Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/83

 fail of feeling deeply interested and delighted at finding it clearly and fully shown that not the very smallest particle of power, life or strength, ought to be ascribed to nature as her own, but that all honor, glory and power, should be given unto him by whom, as divine truth, all things are created and sustained. He may there find it fully demonstrated, that "every thing that exists in the natural world derives its birth and cause from those things that exist in the spiritual world," that "universal nature is nothing else than a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom," that "the things which are in nature are nothing but effects. Their causes are in the spiritual world and the causes of those causes which are ends, are in the interior heavens."

Here may be found a system of spiritual philosophy, which unfolds and demonstrates the most beautiful order and harmony between spiritual and natural things; which shows how and by what laws the natural world, with every thing that appertains to it, has derived its existence, and continues to derive its support from spiritual causes. It is true this system of spiritual philosophy cannot be seen or appreciated, by the mere sensualist, by him who has no love for spiritual things and no perception of them; who has thrown off all apparent respect for the forms of religion, and does not seek to conceal the fact, that the end for which he lives is the gratification of his selfish and sensual desires. And their reception will be equally difficult for those who are in the love of such forms of doctrines as rest entirely upon the sensual plane of the mind,—are formed wholly from ideas of natural and worldly things, and have therefore nothing spiritual in them. Such a doctrine is the Tripersonality, or the doctrine of Three Divine Persons; the Vicarious Atonement, which teaches that one of those divine persons suffered as a substitute for the sins of men; the doctrine of Justification by faith alone, a doctrine which seeks to show that faith and not charity is the essential and fundamental principle of religion; and in fact that whole system of doc-