REVIEWS. A HELP TO FAMILY AND PRIVATE DEVOTION. By the Rev. W. MASON. London: Pitman. THE fourth edition of this work, now of established reputation in the Church, has just been issued, in a neat and inexpensive form. Those who stand in need of such a help, will find this volume of great service. Besides the prayers, which form the body of the work, valuable remarks on the Use of Prayer, Heads of Self-examination, and Hints in aid of the Perception of the Spiritual Sense of the Word, are given in the Introduction and Appendix. NORMAN FLEMING. By the Author of "Christus Victor," &c. Boston (U.S.): Spencer. 1868. NORMAN FLEMING is a rather wild fiction, but the author has made it the vehicle of some useful sentiments. We give, as a specimen, a few lines, to understand which it is necessary to premise, that Julia and Imelda are the Martha and Mary of the poem : "Have we not all sins that we must crucify, And bury in their graves? Must we not rise Dear Julia, take Imelda's hand in yours. Must form a part of a perfected whole. Work without prayer will crumble into dust. Holy Imelda, do not you refuse To come down from the heights where you would fain Of earth's most lowly and neglected ones." SPIRITUAL WIVES. By W. H. DIXON. 2 vols. Mr. Dixon, the well-known editor of the "Athenæum," and author of several valuable works, including "New America" (last season), a description of many new forms of social life across the Atlantic, has just published the volumes whose title we have given above. Mr. Dixon relates the manifestations of the disposition to break the solemn ties of marriage on the pretence of a want of spiritual harmony between the married partners, as they have occurred in Germany amongst the Lutherans of Koenigsberg, the Prince movement in the Church of England, and numerous instances amongst the revival people of America, both Methodists and Baptists. He is always racy Mr. Dixon holds a lively and interesting pen. and readable, but not always profound or correct. He regards the yearning after union in soul between one man and one woman as a Teutonic instinct, and as having little to do with any but the Gothic race,—a notion having very little of truth in appearance and none in reality; for the whole history of our race everywhere evinces that with virtuous, independent souls the impulses are and ever have been those declared by our Lord, that two should become one flesh. God made them male and female. "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Matt. xix. 5-7.) These volumes form a series of illustrations of the danger of neglecting the Word, and a life according to the Lord's Commandments, for a religion of excitement and enthusiasm. Had they been written to illustrate and prove that enthusiastic spirits who come to fanatical religionists in their extreme hunting after excitement are impure spirits, as SWEDENBORG testifies, and not at all the Holy Spirit, as their dupes imagine, they could not have been more appropriately composed. We have lately dwelt upon this subject in the articles on Mr. White and his reviewers in the last three numbers of this periodical. These volumes crowd similar evidences before us. The first is chiefly taken up with the career of Archdeacon Ebel, who in union with a wandering enthusiast, Schönherr, who fancied himself the Paraclete, and some other persons, clergymen, high-born ladies, and others, made very great excitement at Koenigsberg, in old Prussia, filling the neighbourhood with the expectation of the personal coming of our Lord in 1836. After years of intense fervour, commencing about 1816, and affecting a wide circle with frequent fanatical scenes, great scandal was created by Ebel making three ladies his wives, and other disorders, which led to his deposition from the Lutheran ministry, and his retirement, until his death in Dresden. We have then a particular and graphic account of the career of Prince, who founded the Agapemone at Bridgewater, a career equally exciting, equally fanatical, and equally ending in scenes disgustingly immoral, in the name and by the pretended authority of the Holy Spirit. In the second volume we have numerous examples of the confessions of persons who had gone through periods of intense revival excitement, and then lapsed, under impulses which their own loose dispositions made only too successful, into offences against the Divine law of the Commandments. Advantage is taken of the truth that pairs ought to be spiritually united;-not to seek closer union in soul with those to whom they have pledged themselves in marriage, by loving acts of mutual good, but to give play to a loose and wandering affection in lawless association with others than their own wives. Experiences of the bitterest sorrow are detailed. It is sad, indeed, to peruse the accounts of the rending of family ties, the poisoning of the atmosphere of home, the poignant sorrow of betrayed females, who found they had been the victims of coarse scoundrels when they had been led to degrade themselves, at the dictates of the pretended holy spirits. We hope that these disclosures will induce a dread in the minds of all who peruse them, of the substitution of spirit-leading for the pure and holy dictates of the Divine Word. In this second volume, the name of Swedenborg comes often before us, and generally in a respectful manner. Mr. Dixon evidently has only a superficial knowledge of Swedenborg's writings, and quotes them generally when he alludes to them, not citing them word for word; yet so far as he knows he intends to give them respectfully and truly, and declares them to be the true origin of all the doctrine, laws, and principles of spiritual marriage. Goethe, the great German writer, he says, has taught the same principles, but from lower grounds. Our readers will smile at the dress in which he has clothed Swedenborg in the following passage: "Nearly all the contracts made on earth, says the Swede, are null and void from the beginning, because these unions are not made with natural pairs. When the man and the woman die, he says, they become consorts for a while in the land of souls, until they find they are not of kin. Sometimes in that upper (inner) world the husband quits his wife, sometimes the wife quits her husband; now and then they start from each other, like opposite currents in a magnetic coil. What had made this male and female one in name? Perhaps they lived in the same town; their families were associates; they were of corresponding age, sex, fortune; the man was rich, the woman lovely. Tish! cries the sage; what are these vanities to the Lord? After death externals count for