Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/122

116 to see and to feast their souls on the abundant riches of God's Word. This Key is the science or doctrine of correspondence—the fixed and unalterable relation existing between the spiritual and the natural, or between the internal and external. This doctrine is not, as some suppose, a pretty conceit or mere human invention, but has its foundation in the very constitution of things, and is exact as the science of mathematics. This is the grand key for opening the spiritual and true meaning of the Bible. And every one who is sufficiently familiar with this key, may apply it for himself. A hundred different expositors, therefore, equally skilled in the use of the key, will arrive at substantially the same spiritual sense of any given text; just as a hundred different translators, equally versed in the original languages of the Bible, will give substantially the same rendering of the same text. So that there is little room for the play of one's fancy. Fancy may, indeed, provide the dress for the spiritual sense. It may array it in apparel more or less beautiful and attractive. But it has as little to do with the substance of that sense as it has with the rendering of Greek or Hebrew into English, or with the results of a chemical experiment. According to the teaching of the New Church, then, the Scripture is divine throughout; divine to the very ultimates; divine in its structure as well