laws of space and time are also intermediate in their power and operation on the mind between their power and operation on earth, and in heaven and hell. And therefore, as it has been already said, when men leave their dead bodies, they, at first, experience but little charge, from the forms, appearances and usages which they have left behind them.

Of those

None go

Bu this state must end; for all men finally, and most men soon, go upwards or downwards, as the ruling loves formed in this life determine. who go downwards, we will say but this. there but those who bring upon themselves this doom, and therefore none who die before the age and state of free-agency and of full moral responsibility. And they who are impelled downwards by their own proclivities to evil, are still surrounded with the Divine mercy although they know it not. Their Father still loves them, because He is Love, and there is nothing but love in Him. And He so orders all things of their home, and so subjects them to the restraint and discipline they need, and so operates upon them through motives which they can feel, as to give them all the semblance of order which they can appreciate or enjoy.

But for them who go upwards, and yet upwards, a glory and a peace are prepared, which can neither be seen, nor told, nor understood, nor imagined by the dwellers upon earth. Of the little which Swedenborg saw, he tells but little, except in general terms, from

the impossibility of speaking of it so that they should understand it who did not also see it.

Nor can more be said now, than that our ability to form an exact and adequate conception of the things of heaven, must depend, morally, upon the affinity of our affections to those of heaven; and intellectually, upon the degree in which we are able to recognize the apparent presence of space and time, and yet liberate our minds from their controlling influence.

I have now reached the topic, of life in this world. It has already been intimated, that the doctrine of life which belonged to genuine Christianity has been lost from the church in two ways. First, by the orthodoxy which rests salvation upon justification by faith alone, and wholly discards good works, as merely the sign and effect of that regeneration which was produced before these works, and which they could have no agency in producing.

Secondly, by Rationalism, which simply discards the doctrine of salvation altogether; or if it retains the word or the thought, means and teaches that a man is saved by himself. What is the answer which the New Church makes, on the one hand to Orthodoxy; and on the other, to Rationalism?

Orthodoxy sprang, as has been already said, from the difficulty of reconciling the free-agency and responsibility of man, with the absolute omnipotence and fore

knowledge of God. In the fourth century there was a strong effort to bring this subject within the domain of logic and philosophy; and Pelagius, of whom we know nothing that justifies our regarding him as other than good and pious, feared that men were casting off a responsibility and an obligation which God had imposed upon them. Moved by this fear, he asserted this responsibility in the strongest terms; for this purpose he was obliged to found himself upon man's free-agency; and in the course of the controversy which soon arose, expressed himself in terms which seemed to justify, if they did not express, a belief in human sufficiency for self-salvation.

Augustine, whom we have every reason for believing a good and great man, in his dread of this falsity, which seemed to him to destroy the very life of all religion, declared that the whole work of salvation was God's work; and that it might be altogether God's work, he declared that man had no share in it. And with the whole force of his remarkable intellect, he laid the foundations on which was built a system of salvation, which acknowledges only election, predestination, justification by faith alone, and the absolute inability of man.

This system prevailed in the Christian church. In subsequent ages, while still maintained in theory, it lost its force, and there gradually grew up that dreadful system of the sufficiency of works, which culminated in the doctrine of merit, and of the superfluous merits of the saints as forming the treasury of the church,

and, finally, of indulgences; which meant, in fact, that the church had the power of imparting to those who had not merit enough of their own, the needed portion of the 66 superrogatory" "merits of the saints. A doctrine which wise and good men in the Roman church labored to modify and ameliorate, but which is always fatally false.

This doctrine Luther and Calvin encountered; and when it was their business to assail and overthrow the Romish church, they found in Augustine's theory, which was the theory of the church, their readiest and most powerful weapon against what they truly regarded as the corruptions of that church. And Calvin, with marvellous skill and a fearless surrender of his own mind to the conclusions of his own logic, elaborated into exact detail, the whole system of justification by faith alone, with all its requirements and all its consequences. And thus Orthodoxy was established as the doctrine of Protestantism, and came to mean a belief in faith alone.

The view of the New Church on this subject may easily be stated. It regards the whole error as proceeding from a separation and isolation of two elements, which, when united, constitute the truth; and when separated, constitute two enormous and perfect falsities.

This truth is expressed by the Apostle Paul thus: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh within you both to will and to do of His good pleasure." The command

is, to work out our own salvation; and the reason of the command, and of our duty, and of our ability, is, that God worketh within us. Put the two together and we are safe; separate them and we are lost.

All our life is from God; all of it is God's life in us; imparted to us, or in better phrase, flowing into us, becoming in us our life, and determined as to its operation and manifestation (in accordance with the universal law of created existence), by the form and nature of the recipients. I cannot here pause to speak more of this law, although unless it be understood, it is impossible to understand anything of the laws of life. I must only refer to a brief illustration of it in the previous Essay on Paradise.

Let me, however, try to exhibit some of what may be called the reasons why man was created such as to possess this power, and have this duty and responsibility rest upon him.

God creates man in His own image and likeness, to the end that He may impart to him, in the utmost possible degree, His own blessedness; and this blessedness consists in loving and doing good. To this end He makes man capable of loving. But freedom is a vital essential of love. What one loves by compulsion, if such a thing be conceivable, he would not love at all; or certainly he would not love with the glow and warmth and blessedness of free, unforced love. Therefore, because God desires infinitely to make man happy, He imparts to him freedom. He endows him, by the very necessity of God's own nature, with free