flow of Divine love and tranquillity, in other words, a certain resuscitation to life in God. I say "necessarily involves," because if the feeling which man has of his own independence or absoluteness, should govern his reason, or remain uncontrolled by any interior light of truth, he would obviously never rise out of the animal into the human form of life.

Now the spiritual law which I have just recounted is a universal law; it is a law which is inherent in the constitution of creation, and as creation is not diverse, but strictly uni-versal, so the law I have mentioned is a universal law. Accordingly when we regard the spiritual universe, which is the universe of the human mind, we shall find it discriminated into two opposing spheres, one celestial, answering to the influent Divine life in the universal soul of man, the other infernal, answering to the outflowing natural life. In other words, every man is internally either angel or devil, and this by the irreversible necessity of creation, so that if we discard the truth of the Divine natural humanity, or cling to the perpetual regime of the Divine celestial principle merely, hell is seen to be as fixed a feature of the spiritual world as heaven itself, every angel existing, as Swedenborg shews, only by virtue of some diabolic antipodes.

But my letter is growing too long, and I must hasten to a close.

From all that has gone before, we see very

plainly that the angel is only a purified or regenerate natural man, and by no means the fully glorified or Divine natural man, and we need not wonder, therefore, that the heaven of heavens should be unclean in the Divine sight. Indeed, if the Divine Wisdom could effect nothing beyond the angelic form in creation, the time must assuredly come when the devil would reign supreme in the universe, for self-love is an infinitely more potent principle of action than benevolence. But the Lord, or Divine natural man, was always the vital secret of creation, was always the true power of God and the true wisdom of God, the Word of God, by whom all things both in heaven and earth were made, and without whom was not any thing made that has been made. In him is life, and this life is the only true light of men—the light which lighteth every man that comes into the world.

Yours truly,

LETTER V.

MY DEAR W.

Paris, Oct. 10th, 1856.

ALL the literal incidents of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ are an eternal REVELATION of the Divine ways to man. These literal incidents all involve the elements of time, space, and person, or fall within the realm of nature; and hence they do not themselves constitute the substantial verity of the spiritual creation, but only the perfect natural image, form, or manifestation of that verity. The substantial verity of the spiritual creation is, that God alone is life, and that He gives life to man. But this being a spiritual truth, can only be discerned by the reason of man, and not by his senses, under penalty of defeating the entire possibility of creation. Did we sensibly perceive God to be the sole life of the universe : were this truth no less a dictate of feeling than of reason, we should be most unhappy. For as in that case we should not feel life to be in ourselves, of course we should fail to appropriate it, or make

it our own, and consequently should fail to realise that selfhood, or proprium, which is the condition of all our bliss, because it is the source of all the characteristic activity that separates man from the brute. We should sit like stocks and stones, leaving Him who obviously was life, to the exclusive appropriation and enjoyment of it. But happily sense or feeling is at variance with reason in this matter, telling us with the force of an unsuspected instinct that life lies wholly in ourselves; and hence it leaves the real and benignant truth of the case to the exclusive discernment of reason.

Now reason is dependent for its illumination upon experience, and consequently it cannot discern that God alone is life and the Giver of life to man, save in so far as it becomes experimentally instructed on that point. The reason does not live by abstract truths, but real ones. There is no such thing in God's universe as an abstraction: it is a universe exclusively of realities. It is not true abstractly, or apart from fact, that God is life and gives life to man; but really true, or true to fact, true, that is, to the experience of the creature; and so far as it is untrue to that experience, it is manifestly not true at all. Man's rational development demands, then, a theatre of experience, by means of which he may become built up and established in the truth. For the truth being that God alone is life and the Giver of life to man, it

is evident that human reason must strictly ignore it, until it become experimentally demonstrated. I say so much is evident, because no one attributes to man the faculty of intuition, which is the power of growing wise without experience. Had we this power, then indeed we might know the divinest truths without the preliminary discipline of experience. But to say nothing of the utter worthlessness of such knowledge to us, were it actually possible, it is abundantly certain that our reason includes no such faculty: and this being the case, I repeat that reason must obviously remain blind to the great spiritual truth that God alone is Life, and the universal Giver of life, until such time as it shall have become experimentally taught that man is without life in himself, and consequently dependent upon God for it.

This distinctively experimental realm, this needful preliminary sphere of human experience, is the world of Nature. The natural world is not the real world any more than my body, or apparent self, is my real self: it is only the seminary or seed-place of that world, just as my body is only the seminary or seed-place of my soul. The natural world bears to the spiritual or real world precisely the same relation which the body bears to the soul, the shell to the kernel, the effect to the cause, namely: the relation of an image to its projecting substance. As the body is but an image of its spiritual substance, the soul: as the shell is

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