foundation of a friendly feeling on the part of the public in the neighbourhood, which continues to the present day. enemy; John Bradshaw was not the only one among this early band who had to fight against strong natural propensities. Another worthy of that time was Richard Schofield. His failing was the love of drink. When, however, he identified himself with the New Doctrines, he felt it incumbent on him to conform his life to his professions. Long, however, and arduous was the struggle he carried on before he obtained the final mastery, and various were the fortunes of this moral war. Sometimes he would seem to have completely overcome his and then his foe would break forth afresh, and overwhelm him. to which he was enslaved on these occasions may be gathered from the following incident:-Returning one night after one of the outbreaks, in his bemuddled state he walked through a pond, and so intoxicated was he that in his confused state he walked back through it again; nor was it till he had traversed it a third time that he was sufficiently sobered to find his way home! These passages between Richard and his enemy continued till on one occasion, when carrying home the "cut" of cloth he had woven, for he was a weaver, a public-house lay on his road, and he determined that when he had deposited his work at the warehouse of the manufacturer, he would call and regale himself with a glass of ale. He accordingly on returning went to the door, and had his thumb on the latch, when he was arrested by a warning so vivid, that it was like an audible voice speaking within him. “Richard,” it said, "if thou goes in thou'lt stop." Then," said Richard, "I winnut go in," and never after had he any return of the temptation. Speaking years afterwards of these conflicts with his proprium, which he designated "his Jacky ;" he remarked to a friend of mine, who related it to me, "Mau (my) Jacky used to give me a vast o' trouble; but he's more tractable now. If I give him a bit of an out, and say, 'Come Jacky, we mun go back,' he comes back willing eneugh; time has bin when he wouldn't, but he'd wrawl and towzle wi' me, and be th' mesther when I'd done." On another occasion, at one of the meetings held by Mr. Clowes, when he was speaking of the reality of spiritual associations as the source of the various thoughts suggested and impulses excited in the mind, and enforcing the importance of attending to the quality of these influences as indicating the character of our spiritual associates, Richard remarked that he knew it was true, for when walking out a few days before, on a suggestion of an improper character being presented to his mind, he as suddenly turned round, and said, "Get out wi' ye, au'll ha' nowt to do wi' ye," the spontaneous manner of this utterance proving to him the actual presence of some being or beings whom he thus addressed. Richard afterwards became the leader of the little society of Whitefield, and one of its greatest ornaments. The late Mr. James Crompton, the brother of the late Mr. Roger Crompton, whose munificence to the Church is so well known, and to whom I am indebted for many of the particulars here jotted down, spoke of Richard as possessing a native dignity which constituted him, to use Mr. Crompton's own phrase, "one of Nature's gentlemen ;" and from the following incident, related by the same gentleman, appears to have been a not ineffective preacher. I may premise that John Bradshaw kept a shop, a kind of omnium gatherum very common in the Lancashire country villages, where the public might supply themselves, not only with provisions of all kinds, but with drapery, and even cups and saucers. In John's house was a good sized upstairs room, where he stored his earthenware, usually called his " "pot-room." In this room the Sunday services in Whitefield were first held, the earthen vessels being ranged at the one end, and the human vessels at the other. On the occasion in question, Richard Schofield preached on the Flood as descriptive of temptation and its results, in elevating the Christian. It might, he said, increase and rage, but could not overwhelm those who had found refuge in the ark of safety; but the more it increased the higher it bore them, till they found a settled rest. To repeat Mr. Crompton's description, "Richard fairly got them all into the ark, and carried them up with him till he landed them on Mount Ararat ;" when John Bradshaw, who could restrain his feelings no longer, broke out (slapping his thigh with every exclamation to give greater emphasis), "Weel dun, Ruchot! that's reet (right), that's grand, that's true, I know it is!" But this little band did not escape its troubles. John, from some cause, felt himself aggrieved, and waited on Mr. Clowes to lay his grievances before him. Mr. Clowes listened very patiently to John's statement, and when he paused, asked him if he had done. John replying in the affirmative, Mr. Clowes rose, and, suiting the action to the word, said, "Well, John, all you have to do is to stoop, and stoop, and stoop, and it will all blow over your head." Whether John was convinced I do not know; but he expressed his determination never again to carry his complaints to Mr. Clowes. These few instances I have jotted down will give some idea of what formed the staple of the early founders and fathers of the Church, and furnish a practical refutation to the oft-urged objection, that the doctrines of the New Church can only be understood by educated persons. Some may possibly regard the foregoing particulars, and others to be added in future papers, as too trivial to be worth recording; many of the most intelligent members of the Church however whom I have consulted think otherwise. They bring before us a phase of the Church different from the present, and enforce the divine injunction, not to despise the day of small things. They are interesting, moreover, in illustrating the character of those with whom Mr. Clowes held most frequent spiritual converse. His house was always open to them; and many of his happiest hours were spent in instructing and the interchange of sentiment with these unsophisticated men. As a guarantee of the genuineness of the preceding I append my signature. WOODVILLE WOODMAN. SWEDENBORG IN 1746. I. "The times and people that have vividly felt the proximity of God have always been characterized by hearty and productive affections; by vast enterprises and great sacrifices; by the seeds of mighty thought dropped upon the world, and the fruits of great achievements contributed to human history. In contact with every grand era in the experience of mankind will be found the birth of a religion ;-a fresh discovery of the preternatural and mysterious; a plenary sense of God; the descent of a Holy Spirit on waiting hearts; a day of Pentecost to strong and faithful souls, giving them the utterance of a divine persuasion, and dispersing a new Gospel over the world."