Society the redeemed form of man, and the earnest of God's omnipotence in human nature : affirmed in letters to a friend

Front matter

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LETTER III. The meaning of Infinite Love 26

It means, freedom from self-love, and hence stamps self-love unreal 28

Inferiority of science to philosophy as an intellectual culture 30

Man unreal in se, and made real only by natural redemption 32

Primacy of the heart in belief 34

Letter IV

Divine truth has first to create the intelligence it afterwards enlightens , . . . , , 35

Its force purely regenerative 38

Persistent Judaism of the Church 39

" Professional " religion the true Antichrist 40

Ritualism, revivalism, radicalism 42

IV CONTENTS.

LETTEE V.

Sudden demoralization of the writer 43

Almost complete moral imbecility 46

Charm of English landscape 47

Growing delight in nature, and disgust with oneself 48

A friend's account of Swedenborg , 50

I am much interested 51

I resolve to read him 52

LETTEE VI.

A few explanatory words about Swedenborg 53

LETTEE VII.

Further observations about Swedenborg 64

LETTEE VIII.

My moral death and burial.. 70

Profound moral illusion under which I had been living 72

My relief from it equivalent to my belief in the incarnation 74

The moral law essentially typical and prophetic 76

Its votaries make it utterly flat, vapid, and spiritless 78

The law a present stench in the earth 80

LETTEE IX.

Difference between the real Jew and the Christian imitation 81

"We live not under a literal but a spiritual Divine administration ... 84

Growing indifference of m en to their civic repute 86

Our current ecclesiastical culture frivolous and unmanly 88

The horse-car our true Shechinah at this day 90

Christ's precise work on earth 92

LETTEE X.

Swedenborg's interpretation of the gospel 93

The origin of spiritual evil 96

CONTENTS.

Creation inevitably contracts soil on its subjective side 98

Creation as a spiritual work of God is plainly miraculous, and

therefore admits no witness but that of life or consciousness 100

LETTER XI.

Objection to miracle 104

Miracle is bad science, but very good philosophy 106

My own intellectual attitude towards miracle 112

Infirmity of the critical or sceptical understanding 118

Swedenborg an out-and-out realist 124

LETTEK XII.

Creation a spontaneous work 125

Nature unreal and impersonal 127

It is a functioning of Divine Love towards our spiritual manhood 130

The educative use of our natural experience 132

Genesis of this absurd cosmological " Nothing " 134

Creation as a letter an immense fallacy 136

Creation has no locus in quo but the human consciousness 138

Its sole and total method: Redemption 140

LETTER XIII.

God the sole subject in creation, man the sole object 141

Creation only a philosophic name for our natural redemption ...... 144

What do we mean by the term Nature ? 146

Nature a strictly subjective, or metaphysical existence 148

Concrete uses of the word 150

Nature realizable to thought, but not to sense 152

Human nature is the sphere of man's subjective relations 154

It has no existence but as the attribute of a subject 156

Humanity not a material fact, but a spiritual truth 158

Human nature the living link between God and man 160

Our selfhood inexplicable without the creator's natural incarnation 162

VI CONTENTS.

LETTEE XIV.

Personality the true ground of unbelief 164

Natural incarnation the only method of spiritual creation 166

History nothing else than a theatre of Divine revelation 174

Spiritual value of miracle as a scientific irritant 178

LETTEE XV.

Human nature vs. the human person 180

The church, the main citadel of existing evil and falsity 182

Claim of a personal interest in Christ preposterous 184

Swedenborg's doctrine of the constitution of the church 186

Statements in regard to the prehistoric church 188

Innocence of a natural inclination to selfhood 190

Unhandsome pre-natal developments of the church 192

Creation essentially miraculous 194

LETTEE XVI.

Our selfish and worldly loves made evil by the influence of

proprium 195

The excess of them even not hateful to God, because he utilizes

it in the hells 198

The only intolerable evil to God is proprium, selfhood, or self-

• righteousness 200

For this is spiritual or living evil ; and fatal, if allowed, to the

human race 201

The church alone produces this desperate evil in men 204

Conscience the evidence of an infinite and a finite struggle in our

nature 206

The church a mere rudimentary exponent of conscience 208

Change of plan 210

LETTEE XVII.

