says Scott, "for a long season the light would be neither clear nor dark: it would be greatly obscured by ignorance, heresy, superstition, and idolatry; yet not wholly extinguished; and the state of the Church would be much deformed by sin and calamities; yet some holiness and consolation would be found. This period could neither be called a clear bright day, cheered and illumined by the shining of a summer's sun, nor would it be dark as if the Sun were set or totally eclipsed; but it would contain a great mixture of truth and error, of holiness and sin, of happiness and misery. Yet it would form one day, and never be interrupted by a night of total darkness. It would also be known unto the Lord as to the degree of its light and the term of its continuance; and he would watch over it and take care of his cause and people during all the time of it. But his people would hardly know whether to call it day or night, or a compound of both; yet at length, toward the evening of the world, the Sun of Righteousness would break forth and shine with unclouded splendor, dispelling the gloom of ignorance, heresy, idolatry, and superstition; and illuminating the Church and the earth with knowledge, righteousness, peace and consolation."

Accordingly a writer in his Memoirs of a Deist,* when shewing how he passed from Deism to Christianity, observes—"Thus the light of the Word of God, and particularly of the New Testament, became to me as the Sun of my soul; and human nature became as the earth which it enlivens and enlightens." The reason of this language was, that God was then

* Part I., 179.

F performing in his mind the work of the Fourth day. He had created the expanse above, and distinguished between the waters and the dry land below. The tender herb had begun to spring up; and then came the manifestation of the truth from above, as fixed and undoubted as the Sun in the firmament.

We are now enabled to see whence Plato and Philo borrowed their ideas concerning the Sun, Moon, and Stars; for Plato illustrated his doctrine of the Supreme Good by a resemblance to the Sun: as to the Supreme Good, says he,—

"This* is the same in the intelligible world to intellect (or knowledge) and intelligibles, that the Sun is in the sensible world to sight and visibles. For as the Sun is not sight but only the cause of it; nor is that light by which we see, the same with the Sun itself, but only ἡλιασίξεν a Sun-like thing; so neither is the Supreme and Highest Good properly knowledge, but the cause of knowledge; nor is intellect, precisely considered as such, the best and most perfect being, but only ἀγαθοσίξεν, a boniform thing. Again, as the Sun gives to things not only their visibility, but also their generation; so does that Highest Good not only cause the cognoscibility of things, but also their very essences and beings.—This Highest Good being not in itself properly essence, but above essence, transcending the same, both in respect of dignity and power."

But whence did Plato derive this doctrine? According to Celsus it should seem, that "the† doctrine of eternal ideas, as the paradigms and patterns of all things here below in this sensible world, was not proper to Plato nor the Greeks, but common with

* Intellectual System, ii., 302.

† Ibid., p. 547.

"LET THERE BE LIGHTS"— them to the Egyptians also." Nay, even Julian, borrowing from Plato, says—"that* visible Sun which we see with our eyes, is but an image of another intelligible and invisible one; so likewise the visible Moon, and every one of the Stars are but the images and resemblances of another moon and of other stars intelligible."

"Philo indeed† Platonized so far, as to suppose God to have made an archetypal and intelligible world before he made this corporeal and sensible; (for he says:) God intending to make a visible world, first formed an intelligible one; that so having an incorporeal and most godlike pattern before Him, He might make the corporeal world agreeably to the same, this younger an image of that older, that should contain as many sensible kinds in it, as the other did intelligible. But it is not possible, saith he, to conceive this world of ideas to exist in any place.—Nay, according to him, Moses himself philosophized after the same manner in his Cosmopœia, describing in the first five verses of Genesis the making of an intelligible heaven and earth before the sensible. (For, says he), the Creator first of all made an incorporeal heaven and an invisible earth; the ideas of air and vacuum; incorporeal water and air; and last of all Light which was also the incorporeal and intelligible paradigm of the Sun and Stars, and that from whence their sensible light is derived."

The consequence of this doctrine was, says Cudworth, that in the sensible sign they professed to worship the Divine Idea; in the visible Sun, the Divine Sun. Accordingly even Julian believed that "from‡ the first and chief Deity was produced a certain intelligible and Archetypal Sun, which hath the same

* Ibid., ii., p. 488, 34. † Ibid., iii., 48.

‡ Ibid., ii., 34, 522.

the sensible Sun existed, their belief would have only in the *mundus sensibilis*, and every very faith in God as the Supreme Good, would have swept from their minds.

We are, however, further told that “Philæ to speak of a double Sun, Moon, and Heaven.” Julian did, the one sensible, the other intelligent for both acknowledged that “men ought not to and contemplate the heaven and the world in the same eyes that oxen and horses do; but so that which is visible to their outward senses to and discover another invisible nature under. Would that modern Literalists took a lesser of these Pagans; surely by the intelligible, “Divine Idea,” we are not to suppose that meant the natural or physical sciences, such as tronomy, zoology, botany, geology, and so for a knowledge answering to that which in the Testament is called spiritual and which is h.

"LET THE WATERS BRING FORTH—"

We now come to the Fifth stage in the process of bringing the mind out of Chaos into Paradise.

20. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21. And God created great whales, and every living thing that moveth which the waters brought forth abundantly," etc.

It has been observed by some philosophers, that if there existed no animals, the human mind would be far more incomprehensible than it is; and they have consequently studied the natural history of animals, in order to make themselves better acquainted with the corresponding qualities of human nature. So with regard to the anatomical structure of the human frame; every structure in the animal world has been studied for the purpose of shewing its place in the animal kingdom, and its relation to man. Nothing would be regarded as more arbitrary, or unscientific, than to lay down a theory before hand that some animal organisms have relation to man, and some, not; and in virtue of this theory to select what examples we pleased, and regard these only as related to the structure of the human body.

