the Father, when they are then led into heaven; but first towards the east, and hence towards the north, and there they ascend higher and higher even to the west; some of them appeared to go further, some to descend to the south, and some to be borne away elsewhere, because in this manner all are arranged and disposed of to the proper places.

5248. The Mahomedans are more in natural light than the Christians, and also desire to know truths more than they. This truth they understood, received, and imbibed better than Christians, namely, that all things in heaven and the world have relation to truth and goodness, and that truth, when it is believed is of faith, and that good when it is perceived is of the love, and that on this account two faculties are given to man, namely, the understanding and the will, and that the truth which is of faith belongs to the understanding, and that the good which is of the love, belongs to the will; and also that truth and good must be a one, that a man may be truly a man, and consequently that faith and love, and the understanding and will, must also be a one. Some of the Christians who had been learned, both from those who had professed faith alone, thus truth alone, and from those who had professed good works alone, the former from the Reformed, and the latter from the Catholics, heard these things and could not understand them, whereas the Mahomedans understood them clearly. They also clearly perceived that they who had been in the good of life, tion of truth, because good desires truth, since truth is, food of good, and also that truth desires good, because truth then receives its life from good, so that the desire of one to the other is mutual and reciprocal, and that a man, who is a man from wisdom and intelligence, must be in this desire of conjoining good with truth, and truth with good. The Mahomedans found, that many of the Christians placed intelligence and wisdom in cunning and malice, whereas this is quite contrary to wisdom, and nothing but insanity and folly.

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as it were, the

ON THE ORIGIN OF EVIL, AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS DEPENDENT THEREON.

We have received a paper entitled "Difficulties of an Inquirer." With every disposition to open our pages as widely as possible to inquirers, consistently with a prudent regard to the proper uses of our publication, we must beg to remind our correspondent that there is a bound beyond which we cannot pass with propriety. Our Magazine is a magazine FOR the New Church and its sacred truths, and not a magazine against it. It is not an arena for "doubtful disputations." Our journal is

certainly open to inquirers who desire further information respecting our doctrines, provided, however, that their inquiries proceed on the ground of a respect for self-evident fundamental truths (of course according to our conception of them), concerning which sound reason says, "It must be so;" but it is not open to negative arguments against them, on the plea of making inquiry. If we were not to regulate ourselves by this principle, not only the Calvinistic advocate who impugns, as we judge, the self-evident truth, that God is infinitely good, would have a claim to our space, but on the very same principle, we should be compelled to admit the fallacies of the Atheist, the fool who hath said in his heart there is no God! It is nothing to the purpose to say that the former reasoner calls himself a Christian, but the latter does not, because, for our part, we are quite as ready to loosen our absolute conviction that there is a God, by exposing it to be baited by negative reasonings, as we are to subject to the same treatment our other conviction,-that God is infinitely good.

With all due deference to our correspondent, and with every respect for his sincerity as AN INQUIRER, we now proceed to discuss the points he has brought before us, and while we are willing to believe that he will grant us all legitimate freedom, we trust that we shall not be disposed to exceed it.

man.

The subject of the Origin of Evil, upon which his remarks principally turn, has always been admitted to be one of inextricable difficulty to human reason, whenever it quits the guidance of selfevident fundamental principles. Evil exists; the fact supposes a cause,— obviously an active cause, and this cause of evil was either God, or According to all our ideas of the Calvinistic Doctrine, God is made by it to be that cause; but according to the doctrine of the New Church, man was exclusively that cause. Our correspondent is not satisfied with the latter doctrine as he finds it exhibited in some letters from Mr. Clowes, inserted in our number for September last. He affirms that the statements of Mr. Clowes are not accurately made, being liable to objections which he recites; but we consider that his dissatisfaction is not reasonable; and we are compelled to decline inserting his reasonings, because we are convinced, that in proportion as they are attended to, the self-evident truth that God is infinitely good, and therefore not the cause of evil, is brought into question, and consequently into doubt. The reasonings by which our correspondent sustains his objections are of the class that Swedenborg describes as originating in the fallacies of the senses,-the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to which the serpent,-the sensual prin

ciple, continually inclines; and we conscientiously admit the accuracy of this description. Nothing is more in accordance with the natural reason of man, as founded in sensible evidences, than the conviction of the late Rev. Mr. Vaughan, of St. Martin's, Leicester, expressed in the title of his well-known sermon—“ God the Doer of ALL things." Mere Sensual Reason, when unregulated by any higher principle, cannot but conclude, that because God is the First Cause of all things, He must be, as the author of this sermon implies, the cause of all things evil as well as all things good. But this apparently irresistible conclusion is turned aside by a just definition of the word "God," which has the effect of bringing out a totally opposite conclusion. This definition is obtained by the knowledge of a spiritual truth derived from revelation,— the truth that God is infinitely good, by which the natural fallacy is corrected, and then the proposition stands thus,-God is infinite Goodness, Infinite Goodness is the First Cause of all things good, but cannot be the active Cause of any thing evil. We are, for our parts, compelled by our reason and conscience to uphold Mr. Clowes's statement as perfectly satisfactory and conclusive, all things considered, that the Origin of evil was owing to man's abuse of the faculty of liberty,liberty to choose whether he would take his ruling love, and thence his whole character, from his spiritual principle on the one hand, or from his sensual principle on the other: he was instructed by his Maker, that if he kept the lower principle in subjection to the higher, he would rightly use his faculty of liberty, and it would be well with him; but if he allowed the lower to take precedence of the higher, so far he would abuse his liberty, and it would be ill with him. It may have been the case, that the departure of man from the true order of his life was so gradual as to be to himself almost imperceptible, and consequently (although in Genesis described allegorically by one distinct act, distinctly involving the guilt of decided rebellion,) was, in each individual case, especially at the commencement of such departure, accompanied with the least imaginable degree of fault, not greater, perhaps, than the neglect, in a good man, to regard some one of the admonitions of conscience, in reference to some obligation not very clear or perceptibly of great moment. It may have been, that the voice of the sensual principle (the serpent) was listened to in each successive generation (through the quality of the hereditary tendency transmitted) a little more and a little more, until the will (Eve), according to the law of habit, acquired imperceptibly less and less affection and desire towards the voice of God in the internal, and more and more towards the voice of self and nature in the external, until at length confirmation began to creep in

