Nature And Revelation.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Gen. i. 1.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John i. 1.

No one who has observed the tendency of the popular literature of the day and its influence on the public mind, can have failed to note the widespread doubt that everywhere prevails as to the plenary inspiration and absolute divinity of the Scriptures. This doubt is much more extensive even than appears in our literature. It pervades the various divisions of the Church much more than is readily perceived or willingly acknowledged. It does not take the form of the gross assaults of the sceptics and atheists of the last century, nor is it confined to the vulgar and naturally vicious. Men in all the walks and ranks of life alike feel and express these doubts. Men of the highest culture and the purest lives have fallen into the current and swell the stream, not because the Scriptures seem to stand in the way of their sensual indulgences, but because they do not see them to be true.

The development of the natural sciences during the present and the latter half of the past centuries, which has been without a parallel in the history of the race, has had an important influence in causing this state of doubt. Astronomy, looking out upon and tracing the movements of the heavenly bodies, has declared that the account given in the earliest records of the Bible, assuming them to refer to the creation of the material universe, cannot possibly be true. Geology, a science of later birth, reading the records of the rocks, repeats the conclusions of her elder sister, and says, The Bible record as a history of natural creation cannot possibly be true. The opening insight into man himself, the developing science of psychology, repeats the verdict, and calmly but firmly steps to the side of her witnessing sisters, and, adding her testimony to theirs, says, The Bible record, as it has been interpreted, is not and cannot possibly be true.

The very natural result has followed. Men could not reject the demonstrated truths of the natural sciences. And taking for granted that the Bible record assumed to teach natural truths upon the same plane as science, they found a direct conflict between them, and could not accept them both as true. With demonstration on the one side and what seemed but vague and often illogical statements on the other, it is not wonderful that they should cling to that which compelled their assent by reason of its certainty, and give way to doubts as to that which simply demanded their belief on its asserted supernatural authority.

At every step of this scientific development, devout believers in the Bible, or in their own accepted interpretation of it, fearing for the foundations of their faith, have opposed the science itself as a new attack of infidelity, and denounced its advocates as the enemies of religion and virtue. But, to the credit of their sincerity of belief, when the truth of the science has been absolutely established, they have, by a modification of their interpretation, earnestly endeavored to reconcile it with the demonstrated operations of natural laws. Thus, when astronomy demonstrated that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that it could not have been made before the sun, which is the centre of our solar system, and upon which it depends, commentators sought a reconciliation of the natural truth with the record in Genesis by the honestly-adopted but hopelessly unsatisfactory theory that, while the sun, moon, and stars were really made before the earth, yet their light did not appear until the fourth day after the earth was made, and that the writer of the record wrote as if they were only made on the day when their light first appeared.

So, too, when geologists announced that the six thousand years assigned as the age of the earth was utterly irreconcilable with the story inscribed upon its strata; that it, in fact, existed incalculable ages before man had or could have an existence upon it, they, too, were denounced as infidels, and the science itself was proclaimed to be but a new form of infidelity striking at the foundations of all truth and religion. But the geologists delved and discovered and classified and generalized until they compelled the lithographed hieroglyphics of the everlasting rocks to give up their secrets and demonstrate the truth of the science. When the truth of the science could no longer be denied or put aside, the commentators modified their interpretation to meet, as well as they could, the new exigency. But they still clung to the preconceived idea that the writer of Genesis intended his record to be a veritable history of the natural creation, and, as the only mode of reconciliation which they saw, they adopted the theory that the days of creation as given by Moses might well be interpreted to mean not literal days, but indefinite geological periods of hundreds, or thousands, or millions of ages, as the necessities of the case might require. This was dearly a giving up in fact of the literal meaning of the record, and ought to have led them to suspect that the theory itself was an error, and to seek a more rational interpretation ; but, unfortunately, it did not. They still contended that it was a history of the natural creation, but with a figurative meaning of the word day.

