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1234. [Phil. ii. 13.] A man, from his own hereditary evil, reacts against God. But so far as he believes that all his life is from God; and that every good of life is from the action of God, and every evil of life from the reaction of man; in the same proportion there arises a reaction proper to the action, and the man acts with God as from himself. SWEDENBORG's Div. Lové, n. 68.

1235. [1 John i. 8-10.] That a man may see the nature of his will, or what he loves and what he covets, his intellect has a superior and inferior, or an interior and exterior power of thinking; in order that, from his superior or interior thought, he may see what his will is doing in his inferior and exterior thought. This he sees as a man sees his face in a glass. When he sees and knows what sin is, he may, if he implore the help of the Lord, not will it, but shun it, and afterwards act against it; if not freely, still he may force himself against it by combat, and at length be averted from it and abominate it.

SWEDENBORG's Div. Prov. n. 278.

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1239. [Rom. vii. 18.] Thus the Apostle acknowledges, that he had free-will, but not free-agency: he owns he had full liberty to think and will, but not full liberty to speak and do whatever he thought and willed. The cause is this: Every man from his birth is in evils of many kinds. These evils are in his will; and the things which are in the will are loved. What a man wills from his interior, he loves; and what he loves, he wills. The will's love flows into the understanding, and there causes its delight to be felt; it comes thence into the thoughts, and also into

intentions. If therefore it were not permitted a man to think according to his will's love, which is hereditarily inherent in him, that love would continue shut up, and never come to sight. The love of evil, which does not appear, is like an enemy lying in wait, like corrupted matter in an ulcer, like poison in the blood, or like rottenness in the breast; which, if kept inclosed, are the causes of death. But when a man is permitted to think the evils of his life's love, even so far as to intend them, but not to do them actually, they are cured by spiritual means, as diseases are by natural. A man is thus healed of the Lord; yet no farther than to know how to keep the door shut, unless he acknowledge a God, and implore His assistance, as the Apostle did, to deliver him from this body of death.

Sce SWEDENBORG's Div. Prov. n. 281.

NEW BIRTH.

1240. [John iii. 3.] Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of GOD.

All the glad tidings of the Gospel, all the benefits of our Saviour, however variously expressed in Scripture, all centre in this one point, that He is our light, our life, our resurrection, our holiness and salvation; that we are in Him new creatures, created again unto righteousness, born again of Him, from above, of the Spirit of God. Every thing in the Gospel, is for the sake of this new creature, this new man in Christ Jesus, and nothing is regarded without it. This new birth, is not a part, but the whole of our salvation. Every thing in religion from the beginning, to the end of time, is only for the sake of it. Nothing does us any good, but either as it helps forward our regeneration, or as it is a true fruit or effect of it.

1241.

LAW's Spirit of Prayer, p. 44.

Our Salvation is an entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven; now, the life, light and spirit of heaven must as necessarily be in a creature before it can live in heaven, as the life, light and spirit of this world must be in a creature before it can live in this world: Therefore the one only religion that can save any one must be that which can raise or generate the life, light and spirit of Heaven in his Soul, that when the light and spirit of this World leaves him, he may not find himself in eternal Death aud Darkness. LAW's Appeal, p. 92.

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1243. [John iii. 8.] The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

The cause of the winds is not to be sought, according to the received opinion, in the place whence. they proceed, but in those which they visit.-All winds blow toward the parts of the Earth where the air is most rarified. St. PIERRE's Studies of Nature, vol. i. pp. 40, 171.

1244.

PREDESTINATION.

[Acts x. 34, 35.] GOD is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righte ousness, is accepted with him.

1247. [1 Pet. i. 20.] On the doctrine of predestination in Christ, as generally understood, it may be justly remarked, that no error of any kind can keep its currency in the world, as this has done for ages, unless it contain much truth; as no false coin can circulate with those of tolerable discernment,

As electrified bodies, during the insen-except it combine sterling ore with its baser alloy.

sible discharge of their electricity, are always surrounded by a blast of air, which is emitted in all directions; it should seem, that a superabundant escape of the electric matter from any particular part of the earth, must invariably cause the wind to blow from that quarter; and that a number of such electrical vents may, at one and the same time, cause winds to blow in different directions. But, as we know not where, in particular, the electricity of the earth is either discharged, or absorbed, we cannot, even whilst observing the current of the wind, at any time "tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth."

