Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/269

 "THE SWEDENBORG LIBRARY." out into eternity. It will suffice for all the funeral dis- courses that ever need be uttered, so far as instruc- tion goes ; and it tells a man more of what he is made of, than all the volumes of ancient or modern philos- ophy put together. And yet this is but one of these little treatises. " In Yol. YIII. the arrangement is indeed drawn from the author's True Christian Religion; but the subject of creation is wonderfully elucidated by the citations from the Divine Love and Wisdom. No sys- tem of pure philosophy could present a more orderly or logical sequence than is here observed, in starting out first with God as the sole Creative Substayice, then discussing the materials, the form and process of crea- tion by the method of discrete degrees, then the ends or uses of creation, then the completed creation or universe, as an image of the infinite ; then the influx of spirit into nature, or the relation of matter to life and of the natural to the spiritual world. From this primary discussion the book proceeds to the descent of Jehovah God into the created world or into nature as man, for the purpose of the redemption and salva- tion of the human race. This embraces the discussion of the Incarnation, of the union of Humanity with Divinity in the Lord ; also the wars with the power of evil, or the 'conflict with the hells,' by which the Lord succored mankind and restored the race to spir- itual liberty and to the light of divine truth ; and finally, the Holy Spirit and its operation, and the divine Trinity, what it is and what it is not ; and the Divine Providence as directing the formulating of the Christian creeds, teaching a trinity of persons with a view to protecting the Christian church from Arian- ism, or the utter rejection of the Lord's Divinity until the time of his second coming, to show us in Himself, 'plainly of the Father;' — this sublime progress of 7