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In that profound and masterly analysis of the principles of our nature which is given in the revelations made for the benefit of the Lord’s Church of the New Jerusalem, it is stated that religion, or the religious sentiment, occupies the highest seat in the human mind, and sees under it all the civil and secular things which are of the world. It ascends through them, says Swedenborg, as the pure juice ascends through a tree, and mounts to its top, and from that height looks around upon all inferior natural things, like one who, from a tower or mountain, looks downward and around upon the plains below. It is not to be understood from this, that as a matter of fact—of practical life—the religious principle does actually assert for itself this paramount ascendancy in the mind, and exert its legitimate control over the entire man. It is but too palpable, alas! that there are counter influences which tend continually to defeat the operation of this higher principle, but still it is there, occupying the uppermost place in the mental economy, as will be evident upon its being assailed or outraged. Let a positive appeal be made to men upon the question of the comparative value which they place upon their religious and their political creeds, and it will soon appear which sits the loosest upon them. And so of anything else of a purely civil, or worldly character. Nothing enters so deeply into the sanctum sanctorum of men’s interests as those views which take hold of God, heaven, hell, the soul, death, and their related themes. And though it may be said that all this with the majority of men comes rather into the category of sentiment than of principle, yet we see in it evidence that the Lord has determined to establish for himself a testimony in the interior recesses of our being, and to give a clear pre-eminence to those mental workings which relate more directly and intimately to Himself.

There is in fact no possibility of extinguishing or supplanting the religious instinct by any influence ab extra, though a man may do much, by an evil life, towards achieving a fearful triumph over its dictates. God has made it indigenous to the soil of the human mind. Even if you suppose a man intent, like Paine or Voltaire, upon undermining a prevalent faith in Revelation, still it is the religious sentiment, mistaken and perverted, which prompts him to the task. He will strenuously contend that he is battling with human errors for the glory of God. Deism is still the verbal acknowledgment and professed worship of the Deity, though involving the rejection of Christ and the Gospel announced by Him. Indeed the whole history of the race makes it evident that there is no stronger impulse in human nature than the religious, and at the same time none more liable to distortion and perversion, as it exhibits all phases from the rapt and seraphic worship of Gabriel down to the senseless adoration of stocks and stones, and the frenzy of self-immolation in the blinded devotees of Juggernaut. It is, therefore, evermore