Laws of the spiritual creation 211

Spiritual creation inert without the creature's natural constitution 214

CONTENTS. vii

Implication of nature in creation gives it all its interest to the heart 218

Spiritual creation interpreted by the doctrine of evolution 220

Difference between the philosophic and the scientific idea of it 222

Evolution relatively a spiritual flower ; involution its natural stem 224

Science essentially ministerial, not magisterial to the mind 226

Nature neither begins nor ends anything 228

LETTEK XVIII.

The forte and foible of science 229

Nature's first lesson to the intellect 231

Difference between physical and natural existence 232

The philosopher has no call to look at nature outwardly 234

Science has no perception of the spiritual ends of nature, and

therefore confounds nature with physics 236

It claims that natural existence is identical with spiritual being . . . 240

Professor Huxley as a philosopher 242

What protoplasm symbolizes to the intellect 244

Physicism a providential gospel 246

LETTEE XIX.

Swedenborg's philosophy of nature 247

Good and evil the mere earth of the finite consciousness 250

Heaven and hell have only a subjective truth 252

Subjective genesis of hell in man 254

Hell is always heaven to the evil man but when he is forced not

to do evil 256

Human nature the sole sphere of creative power 258

LETTEE XX.

Creation a fusion of God and man 260

It includes creator and creature quite equally 262

Deism as a philosophy is a gross absurdity 264

Creation consists spiritually in divinizing the created nature ; and

so redeeming it from the power and taint of evil 266

Vlll CONTENTS.

The evil of human nature is subjective consciousness 270

Man's moral evils are not the true evil of his nature 272

That consists in exteriorating the creator to the creature 274

LETTEE XXI.

Illusory genesis of selfhood 276

Effect of the illusion in necessitating a Divine-natural order of life 278

This order alone releases man from the evils incident to his selfhood 280

Superiority of living knowledge to mere science for creative ends 282

Science or learning natters the illusion of selfhood 284

The object in knowledge glorifies the subject out of self-consciousness 286

The rule of our natural knowledge the rule of our natural life 288

Our nature — what? and how constituted ? 290

The church's testimony to the Christian facts 292

The realm of fact inferior to the realm of truth 294

Unhappy results to the intellect in tethering it to sense 296

Attitude of men of science 298

Difference between science and faith 299

The gospel untrue tidings to every one who does not first find it

good 300

Man's allegiance henceforth due to Divine-natural good alone 302

LETTEE XXII.

The state culminates in the republic 304

The republic ends our political life 306

The angels an imperfect work of God 307

Swedenborg's indictment of the angelic personality 308

He shows it severely ministerial to a work of God in human nature 310

Man's private selfhood the only inveterate enemy of God 312

Is our natural alienation from God, a fact of science ? 314

Or is it a truth of our personal consciousness merely ? 316

Our inherited theology sottish and suffocating 318

The Divine-natural humanity alone worthy of men's acknowledgment 320

CONTENTS. ix

Selfhood the natural birthmark or congenital stigma of the creature 322

An implication, not an explication of the spiritual creation 324

A dense mask behind which God effects our natural redemption... 326

A mere generalized form of man's natural contrariety to God 328

Impossible to believe any longer in God's s^niatural attributes... 330 God a practical power adequate to all man's natural (or impersonal)

needs ■ 332

He never poses for men's admiration 334

LETTER XXIII.

A higher and lower order of knowledge in man 335

Science self-disqualified as a research of being 338

The spiritual being of things distinct from their natural existence. . . 340

"We achieve the love of our kind only by practically unloving self. . . 342

Spiritual creation unreal unless based in the created nature 344

Implication of the creature's nature in creation, alone makes it real 346

Swedenborg describes creation as a house of three stories 348

Miracle a sensuous symbol of the creative infinitude 350

LETTER XXIV.