Yet this is what has been done in theology. A few isolated examples have been selected in illustration of the moral and spiritual nature of man: these are regarded as exceptions to the rest of the animal creation; the consequence has been, the application of a principle of Correspondence in a few select cases, to the exclusion of nearly the whole animal creation from the same law. It is for this reason, that we have first endeavored to establish universal principles—principles which comprehend the lowest as well as the highest forms of animal life, the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the earth: all having their place in the order of Correspondence. In so doing, we have only regarded Theology as standing in a relation toward the animal world as universal as that of Zoology. Nay, in this respect, the Word of God has preceded the discoveries of Science; for in describing the moral and spiritual state of the Church, the whole animal world has been, as it were, laid under contribution; it has made no more exceptions in illustrating the nature of man, than has Science itself. With these preliminary remarks, we proceed to observe: that—

Water is an element which is intermediate between the air and the earth: it may be called therefore a denser atmosphere, and indeed is the lowest in which living creatures respire. It is to this denser atmosphere that the scientiæ of the natural mind correspond, and hence that they are the lowest forms of spiritual thought. There are those who have regarded even the material element of water as the earliest abode of animal life; and certainly it is in this Chapter regarded as symbolizing the earliest abode of spiritual life, or spiritual life as a life, like that of fishes, on its earliest and lowest scale. There is no more absurdity in regarding the life of fishes in this respect as representing the earliest beginnings of spiritual life, than there is in regarding the vertebræ of fishes as foreshadowing those of man: for, in a scientific point of view, the life of fishes is to the animal life of man, as

"GREAT WHALES"— the structure of fishes to that of the human body. Before the relation was discovered of the icthyic structure to that of the human frame, no perceptible relation might be discovered between fishes and man, and thus the passages in Scripture relating to fishes would be regarded only as metaphorical, sometimes to a degree of absurdity.—"The* fear of you shall be on all the fishes of the sea"—"the† fishes of the sea and the fowls of heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, shall shake at my presence," &c. "The‡ fishes of the sea shall be taken away;" "I will§ consume the fishes of the sea." In some cases the fishes were seen in vision, that is to say, in representative forms in the Spiritual World; and in that world they have as much relation to the mind of man, as in this world to the body of man.

Hence the Glossa observes—By waters are signified knowledges, of which some are speculative and are signified by birds; and some practical (i. e., external) which are signified by fishes.

Haymo likewise explains as follows the passage in the Apocalypse xv. 3:—

"'Every living soul died in the sea,'—is to be understood of those only, who, in reading the law, attend to nothing else but the letter, as did the Jews; but who ceased to be dead, especially from that time in which they began to live as believers, through the medium of its spiritual senses."

Fishes therefore represent those external truths of

* Gen. ix. 2.

† Ezek. xxxvi. 20.

‡ Hosea iv. 3.

§ Zephaniah l. 3.

the Word of God in the natural mind, which are animated by the earliest influxes of spiritual life.

When animated by a spiritual life they are in their own divine order; but when they represent not truths, but falses, they are spiritual monsters of the deep, sharks, behemoth, leviathan, the creations of self-intelligence. Hence in order to exhibit the frightful nature of such mental deformities, "Though* they dig into hell, saith the Lord, thence shall mine hand take them—though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent and he shall bite them."—Accordingly, when speaking of the power of God in destroying these monsters of the human mind, the Psalmist observes, "Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him as meat for the people inhabiting the wilderness"—the giant powers of darkness who feed upon these gigantic falsehoods. We may philosophize as we please upon the nature of good and evil, but no abstract speculations are calculated to inspire such terror into the human mind, and such awe at the power of Omnipotence over these spirits of darkness, as the representations here given; and which, as in the case of the Dragon, are representative forms, actually visible in the Spiritual World.

We may, likewise, upon this principle understand the history of Jonah and the whale; for as "Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three

* Amos ix. 2, 3.

"FOWL THAT MAY FLY"— nights in the heart of the earth;" by which is signified a plenary absorption into those external scientiæ, which were represented by the whale, from out of which the Lord emerged by his own Divine Power, and was hence enabled to remove from man those spirits of darkness which corresponded to these forms, and by which these evils had been brought upon the earth.

In most of these instances fishes have been taken in an evil sense; but in the first chapter of Genesis they are taken in a good sense, as we read also in the vision of Ezekiel: "And it shall come to pass that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers come, shall live, and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because their waters shall come thither;"—referring to the abundant increase of human knowledges, and their animation by good affections.

With respect to the winged fowl which the waters are to bring forth, and which are to fly in the open expanse of heaven, they are representations of thoughts of a higher kind; for they fly above the earth, and ascend to heavenly things.

"Thought,* discursive and excursive thought, that is not confined to the contemplation of things of earth, things that are immediately about us, but can elevate itself to heaven, and the heavenly bodies, not only to those of our own system, but can take flights beyond the bounds of time and space, and enter into the Holy of Holies, and contemplate Him who sitteth upon the cherubim, the throne of the Deity."

In describing the range of thought we naturally

* Kirby's Bridgewater Treatise, vol. i. Introduction, p. 30.

P 3 fall into expressions of this kind, because of the correspondence between the sign and the thing signified: hence the elevation of mind acquired by those who wait upon the Lord—"They that wait upon the Lord shall mount up with wings as eagles." The ground and reason of this expression is, that in the mind there is an expanse; that this expanse has its own proper height and depth, length and breadth, in which take place corresponding motions of elevation or depression.

As the Waters bring forth the fish and the fowl, so the earth brings forth the wild beast and creeping thing after his kind.

On the third day a distinction was made between the waters and the dry land, or between the seas and the earth: the same distinction is here maintained. The waters are the scientiæ of the natural mind; the earth the affections of the will; for which reason, as we have seen, it represents an honest and good heart. We need not say how the heart has been represented as the abode of good or evil affections; of the lamb, the kid, the dove, and every clean and domesticated animal; or of the wolf, the tiger, the fox, and every wild and unclean creature. A knowledge of these animals, and of what they represent would furnish us with a knowledge of the corresponding qualities of the human mind. This is the more important for us to remember, because, as we shall see, the retrogression of the human mind is represented as having been effected by means of one of these animals, namely, a serpent, included under the expression "every creeping thing."

"POWL THAT MAY FLY"—

Thus, as there is said to be an orderly distribution of the parts of human bodies throughout the organic kingdoms of nature; so there is a like distribution of qualities of the animal nature of man, representing, according as they are good or evil, those of a corresponding spiritual nature. Metaphysicians may prefer their own abstract terms; but it is a fact, that the method employed by Scripture in describing and teaching the nature of the voluntary and intellectual faculties is not by abstract, but by concrete terms, not by logical and metaphysical language (for this kind of language was not yet invented in primeval times), but by the objects of the visible world employed as signs, upon the principle of Correspondence—a principle in harmony with that of the Ancient Philosophy.

Thus in regard to the animal creation Cudworth observes;—

..."We find* in Origen, that, as the Egyptian theologers called their religious animals symbols of the eternal ideas, so did they also call them symbols of God. Celsus applauds the Egyptian theologers talking so magnificently and mysteriously of those brute animals worshipped by them, and affirming them to be certain symbols of God." In due time the symbolical meaning was lost, and then succeeded the worship of the sign instead of the thing signified; or, in the words of the Apostle, "They worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator." In what respect the animal kingdom symbolized the attributes of Deity, we may see in the case of the Cherubim where four

* Intellectual System, ii., 549.

animals are represented as full of eyes before and behind; the first animal was like a lion, the second like a calf, the third had a face as a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle: the first signifying Divine power: the second Divine affection: the third Divine Wisdom: the fourth Divine intelligence. However variously interpreted, these animals are generally regarded as symbolizing Divine qualities.

