Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

of which the soul itself is merely the organ; all which, and even the material forms which are their first envelopes, still lie beyond the most subtile forms that the gross observation of the senses can discover. The farther, however, the observation of the senses can extend, the greater are the wonders which appear. Just so it is with the Word of God; and so it must be, if it has in reality God for its Author. Το suppose the literal sense of the Word of God to be all that it contains, because nothing more is obvious to a superficial inspection, is just as reasonable as to affirm that the human body consists of nothing but skin, because this is all that meets the unassisted eye: "but as the researches of anatomists have assured us that within the skin which covers our frame there are innumerable forms of use and beauty, each of which consists again of innumerable vessels and fibres; whilst, after science has carried her discoveries to the utmost, the principle that imparts life to the whole still eludes the search: so the letter of the Holy Word, which may be regarded as its skin, includes within it innumerable spiritual truths, adapted in some measure to the apprehension of spiritually-minded men, but more completely to the intellects of purely spiritual beings; whilst the Essential Divine Wisdom, which gives life to the whole, is beyond the comprehension of the highest finite intelligence, and can only be known to its Infinite Original. And such must be the character of the whole of the Word of God, as well of those passages which afford a clear instructive sense in the letter as of those which do not: for the Word of God, to be truly so, must be like itself throughout, and must everywhere be composed upon one uniform principle. Every mind that reflects deeply upon the subject, will, I am persuaded, see, that to deny the Holy Word to possess such contents as we have described, is equivalent to denying it to have God for its Author."-Plenary Inspiration of the Scriptures Asserted, &c., pp. 63-8. I take the present opportunity of strongly recommending this able work to the reader."

24"The spiritual sense of the Psalms," says Bishop Horne, "is and must be peculiar to the Scriptures; because of those persons and transactions only, which are there mentioned and recorded, can it be affirmed for certain that they were designed to be figurative. And should any one attempt to apply the narrative of Alexander's expedition, by Quintus Curtius, or the commentaries of Casar, as the New Testament writers have done, and taught us to do to the histories of the Old, he would find himself unable to proceed three steps with consistency and

:

propriety. The argument, therefore, which would infer the absurdity of supposing the Scriptures to have a spiritual sense, from the absurdity of supposing history or poems merely human to have it, is inconclusive; the sacred writings differing, in this respect, from all other writings in the world, as much as the nature of the transactions which they relate, differs from that of all other transactions; and the Author who relates them differs from all other authors."-Comm. on the Psalms, pref., p. xvi.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAWS OF THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCES STATED AND CONFIRMED. -THE DOCTRINE OF CORRESPONDENCES WELL KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS, AND ITS CORRUPTION THE ORIGIN OF ALL IDOLATRY AND SUPERSTITION.

"IT is universally confessed," says Swedenborg, "that the Word is from God, is divinely inspired, and of consequence holy; but still it has remained a secret to this day in what part of the Word its divinity resides, inasmuch as in the letter it appears like a common writing, composed in a strange style, neither so sublime, nor so elegant, nor so lucid as that which distinguishes the best secular compositions. Hence it is, that whosoever worships nature instead of God, or in preference to God, and in consequence of such worship makes himself and his own proprium [or selfhood] the centre and fountain of his thoughts, instead of deriving them out of heaven from the Lord, may easily fall into error concerning the Word, or into contempt for it, and say within himself, as he reads it, What is the meaning of this passage? What is the meaning of that? Is it possible this should be divine? Is it possible that God, whose wisdom is infinite, should speak in this manner? Where is its sanctity, or whence can it be derived, but from superstition and credulity? with other suggestions of a similar nature.

[ocr errors]

"But he who reasons thus does not reflect that Jehovah the Lord, who is God of heaven and earth, spake the Word by Moses and the prophets, and that consequently it must be divine truth, inasmuch as what Jehovah himself speaks can be nothing else; nor does such an one consider that the Lord, who is the same with Jehovah, spake the word written by the Evangelists, many parts from his own mouth, and the rest from the Spirit of his mouth, which is the Holy Spirit. Hence it is He himself declares, that in his words there is life, and that He is that light which enlightens, and that He is the truth. The natural man, however, cannot still be persuaded to believe that the Word is divine truth itself, in which is divine wisdom and divine life,

inasmuch as he judges of it by its style, in which no such things

appear.

