the impious conclusion, as it seems to my reason, to which it inevitably leads. Let me state briefly, yet clearly and fairly, the substance of your argument in letter III., pages 25 and 26: Every effect is potentially in its cause. Therefore, whatever is in the human spirit is normally represented in the human body. But man is made in the image of God. Hence, as every effect is potentially in its cause, the human spirit is, therefore, represented in God. But the body is represented in the human spirit. Therefore the human body also, in all its parts, is represented in God. Now the short objection to all this is, that it runs us straight out into downright pantheism. It is the same argument, substantially, applied to man and the human microcosm, which Spinoza extends to the whole universe. Can you fail to see that from this simple premise, "every effect is potentially in its cause," employed just as you employ it, one may with equal conclusiveness prove that the animal creation, too, are in God. Your argument cannot possibly stop short of it. You must go away beyond your Divine Man, to the Divine , Zor, containing within itself every other zov, or every grade of animation, and not man merely. In short, you and Swedenborg have landed in the old doctrine of the universal animal, τὸ ζῶον ἔμψυχον ἐν ἑαυτῷ πάντα ζώα περιέχον, the sentient animal comprising within itself all other animals, which you will find so copiously set forth in Plato's Timæus, only, however, with this difference in favor of the speculating old heathen, that he does not dare to make his Anima Mundi, or universal animal, the Eternal God, as he reverently styles him, or even an emanation from him, but a direct creature of his Almighty power and wisdom, produced in time, and essentially distinct from himself. Plato is much nearer to the Scriptures here than Swedenborg. To find the truest exemplar of his doctrine, we must have recourse to the monstrous pantheisms of the old Eastern World. The wonder is that you should conceive your grateful thanks due to Swedenborg for the discovery of this original view of things, and regard it as one of those self-evidencing proofs of his mission that dispense with all miraculous attestations. No one, you maintain, ever before thought of this doctrine of the Divine Man, so beyond all human investigation, and yet so consonant to reason when discovered. Therefore Swedenborg was inspired with it from heaven (see p. 25, 26). Now we say, that it had before been thought of; it had entered into the depraved human imagination; it had been incorporated into the most monstrous systems of religion, or rather irreligion; and, therefore, Swedenborg was not an inspired messenger from Heaven. But to present another specimen of your reasoning on this head, I give your words from p. 27. You say "Love and wisdom cannot subsist, or be conceived, apart from a subject in whom they inhere. No intelligent person,' says Swedenborg, can deny that in God are Love and Wisdom, mercy and clemency, and good and truth itself, for they are from Him; and as he cannot deny that these things are in God, neither can he deny that God is man; for none of these things can exist abstractedly from man; man is their subject, and to separate them from their subject is to say that they do not exist. Think of wisdom, and suppose it out of man; is it anything? Indeed the idea of love and wisdom existing out of a personal subject is as absurd as to suppose that the heart and lungs can exist and act apart from a body which they actuate. We are shut up, therefore, to the conclusion, that God is Very Man-the Infinite Man." I I must confess myself exceedingly at a loss how to take this. have the most unfeigned respect for the general strength and clearness of your understanding, and the critical acuteness of your reason ing, especially on topics where you are yourself or (pardon me for saying it) are out of the vapors of your mystic creed; and therefore I must not pronounce it nonsense. It, doubtless, to your reason, possesses a convincing force; but mine utterly fails to discover it. It does strike me that your "therefore," in the concluding line, is the most perfect specimen of a non sequitur it has ever been my lot to meet with in the field of argumentation. Can you not see that in the parts which I have put in italics, there is a gratuitous assumption of the whole thing to be proved? "Man is their subject." True. But is he the only being who is their subject, or in whom "they inhere?" Every thing depends on the right answer to this. Without it, your formal "therefore" is an empty sound, signifying nothing, except to tickle the ears of your readers with a mere jingle of logical terminology. You yourself betray a latent feeling of its defect by changing, perhaps unconsciously, your principal term. It was not wide enough; and so you slide gently from "man" to "personal subject," as though they were identical. If, to avoid this, you affirm that angels and all other conceivable beings, or "personal subjects," in whom love and wisdom may inhere, are men, what else do you do but enlarge the definition of a term, so as to include in it as much as you choose, and then delude yourself with the idea that you have really proved something concerning a subject so arbitrarily extended as to fill any predicate you may see fit to attach to it? Let me exhibit the absurdity