Page:A Few Plain Answers to the Question, Why do you Receive the Testimony of Baron Swedenborg.pdf/17

17 Original, that He may be acknowledged to be their Father and Preserver. The mortification therefore which the Gospel requires is not a gloomy and melancholy duty, which annihilates man's joys, and literally deprives him of all that he hath, but it is rather a duty which conducts to the highest possible cheerfulness and gladness of heart, by depriving him of nothing but that selfishness, which alone renders him at any time either gloomy or melancholy, and at the same time by keeping alive those delights which otherwise destroy themselves, whilst they separate themselves and their possessor from their great Author and only Nourisher. Mortification therefore and self-denial, according to this view, are man's best friends and most beneficent companions, opposing only those bad passions which would otherwise lay waste his choicest gratifications, and leaving him thus at perfect liberty to enjoy every natural and rational delight, which will submit itself to the government of reason, of virtue, and of the fear of God. Thus the cross is not the grave of human happiness, as some suppose, but rather its resurrection to life; it doth not kill, but save; and not only saves, but increases and multiplies a hundred-fold the seeds of bliss agreeable to those words of "There is no man that hath left house; or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake and the Gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred-fold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecution; and in the world to come eternal life."

IX.

I receive the Testimony of Baron Swedenborg; because in his Writings the Great Scripure Doctrines of Repentance, and the Remission of Sins are restored, to their original instructive meaning and high importance.

THAT these doctrines have been most lamentably misinterpreted and perverted in the Christian Church, and are so misinterpreted and perverted at this day, must be obvious to every one who is acquainted with the general received systems of modern theology. For in most of those systems, repentance is regarded merely as a work of the lips, in making external confession of sins, or as a work of the eyes, in shedding a few tears of apparent contrition over them, or as a work of the external man, in quitting only external transgressions, without making any account of those internal defilements and disorders of the love and affections, in which all external transgressions originate. In like manner the

+ See the Honourable Author's Work entitled the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Jerusalem, n. 187 to 202.