Letters on spiritual subjects in answer to inquiring souls

Preface

IN the early part of 1882 there appeared in the New Church Independent, four essays upon the Opening of the Interior Degrees of the Human Spirit, and the Descent of the Lord into Ultimates. They attracted considerable attention, and I have received many letters from earnest and anxious souls, desirous of learning more of the Second Coming of the Lord by interior processes, and of that New Life which his coming will establish in the world.

Some of my responses to those letters are here collected, and so arranged as to give an appearance of order and continuity to the subjects discussed. If the reader discovers occasional reiterations of the same ideas, he will understand that it was scarcely avoidable in writing to different persons about the same things. Fortunately the reiterations relate to important truths which cannot be too often repeated or too deeply impressed on the mind.

The four Essays which elicited the correspondence, are here published in the form of Appendix. Those who

I* V

VI PREFACE.

are acquainted with the philosophical and theological teachings of Swedenborg, will do well to read the Essays first and the Letters afterwards. Those who know little or nothing of the doctrines of the New Church, will find the reading of the Letters a suitable preparation for a more thorough understanding of the Essays.

It is useless to say anything to prejudice the reader's mind in favor of the contents of this volume. It is already " made up " by the necessities of its own organic conditions. Those who see truth by a certain interior light, will hail these things with faith and joy, without caring for the name of the author, or the sources of his enlightenment. Those who believe in the authority of Authority, will doubt and cavil and very generally reject. The great majority of the reading and thinking public, if it gives the subject any attention at all, will dismiss it as an idle tale or a poetic dream.

To the receivers of the heavenly doctrines revealed through Swedenborg I would say, that the book makes no claim to any special revelation, nor its author to any spiritual state not accessible to and attainable by all others under similar conditions.

The Lord is perpetually striving to manifest Himself, and the New Life continually presses for utterance ; but the effort can be successful only so far as suitable environments have been prepared for its reception. Hence

PREFACE. Vll

the injunction : " Prepare ye the way of the Lord : make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

During the century preceding Swedenborg's active career, there was a remarkable development of religious fervor, limited in extent but of great intensity, and many abortive attempts were made to manifest the genuine life of heaven upon earth. The cause of the failure of Molinos, Guyon, Fenelon, Bourignon, and others, is very instructive. It was from ignorance of the true relations between internal and external things, which led to a total separation — theoretical and sometimes practical — of the spiritual from the natural or social and business life. Their beautiful and mysterious castles in the air, had no solid foundation on the earth.

Swedenborg was sent, like John the Baptist, to prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. This was done by teaching a vast system of spiritual truth which not only leads to repentance, but delivers us from falsities and brings us into judgment. This system shows the organic connection and correspondence between spiritual and natural things, and demonstrates scientifically, that internal religion without its external basis, and external religion without its internal spirit, are equally sentimental, unreal, and fantastic.

It is very certain that old things are passing away, and a new basis of faith is being gradually constructed

Vlll PREFACE.

in the world. Will it be a "highway in the desert for our God " ? Will it be the solid ground-work and foundation of a higher, and purer, and holier life than has ever before been realized in the church ? Are the environments ready ? If the New Man of the New Era were now ushered into the world, would he survive or would he perish ?

W. H. H.

Letter XX. Page

Swedenborg's View of External and Internal . . .181

LETTER XXL

The Philosophy of Creation: Nature Absolutely Dead . 189

LETTER XXIL Advice to a Wounded Spirit 194

LETTER XXIII.

Coercion in Religious Matters 199

LETTER XXIV.

Conviction of Sin: Infidel Doubts: The Two Propriums . 205

LETTER XXV.

Confirmed in False Doctrines: Brought into Judgment .211

LETTER XXVI.

Unfolding of Interior States 217

LETTER XXVII.

Freedom of Thought, etc. — How is the Lord Nearer to Us ? — Remnants of the Most Ancient Church . . . 223

LETTER XXVIII.

Why should We not Communicate with the Departed? — Swedenborgians and Spiritualists 231

LETTER XXIX.

Mediums in the New Church : The Phenomena and the Law of the Phenomena 239

XU CONTENTS.

LETTER XXX.

PAGE

The Bible of the Spiritualists. — The True Tests of Revelation. — Religious Cranks 249

LETTER XXXI.

The Divine Motherhood Criticised 254

LETTER XXXII.

