SWEDENBORG AND HARRIS. (CONCLUSION.) (8.) Respecting the Arabian Nights, Mr. Harris transmits the following:--"I was afterwards in an ancient Syrian heaven, which overshadows Damascus and is also celestial. . I here saw a Christian version of many of the marvellous romantic legends which survive in the Arabian Nights Entertainments" (Ar. of Ch. iii. 453-4). Now this involves the employment either of Angelic speech, or of English suited to the external mind of the visitor. Assume the latter, and you have an absurdity as extreme as if one should talk of a Buddhist version of some of the translated legends which survive in Boccaccio's Decameron. Neither work is original, national or endogenous. The spirits who communicated the Ar. of Ch. in question probably thought that the Arabic work bears the same relation to the ancient mythologies as do the stories of the older Greek poets; this is a mistake, however, and the tales in question are the product of a comparatively recent civilisation, just as those of the Decameron are; they exhibit the same imperfection of having been worked up artistically for a sensual purpose; and finally, they can be traced back to a strictly foreign -a Persian-source. Furthermore, the ancient Zendic literature was as different even from that of these Persian originals, as the compositions of the old Bedouin bards were unlike the post-Mahommedan writings of the later Arabic. 1 On the other hand, assume that the speech of celestial angels was employed and you find this difficulty; namely, that certain versions of translations of modern compilations in the natural world have their corresponding counterparts in the highest heaven, and consequently (in virtue of a law pervading the three planes of heaven) their other corresponding counterparts in the middle and lower heavens-this involves plenary inspiration! I should not like the reader to imagine I am trying to force conclusions, and will therefore quote from another work through Mr. Harris; it will thus be seen that the above view of plenary inspiration, in other books than the Word, is not a stranger to his mind : "Great Homer's Epic hath an inner sense; The Tale of Troy, inspired by lyric art, respecting the second line of which, I would ask Mr. Berridge,—would a celestial angel give "Lyric Art" the credit of being able to inspire things essentially divine? Less pretentious writers use such expressions as mere impersonations of laws or qualities, by the poetic faculty, in consequence of its very limited vision, as "Wake, sweet wood nymphs, light and shade" (Harris, L. M. Land, p. 103)-which line, by-the-bye, and the fifty lines. following it, are a travesty upon the corresponding portion of Milton's L'Allegro.2 1 Vide Scherr, Allg. Gesch. der Literatur, under the Arabic, division, p. 38: and Schlosser's Weltgeschichte, i. 103-127. 2 It has been urged that Milton's spirit may have communicated the latest form. But if so, there is still this difficulty, if he is a "celestial" angel :-he has made small spiritual progress; he has returned to an immature period of his own terrestrial culture; and-in a poverty of intellectual thought very different from the mental fecundity which characterised the man while on earth-he has had to fall back upon his old left-off materials. The same may be said of "The Raven," a Premising that the angels of heaven speak from intellectual or immaterial ideas, but spirits from ideas of the imagination or material ideas 1—which latter is, no doubt, the key to the mystery-I need only add that the writings of the Church show how, like broken prisms, some splendours of the ancient Word and Lore are to be found still shining in mystical beauty—yet as fragments only-in the myths of the primitive Greek literature (T. C. R. 201); but Heaven and the Word are from the Lord alone in the plenitude of His proceeding. To speak of the inner sense, or of celestial Christian versions, of merely artistic, sensuous products, is to detract from this pre-eminence and sufficiency of the Sacred Scriptures; and my argument at this point, I still venture to think, was anything but " a non-sequitur." (9.) Mr. Berridge denies that Humboldt is spoken of contemptuously through Mr. Harris. To vol. iii. of the Ar. of Ch. then. We there have an illustration of the philosopher's character, shortly after his disease. Humboldt is represented as sneering when the word "Hell" is mentioned (147); he says that in his interior mind he "has not believed for many years that devils or that hells had any existence, except in myths, and that there were philosophical truths confuting them " (147); he is reported to have said, after death," the spirit land is vacuity and intangibility ;" and it is added that "his agonies were frightful to behold, as in spite of his denial, it dawned upon him that he was, to use his own term, a ghost" (149). We are further more told how "his mountain of laboriously constructed formulas brings forth the smallest of pilfering and burrowing animals, squeaking with a ridiculous and effeminate voice against the majestic verities of true religion" (151): and finally, it is said of the book which Germany of to-day places with Gervinus's history of its poetry, Grimm's dictionary of its tongue, Pertz's collection of its primal literature, and Schlosser's history of the world,books unique in their excellence of the "Cosmos" it is said: The reader of "it is lost in vague conjecture at every point beyond the merest rim of matter" (151). Truly it is the reader's fault! I need not quote more to satisfy those who know how speedily the light of the second advent brings right perception to the earnest truth-seeker when he quits mortality for the inner, eternal world. The character of Humboldt rests upon an unusually long life of plodding industry and scientific research. His old age was one of singular tranquillity, usefulness and humility; and his "Cosmos" is permeated by a truly reverential spirit -safely