Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/187

Rh the silent transference of thought regardless of time and space, the supremacy of the spiritual over the natural, of the real over the apparent; these are the factors of Christian Science. Disprove them and it perishes. It stands or falls with these eternal verities."

The central inquiry here is as to the idea of God. Swedenborg says "thought concerning God as Man, in whom is the Divine Trinity, opens heaven; on the other hand, thought concerning God as not Man, which is presented apparently as a cloud or as nature in her smallest principles, closes heaven; for God is Man as the universal heaven in its complex is a man, and every angel and spirit is thence a man. Therefore it is that thoughts alone concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, as being the God of the universe opens heaven. There is one unvarying teaching in Swedenborg's writings—"that the idea of God in heaven is the Lord;" that the only true idea possible to man is that of a Divine Man; that the "idea of an invisible God is no idea, and is not separable from the thought of the principles and forces of nature, and cannot communicate