"Nevertheless, the style in which the Word is written is a divine style, with which no other style, however sublime and excellent it may seem, is at all comparable; for it is as darkness compared to light. The style of the Word is of such a nature as to contain what is holy in every verse, in every word, and in some cases in every letter; and hence the Word conjoins man with the Lord, and opens heaven. There are two things which proceed from the Lord,-divine love and divine wisdom, or, what is the same thing, divine good and divine truth for divine good is of divine love itself, and divine truth is of the divine wisdom: and the Word in its essence is both of these; and inasmuch as it conjoins man with the Lord, and opens heaven, as just observed, therefore the Word fills the man who reads it, under the Lord's influence and not under the influence of proprium or self, with the good of love and the truth of wisdom,-his will with the good of love, and his understanding with the truth of wisdom.

"Hence man has life by and through the Word. Lest, therefore, mankind should remain any longer in doubt concerning the Divinity of the Word, the internal sense thereof is revealed, which in its essence is spiritual, and which is to the external sense, which is natural, what the soul is to the body. This internal sense is the Spirit which gives life to the letter; wherefore this sense will evince the divinity and sanctity of the Word, and may convince even the natural man, if he is willing to be convinced."-S. S. 1-4; A. E. 1065.

In the New Church, then, and for the benefit of all who are willing to receive the truth, it has been disclosed, and the discovery is the most important that has taken place since the completion of the New Testament, that the Holy Word is so written, that each expression corresponds to some distinct spiritual idea, that is, an idea which relates to the Lord, the spiritual world, and the human mind; to goodness, truth, and their activities, or to love, wisdom, and life. Now these spiritual ideas, together with those of the letter, are shown to be so wonderfully connected as to form one perfect unbroken chain of eternal truth from first to last,-one grand series of heavenly particulars, which constitutes the internal and external, or the spiritual and literal senses of the Word of God. The laws which thus unfold the true character of the Sacred Oracles are denominated laws of correspondence. This term is derived from con, re, and spondeo, meaning radically to answer with, or to agree, denoting, in the sense in which

it is used in the New Church, the reciprocal relation of objects in higher and lower degrees,-a mutual union of the internal with the external, the harmony of substance and form,-the concord of cause and effect. From this definition it may be perceived that the science of correspondences is not, as some have rashly asserted, a mere clever invention, an arbitrary device, an imaginary theory, a fanciful conceit, but that it is a systematic, uniform, and certain rule of interpretation, founded upon the nature, qualities, and uses of all terrestrial objects, and all the phenomena of life.25 These have one and all the most exact correspondence with eternal realities and mental operations, for natural objects and truths are the mirrors in which spiritual subjects and infinite wisdom are reflected. Hence, man has been

[ocr errors]

26

25 The want of a strict rule of interpreta- | ments are not unlike the notions which the tion, for which the world was at that time masters of the Cabalistical doctrine among so totally unprepared, is thus acknowledged the Jews held concerning God's SEPHIROTH by Augustine, "where he lays down the and SEAL, wherewith, according to them, all principle which guided him in the investi- the worlds, and everything in them, are gation of historical types." [Tract for the stamped or sealed; and these are probably Times, lxxxix., p. 38.] "These secrets of Di- near akin to what Lord Bacon calls his 'parvine Scripture we trace out as we may, one ralella signicula;' and symbolizantes schemamore or less aptly than another, but as becomes tizmi. According to this hypothesis, these faithful men, holding thus much for certain; parables, which are often taken from natural that not without some kind of foreshadow- things to illustrate such as are divine, will not ing of future events, were these things done be similitudes taken entirely at pleasure, but are and recorded [in the Word]; and that to often in a great measure founded in nature, Christ only, and his Church, the City of and the things themselves." - Leighton's God, are they to be referred in every in- Works, vol. iv., p. 156. stance."-De Civ. Dei, xvi. 2. By the Science of Correspondences, however, all distrust and uncertainty are removed.

"The severe schooles shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a pourtrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible Fabrick."-SIR THOMAS

BROWNE. Ob. A. D. 1682.

"What if earth

Milton says, Be but the shadow of heav'n; and things therein

26"Figures taken from natural things and actions are introduced into the Word of God to express divine things and actions, in such a manner, that, by looking upon one, we may, as it were in a picture, behold the other."-Honert's Institut. Theolog., etc., part 2.

"It is not a little remarkable that, accord

ing to Prescott, the Peruvian Mythology, before the conquest, was not unlike that of Hindostan.' 'They adopted also a notion,' says he, not unlike that professed by some of the schools of ancient philosophy, that everything on earth had its archetype or idea, its

Each to other like, more than on earth is mother, as they emphatically styled it, which thought."

row:

Paradise Lost, book v., lines 574-6.

they held sacred, as in some sort its spiritual essence.'"-Cong. of Peru, vol. i., p. 37.

