or spiritual and divinely-given selfhood would have been destitute of all measure, of all ratio, would have been without any continent, so to speak, by means of which it could become manifested and appropriated. For example, if it were not for my natural ties to my parents, to my brothers and sisters, to my uncles and aunts and cousins, to my neighbours and friends, to my fellow-countrymen and my race, my selfhood, instead of becoming enlarged to universal dimensions would remain imprisoned under my physical limitations, and so present no form adequate to the Divine inhabitation. Thus these natural ties of kindred and of race, which gradually universalize the form of my consciousness, and endow me with a world-wide selfhood, are merely the germ, are merely so many rude husks and fostering envelopes, out of which is born in fulness of time the consummate and immortal spiritual flower. These natural ties fix as it were the supernatural reality, so enabling me, the child of a day, to become woven upon the substance of God, and breathe everlastingly the atmosphere of His incorruption. They are the mirrored semblances of the eternal and invisible Truth, and unless that truth had this preliminary projection to our sensible experience, it would forever remain impenetrable to our rational or spiritual understanding.

In Adam then, formed from the dust and placed in Eden, we find man's natural evolution

distinctly symbolized-his purely instinctual and passional condition-as winning and innocent as infancy no doubt, but also, happily, quite as evanescent. It is his purely genetic and pre-moral state, a state of blissful infantile delight unperturbed as yet by those fierce storms of the intellect which are soon to envelope and sweep it away, but also unvisited by a single glimpse of that Divine and halcyon calm of the heart, in which these hideous storms will finally rock themselves to sleep. Nothing can indeed be more remote (except in pure imagery) from distinctively human attributes, or from the spontaneous life of man, than this sleek and comely Adamic condition, provided it should turn out an abiding one: because man in that case would prove a mere dimpled nursling of the skies, without ever rising into the slightest Divine communion or fellowship, without ever realizing a truly Divine manhood and dignity. He is still a mere natural form sprung from the dust, vivified by no Diviner breath than that of the nostrils, mere unfermented dough, insipid and impracticable and the Lord makes haste accordingly to add the spiritual leaven which shall ensure his endless rise into human, and ultimately Divine proportions. He brings him Eve, or spiritually quickens him; for Eve, according to Swedenborg, symbolizes the Divinely vivified selfhood of man. The Adamic dough, heavy and disheartening before, becomes lively enough now in all conscience,

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becomes instinct and leaping with vitality, although that vitality has no more positive form than a protest against death, a struggle against mortality. Thus had we had Adam, "male and female," alone for a progenitor, we should never have emerged from our Edenic or infantine gristle: we should have remained for ever in a state of Paradisiac childishness and imbecility: in a word, we should have been destitute of our most human characteristic, which is history or progress. We should have had mineral body and consequent inertia, no doubt: we should have had vegetable form and consequent growth; we should have had animal life and consequent motion: but we should have been without all power of human action, because we should have lacked that constant permeation and interpenetration of our spirits by the living spirit of God, which weaves our pallid natural annals into the purple tissue of history, and separates man from nature by all the plenitude and power of incarnate Deity. Human history dates from Eve. Existence dates from Adam, but life, or progress towards God, begins with Eve: hence she is named Eve, mother of all living. It is Eve, or the vivification of our natural earth by the Divine spirit, which disenchants us of our long Adamic babyhood, which emancipates us from Eden, which shews us first how full of inward death and horror is that imbecile being we have in Adam, only that we may subsequently see into

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what pregnant and delicious life this death becomes transmuted by God. For now begins the moral experience of man, that purely transitional stage of human experience, in which man discovers the corruption and death he has in himself as only naturally vivified, or unvivified by God, and which separates him on the one hand from the merely animal life of instinct, and on the other from the truly human one of spontaneity. This is the sole force and function of our moral experience, to release us inwardly from the Adamic clutch, and so leave us free to the Divine indwelling. God has no conceivable quarrel with the Adamic life in itself, but only as claiming our spiritual allegiance. On the contrary, when the natural man spontaneously disposes himself to serve the spiritual, he will find, unless all prophecy is illusory, a far ampler satisfaction of his wants Divinely secured to him, than he now so much as dreams of.

But I shall be obliged to reserve what I have still to say, for another Letter, and am meanwhile Yours truly,

LETTER XVI.

Paris, Jan. 1, 1857.

MY DEAR W.

The

WE saw at the close of the last Letter, that the literal form which the revealed Truth puts on, in order to adapt itself to the carnal apprehension, is that of a Divine regeneration of man. sacred narrative represents the Creator as developing a new life from out the ribs of the natural Adam, or as giving His creature a spiritual newbirth. The natural man is first represented as standing at the head of all created things, or rather, as involving in himself all lower forms of life (for by Adam naming all cattle, etc., is signified that all earthly things derive their quality from man, being all only so many fragmentary exhibitions of human nature, name in the spiritual world meaning quality or character): and then we are told that God finds him still insufficient to himself, or alone, and proposes to furnish him with a suitable companion and helper.

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What is the force of the word "alone" in this passage? What precise infirmity of the natural