Now, we have seen from the doctrine of Typical Forms and Special Adaptations, that the whole animal kingdom has relation to MAN, and this by reason of organic correspondences:

"Professor* Agassiz, after declaring that as yet we scarcely possess the most elementary information requisite for a scientific comparison of the instincts and faculties of animals with those of Man, confesses that he cannot say in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those of a young chimpanzee. He also observes, that the range of the passions of animals is as extensive as that of the human mind; and I am at a loss to perceive a difference of kind between them, however much they may differ in degree, and in the manner in which they are expressed. The gradations among the moral faculties among the higher animals and Man are, moreover, so imperceptible, that to deny to the first a certain sense of responsibility and consciousness, would certainly be an exaggeration of the difference between animals and Man."

Unquestionably Man, in his animal state, is an animal. But he has the faculty of acquiring knowledge; and the knowledges thus acquired the Spirit

* Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, by Sir Charles Lyell, p. 493.

"LET US MAKE MAN"— of God incubates. Can we say this of the animal creation? Can we say that spiritual light enters from above into its acquired knowledge, and enables it to perceive the existence of another world above the visible? Can it perceive the distinctions between intellect and will? Can it act from fixed principles of spiritual light and life? We are told, that "most of the arguments of philosophy in favor of the immortality of Man, apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings." But what is the immortality of Man? "This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."—"He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die;" and why not? Because,—"Yet not I live, but Christ liveth in me."—Immortality, according to the Scriptures, is not continued existence, but something more—it is the life of God in the spirit of man; and therefore, even supposing the existence of animals to be continued hereafter, they never could have immortality in the same sense with Man; nor could they enjoy a life in heaven, unless they had been endowed upon earth with the power of distinguishing heavenly things from earthly, and suffering the earthly to be ruled by the heavenly; in which case they would be no longer animals but men. Animals, therefore, may be representatives of the spiritual life, but can never be more.

26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness."—"By the image of God," says the Glossa, "is signified faith and by likeness love; for love transforms the one who loves into the one who is loved." The image of God therefore has relation to truth, the likeness of God to love; in the present case the love of the truth as it is in Him. Hence Cudworth, speaking of the three essentials of the Deity, says—"The first whereof is infinite Goodness with fecundity; the second infinite Knowledge and Wisdom; and the last infinite active and perceptive Power."* This is the Trinity in God; and corresponding to this is the trinity in man, of love, wisdom, and power; the first having relation to the will, the second to the understanding, the third to external action.

This Trinity, as we have seen, was shadowed forth in the Tabernacle as containing the Holy of Holies, the Sanctuary, and the Court; the Tabernacle, being after the pattern of things in the Heavens, exemplified corresponding divisions in the heavens themselves, that is, corresponding orders of the angelic hosts in accordance with the three Divine attributes of Love, Wisdom, and Power; hence the ancient classification of the Heavens into three; which Lord Bacon thus notices in his De Augmentis Scientiarum:†—

"To proceed to that which is next in order from God to spirits. We find, as far as credit is to be given to the celestial hierarchy of that supposed Dionysius, the senator of Athens, the first place or degree is given to the angels of Love, which are termed Seraphim: the second to the angels of Light, which are termed Cherubim; and the third, and so following places, to thrones, principalities, and the rest, which are all angels of Power and Ministry; so as the angels of Knowledge and Illumination are placed before the angels of Office and Domination;"—

* Intellectual System, i., p. 426. † p. 54. Montagu's Ed.

"LET US MAKE MAN"—

And we may add, the angels of Love before the angels of Light.

We may thus see the correspondence between God-man and the creature man; for in God the human attributes, Love, Wisdom, and Power are Divine; in man they are creaturely: in both the three essentials are called by the same names.

But how can the Creator, on this occasion, be called God-man? Did he not become God-man only at the Incarnation? We have already answered in part this question; and we here further observe, that Our Lord said to Philip, "He that hath seen me, hath seen my Father also."—"Thus Manoah," as Bishop Horsley observes, "having seen the Jehovah-Angel, said with truth he had seen Elohim. We may add with respect to both these passages, what Mr. Parkhurst has remarked of the second, that the Word Elohim is applied to the second Person singly, as the representative of the whole Trinity." Now* the angel which appeared to Manoah is called "a Man of God:" thus our Lord as God-man, and His Person as such, is representative of the whole Trinity. This God-man is the Archetypal form, to which all created forms have more or less relation; thus not only that of the spirit of man, but of the material body in the sense in which we have already explained it.

* Dorner says of this doctrine, "One would suppose that if God were originally and essentially Man, he cannot need afterwards to become Man" (Div. ii., vol. ii., p. 333). To which we reply, that originally and essentially God-man was the Word, but not the Word made flesh.—"And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a Man with him until the breaking of the day," Gen. xxxii. 24.

This brings us to a further explanation of the words, "And God said."

As the revelation of God to man is through the medium of a human form, so this revelation is one not only of Godhead but of manhood. To suppose that a humanity united with Divinity would receive no illustration of its own nature, and would remain as obscurely known to man as if it were in a state of total separation from Deity, would be absurd. And, therefore, when humanity is presented to our contemplation either in union with Deity (in which case it is Divine), or in relation to Deity, as the created image and likeness of God, we behold it in altogether a new aspect, and are presented with an Anthropology very different from that which would otherwise present itself.

This Anthropology is the one which is presented to us in the first chapter of Genesis: it is the relation of the sensuous, rational, and voluntary powers of man to their original; of the type to the Archetype; of man as a spirit to God-man as a spirit; and, therefore, it necessarily treats of the spiritual relation of man to God, and of the laws and order of spiritual things. This is that view of the human mind which is peculiar to a book which claims to be a Revelation of God; and every system of philosophy of the human mind is either true or false in proportion as it receives or rejects these fundamental principles. To contemplate the human mind apart from that of which it is the image and likeness, can only lead to false ideas. That in virtue of which man is man, is his being the image and likeness of God. Until, therefore, he is

"IN OUR IMAGE"— created into this image and likeness he is not man actually, but only potentially; and if he denies the existence of God, he denies the existence of man; for man being the image and likeness of God, if there be no God, he is in the image and likeness of nothing; and man is not man, but a fool—he is his own idol, and an idol is nothing.

We have now traced the development and progress of the human mind from its primordial and sensuous state, to that in which it is created in the image and likeness of God; and are thus enabled to reconcile two opposite and contending theories respecting the origin and primeval state of man:

"When animals,"* says Horace, "first crept forth from the newly formed earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking places with their nails and fists, then with clubs, and at last with arms which, taught by experience, they had forged. They then invented names for things, and words to express their thoughts; after which they began to desist from war, to fortify cities, and enact laws. They who in later times have embraced a similar theory, have been led to it by no deference to the opinions of their pagan predecessors, but rather in spite of very strong prepossessions in favor of an opposite hypothesis, namely, that of the superiority of their original progenitors, of whom they believe themselves to be the corrupt and degenerate descendants."

