Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/84

 trines, of which the points named are the essential principles. These doctrines having been formed by substituting natural and worldly ideas for spiritual, there can be no reasonable hope that the mind, so long as it remains in the love of them, will feel even the least disposition to understand and embrace that system of spiritual philosophy to which I have referred. The mind must at least have been brought to acknowledge that there are spiritual things, and that those things are essentially different from natural and sensual things, before it will seek to understand the relation between spiritual and natural things; before it will be prepared to embrace that beautiful truth that all natural phenomena are external effects from the constant operation of internal and spiritual causes. "A man," says Swedenborg, "receives only so much from others as he either hath of his own, or acquires to himself, by the examination of a thing in himself: the surplus passes away."

But the man who, by the divine mercy, has succeeded in obtaining some measure of deliverance from the debasing love of sensual things, will be gratified and delighted to find in the works to which I have referred, a full and beautiful unfolding of that most intensely interesting subject, the relation of natural to spiritual things.

And there also, he will find it fully demonstrated, that not only does the natural world exist from spiritual causes, but that there is within those causes an inmost cause, a final cause, or end, and that this end is the divine love. The reader who would obtain a correct understanding of this principle, must become a student of Swedenborg's theological works. From all other sources he will seek in vain for a clear and satisfactory explanation of a subject so deep and spiritual, and so far removed from sensual things. It will not, however, be difficult to see the truth of the general principle, that there must be a constant and inseparable connection between ends, causes, and effects, in the works of the Lord, as well as in the works of man. We know that