of your reasoning, by putting it in a more concise and formal shape Love and wisdom inhere in a personal subject. Love and wisdom inhere in God. Therefore God is man. Had it been capable of taking this form- All personal subjects in whom love and wisdom inhere are-men; Your argument would have been syllogistically perfect; but then, there would stare you directly in the face the irrationality of assuming, in your major premise, the very matter you set out to prove. Have I done your argument any injustice? Have I at all separated it from its logical context, so as, in any degree, to mar its just force? I would not dwell on this so minutely, were it not that it forms a general feature of your reasoning in the most important portions of these letters. It consists in assuming a larger sense of a word than has ever before been employed, then proving something (perhaps undenied) respecting it in the common restricted sense, and then boldly drawing your conclusion commensurate with the wide extent of meaning implied in your premise. In this view of the matter, the question, whether or no God may be called the Divine Man, becomes one of the idlest logomachies on which the human mind ever employed itself. Only make your terms large enough, and you may, in the same way, prove him the Divine Animal, the Divine World, the Divine Anything. How does one declaration of the Scriptures, in which words are taken in their established human sense, scatter all this show of argument to the winds! "Lo, I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee." "I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel." "For my thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." I can well imagine the smile with which you would receive such an attempt to confront this monstrous fancy of Swedenborg with the plain letter of Scripture. You might too, perhaps, deny its literal application. Nothing, however, can be clearer, than that, by such strong assertions, the prophets meant to express, not a mere diversity of rank and exaltation, but the most striking generic difference between the Creator and his creature. It is not merely the great with the small, but humanity contrasted with Deity. Thus, in another place, "God is not man, that he should lie.” you say the added words take away the universality, and, therefore, the appositeness of the declaration, I answer that this is the very substance of the argument by which your whole doctrine is thrown down. God cannot lie. Why not? Because He is God, and not man-the Holy One." For, in respect to lying and ignorance, and malevolence, as well as love and wisdom, it may be said, to use your own language, that "man is their subject," or "they inhere" in man. Of these, too, it may be affirmed that "they cannot exist abstractedly" or "away from a personal subject ;" and, therefore," we are shut up to the conclusion" that they must be in God; or if not, then God is not man," but the "Holy One," as a greater prophet than Swedenborg has so sublimely affirmed (Hosea xi. 9; Isaiah xliii. 15; lv. 8). 66 66 There is no avoiding the first of these conclusions, unless you take the expression-the image of God-as our catechism does, in a partial and comparative, instead of a universal sense. Your use of the word finite will not help the matter; for, as far as your argument is concerned, it would only denote a smaller, in which, without the exclusion of any particular, there is some point corresponding to every point in the greater. It is only enlarging or diminishing the scale of the same specific subject. If you say, again, that these evils were not in the original image, but belong to the fallen state, you only make wider and wider the essential, or specific, difference. God, then, it may be replied, is not man that he should fall, or be capable of becoming, in any respect, unholy. And this is the very point of the prophet's remarkable contrast (Hosea xi. 9), "He is not man, but God-The Holy One". You know the force of the Hebrew word-the Separate One-as it and the corresponding terms in all the primitive languages signify; just as the opposite class of words denote that which is common, mixed up with If other things, and thus, in respect to itself, and its own rank, becoming unholy (im-purus, im-mundus) or profane. In this way it is that God, although by his power and presence pervading the universe, is yet, in respect to his essence, or absolute being, eternally separate from all things else; that is, in the highest sense, Holy. In this and similar expressions I have quoted from the Hebrew prophets, we find the most direct antagonism to that pantheism, into which some of the most ancient religions fell, and to which such mystic theosophists as Swedenborg have been ever inclined to run. No possible difference of kind can be greater than that which must exist between the Creator and the creature, even of the loftiest rank; and it is, doubtless, for the want of this idea, that no such thing as creation, in its true sense, is anywhere recognized in the writings of Swedenborg. Man is strictly eternal; his "goings forth are from everlasting," the world is a never beginning, never ending, genesis; all is efflux, influx, emanation. In the Scriptural view, on the other hand, the genus ɛós, if we may reverently use the expression, stands by itself in the eternal loneliness of its essential being, and