Science terrene, sense subterrene 352

Essential or spiritual, and existential or natural, Divine manhood 354

The subjective element in experience intrinsically evil and perishable 356

Science a perpetual strainer for the imbecile judgments of sense ... 358

Not sense, but selfhood, the chief obstacle to man's spiritual welfare 360 Nirvana, or self-extinction, impossible to created or self-conscious

existence 362

The gospel facts worthless save as a revelation of God's infinitude 364 The scientific or ontologic hypothesis of being fundamentally stupid

and void 366

How man realizes immortality 368

A personal reminiscence 369

Anecdote of a murderer's mundane post-mortem perturbations 370

No degree of post-mortem experience equivalent to immortal life... 372

X CONTENTS.

Immortality depends upon no personal favour of God to us 374

Christ's unique lustre, that he despised man's moral righteousness 376 No man a creature of God in his own right, or independently of

God's new church a thoroughly new natural spirit or life in man... 380

LETTEE XXV.

Church development of our nature — 382

Christianity spiritually fulfilled in the events of our own history ... 384

Christ's spiritual foes are they who greatly exalt his finite person 386 Error in point of philosophy of the moralist or statesman : that he

thinks civilization based upon the absoluteness of morality ... 388

The church primarily and inveterately hostile to moralism 392

The latest church development proves its utter spiritual decease... 394

Our highest morality claims no higher sanction than prudence 396

Moral offences not contrary to nature but to culture 398

Meaning of our civic constitution 400

It is a mere steward of man's spiritual destiny 402

It utterly misapprehends its providential function 404

The spiritual form of our nature or creation is social 406

But we are born desperately unsocial or selfish 408

The personal illusion sole root of hell in us 410

LETTEE XXVI.

Moralist and churchman defined 412

The root-error in both the same, but more curable in the former... 414 It is more superficial in the one, and more substantial in the

other 416

All manner of sin forgiven to men but that against the Holy

Ghost 418

Self-righteousness the outgrowth of a church-soil in our nature . . . 420 Both "the church" and "the world" a mere germination of human nature 422

" Church " and " world " a distinctively natural development in man 424

"Church" and "world" natural facts 426

CONTENTS. XI

LETTEE XXVII.

We do not inherit human nature, but attain to it by regeneration 427

Our natural history is a divinely redemptive process 430

Human nature is a universal realm of consciousness in man 432

Human nature not the spiritual creation, but reveals it 434

She fills out our unreal persons with valid human substance 436

She is the life of law or order in all lower existences 438

She is inwardly instinct with love and therefore loathes asceticism 440

But only as a moral force she shows her true infiniting tenderness 442

LETTEE XXYIII.

Human nature metaphysical 444

God alone is man either in substance or in form 446

The creative power in men contingent upon their nature taking

form 448

Nature the sphere of redemption in man 450

The inward meaning of creation is man's deliverance from evil ... 452 Man's freedom and rationality do not make him man : they merely

qualify him to become man 454

God is entirely without a power of independent action 45 8

Our moral and rational manhood not a real but a typical manhood 460

Christ crucified the only adequate revelation of God in humanity. . . 462

The church and the world purely subjective realities in man 464

They are the simple machinery of our natural evolution 466

The existing world-wide tragedy of human life is that church and

world persist in burrowing in men's private conscience 468

States no sooner become united than society is inaugurated 472

The only obstacle to God's kingdom is the hypocrisy of the church 474

The late collapsed Mr. Moody or present distended Mr. Cook 476

The author takes an affectionate leave of his correspondent, by a

citation from Swedenborg 478

Appendix A 481

Appendix B.

Proprium or selfhood, the source of all evil 484

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Letter I

Y DEAR ERIEND: — You know that I am not in good health. Ever since my illness of last May, now more than a year ago, my nerves are easily unstrung by protracted labor, and I am consequently not very sure beforehand that I can meet the demands of your recent letter as well as I should like to. Still I am persuaded that even for weary nerves there is no sedative so sovereign as the reconciling truths we are going to consider, and I hope therefore that our conference will not, on the whole, prove tedious or enervating to either of us.