That is, as I understand, they did so believe themselves, before they were led to adopt the opposite hypothesis.

The characters which most obviously distinguish

* Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. By Sir Charles Lyell. p. 379.

man from the brute are, according to a French physiologist—

..."The* abstract notion of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, or the moral faculty, and a belief in a world beyond ours, and in certain mysterious beings, or a Being of a higher nature than ours, whom we ought to fear or revere; in other words, the religious faculty."

"Animals† are born what they are intended to remain. Nature has bestowed upon them a certain rank, and limited the extent of their capacity by an impassable decree. Man she has empowered and obliged to become the artificer of his own rank in the scale of beings, by the peculiar gift of improvable reason."

But whence arose in man the notion of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice? Whence the moral faculty, the belief in God and in a world beyond this? How was it that the primeval man became the artificer of his own rank? And if his reason were improveable, what was the method by which it was improved? Interpret the first chapter of Genesis in the literal sense only, and we are left as much in the dark upon these subjects as ever: interpret the chapter in the spiritual sense, and all these questions are answered. Whether there was any portion of the human race still left in the sensuous state; whether there were other portions who reached only to some particular stage in the progression, it is not necessary at present to state; but one thing is certain, that there were those who advanced from the animal state, through the rational to the spiritual, or to the image and likeness of God;

* Ibid., p. 496.

† Ibid., p. 497.

"IN OUR IMAGE"— whence also the name of Adam, as including the two sexes.

We are here reminded by a modern writer that :*—

"If the formation of a body corporate or polity be the end of creation, and the happiness of man depend upon admission into this polity, not upon an abstract recognition of truth, or individual and detached morality; then we see at once the reason why the Christian revelation is presented to man as it is presented, through the medium of the Christian Church."†

And was not Adam himself a Church? Or, if we regard the name as generic, must there not have been an Adamic Church? In either case was this Church an automaton?

True it is, that it was by Divine volition that the processes of Creation were carried on; and all the way through, we have explained these processes on the ground of the freedom of man not being interfered with. In what way, then, are we to understand that God made man in his own image and likeness, so as not to interfere with human freedom? for if He willed man to be so made, who, it may be asked, was there to resist His will?—In answer to this, we are told that, "When‡ God gave His Divine benediction to His creatures, and said, 'Increase and multiply,' God so speaking signified only that their natures were so constituted."—"Consider,"§ says Musculus, "that God is here speaking to the inhabitants of the water; an extraordinary way of speaking certainly.

* Dr. Sewell's Christian Vestiges of Creation. p. 146.

† So also Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom, art. 328.

‡ Glasse's Philologia Sacra. p. 1563. § Ibid.

Not, however, that He spake to their organs of hearing, but to those powers of nature by which He imparted naturally, by the word of His power, the capacity of propagating their kind." Hence he adds, "that the word of God is the Divine power and efficacy conspicuous in the creation and conservation of the creatures." Augustin all but furnishes the very interpretation we have before given of the expression, "God said:"—"It* is the unchangeable Truth either ineffably speaking by itself to the mind of the rational creature, or else speaking by the mutable creature; whether by spiritual images addressed to our spirit, or by vocal sounds addressed to the bodily sense."—We have already represented the language of God, as being addressed to the spirit of man by spiritual images, whether representative (as in the case of St. John in the Apocalypse), or as an influx of truths (ideas) from the Spirit of God into the human mind. These interior ideas constituted interior thought, which we have spoken of as interior language.

Accordingly, as the communication of truth to the mind is represented by God speaking, so the reception and intellection of those truths is represented by man hearing: "I† will hear what God the Lord will speak, for He shall speak peace unto His people and to His saints."—"He‡ that is of God heareth God's words."—"Hear§ and your soul shall live."—"I|| speak to the world those things which I have heard of him."—"They¶ shall be all taught of God.

* Ibid. † Psalm lxxxv. 8. ‡ John viii. 47. § Isaiah lv. 1

|| John viii. 26. ¶ John vi. 25.

"IN OUR IMAGE"—

Every man, therefore, that hath heard and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me."—It is in this sense both that God speaks to man, and that man hears what he says. When, therefore, we read that God said, "Let us make man in our image," etc., by this expression is signified the disposition of man to receive and the consequent reception of that influx of truth and love, in virtue of which he would be in the image of God after His likeness. On this ground we may understand the moral responsibility of the human mind.

For lay down as we may the principles of right and wrong, virtue and vice, truth and falsehood, good and evil; declare them to be founded upon eternal and immutable distinctions; yet what would be the use of all this, unless there were something in the primeval constitution of man to enable him to recognize these principles? Would it not be as useless as to create the light without creating an eye, or sound when there was no organ of hearing?

To say that man was made all at once and miraculously in the image and likeness of God; that this image and likeness consisted in a sudden endowment with rational faculties; and that while all the rest of organic nature was made in relation to the model of the human form, the human form was after no model at all, is to contravene every principle of philosophy, science, and theology.

In order to attain, therefore, to the image and likeness of God, it was essential to man not only that he should be originally in the image and likeness of God, but that he should see how it was that he should be so made; because he could not have been so made, except in the exercise of his own freedom, and the co-operation of his own rational faculties. Could we suppose God to have so made him, and yet to have kept him in ignorance of this subject, self-knowledge would have been a thing impossible; and he would have pursued an unintelligent course of rectitude, just in the same manner as a body once impelled to motion, would by its vis inertiae (so called) have moved on in a straight line for ever. To say that the free choice of the primeval man was exercised only in the loss of spiritual life, and not at all in the acquirement of it; that he was so created as to be free to choose evil, and yet not free to choose good; is only to say that he was free to lose his freedom, but not to gain it—free to die, but not free to live. In that case the very nature of good and evil must have been altogether different from the nature of good and evil as it now is: which is impossible.

If, then, man were brought into the gradual perception of good and evil, truth and error, it was of the utmost importance that he should see and know how that perception was created within him; for a revelation of truth would have been to him of no service, unless there had been first formed in him the faculty of perception; and we have already seen that perception and volition go hand in hand. Were the case otherwise, there would have been no use of this narrative: it would have been no use for man to know by what process God originally made him good, and wise, and innocent, for of his original goodness, wisdom, and innocence, man could have had no

"HERB BEARING SEED"— volition; and if no volition, no perception; and if no perception, no moral responsibility.

