in the passages wherein such phrases occur, will show these to be the obvious meanings. All others are fanciful and far-fetched.

The Hutchinsonians, in magnifying the value of the Hebrew language, object to much of the learning of modern times, as not subservient to the cause of truth. But surely if some branches of learning, useful to mankind in a secular point of view, be not prejudicial to divine truth, they are not to be condemned for not being directly subservient to it. Further: we cannot tell in what degree divine truth may be elucidated, by discoveries in sciences seemingly the most remote from it. Dr. Chalmers has recently shown how astronomy, in its improved state, furnishes analogies for illustrating Christianity: I allude chiefly to that passage, in which, adverting to the greater glory accruing to the conqueror, from a private visit to the cottage of indigence, than from all his splendid triumphs, he replies to those who have objected, that our earth is too insignificant a speck in a small system, to merit the stupendous interposition of incarnate Divinity. May not other sciences, in the rapid progress of intelligence, lead on to similar conclusions? Even the objections to the Mosaic cosmogony, stated by chronologers and geologists, have been shown to be altogether futile; Sir William Jones and Dr. Hale having detected the fallacy of the

one; while Saussure, De Luc, Kirwan, Townsend, Cuvier, and Kidd, have triumphed over the other. It is no small advantage, to prove, that Revelation dreads not the light; and that she shines forth more gloriously, in the march of discovery. In fact, the whole science of nature, and the whole philosophy of mind, conduct us to the shrine of Revelation; partly by speaking in harmony with its oracles, and partly by confessing their own imperfections, unaided by superior light. But to what end heap up all secular knowledge, as a monopoly, in the treasures of the Hebrew language? The vulgar Hebrew itself is not the original language of mankind; or even of the Pentateuch. The Samaritan is older, and indeed the real Hebrew. Nor would any evident advantage be derived from supposing either to be a general dictionary of occult truths. Such a notion is the mere pride and parade of human learning.

That there is no morality unless that preceded by justification and sanctification, is a false straining of the Article which maintains, that good works done before the grace of God, have in themselves the nature of sin. This is applicable to Christians baptized and religiously educated; and is pronounced to exclude the boasting of self-righteousness. In heathens, who act up to their lights, there is a morality,

an accepted morality; perhaps the effect of sanctification, and certainly accepted through the retrospective sacrifice of Christ: yet, the recipients being necessarily ignorant of these benefits, it is a morality, strictly speaking, antecedent to them. Some "who had not the law, made a law unto themselves" (Rom. ii. 14); and "a man is accepted according to that he hath, and not according to that he hath not." (2 Cor. viii. 12.)

XVIII. Nothing can be too visionary or too absurd for the human mind, when it imps its wings with the pinions of fancy; and deserting the firm ground of reason and revelation, essays to soar into the regions of spiritual existence. Welleducated and universally learned, the Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg became early distinguished for his abilities, at the court of Sweden*. In the year 1743 he professed to have been favoured with a new revelation, and to have ascended to the invisible world. Theology, from that period, became his only study; and he composed, in good, but unornamented Latin, many books illustrative of his own peculiar views. In these his tenets, different from those of all other sects, are supported by numberless texts of Scripture. In allusion to the New Jerusalem, mentioned in the book of Revelations, he de

Gregory's Christian Church, vol. ii.; Maclean's. Sophron and Philadelphus; Mosheim; Adam's Religious World.

clared himself the founder of a religious society, called the New Jerusalem Church; though he lived and died in the Lutheran communion, and professed a high veneration for the Church of England. He gave out that God, in the beginning of his mission, manifested himself to him in a personal appearance, and opened his spiritual eyes; enabling him thenceforward to hold converse with angelic natures. His visions of the other world, where he saw the angels formed into societies, and dwelling in houses, surrounded by courts, fields, and parterres, are in his Treatise of Heaven and Hell minutely described.

Swedenborg carried his respect for the person and divinity of Jesus Christ to the highest pitch of veneration; considering him altogether as God manifested in the flesh; as the fulness of the Godhead united to the man Jesus. From this peculiar view was generated a subtle Unitarianism; for, rejecting the idea of three distinct Persons, as destructive of the unity of the Godhead, he admitted three distinct essences; the divine essence, or Creator, the human essence, or Redeemer; and the proceeding essence, or Holy Ghost: these, he asserted, were combined,-as the soul, body, and operation, were limited to form one man.

He denied atonement to be a vicarious sacrifice; and considered its virtue and efficacy as

consisting, not in any change of disposition in God towards man, for that must always be the same; but in the change which it wrought in the state of man, by removing from him the powers of hell and darkness, with which he was infested by transgression, and bringing near to him the divine powers of goodness and truth, in the person and spirit of Jesus, the God and Saviour; by which approximation the infirmities and corruptions of human nature might be wrought upon; and every believer thus placed in a state and capacity of arising out of the evils consequent on sin, by a real renewal of all the parts and principles of his life, both bodily and spiritual.

If some traces of resemblance to the Moravian doctrine may be here discovered, Swedenborg agreed with Hutchinson in believing that the sacred volume contained an internal and spiritual sense, to which the outward and literal sense serves as a basis; and he illustrated in various treatises, this doctrine of correspondences, which he states to have been lost ever since the days of Job.

He denied predestination, justification by faith only, and the resurrection of the material body maintaining the free will and agency of man, the necessity of co-operation with grace, and the impossibility of obtaining salvation without repentance: while he held, that, im