Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/43

Rh. If the one ran into the other, they could not correspond; and consequently could not be united; just as if male and female were in one person there could be no marriage." Dr. Wilkinson says with none too much emphasis, "It is important just now to set these most unmystical doctrines or teachings of Correspondence and its necessary discontinuity, before us, because attempt is made in powerful quarters to show that life and nature are continuous and cohere by lines of sameness of law. In short, to show that natural law reigns also in the spiritual world, and thus that there is only one world, which in that case presumably may be the natural world as cognized by the bodily senses. So long as this is held there can be no knowledge of the spiritual world, or the life after death, and the belief in both must be weakened accordingly. And then man's own metaphysics will be the ruler of belief, and will shake hands with all that is worst in materialistic scientism, and take from it the laws with which it traverses religious faith and hope and broadens the public road to agnosticism, or to the positivist dogma of annihilation." Just as surely will the metaphysics