The motives inducing this revised exposition are to be admired, whatever may be thought of its success as meeting the difficulties of the case. It was doubtless a well-meant effort. And, utterly unsatisfactory as it was, it is freely admitted that it was the best that could be done without a relinquishment of the cherished theory that the record was simply a history of the natural creation. But the new gloss never fully satisfied one of the thousands who have advocated and defended it. All the arguments in all the countless volumes that fill the shelves of theological libraries never dispelled the doubts of a single inquiring mind. They silenced the expression of the doubts of thousands who acquiesced in it as the best solution attainable, and it doubtless saved multitudes from an open rejection of the Bible. But there, among the days, which were now interpreted to mean geological periods of incalculable duration, stood, and still stands, the Sabbath with the reason assigned for its institution,--namely, that God, having worked six days in making the natural world, rested on the seventh. Was the Sabbath a geological period too? Natures laws, which are but Gods method of operating, are laws of order. If the Bible is from Him it will be found, when rightly understood, to be as orderly as are His natural laws. But here is confusion, with vacuity and emptiness and darkness impenetrable resting upon the abyss ! No effort of the literalist, however learned and honest he may be, will ever bring harmony out of the chaos.

I might go through the whole circle of the sciences with the same dreary result. The consequence is that a sincere and rational belief in the plenary inspiration and absolute divinity of the Bible has virtually died out of the Church. Hundreds of its professed ministers deny it any degree of Divine inspiration at all, while those who do not go so far as this only claim for it such a degree of Divine supervision and influence over its writers as enabled them to relate with substantial accuracy and in literal terms the events recorded in it; and in the same literal terms and with a like accuracy the religious doctrines and duties which it teaches and inculcates, together with prophecies which either have been or yet will be literally fulfilled on the natural theatre of this world. I need not stop to prove that this is the present state of belief in the Church, for very few of its members would claim that their estimate of the divinity and inspiration of the Bible was even so high as I have credited them with.

I do not propose at present to enter upon a dis-mission of the seeming conflict between science and revelation. In the course of these lectures I shall endeavor to show that the conflict is only apparent, arising from a total misapprehension of the structure of these records and their design and purpose. But believing, as I do, that the material universe and the Sacred Scriptures are both alike out-births from the same infinite Divine Mind, and that a key has been given in the science of correspondences that will open the seals from both and unite philosophy and religion in an everlasting marriage, I have thought that some yearning souls might be helped to a more satisfactory resting-place by a presentation of the New Church views on the subject, without making an uncharitable assault upon the old.

Man finds himself in a world of mysteries, in the midst of which he is himself the greatest mystery of all. He looks around upon a scene of ever-changing phenomena, the causes and operating forces of which lie beyond his perceptions or his powers of investigation. The earth he inhabits is, he sees, composed of various minerals, seemingly a conglomerate of chaotic substances brought together he knows not when, collected he knows not where, combined he knows not how, and for final purposes he knows not what. He sees it permeated with springs and checkered with rivers, and separated by oceans teeming with myriad forms of life. Its surface is covered with growths of inconceivable varieties reproducing themselves from which are but Gods method of operating, are laws of order. If the Bible is from Him it will be found, when rightly understood, to be as orderly as are His natural laws. But here is confusion, with vacuity and emptiness and darkness impenetrable resting upon the abyss ! No effort of the literalist, however learned and honest he may be, will ever bring harmony out of the chaos.

I might go through the whole circle of the sciences with the same dreary result. The consequence is that a sincere and rational belief in the plenary inspiration and absolute divinity of the Bible has virtually died out of the Church. Hundreds of its professed ministers deny it any degree of Divine inspiration at all, while those who do not go so far as this only claim for it such a degree of Divine supervision and influence over its writers as enabled them to relate with substantial accuracy and in literal terms the events recorded in it; and in the same literal terms and with a like accuracy the religious doctrines and duties which it teaches and inculcates, together with prophecies which either have been or yet will be literally fulfilled on the natural theatre of this world. I need not stop to prove that this is the present state of belief in the Church, for very few of its members would claim that their estimate of the divinity and inspiration of the Bible was even so high as I have credited them with.

