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 the New Jerusalem that it is a universal law of being—that all the spirits now in the spiritual world, good, bad, and mixed, were once men in bodies, and have passed out of bodies into the grand receptacle of souls, the world beyond the grave. Consequently, if there are sinless beings of the human race in any of the earths of the universe, they will successfully pass out of their corporeal condition into that of disembodied spirits in the world of spirits. This is then, in one word, the law of development of all created spirits, just as much as it is a law of the vegetable world that a flower shall not be unfolded without bursting its bud, or the chick in the egg be matured into a fowl, without breaking and casting aside its shell.

And as it is with death, so also is it with regeneration. That is the law of human progress. Man is in all cases born natural, or in the natural degree, and thence becomes spiritual. “That is not first,” says Paul, “which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.” So in the case of the Most Ancient or Adamic church; even that was not created in the acme of its purity and perfection, but gradually rose to it by regeneration. It took its start from the natural plane, and by successive degrees ascended thence to the celestial.

The fall, however, has superinduced an enhanced necessity of the process of renovation, inasmuch as the natural principle, which was designed to be a ministering servant to the spiritual, has aspired to the mastery and affected to lord it over the superior. And it is in this that the process in great measure consists, viz., the subjugation of the rebellious natural, and the bringing it into harmony with the internal and spiritual.

But we commenced with saying that we deemed ourselves, in the New Church, possessed of peculiar advantages for addressing our fellow-men on the subject of religion, and it is but reasonable that we state the grounds of our claims on this head; for “he that boasteth of a false gift is as a cloud without rain.”

1. We would say then, in the first place, that we may lay claim to a system of religious doctrine which avoids all those conflicts with reason and science that create an exceeding difficulty in the case of other creeds. It is one that brings into harmony all departments of truth, scientific, theological, and rational, and requires no man to hold his intellect in abeyance while receiving the dogmas propounded to his faith. A thousand problems are solved on the ground of this system which defy solution on any other, and especially do all those stumbling-blocks disappear which the mere literal sense of Scripture presents to its readers, and which have had the effect to drive thousands into the cheerless regions of skepticism. Nothing is more common among those who have received these doctrines than the confession, that they were saved, by the adoption of them, from the abyss of infidelity; for viewed in the light which the New Church throws upon it, they found the Bible every way worthy the Wisdom and Love of its Author.

But to speak less vaguely on this subject, I will advert to some few points on which the teaching of the New Church differs essentially from that of all the other churches with which we are familiar at the present day. I will begin by stating briefly what the New Church does not hold and inculcate on these points.

It does not teach that men are condemned for Adam's sin imputed to them, as though their head was upon his shoulders—it does not teach that God is angry or vindictive, or that He does all things for His own glory as a final end—it does not