Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XV.djvu/542

 518 SWEDENBORG truth revealed to him a new church has been established by the Lord, and thus the prophe- cies in the Apocalypse of the descent of the New Jerusalem have been fulfilled in their symbolical sense. The second coming of the Lord, predicted in Matt, xxiv., has also been accomplished in the same way, a last judg- ment having been effected in the spiritual world in the year 1757, so that we are now living under a new dispensation. The treatise on " Heaven and Hell " embodies Sweden- borg's teachings on the nature of those two realms, and their relations to this world. They exist, he says, not in some other region of space, but within the natural world, as the soul of man exists within his body, being in fact in the souls of men and resting in them as our souls rest in our bodies. At death the body, which is the material envelope of the soul, is cast aside, never to be resumed, and consequently its resurrection is not to be looked for. The soul is the man himself, and is a perfect human being, with a spiritual body of its own, and rises into a conscious percep- tion of the spiritual world, of which the man had previously been unconsciously an inhabi- tant. He sees and feels and possesses all the other senses, and retains all his personal char- acteristics. After a longer or shorter prepara- tion in an intermediate state called the world of spirits, which lies between heaven and hell, he is drawn by his own elective affinity to the place where he belongs, and remains there to eternity. Both heaven and hell consist of in- numerable societies, each composed of human beings of similar and concordant affections; and both are divided into three distinct re- gions, according to the degrees of perfection or depravity of their inhabitants. The Arcana C&lestia, Swedenborg' s largest work, is mainly an exposition of the internal or symbolical sense of Genesis and Exodus, with accounts of his experiences in the spiritual world, and various doctrinal teachings interspersed be- tween the chapters. "The Apocalypse Re- vealed " and " The Apocalypse Explained " are similar expositions of the Apocalypse. In his " Oonjugial Love " Swedenborg expounds his doctrine of the relations of the sexes. Males, he says, are masculine and females feminine in soul as well as in body. .The masculine ele- ment is love clothed with wisdom, while the feminine is wisdom clothed with love. Hence the characteristic of man is wisdom or under- standing, and that of woman love or affection. Marriage is the conjunction of two souls who complement each other, and by their union make one complete being, just as the will and the understanding make the individual. Hence the only true marriage is of one man and one woman, and it exists in the next world as well as in this. Polygamy is a degraded state, but not a sin with those whose religion permits it; but adultery is destructive of the life of the soul, and closes heaven against those who confirm themselves in it. The treatises on the " Divine Love and Wisdom " and the " Divine Provi- dence " -embody Swedenborg's spiritual phi- losophy, and exhibit the symmetrical relations of the various parts of his religious system. Love, he says, is the life of man. God alone is Love itself and Life itself, and angels and men are but recipients of life from him. He is very Man, and our humanity is derived from him, so that it is literally true that we are cre- ated in his image and likeness. His infinite love clothes itself with infinite wisdom and manifests itself in ceaseless operation, produ- cing, maintaining, and reproducing the bound- less universe, with all its innumerable parts and inhabitants. In like manner men, being made in the image of God, also have love or the will, and wisdom or the understanding, and the two produce in them their finite oper- ation. It being the nature of love to desire objects upon which to exercise itself, God could not but create the universe. The crea- tion of this and other solar systems, all of which are inhabited, was effected by a spiritual sun, which is the first emanation proceeding from God, and which is seen in the spiritual world as our sun is seen by us. By means of this spiritual sun natural suns were created, and from them atmospheres, waters, earths, plants, animals, and finally man. Angels, spirits, and devils are men who have been born and died on this or some similar planet. Hence, all things were created from God, and not out of nothing. The spiritual world is re- lated to the natural as cause is to effect, and the supreme first cause of all is God himself. These three, end, cause, and effect, constitute three distinct or discrete degrees, which are repeated in various forms in all created things, and on a grand scale in the universe as a whole. Creation, being from God, is, like the indi- vidual man, an image of him, and hence is in the human form in its greatest and least parjs, and with more or less approximation to per- fection. As we are finitely men, because God is an infinite Man, so all animals, plants, and even minerals wear a resemblance to man, and throughout all nature there is an incessant effort to evolve the human form. In the sight of God and the angels, larger and smaller bodies of human beings and the societies of heaven and hell appear organized like men, and Swedenborg calls the universe the Grand Man (Maximus Homo). As infinite love was the end and infinite wisdom the cause of crea- tion, so the divine life and power are constant- ly active in sustaining and directing it. This activity is the Divine Providence, and it reach- es to every smallest particular of nature and humanity. Man has freedom, because without it he could not be an adequate recipient of the divine love, and by the abuse of his freedom he has introduced evil into the world. The Divine Providence seeks, without destroying this freedom, to lead man back to his original integrity. Hence all the wonderful dealings of God with man recorded in the Scriptures ;