To a Newchurchman Infested by Spirits .... 256

LETTER XXXIII.

If the Hells were Subjugated by the Lord, what Need of . a Second Coming? — Why is Spiritism so Generally Evil and False? 259

LETTER XXXIV.

The Opening of Degrees. — The New Era. — Reticence or

Revelation? 263

LETTER XXXV.

On some Obscure Passages of Scripture 275

LETTER XXXVI.

Shall We Stay in the Old Church ?— Marrying Outside of the New Church. — How Shall We be Saved? . . 284

LETTER XXXVII.

The New Movement, Old as well as New — That Skeleton in the New- Church Closet 294

LETTER XXXVIII.

CONTENTS. Xlll

LETTER XXXIX.

PAGE

The Descent of the Celestial Through the Spiritual into the Natural 308

LETTER XL.

Restatement of Fundamental Principles . . . . 314

Appendix

THE LORD'S DESCENT INTO ULTIMA TES.

ESSAY I.

Opening of the Interiors 325

ESSAY II.

The Lord's Descent Through the Heavens , . . .341

ESSAY III.

The Lord's Descent into the Natural Plane of the Human Mind 358

ESSAY IV.

The Lord's Kingdom on Earth. — The New Life . . . 382 2

ABBREVIATIONS

OF THE WORKS OF SWEDENBORG QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES.

A. C. stand for Arcana Ccelestia.

T. C. R. " True Christian Religion.

D. P. " Divine Providence.

A. R. " Apocalypse Revealed.

A. E. " Apocalypse Explained.

S. D., or Spl. D. " Spiritual Diary.

C. L. " Conjugial Love.

L. J. " Last Judgment.

Contin. L. J. " Continuation of the Last Judgment.

N. J. D. " Doctrine of the New Jerusalem.

Letters

ON

Spiritual Subjects.

Letter I

THE SECOND COMING OF THE LORD, A DESCENT FROM WITHIN, BOTH GENERAL AND SPECIAL.

M

" Y DEAR FRIEND :— You are astonished at my declaration that the Lord Jesus Christ has come again, with his own personal divine-human sphere, and that He now stands upon the earth, ready, under the proper conditions, to reveal his presence and power to men, just as truly as He stood upon the earth when He appeared to Mary in the garden, to the disciples by the way, to the incredulous Thomas in the room closed from fear of the Jews, and to Peter and John by the seaside, when the disciples durst not ask Him, Who art Thou? "knowing that it was the Lord."

This, you say, is a statement so remarkable, so remote from the perceptions and cognitions of men, that it requires to be very fully and clearly explained, or to be immensely qualified. I will offer a few suggestions which may give you a little more light on the subject.

In the first place, let us seriously consider what is meant by the coming and going away of the Lord. He said to the Pharisees, " Ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go," and immediately gives the reason of their ignorance: "Ye judge after the flesh," that is, ye judge from your sensuous, scientific, and rational standpoints, from which you never can discover any spiritual truth. But He said to his disciples, " Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know; " and to the ever-doubting Thomas, who still does not comprehend Him, He says, " I am the way, the truth, and the life." The coming and going of the Lord are therefore spiritual phenomena, dependent upon personal states and experiences, and explicable by spiritual and not by natural laws.

God is one and indivisible. In Himself there are no differentiations or divisions into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. These differentiations or different conceptions of Him are made in the triune, organic, finite structures of the human mind, just as the white ray of light is broken up in the prism into several rays differing in appearance and properties. We know nothing whatever of God except as He has revealed Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ (Jno. i. 18), in whose person " the fulness of the Godhead " or the Divine Trinity resides. Now the Lord is omnipresent ; neither here nor there, but everywhere simultaneously. When He is said to come and go, it is clearly an appearance due to changes occurring, not in Him, for He is unchangeable, but in the states of the human mind itself, which at one time, or under certain circumstances, recognizes his presence, and at another time, or under other conditions, does not recognize it.