There is, therefore, an absolute necessity for the spiritual sense of this Chapter, after the manner in which we have explained it.

29. "And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

"The partaking of all kinds of herbs and trees for food," says a modern writer,* "signified the acquisition of knowledge. The same explanation applies to the partaking of all kinds of animals, and to the distinguishing between one kind and another (Gen. ix. 3). But here the difference in the quality of the food is also significant. As herbs are proper for the weak, and meat for the strong, so knowledge is of different degrees, varying by course of time in the same individual, and varying also in the world generally."

So again on the words—"Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

..."The literal subjugation of the objects named is not meant, but rather the subjugation of the qualities and affections of man's corporeal nature which they represent. These, for the time present, are antagonistic to his spiritual perfection, and will continue to be so, till in the end they are all brought

* Creation in Plan and Progress; being an Essay on the First Chapter of Genesis. By the Rev. James Challis, M.A., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, and late Fellow of Trinity College. p. 89, 90.

into subjection to the Son of Man, and time itself is overcome."

The esoteric method of interpretation which is here applied partially, viz., to particular passages, Swedenborg, as we have seen, applies to the whole chapter; but, says the Plumian Professor,—

"These views may be possibly regarded by the Essayist as coming from a professed mystifier of the school of Philo. I am unacquainted with the writings of Philo, and can assert that the explanations I have proposed are the result of independent research, carried on, with whatever success, under the full persuasion, that there is a Science, fixed and determinate in its principles, to which the words of Scripture stand in the same relation, as facts of observation to the science of Nature. Mysticism is an abuse of this science."

This science is called by Swedenborg the Science of Correspondence.

In conclusion:

"Remarkable," it is said,* "as this narrative is for simple grandeur, it has nothing in it which can be properly called poetical. It bears on its face no trace of mystical or symbolical meaning."—Now admitting, for the sake of argument, this to be true, it may be useful so see what is the relation between the Literalist of the present day, and certain Pagans in times of old. We have seen that according to Julian and others—Pagans as they were—"men ought not to view and contemplate heaven and the world with the same eyes that oxen and horses do, but so as from that which is visible to their outward senses

* Essays and Reviews, p. 222.

discern and discover another invisible nature under

" They were not speaking of the first chapter of

Genesis; but independently of this chapter they believed that the external world was the sign of an internal world; external and visible Nature, the sign of an internal invisible nature. Hence their belief is a Supreme Good, and invisible world. The modern literalist has now found out that all this was supersticon and mysticism, arising from their mistaking metanorms for symbols: that Nature has but one meaning, and that one meaning proper to physical Science. The pagan, therefore, might regard our modern Christian looking upon heaven and earth with no other eyes than oxen and horses do; for it is not the province of the Physical sciences to treat of an invisible nature under the visible. The question then may be put quite independently of the first chapter of Genesis: and the ask, Were these Pagans right, or were they deluded, then they believed this outward world to symbolize an inward? If they were right, whom would they regard as contemplating heaven and earth with the same eyes that oxen and horses do? or as giving them the alternative between being cattle or mystics? For if the Literalist said to these Pagans:—

"You are only professed mystifiers of the school of Philo:" they might rejoin, "And are not you of the school of oxen and horses?" No! you reply in the words of Lord Bacon—

"For* as all works do shew forth the power and skill of the workman, but not his image; so it is with the works of

God, which do shew the Omnipotency and wisdom of the

* De Augmentis Scientiarum, p. 129. Montagu's Ed.

a

Maker, but not his image; and therefore therein the heathen opinion differeth from the sacred truth; for they supposed the world to be the image of God, and man to be an extract or compendious image of the world; but the Scriptures never vouchsafe to attribute to the world that honor as to be the image of God, but only the work of his hands; neither do they speak of any other image of God but man; wherefore by the contemplation of Nature to induce and enforce the acknowledgement of God, and to demonstrate His power, providence, and goodness, is an excellent argument, and hath been excellently handled by divers."

According to this account, Inductive Science never travels further than Natural Theology: it leads men away from the mysticism of Plato and the Pythagoreans, to the laws of Nature as established by observation and experiment. This method of interpreting Nature was in complete harmony with the literal method of interpreting Scripture; and for some centuries the two have proceeded hand in hand. What has been the result? The degradation of Scripture, and the exaltation of Nature. We say the degradation of Scripture: because the first chapter of Genesis has upon this principle lost its authority, and together with it a large portion of Scripture; and thus while Scripture has been sinking more and more into a state of abject and lifeless literalism, inductive science has been advancing more and more to the very altitudes of the Platonic philosophy.

"We have here,"* says the author of Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, "a class of phenomena to which

* p. 27.

Paley has never once alluded in his *Natural Theology*, and which are referred to only in an incidental manner, and without their meaning being apprehended, in one or two passages of the *Bridgewater Treatises*. The authors of these works are not to be blamed for this omission; for in their day the facts had not been discovered, or, at least, admitted into acknowledged Science. But now that they have taken their place, and that a very high place, among settled doctrines, *it is time to examine their religious import and tendency*. They will be found not to be isolated or exceptional in their character, but to belong to a large and wide spread class, with a *deep theological signification*."

What is the deep theological signification which it is time to examine, we have already seen. It is further set before us by another writer, eminent in Natural Science, as follows:—

"Pythagoras* was far from wrong, when he sought for mystic relations between the soul of man and the sensible world; for he imagined that the soul would find within itself a copy of all outside it, and in this respect he believed man to be a *microcosm* or compendium of the Universe."

"Plato conceived that there are substances (*oὐσίαι*) invisible, incorporeal, supermundane, divine, and eternal, which he calls ideas, *i.e.*, forms, exemplars, and causes of all these natural and sensible things, the former being the truths, and the latter the images."

The late Professor Archer Butler regarded this doctrine of Plato as containing within it a "mighty substance of imperishable truth." Such are the principles to which Inductive Science is now gradually advancing; and if the Baconian philosophy ever led

* The Typical Character of Nature, or All Nature a Divine Symbol, p. 113, 137. By Dr. Balfour.

G 2 away the scientific world from these principles, it was only that, by a marvellous Providence, it might in due time return to them again, having confirmed them by its own independent testimony. Inductive science is thus leading men from earth to heaven; and for any one to charge these principles with Gnosticism, is only to shew that the very first day's work of Creation in discriminating between light and darkness, has not yet been achieved in his mind. "The* internal man is formed in the image of heaven," says Swedenborg, "and the external in the image of the world; insomuch that the internal man is a heaven in the least form, and the external is a world in the least form, thus a microcosm." Now the external man is the same with the natural or animal man; and when the ancient heathens said, that we ought not to look upon Nature with the same eyes that oxen and horses do, they were only reprobating, in the interpretation of Nature, the same erroneous principle which the apostle alluded to in the interpretation of the truths of Revelation, when he said,—"The natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God." Natural or animal men under the Christian dispensation, are the oxen and horses of the ancient heathen religion, and vice versd.

