and every man of genuine common sense must see the truth, if he but examines the operations of his own mind.

To the mind accustomed to look up through natural appearances and natural effects, to spiritual causes, and thus to the Lord who created all, both spiritual and natural, for the infinitely Divine end, that He might form a heaven of human beings in His own image and likeness- nothing is more remarkable than the fact that scientific men can possibly confine their thoughts and limit their imaginations to conceptions of merely material things.

That it is so to a great extent, we must admit; and find our only comfort in the thought, that as yet no human mind is capable of comprehending the full connection between spiritual things and material things; that the apparent blindness of the natural scientist to spiritual truth may be permitted by the Lord, in order that his faculties may be devoted to the discovery of those natural laws which form the ultimate basis for the spiritual truths which are simultaneously coming down to us out of heaven; and while to other minds is committed the work of bringing these higher truths to view, the man of science, if not blinded by selflove, may, when he comes into spiritual light, be able to see what now is obscured; and to realize the truth, that all his attainments have been of use to himself or to others, only in so far as they could lead towards a higher development of heavenly life.

To those who receive the doctrines of the New Church, as taught in the writings of Swedenborg, the true use of the imagination, and its relation to the higher and lower faculties of the mind, is more apparent.

Not merely to increase our delight and happiness as natural men, has our Heavenly Father endowed us with this truly delightful faculty. Though even upon this low plane does He bestow bounties with a liberality that is infinitely beyond our comprehension.

Its highest use is in the ability it gives us to look up to and receive through these things which are in themselves

VOL. XLIV: 3

inanimate, an influx of spiritual life from Him who is the Source of all life.

Swedenborg again says, A. C. 5128: "When sensuals are subject to the rational, then the sensuals from which man's first imagination is formed, are illustrated by the light which comes through heaven from the Lord; and then also sensuals are arranged into order, that they may receive the light, and that they may correspond; sensuals, when they are in that state, no longer oppose the acknowledgment and sight of truths, those which disagree being instantly removed, and those which agree accepted."

When the natural life of man, the life of the body and of the world, in which sensuals have power, is subordinated to love to the Lord and the neighbor, when our first and most earnest desire is to shun all evils as sins against Him, then the sensuals which delight the imagination, and from which it is formed, cannot oppose the reception of truth; but "illustrated by the light which comes through heaven from the Lord," they lift us above themselves, into the thoughts and affections to which they correspond; thus bringing us nearer to heaven and to the Lord.

To know that the natural world, with all its wealth of beauty, and capacity to delight the imagination, that the wonders of nature and of art, the works of the painter, the sculptor, the poet, the musician, may all be honestly and purely enjoyed, and made conducive to the one great end for which we were created, a life not of this world, but of heaven, is to know something of the utmost value even to the most practical man, who prides himself upon his common

sense.

And he who enjoys in a high degree the delights attendant upon an imaginative temperament, let him remember that only in so far as sensuals in him are subject to the true rational principle-which sees in all evil sin against the Lord, because it opposes that influx from Him which alone is life can his imagination fulfil its proper function; and he will find that so far from being in bondage to the truth,

the truth will make it free. For truth, with all its infinite beauty and variety of form and expression, must ever transcend the utmost capacity of the human imagination, because it is from the Divine.

The wildest dream of the most poetic temperament has never more than approached the outer portals of that world where thought and affection coming down from Him who is infinite, clothe themselves in forms of spiritual beauty, of which the natural imagination can form no adequate concep

tion.

Only in so far as goodness and truth find in our minds a fitting receptacle, can these wonders and glories of the Heavenly Land be ours to look upon.

Only in so far as the beauties of this world, which enter in by the eye and store themselves up in the memory, are made to serve as bases for the reception of the thoughts and affections to which they correspond, and thus to elevate us into the light of truth from the Lord, can the true purpose for which our natural faculties were implanted, be attained; and imagination and common sense combine to elevate us from a condition not much above that of brutes, to one but "a little lower than the angels"; leading us still onward and upward until we may become even as the angels of heaven; in the image and after the likeness of the Lord our Heavenly Father.