1245.

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The inequality of heat in the different climates and places, and the earth's rotation on its axis, appear to be the grand and chief causes of all winds, both regular and irregular. Thus, the regular trade-winds blow from east to west, because the earth revolves the contrary way, or from west to east; and because the heat is at all times greatest in the torrid zone, causing there a constant ascent of air, which afterwards falls northward and southward, whilst the colder air below, coming from the north and south poles, is determined by a continual impulse towards the equator, where it proceeds from east to west round the torrid zone. DALTON'S Essays, pp. 87, 88, 90, 95.

1246.

"Every thing we see, gives off its parts to the air, and has a little floating atmosphere of its own round it. The rose is encompassed with a sphere of its own odorous particles; while the nightshade infects the air with scents of a more ungrateful nature. The perfume of musk flies off in such abundance, that the quantity remaining becomes sensibly lighter by the loss. A thousand substances that escape all our senses, we know to be there; the powerful emanations of the loadstone, the effluvia of electricity, the rays of light, and the insinuations of fire. Such are the various substances through which we move, and which we are constantly taking in at every pore, and returning again with imperceptible discharge!"

GOLDSMITH'S Hist. of the Earth,
vol. i. p.
312.

1248. [Rom. viii. 29.] With God there is no past, present, and to come; he knows all things equally at all times, and therefore cannot properly be said to foreknow or predestinate any thing. JENYNS' Works, vol. iv. p. 242.

1249. It is impossible but that an omniscient Being, "in whom we live, and move, and have our being," must foresee all our thoughts and actions, and the consequences which attend them; and therefore must foreknow our destination in the present, and in a future life: but His foreknowledge is not the cause of it, nor in the least controls the freedom of our elections, in which we enjoy as perfect liberty as if they were totally unknown; for the mere knowledge of one being, cannot possibly have any influence on the actions of another. Ibid. p. 241.

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1251. If any man is well acquainted with the dispositions of another, he may nearly guess how he will conduct himself on any occasion; if he knows they are profligate and prodigal, he may reasonably conclude that he will destroy his health, waste his fortune, and die in an hospital or a gaol; this accordingly happens, but not because he had foreseen it: that could not be the cause of this man's misbehaviour or misfortune, which could be derived only from his own folly and extravagance. What is but conjecture in man, in God is certain prescience; but the elections of free agents are no more controled by the one than the other.

Ibid. p. 242.

1252.

The Lord who is divine love cannot act any otherwise with men, than as a Father upon earth does with his children, only with infinitely more tenderness, because the Divine Love is infinite; also that he cannot recede from any one, because the life of every one is from him. It appears as if he receded from the wicked, whereas it is the wicked themselves who recede; but still out of Love he leadeth them: Wherefore he saith, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Matt. vii. 7-11.)—" For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matt. v. 45.) —Moreover, the Lord desireth the salvation of all, and not the death of any and all who keep His commandments may have a place in heaven.

SWEDENBORG's Divine Prov. n. 330.

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1253. [Rom. v. 10, 11.] By the Atonement, is not to be understood an arbitrary, discretionary pleasure of God, accepting the sufferings of an innocent person, as a sufficient amends or satisfaction for the sins of criminals. This is by no means the true ground of the matter. In this view we neither think rightly of our Saviour, nor rightly of God's receiving us to salvation through him. God is reconciled to us through Jesus Christ in no other sense than as we are new born, new created in Christ Jesus. "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." John. i. 12.

1254.

LAW'S Appeal, p. 199.

They who suppose the wrath and anger of God upon fallen man, to be a state of mind in GoD himself; to be a political kind of just indignation, a point of honourable resentment which the sovereign Deity, as governor of the world, ought not to recede from, but must have a sufficient satisfaction done to his offended authority, before he can, consistently with his Sovereign Honor, receive the sinner into His favor; hold the doctrine of the necessity of Christ's atoning life and death in a mistaken sense. neither reason nor Scripture will allow us to bring wrath into God himself, as a temper of His mind, who is only infinite, unalterable, overflowing Love, as unchangeable in Love, as He is in power and goodness. But the Holy Scriptures

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continually teach us, that the Holy Jesus became incarnate to destroy the works of the Devil, to overcome death and hell that had taken man captive. And is not this sufficiently telling us, what that wrath was, and where it existed, which must be atoned, satisfied and extinguished, before man could again be alive to God, or reconciled unto Him, so as to have the triune life of light and love in him? It was a wrath of death, a wrath of hell: and when this wrath of death and hell are removed from human nature, there neither is, nor can be any other wrath of God abiding on it. See No. 1089.