The world demonstrates then the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as principles of natural theology; but this is not all: over and above this it has a deep spiritual or esoteric meaning. The heathens of the school of Philo knew this; and the advance of

* Arcana Celestia, art. 6057. See the whole article.

natural Science has confirmed it. This is one of the signs of the times—the herald of a new era. For, as Cudworth observes*—“There be many that speak of new glimpses and discoveries of truth, of dawnings of Gospel light; and no question but God hath revealed much of this for the very evening and sunset of the world; for in the latter days knowledge shall be increased.”

If then, as some maintain, the proper method of interpreting Scripture be the same with the proper method of interpreting Nature; there are two methods of interpreting Nature, the scientific and the esoteric; and the former, in consequence of modern discoveries, has furnished important evidence of the latter. Nay, but it is said, “If words have more than one meaning, they may have any meaning.”—Grant this, and then the object of a large class of literalists is to shew that the Scriptures can have but one meaning only, and that this one meaning is Geologically untrue.

We quite agree, indeed, that “It would† have been well if theologians had made up their minds to accept frankly the principle, that those things for the discovery of which man has faculties specially provided, are not fit objects for a Divine revelation.” It is for this reason that we have not at all been anxious to trace in the first chapter of Genesis the Geological history of gases, mud, granite, coral, or coal; nor can we see that its divine Inspiration is at all affected because we cannot trace in it the Cambrian, Devonian, and Silurian strata. We say to the Literalists—Apply

* Sermon i.

† Essays and Reviews, p. 209.

to yourselves your own principles; and if, as you maintain, Geology ought not to be sought for in Revelation, why do you seek for it; and then say, because the Geology you seek is not there, it is not a Revelation? But some of you say that a Geology is there, and that it is false. To this Philo might certainly reply—'Whether true or false, it is your antecedent denial of any esoteric meaning in Creation that causes you to be more concerned, in the first chapter of Genesis, about the Old Red Sandstone, than about your new creation in righteousness and true holiness.'

We, however, whom you would call the "professed mystifiers of the school of Philo," agree with you and others upon many important points: you say, for instance, that the* great object of Scripture was "to tell man of his origin and fall, and to draw his mind to his Creator and Redeemer;" that Scripture was not designed to teach us physical Science, and that "it is vain to attempt to make a Cosmogony out of its statements;" that any true doctrine of Inspiration must conform to, not contradict, the well-ascertained facts of history and science; that what‡ we give up as a general principle (the esoteric meaning for instance), we shall find it impossible to maintain partially; that a§ little more or a little less of the mystical method does not make the difference between certainty and uncertainty in the Interpretation of Scripture; that a|| change in some of the prevailing modes of Interpretation of

* Essays and Reviews, p. 235.

† Ibid., p. 348.

‡ Ibid., p. 419.

§ Ibid., p. 369.

|| Ibid., p. 418.

Scripture, is not so much a matter of expediency as of necessity.

Here, however, we remark, that the prevailing mode of interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis is the literal: a mode common to those who deny, as well as to those who maintain, the Geological truth of the first chapter of Genesis. It is upon the interpretation resulting from this method, that you both disagree. If you call upon others to give up this literal interpretation, you must give it up yourselves. For if you say that you ought not to look for Geology in Revelation, you ought not to attempt to find it there; no matter whether the Geology you profess to find be true or false. In this case both parties are silenced; the melancholy spectacle is no longer witnessed, of making the whole superstructure of Christianity to rest upon Geological interpretations; and we can admit with a very composed mind the remark, that "he* who notices the circumstance that the explanations of the first chapter of Genesis have slowly changed, and, as it were, retreated before the advance of Geology, will be unwilling to add another to the spurious reconcilements of Science and Revelation."

It is remarkable that Literalism occasions the same controversy with regard to the END of all things, as with regard to the BEGINNING of all things.—"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, is not more a matter of controversy than the words, "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea."—"A recent commentator on

* Ibid., p. 341.

Scripture (says Mr. Jowett) appears* willing to peril religion on the literal truth of such an expression as, 'We shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air.' Would he be equally ready to stake Christianity on the literal meaning of the words, 'Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched?'"

Mr. Jowett has intimated that "there† are signs that times are changing, and that we are changing too;" that even "the‡ intellectual forms under which Christianity has been described, are in a state of transition and resolution."—"If it§ has been said with an allowable hyperbole, that Homer is Greece, with much more truth may it be said that the Bible is Christendom."—As then the state of Christendom is one of transition, so, we are left to infer, is that of the Bible.—Not so, says another: "historically the Bible is neither antecedent to nor independent of the Church: it is the production of the Church. The Church in fact creates the Bible; for not only is the Bible actually written by members of the Church, but whatever Divine authority it possesses, it derives from the Church." That the Church has, in any sense, created what is commonly called the Word of God; that the Word of God has in this respect its origin in the word of man, and the Divine authority of Scripture in the human authority of councils, Sceptics in general would be willing to grant; and in this respect there might be a greater cordiality between the two parties than would otherwise seem; nor do we deny that where the inner meaning of Scripture is taken

* Ibid., p. 403.

† Ibid., p. 421.

‡ Ibid., p. 420.

§ Ibid., p. 406.

y, the authority imparted to it by the Church is that remains. In this case, the Inspiration of the ick is entirely dependent upon the testimony of the urch; although the Church acknowledges, in the ent day, that it will not venture to say in what

Inspiration consists.

The Essayist affirms that* the meaning of Scripture the thing, the Inspiration of Scripture another:

Donaldson says, "Both† Clement of Alexandria

Origen regarded the Divine or spiritual element

Scripture as belonging to the inner meaning." . . .

then the Church denies this inner meaning, it ies the divine or spiritual element in Scripture;

this in its very character as a steward of the les of God. Is it then strange that, under such umstances, the admonition should be heard, ow is it that I hear this of thee? Give an unt of thy stewardship?" Primevally, indeed,

Church existed before the Book; the wisdom of

I was written upon the heart before it was ten upon paper; and if the inner truths of the le were verily written upon the heart of the rch, the Church might then be a living witness to

Book: but God foresaw that, in successive ages, wisdom would be obliterated from the Church, would be left only in a Book; and that if the k were to pass away, there would be nothing left which the Church would bear witness; consently, that the office of witness would cease.

We have seen, that the great principle upon which parties maintain the literal sense, is, that the

* Ibid., p. 350.