I do not propose at present to enter upon a dis-mission of the seeming conflict between science and revelation. In the course of these lectures I shall endeavor to show that the conflict is only apparent, arising from a total misapprehension of the structure of these records and their design and purpose. But believing, as I do, that the material universe and the Sacred Scriptures are both alike out-births from the same infinite Divine Mind, and that a key has been given in the science of correspondences that will open the seals from both and unite philosophy and religion in an everlasting marriage, I have thought that some yearning souls might be helped to a more satisfactory resting-place by a presentation of the New Church views on the subject, without making an uncharitable assault upon the old.

Man finds himself in a world of mysteries, in the midst of which he is himself the greatest mystery of all. He looks around upon a scene of ever-changing phenomena, the causes and operating forces of which lie beyond his perceptions or his powers of investigation. The earth he inhabits is, he sees, composed of various minerals, seemingly a conglomerate of chaotic substances brought together he knows not when, collected he knows not where, combined he knows not how, and for final purposes he knows not what. He sees it permeated with springs and checkered with rivers, and separated by oceans teeming with myriad forms of life. Its surface is covered with growths of inconceivable varieties reproducing themselves from seeds each true to its kind. It is surrounded and bathed in an atmosphere the invisible but omnipresent medium of communicating sight and sound and odors to his senses. The seasons pass over the scene, and change succeeds change like the moving pictures in a panorama. Spring comes with gentle showers and genial warmth and bud and leaf and flower expand, and all animated nature pulsates in unison. Summer comes, and the bright deep green of spring sobers into the russet brown of maturing harvests. The flowers fade only to give place to the more useful clusters of fruits, to waving wheat-fields, to the golden corn, to the brown and blue and purple grass. Autumn comes with new forms, new combinations, new colors, a new but fading glory. On this sober ground of decaying life she embroiders all the richest and deepest colors of the spring and summer flowers. So brilliant and varied are the hues of the autumn woods that poets have pictured them as beautiful fairies dressed in rain bows and summer sunbeams, who, tired with their gambols, had gone to sleep upon the forest leaves. Winter comes and all this glory changes, and the whole scene is wrapped in a pure soft mantle of snow, of which every fibre is a crystal and every knot a gem. He looks aloft and sees the sun by day and the moon and stars by night shed down their glory until his soul thrills with unutterable longings to comprehend the wondrous scene so far beyond his reach.

He asks, Who made all this? and only receives for answer the echo of his own perplexed thought in the repeated inquiry, Who? Who clothed the earth with all this varied beauty? Who wove the exquisite texture of the flowers ? Who touched their petals with their delicate shades of light? Who painted the lilies and perfumed the rose and spread the carpeting grass and stored the rich juices in the Mushing fruits, and brought to man his daily bread in the golden beauty of the ripened corn? Alas, no answer comes in response to these questionings. No solution to these mysteries that does not involve profounder mysteries, until in some form revelation reaches him, that it is all the work of God, his infinite and divine Father. God! He cannot comprehend God. No. The lesser cannot contain the greater. The finite cannot comprehend the Infinite. Who by searching can find out God ? What shall we do then? Shall we say in our hearts that there is no God ? That will not remove the difficulty. It will only cast us back into the abyss rendered tenfold darker by the ray of light which penetrated it when the announcement was made that God created all these things. Without a revelation we could not know and could not find the cause of all things. When revelation, in whatever form it comes to us, tells of the great First Cause, shall we reject the message because we cannot comprehend God ?