I will quote a few lines of your letter in order that by my comment upon them I may pitch the tune of our subsequent discussion, or indicate the harmonic issues to which I would have it lead. You say : " I cannot bear to think with any purpose of my private regeneration after having so long committed all my Godward hopes to the destiny of my race. Least of all should I be likely to entertain that question just now, when the labors of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and the rhetoric of Rev. Joseph Cook, seem providentially intended to show us the vulgar egotism and the blatant unbelief in the Divine name, with which it is almost sure to be associated."

Now I have as little respect for Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and for their flashy, histrionic colleague, as you can desire, and think our daily papers might easily furnish better food to their readers than the puerile stuff they give us as reports of these men's sensational sermons and lectures. But what interests me chiefly in the extract from your letter is the general sentiment of preference you exhibit for a fixed life of relation to God over one of a free and spiritual character : that is, for a life of passive submission to your race-destiny, over one of active private regeneration. You have always one great merit, that of knowing well your own mind. Bat I take the liberty of offering you a few considerations in regard to this sentiment of preference you express, which perhaps you have not done justice to, and which may therefore lead you in the present case to an improved knowledge of your own mind.

Let me ask you then, in the first place, what good our race-destiny is going to do us individually ? Our race-destiny is thoroughly incapable, I am happy to say, of furnishing a destiny for the individual man. We are not the race, but individuals embraced in it ; and though there is beyond doubt a race-destiny for man, there is no such thing as an individual destiny. Human individuality is constituted by freedom and rationality; and if therefore a certain destiny were imposed upon it to fulfil, either by deity or demon, it would immediately collapse. If I am really destined to undergo a certain mental development, ending in my spiritual manhood, just as I am destined to undergo a certain physical growth ending in my natural manhood, it must be because I have no selfhood — that is, no freedom and rationality — wherewith to work out my spiritual manhood. In short, to have a fixed "destiny" is not to be a free and rational subject, and therefore to be without individuality; and to be without individuality is to be destitute of spiritual possibilities, and claim only natural.

I repeat, then, that the human race alone, and not any individual subject of it, claims a Divine "destiny," because the race has only an indefinite or universal personality, and of itself therefore is only fit to minister to a defined or individual one. But the individual man, because he is by creation free and rational, is ipso facto the arbiter of his own spiritual life and character : that is, he either remains what he already is by derivation from his past ancestry, and the circumstances of his own position, or else he becomes a new and regenerate form of life, according to his own pleasure.

Thus your and my private regeneration is not an outcome of destiny in any sense of the word. No doubt, we may picture the heart of God as very much interested in every man's private or spiritual regeneration. But then at the same time we must take extreme good care not to represent Him as interested in it to the extent of "destining" any of us for it, as the sect of Universalists holds ; or what is the same thing, imposing it upon any of us contrary to his own good will and pleasure ; because obviously that would be to represent Him as violating the express means He has appointed for bringing it about, and so defeating the realization of it. For what does our spiritual regeneration mean? It means — our new birth, or our getting a new heart and mind: that is, a different one from that we are actually born to, or inherit from our forefathers. As this old heart and mind take place in us without our own privity or consent previously asked, so our new birth signalizes its own superior lustre or more intimate nearness to us, by conditioning itself upon our private freedom and rationality, or accommodating itself to our secret hearts' demands, derived from culture.

