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 separation among brethren where charity conjoins, and where true charity exists it will infallibly conjoin.

3. The dispensation of the New Jerusalem, whose character and genius we are now unfolding, has also the merit of making life its great distinguishing feature. Without at all disparaging the theoretical element of religion, it still gives a paramount place to the practical, and it does this too on such grounds—grounds laid in the very structure of our being—that no one who is at all conversant with the system can fail to see that the love-element is the nethermost stratum in the geology of our nature, and that from love flows charity, and from charity good works or neighborly uses. There is little danger, therefore, of splitting on the rock of Antinomianism, or of sitting down at ease in our evils, under the flattering unction applied to our souls, that Christ has made an atonement—that is, purchased an indulgence—for our sins, while we are exempted, by a wondrous stretch of grace, from all active warfare with them. The New Church is as far as possible from giving a quietus to the conscience in this way. It plants the essence of religion, not in a faith of imputation, but in a life of genuine charity and active use. If this be not the actual form which the principle assumes—if it do not ultimate itself in a pure, upright, exemplary deportment on the part of the professors of these truths; the fault is theirs, and not that of the system itself. It is because they are unfaithful to its teachings. The system makes the most ample provision, by its innate principles and its superadded revelations. I say by its innate principles, for, according to these we are taught, that love or affection is the ground-element of our being, and that the outward works are, in all cases, when free and unconstrained, the expression of the inward moving power of the love. But the love is the life. If you would know what a man's life is, you have only to learn what his ruling love is, and you have an infallible clew to it. Now, as all true religion demands a good love, it must demand a good life of course, for the life is merely an exponent of the love. But the life which a man possesses here is the life, which he carries with him into the other world, and unless that life has been the native product of a pure and heavenly love here, it can by no means be a source of blessedness hereafter. It is immaterial how much faith he may have, or how much righteousness he may have imputed to him on the ground of his faith, his heaven is a delusion so long as he is lacking in a life's love that is in accordance with the Divine precepts, which are themselves an expression of the Divine love. To say that the works and fruits of a good life are, in the first instance, the effect of faith, is completely to reverse the true order of things, and to put the effect for the cause, and the cause for the effect. It is love that produces faith, and not faith that produces love; for faith pertains to the understanding, and the understanding is evermore secondary to the love, as light is to heat.

The paramount importance of a good life, therefore, as the essential element of a man's hope of eternal blessedness, is a necessary result of the constitution of our being, and there is nothing arbitrary about it. Nor is the doctrine liable to the charge of establishing human merit as the basis of salvation. The New Church disavows every claim of merit in its good works, while at the same time it insists upon the works as a sine qua non. But, together with this, it assures us that our loving, willing, working power is not our own, but the Lord's, though we are still to be active and co-operative, as if the ability were inherent in us.