Page:A brief discussion of some of the claims of the Hon. E. Swedenborg.pdf/27

 lectual enquiry, whence the understanding may become enlightened with the profoundest knowledge. He presents to the imagination scenes of truth, and principles of holiness, which enlarge the soul by their magnificence, and give to its conceptions vigour and delight. Questions of the deepest erudition, connected with mental philosophy and the subjects of the eternal world, are discussed with simplicity and force, and explained with propriety and satisfaction. Order and perspicuity constitute his style, while he invariably ascribes glory of every excellence to the unmerited mercy of the lord.

O, but it will be said that the second advent cannot have taken place, and that therefore Swedenborg's pretensions must be false, because the time of the Resurrection has not arrived, the Last Judgment has not transpired, and the End of the World has not been effected. Alas for the feebleness of such objections! They take for granted that the notions commonly attached to these doctrines are true; whereas we consider them distinctly false—false and, therefore, parts and parcels of those desolating principles which have brought destruction upon the professing church.

The End of the World is no where treated of in the Scriptures. The passages from which that idea has been drawn are purely figurative, and, for the most part, ought to have been translated consummation of the age; a fact open to the inspection of the learned, and admitted by the scholar. They do not relate to the destruction of the universe, but to the end of the church—the termination of that religious dispensation which was planted by the Lord, by the introduction into it of the evils of life and the falses of doctrine. It is written, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever: that the Lord "laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed for ever." The earth cannot have perpetrated any moral ill: why, then, destroy it? The Lord did not create it to abandon. The earth is His footstool; He will not cast it from Him. It is the seminary of the human race, whence He will continually draw the population of a kingdom, of the increase of which he has declared there shall be no end.

The Resurrection of the material body, whence the objection supposed takes its ground, is a notion at once gross and sen-