In the next place let us look at some peculiar features of his first coming, or incarnation. How could that event possibly have occurred without there being the slightest change in the

SECOND COMING OF THE LORD. \J

Divine whereabouts ? While the historical man, Jesus Christ, was living out his divine life in Judea, his spirit was everywhere and simultaneously present throughout the universe. The Jesus Christ perceptible and cognizable by men, was only the Divine Being as received, limited, and projected through the mind of the Jewish church. His career was therefore representative and significative of the organic spiritual states of that church and determined by them. Therefore, also, all his words and deeds were parables, representative and significative of spiritual truths. He could force no external belief in Him. Unbelief even suspends the working of his power. Every man saw Him and judged of Him from his own standpoint. To some, He was only the carpenter's son, and how could they comprehend the sources of his knowledge ? To others, He was a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, "a friend of publicans and sinners/' and how could they appreciate his mission? To some, He " had a devil and was mad ; " and why should they listen to his words ? To others, He was a deceiver and a blasphemer, and why should they not crucify Him ? To some, He was Elias, or John the Baptist, or one of the old prophets risen from the dead. But to his disciples He was " the Christ, the Son of the living God," or the divine truth emanating from the divine good. Nor did they perceive Him in his true light from the " flesh and blood," or the external standpoints of the Jewish church, which altogether rejected Him, but from the interior illuminating power of the Divine Love, "the Father which is in heaven." And this interior perception of truth from the standpoint of good, is the rock upon which the church is built.

But why was the Divine Being, at his first coming, projected through the mind of the church as an external man like our- 2* B selves ? But first mark in this place, that Jesus Christ was a genuine objective human being, and not a mere appearance, as Tulk and some others have supposed. Our sun, with its heat and light, is a projection of the Divine mind through the sun of the spiritual world, but what can be more real and substantial ? And so of the body and the external life of Christ. The reason why He became a man in the lowest or sensuo-corporeal degree, was this : The Divine Life found no plane or resting-place in the affections of the church, for they were confirmed in evils ; and so their celestial degree was closed to the influx of the divine love. It could find no plane or resting-place in their thoughts, for they were confirmed in false doctrines, and the spiritual degree was closed to the influx of the divine wisdom. It could find no plane or resting-place in their natural degree of life and conduct, for that was the ultimate effect of their interior evils and falsities. There was, therefore, no abiding place for Him. The foxes and birds of the old selfhood had ample provision, " but the Son of man had not where to lay his head." " He came unto his own, and his own received Him not."

The Divine Life therefore, impregnating the virgin affection for truth, the last feeble remains of genuine good and truth in the world, produced that extraordinary human being, the historical Christ, born without natural father, both God and man, living a divine life but tempted as we are, putting off everything derived from the mother, and passing away, even as to his physical remains, entirely out of the sphere of human perception ; disappearing or ascending from without inwards, exactly as He had descended from within outwards. This was " the eternal life " about whom his favorite disciple uses these solemn and wonderful words :

"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life :

" (For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness and show unto you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us .•)

"That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us : and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. ' 9

The divine love produces the divine wisdom just as heat produces light. It was the divine love, in its outflowing endeavor to save the human race from hell, that, passing through the organic spiritual forms of the Jewish church, produced the manifestation of the divine wisdom embodied in the person and life of Christ. This divine love was called the Father, who was prior, superior, and greater than He; from whom He came forth, who sent Him, who gave Him every word that He spoke, and who did through Him everything that was done. " I am in the Father, and the Father in me : the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works."

Such was the first coming of the Lord. He was compelled to manifest Himself in the lowest or sensuo-corporeal sphere of human life, because He had been interiorly rejected and could not be manifested through its higher and interior spheres of affection and thought. He looked, " and behold ! there was no man," no genuine image and likeness of God in the world. So He apparently descended because man had descended, and could only see Him on his own plane. He became man in order to restore the broken and desecrated order of heaven to humanity, and to make it divine.

If He could have found a receptive plane for his influx in the affections of that age, it would have produced such people as Fenelon, Wesley, and William Law. If He could have found a receptive plane for his influx into the thoughts of that age, it would have produced a Swedenborg, and the spiritual sense of the Word would have been opened, and not merely guessed at, as by Paul, Origen, and others. If He could have been received at that time in the natural plane of human life, all our modern discoveries in science, our political revolutions and social advances would have then been possible. But the interior degrees of the human race were closed, and it was sinking into animalism, and would have perished morally and physically, had not the Lord taken on or entered into its lowest environments, prepared for Himself a human nature, with its infirm human conditions and propensities to evil derived from the mother, and perfected and glorified his humanity by the conquest of the influent hells, and by the reopening of all the closed degrees of life, becoming successively a divine natural, divine rational, divine spiritual, and divine celestial man, until He and the Father were one, and He had "all power in heaven and upon earth. "

But I find myself, my dear sir, carried away by that most sublime and sacred of all themes, the philosophy of the incarnation, and must return to the simpler purpose of this letter, which was to show that the three apparent movements of the Lord — his coming from the Father, his going back to the Father, and his return or second coming to us, were dependent, not upon any changes in Himself, but upon his accommodation of the divine love and wisdom to the varying spiritual states and organic receptivities of his creatures.