Let us see if we can fully comprehend the simplest thing that surrounds us. Can we comprehend how the plant is contained in the germ of the seed, and how it grows to put forth leaves and flowers and seed again to reproduce itself forever? Can we comprehend how the bird is in the egg like the plant in the seed and reproduces itself in a perpetual circle? Can we fully comprehend the functions of the heart, the lungs, the brain, and all the varied parts of our own bodies ? Can we fully comprehend our own mental constitution, and trace with certainty affection and thought to their sources? Can we, in short, absolutely comprehend anything in its last analysis? If we cannot, then let us acknowledge that we are simply limited; not alone in our knowledge but our capacity to know; that while study and development will increase our knowledge forever and enlarge our capacity to eternity, they cannot transcend the limits of the finite, or enable us wholly to grasp what the finite cannot contain. The finite mind will never fully comprehend God with the back-lying questions as to how He came to be, the mode of His existence, when He began to create, and the thousand others that sometimes press upon it with such strange persistence for answers that will never come.

In every process of reasoning some starting-point must of necessity be taken as true. It is so in the exact sciences. It is so in everything. In these lectures I assume as true, and as the starting-point of all that follows, that there is an Infinite Divine Being who is the creator and preserver of all things. I do not propose to prove the existence of such a Being, nor even to attempt such proof. The knowledge of such a Being could come to man only by means of a revelation in some form from that Being Himself. But when once so revealed, the know ledge may be handed down by instruction from generation to generation with more or less clearness and accuracy. And the fact once announced and admitted, everything in nature may be made to add its testimony to and confirm the truth of the revelation. In fact, all our knowledge, beyond the merest animal sensations, comes to us through instruction which is to us as a revelation. The child, if it were possible for it to live at all without the care and instruction of parents or others, would be more absolutely ignorant and vile than any animal. Living wholly in the sphere of the senses, it could never rise to the idea of God, or of supersensual things. The truth of this proposition needs no demonstration. But, as a matter of fact, men have ideas of God and of spiritual things, however inadequate these ideas may be. I therefore assume further, that at some time in the existence of the race a revelation was made to man, which has, in various forms and with great corruptions, been handed down by tradition through all times and among all peoples: even the most savage and degraded retaining traces of it in their most irrational forms of idolatry and superstition. That this revelation from God to man finally took the form in which we have it in the volume of our Sacred Scriptures is the proposition which I propose to discuss in these lectures.

But I do not propose to prove by historic evidence that Moses and Elias, Peter and John, and the other prophets and apostles are the authors of the books which bear their names; that they performed miracles, and that, therefore, whatever they wrote must necessarily be true. That, I know, is the process of theologians; but that kind of reasoning was never satisfactory to my mind, and I do not suppose it is to any one who is at all troubled with doubts. There is a much higher species of evidence which makes the record itself the incontestable proof of its Divine character. The validity of this evidence in no manner rests upon the character of its real or supposed writers; whether they were good men or bad men; whether they wrought miracles or not; whether their narratives are true as to the natural events which they appear to narrate or not; whether they had or had not a correct understanding of what they wrote; or whether such men as the reputed writers ever even existed or not. If the Bible be indeed a revelation of the will of God to man, then those through whom it was given were in no sense its authors. It would be just as rational to reject the gift of a precious gem because you have no absolute evidence of the pecuniary responsibility or legal incorporation of the express company that brought it to you, as to reject the Bible as the Word of God because of doubts concerning the identity or intelligence of the instruments of communicating it. We do not look to the post-boy for the meaning of the letter he brings, but to the contents of the letter itself. For the same reason we should not look to the writers of the Bible for its interpretation, but to the book itself. If anything at all of the writers entered into its composition, then it is not the Word of God, but of Moses, or John, and it is not Divine. If it is like any other book it must have had a like origin, for a book is the transcript of the thoughts of its author, and will contain his wisdom. A human composition can contain only human wisdom. If God should write or dictate a book, it could contain nothing less than His infinite, Divine wisdom, and it would be as different from any human composition as any of His works is from mans. If, then, the Bible be indeed the divine Word of God, it must contain within itself the evidence of its origin.