† Christian Orthodoxy, p. 314.

a 3 narrative in Genesis bears on its face every indication of being written as plain matter of fact history. But if, in order to interpret any writing, we must refer it to the times in which it was written, and see how they would interpret it for whom it is written; surely it is as incumbent upon Geologists as upon others to do the same; and if to say it was never understood properly till modern discoveries came to explain it, be a false position for theologians, it is equally a false position for Geologists; and both parties are equally bound to refer back the narrative to the period in which it was composed. In this case, it becomes an important question, whether the style of writing of that day was altogether the same with that which prevails in the present. We shall see that it was not; and that the circumstance of the narrative being written in an historical form, does not militate against its containing an internal sense, but rather the contrary.

... "All things contained in the first chapters of Genesis," says Swedenborg,* "are things reduced to an historical form, in the internal sense of which are things Divine concerning the new creation or regeneration of the man of the celestial Church. This manner of writing was customary in the most ancient times, not only with those who were of the Church, but also with those who were out of the Church; as with the Arabians, the Syrians, and the Grecians, as is evident from the books of those times, both sacred and profane. In imitation of those books, because derived from them, was written the Song of Songs

* Arcana Celestia, art. 9942.

by Solomon; a book which is not a Sacred Book, as it does not interiorly contain things Celestial and Divine, in a series, like the Sacred Books. The book of Job also is a book of the ancient Church. Mention is made also of books of the ancient Church which are now lost, as in Numbers xxi. 14, etc., the *historicals* of which were called the WARS OF JEHOVAH, and the propheticals, ENUNCIATIONS. That in the *historicals* of those books which were called the *Wars of Jehovah* the style was such, is evident from the quotations thence by Moses. Thus these *historicals* approached to a sort of prophetic style, of such a kind that the subjects might be retained in the memory by infants and by the simple. That the books there cited were sacred, is evident from the things extant therein (verses 28—30) compared with those which are extant in Jeremiah xlviii. 45, 46, where similar things occur. That a style of the same kind was most usual at that time, and was almost the only style with those who were out of the Church, is clear from the fabulous accounts of those writers who were out of the Church, in which they involved *moral* instruction, or such as related to the affections and life."

Now that *historical* narratives of this kind were prevalent in the early ages of the world, is admitted even by some Literalists themselves; thus it is said, that "Speculations* on metaphysical subjects, as well as theories and reflections on the origin and revolutions of the universe, on the *moral* and physical constitution of the world, on the *commencement* and *first*

* Dr. Davidson's *Introduction to the Old Testament*, vol. i., p. 147. A quotation from Van Bohlen.

development of the human race, were clothed, like all the learning of the East, in an historical dress." . . . The ground, therefore, taken up by Swedenborg is confirmed by others: we only maintain that the subject thus thrown into an historical form is of a spiritual nature, viz., the progress of man from Chaos to Paradise.*

"They who do not think beyond the sense of the letter," said Swedenborg nearly a century ago,† "cannot believe otherwise than that the Creation which is described in the first and second chapters of Genesis, denotes the Creation of the (material) Universe; and that there were six days within which were created the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things which were in them; and at length—man in the likeness of God. But who cannot see, if he duly considers the subject, that it is not the Creation of the visible Universe which is there meant; for such things are there described as may be known from common sense not to have so been; as that before the Sun and Moon there were days, as also light and darkness, and that herbs and trees budded forth; that light was given by those luminaries afterwards; and then, also, a distinction was made between light and darkness, and that days were made in this manner likewise."

We have now stated the origin and reason of the

* The interesting work of Professor Müller on Comparative Mythology in no way interferes with this view of the subject; but it reminds us of a great truth when it says, that in order to know what man is, we ought to know what man has been.

† Ibid., art. 8891.

external historical form of the narrative respecting the Creation, and have had to treat of several questions of importance raised by modern controversies with respect to this chapter; but we have come into no collision with any principles of Geology, Ethnology, Astronomy, or any other science; although subjects have been treated of which might easily have led to it upon any other grounds. The Interpretations offered have, indeed, been but of a general nature; nor would our limits have allowed us to enter into detail. Even upon this plan, however, we have been obliged to omit several important subjects which are reserved for the next chapter. In the mean time we observe, that it would have been almost useless to enter into details, so long as general principles were at stake.

The symbolical meaning of the Chapter has been denied by the Essayists. The defenders of the Faith have far too easily given up this important position. This being surrendered, all is surrendered; for the Divine authority of the First Chapter of Genesis becomes then a mere question of Science: the battle of Divine Inspiration has then to be fought on the ground of Geology—a false position, in which the defenders of the faith have been worsted. Indeed—

To subordinate spiritual truth to natural Science, however demonstrable the Science may be, is an inversion of the true order of things. To harmonize the facts of Geology with Geological theories, whether resulting from interpretations of Scripture or not, is not to harmonize Geology with Scripture, but Geology with itself; the natural with the natural, not the natural with the spiritual; indeed so far from the latter being the case, the natural has banished the spiritual, ignored and contemned it—which is itself the very state of Chaos. To discover, then, a Geological interpretation of Genesis, and in that interpretation to rest, would not be to extricate the Church from Chaos, but to be satisfied with her Chaotic state; and if in consequence of the troubles thence arising, we should say that it is a necessary condition of the Church militant, the Church in this case is militant only against herself.

I can have no doubt that the great purpose of Divine Providence in permitting the present crisis of Christendom, is—to bring the question of spiritual interpretation to an issue. Yes! in the words of the Public Orator of Cambridge—"The crisis is at hand—such a crisis as this Church and Nation have not seen for more than two hundred years. It forces itself upon our thoughts. We cannot, if we would, ignore it. We, of all men, are least able to ignore it."

"Of all* the points in dispute at the present time, the chief is that which relates to the Inspiration and Authority of Holy Scripture."

"A great preacher told you from the University pulpit last term, that the Bible would be the battle ground of the present generation."

Admirably does the Public Orator conclude, when

* Duty of Members of the English Church in the present Controversies; a Sermon preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, Feb. 8, by W. G. Clark, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College and Public Orator in the University of Cambridge. p. 10, 12.

he says—"Therefore we will not fear. At the bidding of the God of Truth, we will seek for truth, at whatever cost."—Will you, then, at whatever cost, enquire into the doctrine taught by Swedenborg, according to which there is a spiritual sense in every part of the Word, and owing to which sense it is that the Word is divinely inspired, and holy in every syllable? I am speaking of that doctrine which includes in the Canon those Books of Scripture only which are capable of this interpretation.