His going away, his returning to the Father, was the elevation of his human states into such a degree of unition with the divine love, that our human perceptions and cognitions could no longer retain Him. So He passed away from us, becoming invisible simply because He was no longer comprehensible, even by the highest finite intelligences. This was the lifting up which draws all men unto Him, a state not attained by the death of the cross, as is commonly supposed, but by the far more important death of the selfhood or old proprium derived from the mother. We follow Him in the regeneration by a similar death of the selfhood and a similar elevation of our natural states of life into spiritual states, which are " the heavenly places in Christ Jesus " mentioned by Paul : " If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection."

We ourselves "come to the Father/' or attain to states of heavenly peace and love, only by Jesus Christ, who is "the way, the truth, and the life." The way is the external rule or conduct, the truth is the spiritual light or guide, the life is the celestial essence or power. It is only by the divine presence of the threefold spirit of Christ within ourselves, that we enter into union with the Father as He did, and become one with Him even as He was one with the Father. These heavenly states of life are the many mansions in our Father's house — the spiritual places or conditions prepared for us by his going away, or by the unition of the human nature with the divine.

Observe, my dear friend, the stress which our Lord lays upon the expediency and necessity of his going away :

"It is expedient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you, ' '

" If ye loved me, ye would rejoice because I said, I go unto the Father ; for my Father is greater than I."

" I go to prepare a place for you ;

11 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also. ' '

It is clear from these considerations that the race cannot be saved so long as the divine life flows through distorted mediums into the external sphere of our being, as it did through the Jewish church. Nor can even a perfect medium, like the Christ, do us any good, so long as He seems to remain in our own external sphere, or to operate upon us only in an external manner. He must be lifted up into higher and more and more interior standpoints, even to his own divine centres, or into union with the Father, so that He may come back or return from above downwards, from within outwards, and, by the spiritual laws of creation, reconstruct and re-create us after the model of his own divine image.

The Divine Being contains within Himself all possible states of humanity as to goodness and truth, for He is the infinite good, the infinite truth. In the process of his incarnation He never laid aside or lost any of those states ; in the process of glorification he never obtained any state which He did not have before in infinite fulness. He underwent no change at all. But He projected Himself outwardly into visible human form, not directly from Himself, but mediately through the human race. In that form He bore the sins and iniquities of the world ; through it He combated against all the powers of hell ; and into it He infused the fulness of the divine life, until it passed away from the perceptions and cognitions of men. It was a manifestation of Himself, a means of bringing us into rapport with Him. The places prepared for us are states of goodness and truth which his divine love and power have thus opened to us and made possible to us, for He now draws all men unto Him. We are where He is, when we can appropriate his divine love and wisdom, and conform our wills to his will, until we are clothed upon with the spirit of Christ. Similarity of thought and feeling makes presence in the spiritual world.

Our Lord's first coming was only preparatory to the second. It was exceedingly limited on the earthly or external side, made so by the influx of the divine life through interior spheres which repudiated and rejected Him, crucifying his divine truth in their own spirits before they condemned his external manifestation to the cross. But by the glorification or divinization of his assumed humanity, He has elevated our states, or so spiritualized our being that states of affection and thought, "heavenly places" in our religious life, are ready to receive Him at his second coming. It will, therefore, not be a coming from without, as the Christian world expects, but a genuine coming or descent from within ; not special to one race or religion, but universal ; an influx of a divine-human life into the Body of Humanity, which will finally purify the affections, illumine the understandings, and regulate the conduct of men.