Ibid. p. 179.

1255. [John xvii. 1.] The Bolognian stone emits light the more copiously, according to the degree of heat applied to it. This substance, after having been exposed to the light, is plainly visible in a dark place, by light issuing from itself. It has been observed also, that artificial phosphorus emits the very same light that it receives, and no other; and it is consequently inferred, that light consists of real particles of matter, capable of being thus imbibed, retained and emitted. Indeed, Beccarius found that almost every thing in nature imbibed more or less light, and emitted it again in the dark, and with a great deal of labor he distinguished natural bodies into several classes, as they were phosphori with or without preparation. See PRIESTLEY'S Hist. of Vision,

pp. 361, 365, 368.

1256. [John xvii. 6.] The light shews us the sun it is pushed by. But to argue, that the sun produces the light every instant, and fro.n one moment to another fills with it the enormous space of the sphere it enlightens, would be equally ridiculous as to assert, that the bell produces the air which it agitates on the ear in sensible undulations.

See ABBE PLUCHE's list. of the Heavens, vol. ii. p. 228.

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1259. [John xvii. 4.] Dr. NIEWENTYT has computed || standing, as seated primarily in the heart and lungs, borrow that there flows more than 6,000,000,000,000 times as many particles of light from a candle in one second of time, as there are grains of sand in the whole earth, supposing each cubic inch to contain 1,000,000. FERGUSON, Lect. vii.

1260. [John xvii. 22.] Light is regarded by philosophers as a substance consisting of a vast number of exceedingly small particles, which are actually projected from luminous bodies, and which probably never return again to the body from which they were emitted. (ACCUM's Chem. vol. i. p. 138.) -Thus; as all images of natural objects are given and continued by natural light, so all ideas are imparted and retained in the presence of spiritual light. Consequently the prototypes of existing things, once brought forth out of the light of God into the light of man, abide with us as a permanent revelation, being for ever renewed and embodied in the human spirit, as fast as transmitted thence, by a never-ceasing influx of the omnipotent light of God.

1261. [John xvii. 23.] ARISTOTLE, in his Treatise concerning the Soul, has asserted, that Intellect does not exist individually in this or that man; but that there is one intellect belonging to the whole race of human beings, the common source of all individual thought, as the sun is the common source of light to the world. Similar to this was the doctrine of MALEBRANCHE, who ascribed the production of ideas immediately to God, and taught that the human mind perceives God, and sees all things in him. AVERROES, the Saraacen philosopher of Corduba, proceeded further: he seems to have conceived, that there is no other cause of thought in individual men, than one universal intelligence, which, without multiplying itself, is actually united to all the individuals of the species, as a common soul.

THE DEGREES OF LIFE IN MAN.

1262. [Rom. vii. 22, 23.] I delight in the law of Gon after the inward man; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

Let no

The inward man has his will in the cerebellum and his intellect in the cerebrum of the brains. The external or carnal mind has its will in the heart and its understanding in the lungs within the breast. one think of these minds and their faculties, as though they were unorganized in a kind of vacuum within the body. Each has its appropriate receptacle. The interior will and intellect pervade those cortical glands and medullary fibrils, which, as diffused in the nervous system, may be compared to the innumerable solar stars sphered in their projected rays throughout the universe. The external will and its under

and transfuse from the inner mind their subordinate life and glory throughout the muscles and vascular system; as the planetary earths and their atmospheres receive and transmit the solar heat and light in the immeasurable body of expanded nature. Thus the whole man is, as it were, a heaven and a universe in miniature. The inner mind, filled with the Divine Spirit, delights in the law of God; the outer mind, till irradiated by the same Spirit, is subject to the law of sin: when both participate and exhale the Divine Glory, the man is sanctified wholly in spirit, soul and body.

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for, if it did not react, the interiors or things included would be relaxed, would escape, and be dispersed. If the spiritual mind be closed, the natural mind continually acts against those things from heaven which are of the spiritual mind. But, when the spiritual mind is open, the natural mind is disposed in obedience to the spiritual mind, and is held in subordination; for the spiritual mind acts from above and from within on the natural mind, and removes the things of the world which react there, adapting to itself those things which act in like manner with itself: whence the superabundant reaction is successively removed. This constitutes the change of state, which is called reformation and regeneration.