This is what to every man, spiritually exercised, makes his private regeneration a question of such vital moment, namely : that Ids deepest instincts of manJiood are met by it, and by it alone. For example, my inherited personality is full of stain or frailty derived from some or other of my progenitors, so that I find myself, when tempted, not only liable but sure to succumb to theft, false witness, adultery, or murder. Now in this state of things it is evident that unless there be some Divine revelation in our nature and history making me aware of this tendency to evil in me, and prompting me to combat it, I am as good as gone to all eternity. Tor I have no intuitive conscience of the difference between good and evil, but only an empirical or acquired one. As far as my personal intuitions go I unhesitatingly deem good evil and evil good. Our moral conscience is a Divine endowment of our nature exclusively, utterly beyond the sphere of our personal intuitions ; and we come into the experience of it accordingly only through the intercourse of our kind. It is notorious to every man of thoroughly educated experience, that when he is tempted to bear false witness, to steal, to commit adultery, or murder, the whole pressure of the temptation lies in the fact that these damnable things seem ravishingly good to him and not evil. Other men, interested in preventing me doing them may denounce them as evil. But I in my secret heart, when tempted by these unhandsome things, cannot help pronouncing them good, the most intimate and exquisite good I know, in fact ; and I inwardly renounce the doing of them only out of deference to the Divine law forbidding me to do them under penalty of death.

I repeat then, that it is this strictly redemptive effort of God in our nature, which alone qualifies me to realize my deepest human instincts, or learn in what consists my true freedom and rationality. Before being inwardly born — before being spiritually quickened — I have no misgiving as to my appetites and passions forming in me only a conditional or limited good. They seem so much my nearest good, that I feel no higher exercise of freedom or selfhood possible to me, than to obey them unreservedly, or whenever they demand satisfaction. And I have no sort of a suspicion, until I receive my information from others, that I am then meanwhile, in spite of my apparent selfhood or freedom, the wretched slave of wy personal organization. It seems at this period so like free action to give way to my appetites and passions regardless of any higher law, and my nascent unripe sense of selfhood or personality is so fostered by it, that I cannot help yielding for a while to the deceptive seeming : but it is wholly a seeming, destitute of the least vital truth. Sooner or later this felt freedom — this apparent rationality of mine — confess themselves a burdensome and abject servitude, from which there is no release but in the fetterless air of the spiritual world. In fact, dear friend, our inherited selfhood or freedom — the selfhood that comes to us from birth, or is derived to us from our special ancestry — is a mere provisional base for a Divinely-given selfhood or personality, which comes to us through the natural redemption wrought in us by the Lord Jesus Christ: and it is literally next to nothing, if it refuse to operate as such base.

Admitting then that we have to the fullest extent a "destined" or unfree life of God in our race: I ask afresh how does that supply the wants of our free spiritual or highest culture? And can a man really be so false to the instincts of his proper manhood as deliberately to prefer a "destined" life, even at the Divine hands, to one of freedom? I know my good friend Emerson has long been singing us songs set to this indolent tune, and that many feebler warblers reflect his inspiration. And I know besides, that our orthodox churches give out so clecrepid a doctrine of the Divine name, and our Unitarian or rationalistic pulpits in their turn reply to it in so scant and penurious a strain, that the common mind has grown altogether tired of the senseless jangle, and prefers to take its very unexacting religion and philosophy at the hands of a poet, and that too a pantheistic one. But you don't belong to the common or scientific crowd of men, shut up like so many gregarious sheep to the pens of sense. You are a person first of all of sincere, original thought, taking nothing on trust from other men, despising the servile limits of sensuous observation by which their intellect is bound, and thinking out your own conclusions according to the free range of sympathy and intelligence God has given you. And you accordingly can never permanently consent to sell your Divine birthright of freedom, for the paltry mess of pottage these respectable sentimentalists offer you under the name of " destiny." Besides, so active an intellect as yours ought by this time to know that we can have no positive but only a negative action upon this destined life of our race, because our race interests belong exclusively to God, and He is absolute over them. We have no power to promote our race destiny, but by our spiritual regeneration. Every man who becomes regenerate by abstaining from the commission of evils, in virtue purely of their contrariety to the Divine name, does indirectly promote his race-evolution y because he ceases any longer actively to obstruct and retard it. Our natural evolution, or our race-destiny, is to put on Divine form and order; and this form and order undeniably consist in each man seeking supremely the good of the whole, and in all men seeking supremely the good of each. It is manifest then that the regenerate person does indirectly promote this race-evolution, inasmuch as he alone freely abstains from conflict with his fellowman. But this is all he does towards it, and a fortiori all and more than all that any one else does towards it. The man who lives in practically selfish relations with his kind, seeking himself first and his neighbor last, does absolutely nothing for his race or nature but retard its due and orderly evolution. And when it is evolved, he will do nothing spiritually to promote its well-being, because although he will then be inhibited from any moral conflict with his fellows, he will cultivate no spiritual sympathy with them.

