Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/854

* SWEDENBORG. 746 SWEDENBOKGIANS. and has been preserved in immaculate perfection since the hour of its divine dictation. The Jew- ish dispensation having reached its period, tiod appeared in Jesus Cluist. lie assumed human nature in its lowest condition in the Virj^in, wrought it into conformity with himself, "glori- fied and made it divine." There is a Trinity, not of Per.sons. but of Divine Essentials, consisting of the Father, or God as He is in himself, and thus incomprehensible to man; the Son, or God as revealed to man in Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit, or divine operation thence. Jt is imaged in man by his soul, his body, and their operation. Swedenborg acknowledged God in Jesus Christ, and regarded Him as the sole object of Christian worship. The Churcli which Christ establi.shed at His advent in the flesh came to an end in 17.57, and Swedenborg witnessed the last General .Judg- ment at that time effected in the world of spirits. Then commenced a new dispensation, and a New Cliureh, signified by the Xew Jerusalem in the Revelation, of which the writings of Swedenborg contained the doctrines. The grand and distinctive principle of Sweden- borgian theologv, next to the doctrine of the divine humanity, is the doctrine of life. God alone lives. Creation is dead — man is dead; and their apparent life is the divine presence. God is everywhere the same. It fallaciously appears as if He were different in one man and in another. The difference is in the recipients; by one He is not received in the same degree as another. There is an inmost, or highest, degree, or plane, of man's reception of the divine life, called the celestial or love plane; there is a second, or lower degree of rcce|rtivity called the spiritual or wisdom plane, and there is a third called the natural or plane of obedience. The life of evil is the perversion of divine life into disorderly forms. These degrees of man's reception of God's life are entirely separate from each other, and can never be commingled. They are related by correspondence, by which each lower degree de- rives its existence and its life from the plane above. The relation of correspondence is plenary, there being nothing in a higher plane which is not represented by something corresponding to it in the plane below ; and there is nothing in the lower plane w-hich does not exist from some cor- responding thing in the plane above: and all this to the most minute detail, even to the things on this earth. Earthly things beautiful and useful manifest spiritual good; and earthly things ugly and hurtful, spiritual evil. The Scriptures are written according to correspondences, and by the aid of that science their mysteries are unlocked. By it, too, the constitution of heaven and of hell is revealed. There are three heavens in which there live three orders of angels, the first, the second, and the third, or the natural, the spiritual, and the celestial : they are three planes, or degrees, of man's receptivity of divine life de- scribed above. All angels were once men, and have lived on this or some other planet. They marry and live in societies, in cities and conn- tries as in the world, in outer appearance differ- ing only in the vast superiority and glory of these things there. But the similarity between the life of angels in heaven and that of men on earth is of the outer appearance only, while the differences between them are internal and rad- ical; for it is not in degrees of outer perfection and glory that the life in heaven and the life on earth may be compared truly, but in tlicir ca- pacity to supply a field for the realization of the inner life of the soul. To the angels the images presented to their senses are the expressions of ideas and emotions which are by this means re- vealed to them; and .so concerned are they in the.se meanings, that they are unconscious of the objects of their senses^ or of their own bodily life, as such. To them their sense-life therefore is made only a visible, audible, and tangible — a concrete spiritual life. There is no denomina- tional favoritism with God; all in whom the love for God and man prevails in any degree what- ever, and whatever may have been their Church, or religious connection, go to he.aven after the death of their bodies. Between heaven and hell, there is an intermediate state called the world of spirits, where all those who pass into the spiritual world are prepared for their final states. Hell is not merely a place of punishment for the sins done in the body, but is a provision of divine love, and the necessary state and condition of the unregenerated natural man. No one is sent there, but the unregenerated seek a place there of their own accord. Hell as a wdiole is called the devil, or Satan; there is no supreme individual bear- ing that name. There are three hells opposite the three heavens. All of Swedenborg's works were written in Latin and received little attention from con- temporaries. The American Swedenborg Print- ing and Publishing Society of New York issued complete editions of the theological works in English, a nearly complete edition in Latin, certain of the works in Latin-English, and some in other languages. Jlost of the origi- nal manuscripts have been reproduced by photolithographic processes. Complete editions have been issued in English by the Swedenborg Society of London, which has also issued a con- cordance to the works by Potts (6 vols. 18S8 et seq. ). The liotch Edition of Swedenborg's works in small volume is published by the jfassachu- setts New-Chui'ch Union. About forty biog- raphies of Swedenborg have been published. The most important of those now in print are by Wilkinson (London. 1849), White (ib., ISoG)', Swift (ib., 1883), and Worcester (Boston, 1883). Consult also Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Sircdenhorri. Collected, Tran.tlatrd. and Annotated by K. L. Tafel (Lon- don. 187.5-77). a very scholarly work, compiled with great labor. SWEDENBOKGIANS. The name jiopnlarly applied to those who accept the doctrines of Christianity and of philosophy as set forth in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (q.v. ). They do not call themselves Swedcnborgians, but members of the New Church. Swedenborg formed no ecclesiastical organization, and many of his followers do not sever themselves from their previous Church connections: but the majority have organized ii Church which they have named 'The Church of the New Jerusalem,' after the New Jerusalem of Apocalyptic vision (Eev. xxi.). The first movement toward organization began in Great Britain in 1782, when Robert Hind- marsh, a printer of London, and certain asso- ciates formed a class for reading and studying