Every coming of the Lord is, therefore, not a voluntary movement on his part, such as we imagine that He made, but a revelation to us of his presence, made always according to spiritual laws ; for God is the supreme law of laws. It is a change within ourselves, which enables us in some manner to realize the fact that He is here and is always here — that "open secret " which is so hard for us to comprehend. This revelation of the Lord occurs with infinitely varying phenomena to human souls in the course of their religious experiences and regeneration. But all human souls are bound together by spiritual laws into a great, invisible solidarity; and in the course of the evolution of the race there are mighty epochs or crises, caused really by the reaction of the heavens against a perverted church and an evil world (" the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence"), and accompanied by new influxes, internal and external revolutions, the destruction of old and the establishment of new orders, revelations of some sorts, or rather of many sorts, from within, and the unfolding of a better and wiser life in the world. Such epoch or crisis constitutes a general coming of the Lord. Such phenomena occurred in the time of Christ ; and similar phenomena are now occurring, and are still to occur, for the Lord has come again.

The historian and the scientist cannot discover the real causes of these extraordinary movements of humanity, for those causes do not lie upon the same plane or level with their researches. The dog that hunts with his nose along the ground, can never reach the bird that flies in the air over his head. The causes are spiritual, and can only be made known by revelation ; and they have been revealed through Swedenborg for the benefit of the new age which is dawning upon us. And if Swedenborg is a star of very small magnitude to some people, and entirely out of sight to others, it is only because they are too remote from him to recognize his solar immensity.

From Swedenborg we learn that there is a perfect continuity and solidarity of law and life throughout the universe. The human race, as a spiritual totality, does not stand alone deriving its life from natural sources, but is organically connected by internal bonds with the world of spirits, with heaven and with hell. Its life is a composite problem, the result of a vast series of actions and reactions between the spiritual world and the natural world. Every coming of the Lord is therefore attended by rearrangements of societies in the heavens and the hells ; by judgments executed in the world of spirits and repeating themselves in different forms in the world of men ; by removal of obstacles from the interior, and a consequently greater influx of spiritual heat and light, which are love and wisdom, into the hearts and minds of those who are in conditions to receive them.

Those disciples of Swedenborg who are teaching that the second coming of the Lord consists wholly and solely in the revelation of the spiritual sense of the Word, do great injustice to Swedenborg and to the Christian world. That is one statement of Swedenborg, and a reiterated and a most important and truthful statement ; but it is not the whole truth. Swedenborg also says that the revelation by angelic spirits of the doctrine of the celestial life to certain people in Africa, was not only the initiament of the New Church, but the advent of the Lord. He also states plainly the universal truth, that the formation of the church and the heavenly life in the soul constitutes the coming of the Lord ; and moreover, that the opening of the interior degrees of life in the regeneration, constitutes the coming of the Lord to the individual.

The better portion of the Christian world turns us a deaf ear when we insist that the coming of the Lord is in a new system of spiritual doctrine, to be promulgated by a new church. It is not looking for doctrines or churches, but for the Lord Himself. It will willingly accept new doctrines and new churches if they are preceded by the personal presence 3 of the Divine man. And in this it is quite right. We want no more authoritative teaching; we question the authority of Authority. We care but little at present for outside church-building ; we want the church constructed within ourselves. We want the Lord : we want to hear his voice ; to see Him walking upon the troubled waters of our life ; to touch the hem of his garment and be healed ; to put our fingers into the print of the nails and to believe. We expect Him to fulfil his promises.

"And when He had spoken these things, while they beheld, He was taken up : and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

"And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven, as He went up, behold, two men stood by them i7i white apparel :

" Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? this same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven."

Now, my dear sir, the assertion of the two men, who were two angels, that Jesus would come again from heaven, "in like manner" or under precisely similar conditions, as those under which He ascended to heaven, was absolutely and literally true. But what was the manner? What were the conditions? All depends upon a correct conception of the manner and the conditions. If our Lord was in the same organic state He occupied before his crucifixion; if the disciples were in their normal, closed condition of life ; if a material body really disappeared in a material cloud ; then is the Christian world perfectly justified in expecting the Lord to descend through natural space in a material form, and meet us and judge us on the lowest or sensuo-corporeal plane of life, however preposterous and incomprehensible such a proceeding might appear.

SECOND COMING OF THE LORD. 2J

But there is a very different and perfectly rational way of interpreting the phenomenon. There is a coming from within far more sublime and effective, because universal and special, than any coming from without, like a king marching from one country to another, ever could be. He is to come from within, because He passed from without inwards. Our Lord's glorified body was never seen by the natural eyes of men; but all his appearances or manifestations after his resurrection were projections from and through the minds of his disciples into apparent time and space, made according to spiritual laws, with which m the experience of Swedenborg and others have now made us familiar.