What then? Do I urge you to cherish an intellectual indifference to your race-destiny? God forbid ! I should in so doing be utterly faithless to my own best inspiration. I find it unspeakably blessed to believe that there is a Diviiie-natwal destiny for man slowly but surely working out, which no spiritual wickedness in high places, nor any personal stupidity and egotism on our part, can seriously compromise. Why? Because this benign conviction gives me the indispensable stay or guarantee which my meagre individual faith and hope in God demand as a basis. I could of course have no spiritual or private hope for myself in God, unless it were built upon His natural or public mercy to my race: for how shall any man this side of hell ever deem himself a fitter object of the Divine complacency than any other man, especially than all men? My moral freedom — my freedom to be good or evil at my pleasure, subject only to what is due to other men — is full of the divinest benignity to my nature, because the development of that nature in all Divine form and order is conditioned upon it. The actual distinction of heaven and hell, in fact, is conditioned upon it; which distinction is no less vital to spiritual order. So that the interests of both worlds, natural and spiritual alike, may be said to demand it. But my moral freedom is but a quasi freedom after all, and therefore however it may condition my true or spiritual freedom, is heaven-wide of constituting it. My moral freedom consists in my ability, under the pressure of any mercenary motive, to abstain from false-witness, theft, adultery, and murder.

My spiritual freedom endows me with a totally new motive of action, which is the love of God and my neighbor, or the power of immortal life ; and so not only enables me to abstain with disgust from these unholy things, but to do with relish the exact opposite. The element of will or choice is everything in the moral life, and the fussy votaries of it accordingly are absurdly tenacious of their personal merit. But this element of will or choice scarcely enters appreciably into the spiritual life, unless into the lowest forms of it ; and in all the higher or celestial forms it is unknown. I rejoice then with unspeakable joy in this ordering of our natural destiny at God's hands — this final and decisive adjustment of men's outward and warring relations — because in the first place it authenticates every deepest breath of man's regenerate hope and aspiration towards God, and in the second place forever exempts men from the temptation again to seek their own welfare by the methods of vice and crime. But apart from these considerations — apart, in other words, from its power to illustrate the Divine name — I have no thought nor care about our natural destiny. Especially when invited to regard it, as so many men at this day do, in the light of a full satisfaction to men's faith and hope in God, it seems to me inexpressibly revolting. For after all is said that can be said, it is a mere reduction to order of man's natural or constitutional life, with the spiritual, functional, or infinite side of his being left out.

And are men content to deem themselves cattle, that they expect no higher boon at the hands of the Divine Natural Humanity but an unexampled provision for their board and lodging? Understand me then, and understand my books. I strongly affirm a Divine destiny — a Divine-natural order — for mankind, but I affirm it in the interest of the Divine name alone, which the church obscures, by practically cutting off men's secular hope towards God, unless it claims a sanctimonious basis. In short I have no interest in maintaining this truth of a Divinely appointed destiny for the race, but the interest of Divine justice or righteousness. Of course no one can deny that it is infinitely pleasanter to think of men living together in outward harmony, than living like pigs in a sty, where every one is bent upon grabbing as much as he can from his neighbor, or pushing away his unfortunate neighbor from the trough altogether. But the outward order of human life is, after all, supremely pleasant to me, because it discloses an eternal Divine rest and refreshment for the inward man, or indicates at least the method by which the individual conscience attains to spiritual peace in God. If our natural evolution did nothing to reveal and guarantee our inward and immortal joy in God, I for one should be obdurately indifferent to it. If my life is to be spiritually snuffed out at last, I should very much prefer to have beforehand no natural glimpse of peace and order, arising from the Divine subjugation of heaven and hell, to mislead me into making false inferences.