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 of the free investigation which is going on, and that too in despite of the warning voice which would admonish of peril to the soul from the indulgence in daring speculation. Among other systems coming into this category, and eliciting interested inquiry, is that of the New Jerusalem, notwithstanding that the strenuous conservators of sound doctrine would gladly inscribe on the portals of its temple, as Solomon does over the door of the house of the strange woman,—“Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; but he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”

But, notwithstanding all these solemn caveats, still the haunts of heresy are visited from Sabbath to Sabbath, and multitudes find their way into New Church places of worship, often, it may be, merely to gratify a transient impulse of curiosity, yet often too to seek a solution of the question, What is truth? “Wherewithal shall a man come before the Lord? Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his way?” Now we venture to believe that we have peculiar and pre-eminent advantages for answering questions of this nature—that we are prepared to point out the way to the acquisition of a religious character, and consequently the way to eternal life with more clearness and certainty than is attainable under any other system of theological belief. Those who listen to New Church instructions will find, at any rate, that so far from involving a mere farrago of mystical and visionary crudities, they do actually inculcate the necessity of a practical and life-pervading religion, and that our doctrines are not, as the impression often is, a peculiar mode of dispensing with all religion—a sort of quitclaim to all genuine devotion and piety. On this head, it will not take any candid man long to be corrected in his opinion, if he is willing to be disabused of an error. He will learn that the New Church preaches a religion of the most earnest and exacting kind—a religion founded upon a change of heart, that is to say, upon regeneration; and when strangers drop in from time to time upon our worship, there is no point on which we are more anxious to have them informed, than in regard to the importance which the New Church attaches to the regenerating process. It would fain re-echo the voice of her Lord; “Verily, I say unto you, ye must be born again;” and by this we mean not a sudden flash of conviction, or a sudden sense of conversion, which is apt to be “as the early cloud and the morning dew;” but a gradual, steadily advancing, and permanently enduring change in the dominant loves of the soul, and in the paramount ends of life. It must be a process by which there is a constant progressive elevation from the natural to the spiritual; and, as far as possible, from the spiritual to the celestial. On this theme we are furnished with a world of new light in the revelations of the New Church. We there learn that the necessity of regeneration is not grounded solely in the fact, that man, as a fallen being, needs to have restored, by a new birth, the spiritual life which he lost by his apostasy. It is in this matter very much as it is in regard to death. It was once, we know, universally supposed that physical death was introduced into the world in consequence of Adam's transgression, previous to which time nothing of the kind had been known, either with the race of men or of animals. But of late years science, apart from revelation, has clearly established that death had reigned among the animate orders of creation for myriads of ages before man had been ushered into being and made a denizen of this terraqueous globe. And not only so; we now learn by the light of