nothing. In the higher spheres no one is richer than another, for every soul is heir to an unfading crown; no one stands nearer than his fellow, for space is a thing unknown; no one is of higher birth than the rest, for every soul is a son of God." (pp. 192, 194.) In the above, and in every reference to Swedenborg, our readers will perceive that though he has a just conception of the doctrine in general, he is by no means enabled to give it exactly. He is not at home with Swedenborg, and, without intending it, does injustice to his views. We subjoin three other passages which justify a similar observation. It is to be regretted that Mr. Dixon did not quote verbatim : In the new heaven and new earth imagined by Swedenborg, and painted by kim with so much sensuous and voluptuous language, the union of male and female is not only a spiritual fact, but the soul and motive of all celestial facts. Without perfect marriage, there is no perfect rest for either man or woman, even in heaven; nothing but a striving after distant joys: joys which can never be attained, except by the happy blending of two souls in one everlasting covenant of love. Heaven itself is nothing without love; less than a land without moisture, a field without seed, a world without sunshine. Love is its light and life. Take away love, and heaven is a blank, a waste, a ruin: for love is the inner soul and source of things, which sends its radiance through the world of spirits much as the sun sends forth its heat and light through the world of sense. So firmly is this doctrine of the need of a true marriage of souls in heaven held by Swedenborg, and by those who follow him, that they represent the happy man and wife, who have loved each other well on earth, and come together in the after-life, in perfect innocence and ardour, as melting, so to speak, into each other's essence; so that these blending souls are no longer visible as two angels, but only as one angel." (pp. 190, 191.) The sensuous and voluptuous language spoken of in the above extract is in Mr. Dixon's imagination, not in Swedenborg; and the two angelic partners being no longer visible, as two angels, is far from exact. When Swedenborg saw a conjugial pair, who were in heaven from the golden age, he made the observation that there was a unity of their souls manifest in their faces. On which the male-angel replied "We are one; her life is in me, and mine in her: we are two bodies, but one soul. She is the love of my wisdom, and I am the wisdom of her love wherefore her love from without veils my wisdom, and my wisdom from within enters into her love; hence, as thou saidst, there is an appearance of the unity of our souls in our faces." (C. L. 75.) In the exquisite description of a conjugial pair in the work on "Conjugial Love," (n. 42.) it is said, that at a distance they appeared as one angel, but when they came nearer they were two. Perhaps this, hastily perused, may have led to Mr. Dixon's misapprehension. Swedenborg's words are "There appeared a chariot, descending from the highest or third heaven, in which was seen one angel; but as it approached there were seen therein Two: the chariot glittered before my eyes like a diamond, and to it were harnessed young horses, white as snow; and they who sat in the chariot held in their hands two turtle doves. Lo, it was a husband and a wife; and they said—'We are a conjugial pair: we have lived blessed in heaven since the first age of the world, which is called by you the golden age, and during that time in the same perpetual flower of youth in which thou now seest us at this day.' In another professed quotation from Swedenborg, he speaks of the youthful pairs who have been educated in heaven coming together by chance-language which every one familiar with Swedenborg's writings at once feels to be foreign to him, and incorrect. With him Divine Providence is present in all things, ordaining or permitting: nothing happens by chance. His words in the place alluded to are― 66 They meet somewhere or other as by chance, and see each other, and in this case they instantly know as by a kind of instinct that they are pairs, and by a kind of inward dictate think within themselves, the youth that she is mine, and the virgin that he is mine; and when this thought hath had place some time in the minds of each, they accost each other, and betroth themselves. It is said as by chance, and as by instinct, and the meaning is by Divine Providence, inasmuch as whilst the Divine Providence is unknown it hath such an appearance." (C. L., n. 316.) The next extract is less faulty, and yet it is not exactly in accordance with Swedenborg; and we cannot but repeat the remark that it would have evinced a closer fealty to truth if Mr. Dixon had enriched his account of Swedenborg's views by the very language of Swedenborg himself. Indeed, from phrases here and there, we are strongly inclined to conclude that Mr. Dixon's information is from very second-rate sources. He speaks of the origin of the doctrine of spiritualism as being "The Arcana Coelestia." He speaks of one passage in Swedenborg from which Davis's loose doctrine of social life was derived, and of this passage being hostile to marriage. Vol. II., p. 249. He never mentions the work on "Conjugial Love"-the work in which Swedenborg specially treats upon the subject, and from which alone his ideas can be fully learned. Mr. Dixon's thoroughly independent character forbids the suspicion of the slightest desire to pervert his sources of information; but justice also compels us to say that his study of those sources is manifestly of a very superficial kind, and his remarks, therefore, less valuable to the cause of truth than they would be, had his readers been favoured with less dash and more care. We subjoin another extract, which will give our readers the best passage in the description of the doctrine of Swedenborg respecting marriage, to be found in the work. It is not exactly correct, yet it is probably as nearly so as a merely literary man could make it: - "Happiest of all is he who shall have found and won his natural mate on earth. For him the joys of heaven have come in his mortal days. God's purposes are then wrought out in the living flesh, and nothing in the scheme of his existence runs to waste. Are there many such unions of soul with soul,-of heart with heart? Yea, many; for God is bountiful to his children, and their perfect bliss may be noted by the discerning eye." "The signs by which you may know a spiritual pair on earth are mainly these three: union from an early time in youth; perfect love and unbroken faith towards |