F. A. D.

MILTON.

THE DELUGE.

"And now the thickened sky

Like a dark ceiling stood: sea covered sea,

Sea without a shore; and in their palaces,
Where luxury late reigned, sea-monsters whelped
And stabled."

IN silence, 'neath the howlings of the storm

'Neath the white foam-full many a fathom down,

Lay awful Sinai, Ararat's huge form,

Mont Blanc's proud peak, and Chimborazo's crown

Yet long the monarch of the mountains stood,—
Mantled with rolling clouds, defiant, lone,—
Towering in gloomy grandeur o'er the flood,
Like some doomed Titan on a battered throne.

But sternly God had voiced the dread decree:
"The flesh I made shall cumber earth no more."
The rains descended, and uprose the sea,

Rose with wild dash, and long and angry roar.

Till, combing high, a giant billow leapt

Full over* Deodunga's storm-scarred brow,

And the drowned orb,-with cloud-pall round her,— swept Down her blue path—a shoreless ocean now!

Mirth's voice was hushed; the revel's song was done;

Soft eyes no more love's glance responsive gave; The flush of beauty, pomp of wealth, were gone – All whelmed beneath th' inexorable wave!

But o'er the wreck though angels may have wept,
God's wrath was seeming-mercy struck the blow;
A generation from the earth was swept,

To save a race from everlasting woe.

For, out hell's caverns welling, had a flood

Of dire persuasions poured o'er earth amain; And man had stooped to sin; called evil good; And staggered to his doom — of endless pain.

But God remembered those within the Ark;
The fountains of the deep restrained their flow;
The lurid clouds sailed off; and on one dark,
Dissolving bank of weeping rack, a Bow,
Seven-hued, and fair as lustrous morning, shone!
The beam, whose touch is beauty, through the sky

Went flashing from the reappearing sun,

And writ upon the cloud that God was nigh!

Noon whirled his torch the glassy flood along;

The waves, whose crests had laughed 'mid lightnings glare, Shrank from a power than tempest's rage more strong, And, changed to clouds, fled darkling on the air.

Along the Andes, and along the Alps,

Along each Afric, and each Asian chain;
The mountains lifted up their wave-worn scalps,
And plead for verdure for the steeps again.

And God was gracious: the receding floods,
Left a fat ooze whence swelled the teeming grain;
The future groves soon spread to waving woods,
And smiling Flora reassumed her reign.

*One of the Himalayas-the loftiest peak on the globe.

Earth, jocund, bloomed as fair as when she sung,
Amid her sister spheres, her morning song;
Fair as if never terror's shriek had rung,

Nor death had stalked those lovely vales along.

The clearer skies, the lawns of fresher hue,
The renovated look all Nature wore,
Emblemed the truth that man was born anew-
He owned a Father in his God once more!

That covenant, whose token was the Bow,
Flung o'er the storm-cloud like a gorgeous robe,
God ne'er hath cancelled; and it shelters now,
As a broad bastion, all the peopled globe!

BROOKLINE, MASS.

W. B. H.

MINISTERS AND THEIR SALARIES.

THE discussion on the Ministry which has been running through the pages of the New Jerusalem Magazine and the New Jerusalem Messenger, for nearly a year, seems to have reached, at last, a very practical issue, to wit, the amount due to ministers in return for their labors. "T. F. W." has raised this point in the March number of this magazine, and "Sacerdos" has replied to him in the May number. Now I, to speak personally, as one of the ministers of the Church, am far from being satisfied with the nature of this reply from our brother; moreover, I do not believe that his utterance at all represents the general feeling among us.

The ministers of the New Church in this country of Great Britain, of which the present writer is a citizen, are deeply interested in everything that is going on among our brethren in America, because we see that America is taking the lead in all matters relating to the progress of the New Church, and we know that whatever is done among our trans-Atlantic fellow-laborers is sure to affect us soon afterwards. I have, therefore, felt it no encroachment to take a little part in this discussion, especially as my distance, as to the flesh, enables