A similar idea is thus expressed by Bar- "Bacon hath wisely observed, that the "What we see in a lower degree some- works of God minister a singular help and where to exist, doth probably otherwise exist in preservative against unbelief and error: a higher degree."— Works, vol. iv., p. 170. our Saviour, as he saith, having laid before "The Platonists," says Archbishop Leigh-us two books or volumes to study; first, the ton, "divide the world into two, the sensible and intellectual world, they imagine the one to be the type of the other, and that sensible and spiritual things are stamped, as it were, with the same stamp. These senti

Scriptures, revealing the will of God, and then the creatures, expressing his power; whereof the latter is a key unto the former.”— Bacon's Adv. of Learning, b. 1. Such was the piety and penetration of this great man.

emphatically called by the ancients a microcosm, or little world, and considered as an epitome of the macrocosm, or great universe;" and as the lower or natural region of the mind is thus the world in its least effigy, so the superior or spiritual region of the mind is a heaven in its least effigy, on which account man may also be called a microuranos, or little heaven (T. C. R. 604). And a fragment of the very earliest philosophy which has been handed down to us, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (the Greek name for Thoth, the personification of Egyptian wisdom), affirms, that "there is nothing in the heavens which is not in the earth in an earthly form; and there is nothing on the earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form."28

For as the indefinite particulars of which the universe is composed

"The universe is but a great mirror of the mind of man."—Gilfillan's Lit. Port., p. 8.

"Now this earthly world which we do see is an exact picture and pattern of the spiritual, heavenly world which we do not see. As Solomon says in the Proverbs, The things which are seen are the doubles of the things which are not seen.'"-Kingsley's Village Sermons, p. 187.

"For it will be found true, that the invisi- | originating the existence, as well as mainble things of God, that is, the things con- taining the order and harmony, of the natucerning his Being and his Power, and the ral universe." economy of his spiritual kingdom, which are the objects of our faith, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, and understood by the things that are made."-Jones's Sermon on the Nat. Evid. of Christianity, preached 1787. "There was an opinion [I should rather call it a tradition] among some heathen philosophers that the world is a parable, the literal or bodily part of which is manifest to all men, while the inward mean28" Things invisible to the carnal eye are ing is hidden, as the soul in the body, clearly seen by the enlightened eye of the the moral in the fable, or the interpretation mind-being understood by the lively and in the parable." "We may call the world a sensible description of them in the things fable, or parable; in which there is an out-that are made. The material world and its ward appearance of visible things, with an inward sense, which is hidden as the soul under the body."-Sallust Peri Theown., cap. 3. Jones's Lec. on the Fig. Lang. of Scrip., p.

70.

objects are pictures or similitudes, in some view or other, of the actings of God in the spiritual world. Upon this plan the lively oracles of truth appear to have been written."-Serle's Hor. Solit., p. 137.

"The whole of the visible creation is but the outside of a vast magnificent house or temple, whose inside is heaven, or the an

Philo says that "man is a little world, and that the world is one great man;" and Origen calls man "Minorem Mundum, a Microcosme."—H. More's Conj. Cab., Defence of,gelic kingdom; and this again is but the p. 205.

"Out of all beings known to us, man is the most elevated; as in his form, at the same time one and complex, he contains all inferior existences."-Abbe De Lamennais, Equ isse D'une Philosophie, vol. i., p. 409. See Morell's Hist. of Mod. Philos., 2d ed., vol., ii. p. 297. "Properly understood, earthly substances are the types, representatives, and shadows of heavenly things."-Dr. A. Clarke's Commentary, vol. v., p. 562.

"Davis, in his History of the Chinese, tells us that the Chinese physiologists expressly call man a little universe, or microcosm; to which they extend the dual principle, as

outside of a temple or house still more vast and magnificent, whose inside is Jesus Christ, the only living and eternal Lord our God."-Clowes' Miscell. Thoughts, p. 53.

"That the teaching of Nature is symbolical, none, we think, can deny."-Neale and Webb's Introd. Ess. to Durandus on Symb., p. xlv.

"Philosophy, fable, poetry, and the most refined metaphysics, have not been able to form an idea of the universe which surrounds us, without at the same time imagining another universe of which this is the image."-Richer's La Nouv. Jerus. on Correspon., vol. i., 2d part, p. 355.

« ÎnapoiContinuă »