Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/18

 to which it should in the end attain, Swedenborg learned much in the other world, quite in accordance with our traditions of the Golden Age. With this called by him the Most Ancient Church the history of man begins, though in scarce other than mythical form. Of the immediate revelation to it of the Divine will we have intimation in the voice of the Lord God heard by Adam. Of its duration we know nothing, but may conjecture it to have equalled all recorded time. Of its decline, due to the growing child desire to taste and choose for himself what to call good, we have symbolized record in the following of the serpent's counsel and in the decadent generations of Adam. The moral and spiritual desolation at the end of this first church swamped by accumulating falsities is represented by the flood, out of which was Divinely rescued the germ for a new development under the name of Noah [Rest].

The men of this succeeding age, called by Swedenborg the Ancient Church, though no longer to be led by the angels of infancy who do always behold the face of the Father in heaven, were yet willing to be instructed of heaven through their wise men learned in ancient