Every one projects himself more or less perfectly in his works. The whole of man may be summed up in two faculties, which, in the rather technical terms used in the New Church, are called the will and the understanding, meaning by the will all of his affections, and by the understanding all of his intellectual or thinking power, or, in still other words, his love and wisdom. Take from man all affection and all thought and you see at once that there would be nothing of the human left. It is the manifestation of affection and thought that constitutes language. Every possible manifestation of these is a word in that language. It may be conveyed by gesture, by vocal sound, by written sign, by pictured hieroglyph, by painting, by statuary, by architecture, or any of the thousand other methods employed for the purpose. But in whatever method, affection flows through thought to the outward manifestation, which is the word, and there rests. Consequently, as affection and thought constitute the man, and as each of his works is an embodiment of these, he is, in a sense, in his works. Whatever man does, therefore, is done by his word, and is his word, and in this, by his affection and thought, which constitute himself, he dwells. The same must be true of the Infinite Creator, with the difference that exists between Him and His finite creature. His love, through His wisdom, is manifested in the works of His creation. But love and wisdom or affection and thought manifested are language. Every created thing in the universe, therefore, is and must be a word in a Divine language infilled with the Divine love and wisdom. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him [the Word] was not anything made that was made.

As a starting-point we assumed the existence of a Creator. We know there is a creation, of which we form a part. It must, therefore, embody the affection and thought, or the love and wisdom, of the Creator. But affection and thought manifested, as before shown, constitute language. Therefore, as before stated, all nature is a Divine language, symbolizing the Divine ideas, as mans works represent his ideas. The difference is seen in their respective works. The artist manifests his idea in a beautiful statue. In form and proportion it may be more perfect than any single human body. But it is all external, and when you have studied its outward form you have the full idea of its maker. It has no internal organization, no spirit, no life. But the real man, the workmanship of God, embodies the ideas of his Maker. Who can exhaust the wisdom contained in the Divine work ? In external form and proportion the man may not equal the statue. But science may employ itself forever without perfectly mastering the wonders of the mere physical part of man, much less the indwelling spirit that gives it life. The real man, with all the mysteries of his wondrous being, is internal. So it is with all the works of God and Man. The one is all external and dead, the other internal and vivid with life. The one embodies finite affection and thought, the other infinite love and wisdom.

Now if man, instead of manifesting his ideas in mechanical structures, in imitation of the works of God, should put them in a book by means of written words, the book will be a transcript of his affection and thought, for it can be nothing else. The ideas will be as finite as the author. Like the statue, their meaning will be on the surface; it will be literal and can be fully comprehended by other men. But should God, in His dealings with His children and for their instruction in Divine things, dictate a book to be written, although in external form it might not seem to equal some of the masterpieces of human composition, it must, of necessity, contain Divine ideas, it must embody the Divine affection and thought, the love and wisdom of its Author. The real divinity and inspiration of such a book must lie concealed within the letter, just as the real man lies concealed within the outward form. Such a Word must be Divine in every iota. Its very jots and tittles must pulsate with interior love and wisdom as the finest fibres and tissues of man throb with the indwelling life. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.

Just such a book we hold the Bible to be, and the science of correspondences is the key that opens the letter and reveals the exhaustless treasures that lie within. If this can be demonstrated to the rational mind, thus placing the book as high above all human compositions as a living man is above a statue; if it can be further demonstrated by the application of this science, that no finite intelligence could have produced it, the proposition that it is a book of plenary inspiration and absolutely Divine will have been established. The blade, the ear, and the full corn in the ear, need no labored historical research into their origin to prove that they are not of human production. The evidence is embodied in themselves. So, too, if the Bible is from the same author it will contain within itself the like evidence. The science of correspondences is given to elicit this proof.

