strives to prove that betrothals, conjugal fidelity, monogamy, and agnation-descent traced from the paternal line-have ever and everywhere been attained by slow steps as developments of the more primitive marriage by capture, promiscuity, regulated polygamy, and cognation— descent traced through the maternal line. He has coined the ingenious epithets endogamous and exogamous, to characterize respectively the tribes which permitted marriage between members of the same tribe, and those which disallowed it, and, among other theories, he attempis to deduce therefrom a novel one as to castes.

These three books may be regarded as representative books. They may serve as standards of reference, leaders, and authorities among a rapidly increasing literature. What Darwin endeavours to accomplish for man's physical nature, M'Lennan attempts to perform for man's domestic conditions, and Lubbock strives to do for man's social states. That man sprang from an ape, that marriage has originated in promiscuity, and that civilization is the outcome of savagery, are kindred and correlative propositions. To trace back the state of mankind to the brutal, supports the bolder induction which seeks to trace man's origin to a brute beast. If it can be shown that man's moral status is only the result of development; that man's domestic conditions are also the results of development; that all the arrangements and principles of social life are likewise the results of development; if in every known case voluntary or instinctive selection is the means by which such a development has been attained, a remarkable analogy is found for the effects of "natural and sexual selection" in man's physical organism. The advocates of the theory are both ingenious and intrepid. If they accomplish nothing else, we may expect that they will ransack all history and all nations for facts, catalogue and tabulate them, and thus increase our knowledge, and provide materials for future inductions.

While they are prosecuting their labours, and occasionally startling readers with their results, it must be well for us to see clearly the inevitable drift and tendency of their conclusions. It is easy to understand the alarm which such theories occasion to those who cling tenaciously to certain other principles, which they hold as being both true and of paramount value. When it is seen how many doctrines of vital interest are cut away by these sweeping generalizations, no one can afford to permit a merely intellectual curiosity to dally with the premises. They touch too destructively some of our most cherished

beliefs to allow us to rest satisfied in making them even matters of speculative pastime.

It is clearly the duty of New Churchmen to compare these new notions with the standards of truth in which they have learned to confide. Such a review may contribute something of value to the discussion which the theories are certain to provoke. Such a review I

now propose to attempt.

In the first place, let us see clearly what the acceptance of Darwin's notion as to the descent of man will compel us to reject. Among the very first questions which these theories open up is that of man's immortality.

If man is no more than a developed anthropoid ape; which, in its turn, was, through a thousand stages, only a developed jelly fish ; which, in its turn, was, through various stages, a developed mass of protoplastic substance; which, in its turn, was only a development of a fortuitous agglomerate of its chemical triunity, produced, we are left to suppose, by some accidental exertion of spontaneous generation, -then, one of three things must be inferred in reference to immortality

:

1. Either all animals must be immortal, and man may share in what would then be the heritage of all creatures of the animal kingdom.

2. Or no animal is immortal, and the belief in the immortality of man must therefore be an error, a superstition, the fond delusion of his own conceit.

3. Or at some period in his career of development, man must have been endowed with immortality.

There are a few persons who believe that man is not immortal by reason of anything in his nature, but that immortality is given by the Christian Saviour to those "who believe in Him." All the rest of mankind, non-believers as well as disbelievers, will, they hold, perish at death as certainly as do the animals. To such thinkers, the question of man's immortality might seem sufficiently solved by the third alternative. To them Darwinianism may seem a God-send of philosophy. We presume, however, that this view will hardly find favour with many believers in the Scriptures; and, certainly, the Darwinians are not at all likely to adopt the explanation. The Darwinian theory is really an effort to get rid of all supernatural causes, to banish the Creator out of His universe, to erect "natural laws" into the sole causative or producing agencies; and they who hold it would demand overwhelming evidence to satisfy them that some 1800 years ago such

a supernatural gift as immortality first began to be distributed to a certain few among men. The same difficulty would be felt as to any such gift ever having been bestowed on man, or as to any such change ever having taken place in man as would render him immortal, at any other previous or subsequent period. The third alternative, consequently, would be instantly rejected, as requiring those who hold it. to do, what they certainly cannot do, to prove their hypothesis.

The first alternative would only provoke ridicule. The notion of an immortal jelly-fish or an immortal ape would seem only as ludicrous as the notion of an immortal rhinoceros or mouse, mammoth or animalcule. The theory of "development" leaves no [room for the supernatural, and those who believe most firmly in the immortality of man would at once recoil from the notion of believing in the immortality of any creature below man. Hence the first alternative must likewise be rejected.