from the intellect (Adam), to the effect that it was desirable to seek the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that is, to confirm, as a reality, the appearance that man lives and acts from himself,-in preference to the fruit of the tree of life,—that is, the interior conviction that all life and power are from God.

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It appears from the explanation of the second chapter of Genesis by Swedenborg, in the first volume of his Arcana Calestia,-and we beg to remark by the way, that until AN INQUIRER has read this volume, in our opinion, he is not qualified to discuss the subject under view with a New Churchman,-it appears that an inclination towards the fall was indicated before the serpent was called up as an actor in the scene. In explaining the statement that while Adam slept a woman was formed from one of his ribs, E. S. says, "By a rib is meant man's proprium, and by the deep sleep of Adam is denoted that while man thinks from the proprium he knows no other than that he lives, thinks, speaks, and acts of himself; but when he begins to know that this is false, he then starts, as it were, out of sleep, and becomes awake." "The posterity of the Most Ancient Church [which in its highest state is signified by the Sabbath of rest] not being willing like their parents to be a celestial man, but to be under their own self-guidance, and thereby inclining to proprium, had a proprium granted to them, but still it was a proprium vivified by the Lord, wherefore it is called woman, and afterwards wife." (A.C. 147, 151.) Thus the member of the New Church is led to think of the fall of man as arising gradually, and as the scarcely perceptible decline of a being who was necessarily infirm because finite, and who was constituted a free-agent, because if he had not been thus constituted, he could not have become at all the happy being whom Divine Love intended him to be. The gift to man of the power of rising higher and higher in the scale of his being, necessarily involved the liability to descend from the elevation to which he had attained; and thus commenced that fall of man from innocence, which did not arrive at its consummation until "the fulness of time," when "the Word was made flesh." So that, in strict fact, the Allegory of the Serpent deceiving Eve does not point to the first or earliest inclination in man to descend, but to a stage of his descent, when his fall had acquired, in the Divine view, (if not in the view of the consciences of those who had fallen) a decided character. Still it is evident, that the downward inclination of the thoughts was, from the very first, altogether against the Divine will and operation in the interiors of the mind, and is therefore to be ascribed not at all to God, but entirely to the abuse by man of his free-will.

And when we have made this declaration, we have actually gone as far as it is possible for a human being to go by means of language, in accounting for man's fall, and in vindicating God from all implication in it. When, then, we are asked, "But what was the cause of this abuse, for every act must have a cause from which it originates ?" we must meet the question thus propounded with a pointed and earnest declaration, that it is a question altogether inadmissible, for it lacks every attribute which can render a question worthy of attention. It does not admit of a direct answer, but not because it is too wise and deep, but because it is quite the contrary, for after an effect has been traced to its beginning, it seeks to follow it still further! It is not a pertinent question, being inconsistent with the nature of the subject to which it refers. It is a question not a whit wiser than the question of a child who asks, when he is told that God made man, "but who made God?" The full previous knowledge of the questioner, that his question, from its very nature, cannot receive a direct reply, shows it to be a captious question, essentially, although it may not be intended as such. It is not a sincere question, because, as the course of the Calvinistic theory has proved, it covertly means, and can mean nothing else than to ask,-"Was it God that led man to abuse his free-will, for how could man begin to abuse it unless there were a cause, and if it cannot be shown what the active cause in man was, beyond the assertion that he caused himself to disobey by the abuse of his free-will, it will follow, that God caused man to sin (because he could have prevented sin and did not), and that Calvinism is the truth?" Such is, and must be, in substance, the secret thought of every one, whether Calvinist or Philosophical Necessitarian, who pertinaciously presses his question, "What caused the abuse of free-will ?"*

By means of the particulars relating to the fall laid open in the explanation of the spiritual sense of the narrative in Genesis, the New Churchman is able to think satisfactorily to himself, how the fall began and proceeded. But these particulars will go for nothing to the questioners who do not admit the authority of E. S., and therefore they will only proceed the more, when these particulars are presented, to press their favorite question with feelings of inward exultation, and a fond persuasion, that he that can puzzle another must himself be the wiser man. What, then, is the course which it befits a New Churchman to pursue, to whom this question is put? To us it appears, that the

* Calvin expressly states this amongst many other things to the same purport: "Cadit igitur homo, Dei providentia sic ordinante," that is, "man therefore fell, the providence of God so ordaining it.”—Institut. lib. iii. chap. 23, § 8.