Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/176

 generalizes bad persons or spirits, with their bad thoughts or characters, many in one. That there is any single one of them who, by distinction or pre-eminence, is called Satan, or Devil, is wholly improbable. The name is one taken up by the imagination, to designate or embody, in a conception the mind can most easily wield, the all or total of bad minds or powers."—pp. 134, '5.

I do not know whether this learned writer derived the view here expressed from Swedenborg, or whether he reached it by a kind of spiritual intuition. In either case the testimony of such a mind is equally valuable. The doctrine, we see, is identically the same as that revealed through Swedenborg.

Pursuing our inquiry,—we find that the word Angel is used in Scripture in a manner similar to the word Devil, as explained by Swedenborg. Sometimes it is used to denote a single individual, sometimes a single angelic society, and sometimes the whole angelic heaven which is an angel in the largest form. Thus the seer of Patmos speaks of the angels of the churches of Ephesus. Smyrna, Thyatira, etc., by which are meant the angelic societies connected with and presiding over these churches. We read also in Psalms: "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him, and delivereth them." Here "the angel of the Lord" means the whole angelic heaven.

But heaven is the same in each and all of its parts, as it is in the whole. Therefore the word angel, which is