This interpretation we have exemplified in the present chapter—an interpretation which is spiritual, not Geological. It is one which relates to the primeval constitution of the mind of man as a religious being. It shews to us the real nature of the human mind, in its progression according to heavenly order; hence also its nature when perverted into a state of infernal disorder. We may trace the development of this infernal disorder in the following manner:

First day—the light of the senses and thence of reason. Second day—no distinction between things spiritual and natural—natural things only being conceived to exist. Third day—an increase of knowledge upon this principle, no distinction being made between the possession of knowledge as the means, and good as the end. Fourth day—fixed principles of self-intelligence, self-love, and selfish knowledge; Man being now wise in his own eyes, and prudent in his own sight. Fifth day—intellectual creations upon this principle—whence pantheism and naturalism all upon the wing, idolatrous religions, monstrous philosophies, insidious fallacies—being the water-serpents, flying dragons, and leviathans of the deep. Sixth day—the wild beasts of the earth, or the concupiscences and untamed passions of the mind, arising from the lust of power desolating the world; man having now changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator: God himself being thus made in the image and likeness of perverted man.

Observe, on the other hand, the orderly history of the mind, beginning from the same original state of Nature. First day: a perception, in virtue of a higher light, between sense and rationality. Second day: the distinction consequently between heavenly and earthly things; those of heaven being regarded as first in order, and those of earth as subordinate. Third day: the acquisition and arrangement of knowledge upon this principle, the result of which is a first effort to bring forth the good works of a new though external life. Fourth day: light and love issuing forth from spiritual truths which have become fixed principles, and enlighten the way of life. Fifth day: thoughts that breathe with the truth, the natural lusts and passions being opposed. Sixth day: all the good affections resulting from a knowledge of the truth, and signified by tame and domesticated animals, or by the clean beasts of the Mosaic law; the creature man being now an image and likeness of the Creator.

Thus has God caused to be recorded, for the edification of the Church, the successive steps by which Man passes out of the region of sense into that of rationality, and hence onwards to the image and likeness of God.

One would have thought that, in a professedly Christian age, a more practical subject could not have engaged the attention. For how does the case stand? Call it mystical as you may, we affirm that it is HISTORICAL in the highest sense of the term; for it contains the PRIMEVAL HISTORY of the development and progress of the human mind—a HISTORY which serves as a beacon to all other histories; a HISTORY which Christianity is but laboring to realize, in order to effect the restitution of all things; a HISTORY which alone explains the infinite diversities of the human race, and all the mythologies, religions, wars, speculations, philosophies, crimes, and virtues which diversify the annals of the world—a HISTORY OF PROGRESS on the consummation of which the Seven Thunders utter their voices, and the mystery of God is finished.

PAGE 14.—Professor Wilson observes, in his article upon Chemical Final Causes, that—“What we call a final cause is not God’s final cause, but only that small corner of it which we can comprehend in our widest glance.”—“Final causes, like the vestal virgins, belong to God.”—“Nevertheless,” says he, “we must seek after and love final causes, even with a lover’s passion, although in this life they can never be ours.” The physical final cause of the organization of the eye is that it may see; of the hearing, that it may hear. The spiritual final cause is, that the natural sight may minister to the spiritual sight, the natural hearing to spiritual hearing, and these to the formation of man into the image and likeness of God, who is the Beginning and the Ending, the First and the Last.—See Religio Chemici, p. 162, 163.

PAGE 28.—“Every one sees that there is a scale in nature: that animals and plants, by the intervention of an infinity of intermediate forms, gradually blend into each other, and are finally so united that we know not where to draw the line of demarcation. This is an acknowledged truth, known for centuries; but whether this series was simple, or whether, in its progress, it branched off into other ramifications, and became complex, were questions which long engaged the attention of philosophers. The discoveries, however, of this century have at length set this question also at rest, and decided that the natural series is complex, forming in its progress certain deviations which resemble a series of circles.”—A Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals. By William Swainson, Esq. p. 128.

PAGE 41.—Dr. Balfour observes respecting Swedenborg, that—“The subsequent eccentricities of this great man do not detract from the grandeur of the idea with which his mind was filled;” i. e., when he was speaking of the doctrine of representations and correspondences. It would not be difficult to shew that this very doctrine is, according to some, itself the evidence of his eccentricity; and if Dr. Balfour has attempted to shew that this doctrine is true nevertheless, he will be regarded as having neutralized, to a very considerable extent, the charge of eccentricity. If Swedenborg’s principles are shewn to be true, it is of little consequence what may be said against them.—Typical Character of Nature, p. 38.

PAGE 42.—“Two appears as the typical number in the lowest class of plants, and regulates that pairing or marriage of plants and animals which is one of the fundamental laws of the organic kingdoms. Three is the characteristic number of that class of plants which have parallel veined leaves, and is the number of joints in the typical digit. Four is a significant number in those beautiful crystals which shew that minerals (as well as stars) have their geometry. Five is the model number of the highest class of plants—those with reticulated veins and branches, it is the typical number of the fingers and toes of vertebrate animals, and is of frequent occurrence among star-fishes. Six is the proportional number of carbon in chemistry, and 3 × 2 is a common number in the floral organs of monocotyledonous plants, such as the lilies of the field which we are exhorted to consider. Seven appears as significant only in a single order of plants (Heptandria), but has an importance in the animal kingdom, where it is the number of vertebræ in the neck of mammalia, and according to M. Edwards, the typical number of rings in the head, in the thorax, and in the abdomen of crustacea. Eight is the definite number in chemical composition for oxygen, the most universal element in Nature, and is very common in the organs of sea-jellies. Nine seems to be rare in the organic kingdoms. Ten or 5 × 2 is found in star-fishes, and is the number of digits on the fore and hind limbs of animals. Without going over any more individual numbers, we find multiple numbers acting an important part in chemical compositions, and in the organs of flowers; for the elements unite in multiple relations, and the stamens are often the multiples of the petals. In the arrangement of the appendages of the plant we have a strange series, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, which was supposed to possess virtues of an old date, and before it was discovered in the plant. In natural philosophy the highest law, that of forces acting from a centre, proceeds according to the square of numbers. In the curves and relative lengths of branches of plants, there are evidently quantitative relations which mathematics have not been able to seize and express."—Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, p. 534.

PAGE 45.—"Things upon earth" of course here signify those which are in Divine order, and correspond to what is good and true. Such as correspond to what is evil and false, and are thus not in Divine order, represent things in hell and not in heaven.

PAGE 57.—Some have denied the existence of a material Chaos in any sense, and have affirmed that the Newtonian philosophy is adverse to such an hypothesis. That there has been a period of great disorder in the progression of the earth from its primitive to its present state, is generally admitted by Geologists; but writers are not agreed as to the propriety of designating it by the name of Chaos, which, as applied to the literal sense of the second verse (Gen. i.) some regard as the result of a mere gratuitous assumption. The term Chaos itself is not a scriptural but a classical term; we have made use of it merely to express in brief the spiritual