Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/137

Rh the subjects, wherein those heavenly things are contained, or whereby they are set forth.

Such is the nature of correspondences, according to which the Sacred Scriptures were written, and by the knowledge of which they can alone be understood as to their real internal meaning. This science is indeed but little known in the present day, although it was a subject familiar to the men of the most ancient times, who esteemed it the science of sciences, and cultivated it so universally, that all their books and tracts were written by correspondences. The book of Job, which was a book of the ancient church, is full of correspondences. The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, and the fabulous stories of antiquity, were founded on the same science, after it had begun to decline. The poets of Greece, in whose writings traces of it are still to be found, disfigured it with their mythological fictions, and thus consigned to a long oblivion a science, which they did not rightly understand.

All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things: their ceremonies, and even their statutes, which were rules for the institution of their worship, consisted of mere correspondences. In like manner, every thing in the Israelitish church, their burnt-offerings, sacrifices, meat-offerings, and drink-offerings, with all the particulars belonging to each, were correspondences. So also was the tabernacle, with all things contained in it; likewise their festivals, as the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of tabernacles, and the feast of first-fruits; also the priesthood of Aaron and of the Levites, and the garments of their holiness. Now as divine things fix their existence in outward nature in correspondences, therefore the Word was written by mere correspondences; and for the same reason the Lord, in consequence of speaking from the Divinity, spake by