in direct contrast with all that is created. It may take up humanity into union with its life, but not to a participation of its incommuniable essence (or that which makes it what it is), unless you confound all language, and all ideas and all things, in one all-absorbing pantheism, or pan-anthropism, whichever term your theology, or your anthropology, may most appropriately require. Your 4th letter is a continuation of the same subject-the Divine Humanity. In it, however, you proceed to give more fully what you and Swedenborg intend by a trinity, as existing in the Divine Man. You are careful enough, and clear enough, in stating that you do not mean a trinity of persons, which you regard as so utterly irrational that Scripture never could have taught it, and, therefore, never has taught it. But of your logic on that head in some other place. You must, however, somehow find a trinity in your conception, or a subjective trinity, and you proceed to deduce it in the following manner. distinguish between what you call the esse, the existere, and the procedere, in the Divine Nature. The first is the Divine Love; but this cannot be seen unless it takes form. This form is the Divine thought, or wisdom, which you style the existere. You "If now we add the idea of action, operation, proceeding, energy, we complete our conception of a trinal Deity, without, at the same time, mentally dividing him into three. There is, indeed, a triplicity of aspects, in which he is presented to the mind, but not one that can with any propriety be laid as the foundation of a tripersonal distinction. The terms Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, denote not three persons, but three essentials of one person."—P. 23. If ever a man should be clear and careful, it should be on such subjects as these; and, therefore, I may well ask, What do you mean here by the word essentials? The use of it evidently shows embarrassment, and that you want to make your trinity something more than the inside, and outside, and both sides, of the same conception, or three shadows of the same object cast from three different points of view. I mean no irreverence, but find these the best methods of expressing my conception of your conception. You want more of reality, or objectivity corresponding to these striking names, so significant of something like personality, and personal relation; and you seem, therefore, to have been led to the use of this word essentials. But what does it avail you? If you mean by it three appearances, or phenomena, the word is very much out of place; you could not have chosen a worse one for that purpose. If you mean three essences in one person, then indeed you have landed on a mystery vastly transcending the one you deem so irrational, of three persons in one essence; unless you take essence in the chemical sense of component element, and make the Deity a compound of spirit, motion, and matter. But, to return to your trinal division. The first question is, What would you make out of it? Suppose we admit all you say, it would not at all affect any view we might take hereafter of the personal distinction. Mystical dreamers, in all ages of the church, both among heretics and the nominally orthodox, have been fond of these metaphysical trinities; some, in connection with a personal distinction of hypostases, and others, without it. They are not inconsistent with each other. The former, too, have generally presented the same conceptions-Love, Wisdom, Energy, or sometimes slightly variedGoodness, Intellect, Life. They all seem to have come from the Platonic, Αγαθόν-Νους-Ψυχή. I would not waste time upon these speculations, were it not that it furnishes another specimen of the Swedenborgian logic, or of the manner in which an air of vast profundity may be imparted to the most simple conceptions, and the plainest thoughts (plain, but none the less valuable on that account) may be buried, and made unnecessarily obscure, under an ocean of mere words. Let me imagine myself a teacher in a Sabbath School. To a class of ordinary intelligence, and nothing more, I am endeavoring to present the best conceptions I can form, from reason and the Scriptures, of the Divine character and government. I tell them that God is good-that He is love, but that in order to the manifestation of these attributes, there must be objects for him to love, and to whom He is good. Hence, from His love, or goodness, there would be the purpose to create worlds inhabited by men, and angels, and higher and lower beings. This was God's thought; and I might call this thought the form of His love, without much confounding their understanding; although you apologize lest I might find the term a difficult one, or a "stone of stumbling" from want of acquaintance with the deeper Swedenborgian philosophy. Connected with God's goodness, thus taking the form of a thought, or purpose, there would be a going-forth (a much better term this genuine old Saxon than your Latin procedere) of action necessary to carry this feeling and this thought into execution. In this way, I might tell them, God becomes known; and this is what the good men, who made the catechisms, meant by his declarative glory. We cannot see His goodness until it thus takes form in His thought and consequent action. And so that which in itself is unseen, becomes visible; and then I might quote to |