What then is the science of correspondences? It is so all-embracing that men and angels will draw their wisdom from it forever without exhausting it. And yet it comes to the rational mind of man in such clear light that it removes all doubt and uncertainty so far as he becomes acquainted with it. It is so absolutely definite and certain that no two minds can differ about it any more than they can about mathematical truths, for it is founded upon the everlasting verity of things, being the relation that exists between causes and their effects. That the outward or natural world with all its phenomena is a world of effects is manifest. That the causes which produced them, back even to the first cause of all, are in the spiritual world can only be denied by that naked atheism that denies a creator and deifies chance. The effect here corresponds to the cause there, and represents it. As this science is the relation between cause and effect, it necessarily includes all possible true sciences. As natural things correspond to and represent the spiritual principles from which they sprung, just so far as we become acquainted with these relations, the sight or name of anything in nature will carry the mind over to the spiritual principle which it represents. And as all nature is and must be a clothing of the Divine ideas of the Creator in material forms, each and every created thing is and must be a representative of a Divine idea and constitute a word in a Divine language.

Man, as a finite image of God, has aggregated in him, as the perfection and head of creation, all the principles of all below him. Every least thing in nature, therefore, represents some constituent of man as well as some idea of the love and wisdom of his Maker. Man is so made that while here he is an inhabitant of two worlds. His body with its senses lives in the natural world on the plane of effects, while his soul or spirit, which is the real man, lives at the same time in the spiritual world which is the sphere of causes. His affection and thought belong to the spirit, they are spiritual and are the causes of all that he does. What he does to manifest these are effects flowing from the causes, and are natural. We can only reach the spiritual processes of the mind through the natural operations of the body ; and we can only do this because the outward bears the relation of effect to the inward, and represents it. If man, therefore, without dissimulation, acted out his interior purposes, we could read, as in a book, his exact spiritual state by his actions and surroundings. We are told, in the writings of the New Church, that the most ancient people or church, called Adam, in the Bible, were of this genius, and had no other than this natural language, which was then universal. By it they understood not only the affections and thoughts of each other by corresponding changes of the face and body, but, understanding as well what the objects of nature around them represented, they used those objects themselves, or pictures of them, to express their thoughts on all mental and spiritual subjects. And it is manifest that this was the origin of all language. The roots of every language must have been in natural things. The science of correspondences being lost, language has become, to a large extent, artificial and arbitrary. But it still contains abundant traces of its origin. The sense of taste conveys to us peculiar bodily sensations, and we say the substance is sweet, or sour, or bitter, as the case may be. And we use the same terms to express mental or spiritual states,--as a sweet disposition, a sour temper, a bitter feeling, and the like. When these terms are applied to mental operations the real meaning is not at all in the literal sense of words, but in the spiritual sense contained within the letter.

Now it is evident that a book might be written in the form of history, biography, poetry, prophecy, by so using the objects of nature with their various qualities and relations as to contain a most perfect record of all possible mental processes and spiritual verities without having a word of literal truth in it, and yet to those ignorant of the structure of the work, and of the spiritual life, and not well informed in natural sciences, nothing at all but natural ideas would appear. In fact we have examples of a kind of writing somewhat similar to this in such works as the Pilgrims Progress. Here a whole volume is so constructed as to convey the authors idea of a full religious development under the similitude of a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Children read it as a real history. It so appears to them and they derive no other idea from it until they are instructed in its true purpose by being further instructed in the popular theology of the day which it was written to teach. Yet there is not a single sentence of literal history in the book.