The second alternative alone remains, if Darwin's speculations are well founded. Accordingly, we find Sir J. Lubbock endeavouring to' trace the belief in immortality along the line of its "development." He finds that man has " a shadow," and that he dreams; but animals also cast shadows, and they also dream; hence man's shadow, or his dreams, do not separate him from the rest of the animal kingdom. The foundation of the notion of immortality he places in man's natural meditation on his shadow, and especially on his dreams. He shews how some barbarous races regard the shadow which is cast from their bodies as a species of subtle second-self. But he lays more stress on dreams. A savage dreams of his deceased relatives or friends, and inasmuch as he regards dreams as a real seeing of objective things, he is thus led to infer the continued existence of the person of whom he dreams. But the body having been buried or burned, perhaps roasted and eaten, the savage is led to infer the existence of the person of whom he dreams apart from the body. A belief in the separate existence of a person after the death of the body, only requires one more step in inference to conduct to the conclusion that this separately existing person will never again die, i.e. that he is immortal. Thus the belief in the spiritual world, in angels, spirits, and devils, in heaven, hades and hell, are resolved into being nothing more than the intellectual" development," through long ages, of what has no broader or more solid basis than a "shadow" and a "dream." Inasmuch as the savages have to endure long seasons of privation, varied by an occasional gorge; and inasmuch as sleeping after a gorge produces indigestion, congested blood vessels, nightmare, &c. &c. &c., the dreams

of savages were vivid, and most likely terrible. So, by this process of reasoning, belief in immortality is made to have really orginated in a too heavy supper, an attack of indigestion, and consequent broken slumber! All serious belief in immortality is evaporated away. This outgrowth of a dream, this superstructure raised on a basis of flatulency, this immortality-notion, thus abolished, consequently, must now be dismissed among the other intellectual lumber to the limbo of exploded theories! Animals are embryotic men; men are developed animals; and belief in immortality is only the expression of man's sovereign self-conceit, anxious to separate himself by an impassable gulf from the degraded ancestry from which he sprang! One cannot but feel grateful to Mr. Darwin and his abettors for exploding for ever all such vain imaginations! Like "the brutes which perish," as to his origin, man also resembles them in his destiny, and it is only superstition piled on superstition, and all based on a shadow and a dream, which would lead him to any other and more consoling conclusion !

To those whose incredulity rejects the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, but whose credulity greedily swallows the new doctrine of metamorphosis styled "development," it may appear very singular; but I cannot believe that men generally will surrender their belief in immortality, and their hopes of heaven, on any such suppository grounds. The immortality of man is, however, only one of a numerous class of old beliefs of which the acceptance of the development hypothesis necessitates the denial.

(To be continued)..

J. H.

SWEDENBORG IN 1746-7.

II.

"Man is governed by spirits from the Lord because he is not in the order of heaven, for he is born into the evils of hell, and thus into a state altogether contrary to divine order. It is necessary, therefore, that he should be brought back into this order, and this cannot be effected except by means of spirits; but it would be otherwise if man were born into good, which is according to the order of heaven; for then he would not be governed of the Lord by spirits, but by order itself, and thus by general influx."-SWEDENBORG (H. H. 296).

NEXT to the doctrine that the Lord Jesus Christ is the one sole God, there is nothing in the teachings of Swedenborg more difficult of acceptance by the trinitarian than that peculiar view we hold as to the last judgment. It involves a complete reversal of the general opinion in

regard to the consummation of the age, yet must be accepted before Swedenborg's mission can be believed in; for the descent of the New Jerusalem the creation of a new earth-is everywhere shown to be the result of a new heaven, the production of which latter was the chief consequence of the last judgment itself. Although this latter took place in 1757, its preliminaries date far back beyond this period, even as its full operations incline far forwards. The opening of Swedenborg's spiritual sight was no doubt connected therewith, but it was only now in 1746 that he received clear tidings of the coming change -an important circumstance, as exemplifying the gradual process of Swedenborg's doctrinal renovation.

At the begining of the "Adversaria," when our author could only with difficulty divorce his thought from the merely allegorical, he held that the six days' creation were so many stages of social progress, to culminate in a seventh one-the millennial age (i. 19); and even at the very close of 1745, when explaining Gen. xxix., and in showing how Leah prefigured the Jewish Church, Rachel the Gentile one, and Jacob the Messiah, he tells us both churches should advance into the seventh age of the world's history, "that last time when Messiah's kingdom (a festal, holy day) should come. The years of the sixth phase were from the period of the first advent until the present time, and now we must look for that last sacred day (thus named from His kingdom, wherein Jehovah God should be worshipped in holiness), a day of tranquillity, in which Messiah shall rest from His labours, and return to Canaan with His brides"-"the Jewish and Gentile Churches" (i. 680).

We pass on then some few months: it is now the spring of 1746. Swedenborg here informs us that the patriarch Abraham, in exhorting certain of Jacob's hypocritical followers to amend their ways, warns them "they must no longer be such as they had been and still are." What had just previously been written through Swedenborg concerning Jacob, is referred to as a proof of our Lord's advent, in a true church, from which should be excluded "whoever would not follow Messiah, that is, worship Him as their God." It is added that a fearful doom awaited them should they persist in their wickedness; and finally, strangest of all, Swedenborg affirms the passage to have been written "by his hand as an instrument but dictated by Messiah Himself through Abraham;" nay, more than this (and as if himself amazed), he adds:"Not the least word of this matter is my own, as I can solemnly attest before Jehovah God" (i. 1527, 1523, 1529). Here,