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 Now, every one of these old doctrines believed and taught by the former Christian church, are reaffirmed in the New Church. But so differently are they here understood and explained that they are considered, and not unjustly called, new doctrines;—as an individual by regeneration becomes a new man, though still retaining his personal identity; or as the same old Bible becomes, as it were, a new Bible when its divine nature and its fullness of divine and heavenly wisdom are clearly disclosed to the reader's understanding.

From what has now been said it may be clearly seen that the relation of the New to the Old Christian church is very different from that of the latter to the Jewish church. Judaism was a totally different religion from Christianity. But the New Christianity is not a new and different religion from the Old. It is still the Christian religion—more thoroughly and genuinely Christian, indeed, than the Old. It is the Old Christianity divested of the cumbrous pile of errors which sundry councils of unenlightened men had from time to time heaped upon it;—the Old transfigured, as it were, and exhibited in its native but hitherto undiscovered and unknown grandeur and glory;一the old interpreted in a manner to meet the demands of enlightened reason and the deep needs of the human soul; its doctrines explained by a divinely authorized and divinely illumined