See SWEDENBORG's Div. Love, nn. 260–263.

1267. [Rom. ii. 28.] Evil without any good is in itself dead; wherefore every man is in both. There is, however, this difference; one man is interiorly in the Lord, and exteriorly as if in himself; another is interiorly in himself, but exteriorly as if in the Lord: the latter is in evil, and the former in good; yet each is in both. Thus the Lord separates what is evil and what is good, that the one may be interior and the other exterior; and so provides that they be not mixed.

SWEDENBORG's Divine Providence, n. 227.

After death, however, the exterior, whether good or evil, is taken away.

Ibid. See Matt. xiii. 12. -xxv. 29. Mark iv. 25. Luke viii. 18. —xix. 26.

1268. [Matt. xi. 12.] There are always two forces acting on man; the one from without, the other from within. The atmospheres are what keep the whole body in connexion, by their continual pressure or incumbence from without the aërial atmosphere, by its influx, keeps the lungs in their connexion and form; the ethereal atmosphere, in like manner, keeps the interior parts of the body in their connexion. The correspondent internal forces which act from within, are from heaven, and through heaven from the Lord, having in them life. This is very evident from the organ of hearing: Unless there were interior modifications, which are of the life, to which there corresponded exterior modifications that are of the air, hearing could not exist. The same also is evident from the organ of sight: Unless there were an interior light which is of the life, and to which there corresponded an exterior light which is that of the sun, it would be impossible for vision to exist. The case is the same with all the other organs and members in the human body: There are forces acting from without, which are natural, and in themselves not alive; and there are forces acting from within, in themselves alive, which keep each in its connexion, causing it to live; and this according to the form given it for use.

SWEDENBORG'S Arcana, n. 3628.

When, by the elective attraction of a man's will, external forces predominate, the man is earthly, natural, or carnal;

but, when the internal have the ascendency, he becomes religious, heavenly, or spiritual.

1269. [Acts ii. 3.] On the day of Pentecost cloven tongues like as of fire sat upon each of the apostles. This proves that, while natural life enters by respiration, spiritual life comes down from heaven and enters man by the nerves and fibres of the brain. -Dr. Le Gallois, of the faculty of Medicine at Paris, found by experiment that all the cerebrum of a living animal could be removed, and the whole of the cerebellum, and even part of the medulla oblongata, without interrupting respiration; but that this function suddenly ceased when the origin of the eighth pair of nerves was injured by the knife. It therefore became evident that the principle of motion in the respiratory organs proceeds from this point in fact, when these nerves only were divided, respiration ceased, and the animal died from asphyxia. Month. Mag. for Aug. 1814.

1270. [Ephes. iii. 16, 17.] Haller and his followers maintain, that there are two distinct vital powers, one of the nervous and another of the sanguiferous system. It has been shewn, however, from direct experiment by M. le Gallois, that there is a threefold vitality acting independently, 1. In the brain and its sensorial system, 2. In the spinal marrow and its nerves, 3. In the heart and its subordinate muscles. And this, says Dr. Philips, is finely illustrated by reviewing the various classes of animals: In the lowest class we find only the muscular system, which exists without either nervous system or sensorium in the next class we find the muscular and nervous systems, which exist without sensorium; and in the most perfect animals, we find the three vital powers combined, each having an existence so immediately depending on the others, but all so connected, that none can exist long without the others. It appears also, from numerous experiments, that the peristaltic motion of the bowels obeys the same laws as the action of the heart; and that this motion (as a fourth degree in the life of perfect animals) is wholly independent of the (interior) nervous system; continuing its action till the parts become cold after the brain and spinal marrow are removed. See Phil. Trans. for 1815, part i. p. 66, &c.

1271. Mr. ABERNETHY says, in his Lecture for 1815, that it is evident to him, as it was to Mr. Hunter, that the stomach has a direct sympathy with the most distant parts of the body; and that the heart sympathizes with the stomach.

Month. Mag. for Aug. 1815, p. 65.

1272. [Ps. xxii. 26.] From anatomy we learn, that every thing lives, or is in compliance with life, where the heart acts by the vessels sent out from itself, and that nothing lives where the heart does not act by its vessels.

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