Now suppose the English language should become lost, all contemporary literature that could throw light upon it obliterated for centuries, and the whole face of society with its customs, culture, civilization, and religious rites and ceremonies changed. Suppose, further, that the Pilgrims Progress,” or a part of it, should be found and translated into the then languages of men, and be taken as a real literal history, what could be made of it? Would not the commentators differ as much about the location of the City of Destruction, the Delectable Mountains, and the Celestial City, and other places named as our commentators have about the location of the Garden of Eden, Mount Ararat, the Land of Nod, and the city that Cain built in the name of his son Enoch? And so with every other particular mentioned in it. This has been the precise difficulty with the Bible. It is a book— portions of which have come down from the most ancient times—o which other portions have been added from century to century for some thousands of years, the most modern being now nearly two thousand years old. The languages in which it was written have long ceased to be spoken. The whole aspects of human society have been radically changed, and the habits of thought are altogether different. There is no literature contemporary with it extant to throw certain light upon it. And the wonderful mistake has been made of assuming it to be a literal history of creation and the other events seemingly related in it. The mistake is infinitely greater than would be the one I have supposed in the case of the Pilgrims Progress.

Of course there is no real analogy between the Pilgrims Progress and the Bible, the one being written as an allegory merely, and with only one indefinite and general meaning, while the other, if written according to the immutable law of correspondences, must have, in every single word and sentence and expression, a precise, definite, and scientific meaning that can never be interpreted differently by those who understand that science any more than the problems in geometry can be differently understood by those who have made it their study.

It is admitted that if the Bible really does contain an internal sense which treats wholly of spiritual things it could never have been discovered without the science of correspondences, while many of its precepts are so plain that the merely natural man may understand them, and, regulating his life by them, may reap the blessings which result from obedience to their teachings. And while the state of mankind was such that they could only be influenced by external motives, and so long as they could accept it as a Divine revelation, either upon authority or on external evidence, it had a powerful restraining effect upon their conduct, leading them to better lives and to heaven. But men had sunk so low into mere naturalism that they could not even conceive of what was spiritual. A revelation to them, therefore, in language speaking only about spiritual things would have been wholly incomprehensible, and must have been rejected by them as the ravings of insanity. It was therefore given in such terms of natural language and accompanied with such manifestations that it could appeal to the merely natural hopes and fears of the natural mind, while it contained within these natural terms all spiritual and Divine wisdom to meet the wants of every possible development of men and angels forever.

But as men progressed in the natural sciences they began to find discrepancies between the natural laws and the supposed teachings of the Bible. And as some, at least, were being prepared to receive its higher—or interior and spiritual—meaning, the science of correspondences was restored for their use. Such persons can receive and be benefited by it.

The world is evidently preparing to receive this new development, but its spread will hardly be very rapid. The natural mind cannot receive the things of the spirit, for they are spiritually discerned. It is true that the understanding may be elevated into the light for a time, so as to see the beauties of this inner glory; but it is married to the will, and must go back to its mate unless the will goes with it. The intellect serves and permanently accepts precisely what the affections demand of it. This is so true that it has passed into the proverb of our common speech, The wish is father to the thought. It is s) in all things. The wish is always the father of the thought. The craving desire inspires the thought and drives the intellect as a servant to procure its gratification. Unless there is a wish, therefore,a longing desire for a higher and more rational interpretation of the Bible,—there will be no interest felt on this subject, and it will be treated as visionary and phantastic.

But there must be, and there are, here and there some who have not become wholly sunk in materialism ; who have not confirmed themselves in a denial of God and the Bible; who would gladly accept the Scriptures as a Divine revelation if they could be rationally enabled to see their Divine character and consistency with other known truths, but who are troubled with doubts which no evidence that they have seen has been able wholly to remove. It is this class, be it larger or smaller, for whom these lectures are designed, and they are given with the sincere hope that, if they do not remove the difficulties, they will at least point them to the source from which such help may be obtained.

But the science of correspondences will be more clearly seen by its effect in the opening of otherwise obscure passages in the Bible. It will thus be seen to be a key to open the whole Scriptures, giving a definite, consistent, rational, and supremely important signification to even the most uncomprehended portions of it, and making it all practically applicable to the every-day life and duty of every one, in all time and in eternity.