-REV. JAMES MARTINEAU. THE year which precedes that wherein the doctrinal descent of the New Jerusalem took place was one of further interioration for Swedenborg. We find from the "Adversaria" that by the beginning of 1746 he had attained sufficient knowledge of Hebrew for winning important elucidations thereby. As might have been expected the noun was the part of speech he first dealt with: it was the soonest mastered as far as lexicon and grammar were concerned. Between pages 456 and 520 of "Adversaria," part i., we have a dozen places where interpretations of names occur, and you have only to read the passages themselves in order to be convinced that without this first slender knowledge of Hebrew, Swedenborg would not have been able to evolve the series of beautiful spiritual truths which followed its application. Already would the man feel a further assurance that he was upon the right track, and as he followed up these linguistic studies to greater heights he would often see that any translation of that idiomatic and poetical old Hebrew Bible would be but a lame and imperfect thing,—a mere mountain-echo of that marriage-song of heaven it so vaguely repeated. "The very, very words of the original text must be gone into," he now says (ipsissima verba textus originalis inspicienda sunt), nor ought we to give ourselves up to the elegancies of Latin and other renderings" (Adv. i. 3, 736); and ever afterwards he shows that "holiness to the Lord" rather than ideas from cultured grammatical expression must rule even in the contemplation of the letter of the Word. "Son of man, the place of My throne, and the place of the soles of My feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel for ever, and My holy name, shall the house of Israel no more defile, neither they nor their kings" (Ezek. xliii. 7). Hence those subsequent remarks of Swedenborg, (1) that there are numerous words in Hebrew which contain a complex of many ideas in one word extending its meaning from one opposite to the other, so that the sense of the word cannot be understood except from the interior sense (Sp. Diary, 2833); (2) that there are no distinctions by punctuation or interstitial signs, because the Hebrew flows from one state of a thing to another (A. C. 4987); and (3) that the peculiarity of the tenses whereby one form of the verb is sometimes applicable to various times is from the internal sense which is independent of times (A. C. 618); statements, all these, not only tending to justify the course our author took in these early years, but also of the utmost importance to whoever acknowledges that it is the internal sense of the Word which contains the real doctrine of the Church (A. C. 9424), the essential truth being there exhibited in its purity, and things expressed such as they really are in themselves (A. C. 8717). Nearly all that Swedenborg afterwards wrote recognised the principles, that the ultimate heaven is in the representatives of the Word (A. C. 4442), and that the real internal man thinks no otherwise than according to the science of correspondences (A. C. 4280); if the letter be misapprehended then, the parallelism of true order is destroyed: hence the absolute necessity of a proper understanding of the word in its literal sense as through this alone the doctrine is obtained (S. S. 56): hence too the certainty of lethargy and spiritual paralysis in what ever Christian Church neglects the study of Hebrew. After our author had completed his great work, the "Arcana Cœlestia," we still find him in fullest agreement with his earlier self on this point: "In the old Hebrew tongue," says he, "the Word has more immediate communication with heaven" (Diarium, vii. 83); events have justified his statements, and have clearly shewn, in the spiritual helplessness of Protestantism and Catholicism in their relation to the Bible, that pure doctrine will not manifest itself beneath a surface whose hazy ripples were produced by Trinitarian translators; and however necessary in God's providence it may be for the existence of fallacies of the external senses to conjoin opposites (A. C. 7344), Swedenborg's example, in this deliberate study of Hebrew despite his Smidius, his Castellio, his Tremellius, his German Luther and his own Swedish Bible-this-for whoever accepts his illuminated writings-is a lesson that we may not (save at certain loss and perchance at great peril) sanction any disfigurement of “the words of the prophecy," nor resign ourselves with complacency to those translations of the Old Church which Swedenborg himself had to rise above ere he could meet the brighter glories of the New Jerusalem. If Swedenborg at this time was thus active in divine uses, it was because he was singularly passive to divine influences: he was a true New Churchman in that he did not throw his own proprium across the path of God's providence, nor suborned to the dictates of common prudence those thoughts and emotions whose birth is in spontaneousness only and whose ultimation into act are ever for the commonweal. Thus, at the end of January 1746, we find him writing as follows: "For eight months now, through the divine favour of Messiah, my mind has been governed by the spirits of His heaven. With these, through all this time, I have been in well nigh continual converse, and they have so actively influenced my mind with spiritual light both as to the very ideas, the very thoughts of each moment and the living utterances themselves, that nothing whatever was thought which did not sensibly inflow. Indeed, it was with me as if from my own effort I was unable to produce a single idea. For five months now, here in my native country, this has been the case, and all the time I have followed up my wonted social intercourse with friends and with others; nor has any one detected that such celestial fellowship was my lot. Not only have spirits acted thus upon my intellect, but also upon my will and my very actions themselves. I have thus been led as a mere passive power whithersoever it has pleased, by streets and squares, to my dwelling-place and about. So sensibly were the very motions of my feet, arms, head, eyes and joints governed, inter colloquia—midst converse-according to the will of Messiah Himself and the spirits of His own heaven (which spirits also are but passive powers governed by Messiah, as they themselves have confessed to me), that these have wondered at seeing I have scarcely gone the least astray," (Adv. i. 943; the same facts are reasserted, i. 967). Never probably did the lines from Edmeston's sweet hymn have such perfect realization in the experience of frail mortality as here : |