Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/204

 employed to make it known. Prior to the flood, the divine purpose was communicated to Noah, who, as tradition reports, warned, though in vain, his abandoned contemporaries; whence he is called by an Apostle "a preacher of righteousness." (2 Pet. ii. 5.) When the time had arrived in which Jehovah proposed to verify to the Israelites the promise made to their fathers of putting them in possession of Canaan, a band of angels was not sent to announce the fact to the whole nation, but God revealed himself to Moses, and commissioned him to bear the tidings to his brethren. Even when the Lord Jesus Christ appeared personally on earth, and when, if ever, it might be supposed that merely human agency might have been dispensed with, he did not show himself to the people, till John the Baptist had announced his approach, and had proclaimed the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. Surely then, at his second coming, which was not to be a personal one, a Human Herald must be altogether indispensable. Had it occurred in the first ages, when Christians were looking daily, though mistakenly, for the second coming of the Lord, and when they had not yet learned to regard such an interposition as impossible, the appearance of such a herald would have been hailed with joy; and it surely ought not now to be scouted as ridiculous, by any but those who, because mankind have lived so long under an economy different from that which prevailed before the introduction of Christianity,—under an economy in which continually repeated missions of divine messengers were not required,—have forgotten that such missions ever existed at all, and that without them, Christianity itself could not have been established. It is however, an unquestionable truth, that how long soever the suspension may have lasted, one more example of them must be afforded; one case more must inevitably arise, in which, without the employment again of one more such messenger, the last great purpose in the divine economy must fail to take effect,—the last great predictions of holy writ must remain unfulfilled for ever." The writer then gives a very clear and beautiful exposition of the character of Swedenborg, showing from public documents of undoubted authenticity, as well as from the admissions of his adversaries, that he was a man of the very highest intellectual and moral endowments, and in every way most admirably qualified, to be an instrument in the hands of the Lord, for the introduction of a higher and more