then we may go back, in imagination, to the bed-side of the dying philanthropist, there--lovingly, hopefully, and not without emotion-to recall to memory those last words of his upon earth:-Wie herrlich diese Strahlen! Sie scheinen die Erde zum Himmel zu rufen !” "How glorious these beams! they seem to call earth to heaven." (10.) World-souls and spirit-stars. "Harris states that every material earth contains a spirit called a world-soul, and that when the human race on that earth has arrived at its perfection, the particles of the material earth are dissipated and the world-soul ascends and becomes the heaven of the inhabitants of that earth." So far Mr. Berridge; who also remarks that the above is the only rational explanation yet given of the cause of the disappearance of stars. Were that a "rational explanation, should it not also In an in travesty upon E. A. Poe's poem, and transmitted through Mr. Harris. troduction Poe informs us (through his medium) that "he left the body to recover sanity; and then, in that mysterious, ethereal, ideal world, discovered the painproducing, vision-creating influence, operative in him in his earth-life, to have been, not demoniacal, but celestial" (Spir. Herald, 1856, p. 196). Yet here again we have old materials. 1 See A. C. 6987, 8733, 8734. throw light upon the fact that some stars not only disappear but also reappear? This latter circumstance invalidates the theory, unless indeed, Mr. Harris's friends will go so far as to assert that after a time the material particles are reassumed and the heaven of that earth affects dissipation in its turn! Then again, the idea of the human race on any earth "arriving at its perfection!" But these are not the only absurdities this so-called "rational" explanation involves; for,—if you have a world-soul for your world-body, you must have a nerve-spirit in connection therewith! Certainly: hence it is declared through Mr. Harris :— "The wounds in the nerve-spirit of the earth can hardly be counted, since wherever human blood has been shed, or men have slaughtered their fellows from the creation, a death-mark is visible in its substance. The frequent cause Children of the insanity of animals, and their epileptic disorders, is the ascent, into the pastures in which they feed, of some air-stream of electric breath which vents through the wound; this deranges, by sympathy, the animal economy. who are born near these places frequently are idiotic or malformed" (Ar. of Ch. iii. 795). The aspect of the world soul must thus grow more and more hideous from hour to hour, seeing that the number of wounds in its nerve-spirit must continually increase! Human progress is therefore a fable; physical deterioration an ever-widening reality; social regeneration an impossibility beneath the still augmenting evil; Ormuzd must succumb to Ahriman, and darkness at length crown all !1 How different the teaching of the New Church, that the sphere of the extension of good-which is infinite and of the Divine Love- pervades the universe throughout! a sphere elevating all towards heaven; and whichproceeding continually from the Lord-fills the whole spiritual world and the whole natural world (T. C. R. 44,365, 56,652):-teaching full of mercy as it is strong in hope! yet leaving man free to co-operate or refuse even in the moment when he is being externally bettered by that divine sphere which is infinite. Another peculiarity of this theory is, that when these world-bodies become glorified into angels, they sit, each one, either upon itself or else upon its own soul ! 2 Verily logic maintains scant influence here, and with him who places 1 A false premise generally gets doubled in the conclusion, a circumstance which tells sadly against the celestial" character of such statements: worse than this however, occurs in the above page; the "celestial" reporter is caught in the 66 "lie direct.' George Fox the Quaker is affirmed to have been at Taunton when he cried "Woe unto the bloody city!" whereas George himself declares it was at Lichfield where this happened (comp. Harris, Ar. of Ch. iii. 794 with George Fox's Journal," under date of 1651). 66 2 "It is not a question of Logic but of perception," my Harrisite friends have said to me when, while admitting artistic excellences, I have pointed out these illogical extravagances in their master's publications. Logic disowned, further reasoning was useless. faith in the lore concerning world-souls and fairies (another essential with Harris) the writings of the New Church can command but little respect for the question straightway occurs, "If Swedenborg was so short-sighted as really not to have seen these things; much more that is important may also have escaped his ken; he is obsolete, limited, outmatched ; bring Harris to the fore" One of the worst thrusts at Swedenborg, in this way, may properly be here pointed out. Inasmuch as, according to Mr. Harris, each material earth contains only one world soul, the latter in its glorification could not become both a hell and a heaven. So all shall become heavens. That belonging to our earth, strictly speaking, ought to become a hell, seeing how completely it was magnetized by the now Lost Orb, and how the death-marks in its nervespirit continually increase; but Divine Mercy "Separates the seed-wheat from the chaff Hell, therefore, is not eternal; the doctrine (pervading the whole of Swedenborg's treatise, Heaven and Hell, and recognised generally throughout his writings) is an error! Here then, again, I must remind Mr. Berridge of his assertion that, except the doctrine concerning the existence of evil on the other earths, he did not know one of importance in which Harris stood opposed to Swedenborg. 2 (11.) Internal Respiration. This, of all Swedenborg's doctrines, has been the one most misunderstood and abused by the trans-sepulchral informants of Mr. Harris. The New Church teachings concerning the men of the most ancient Church have become mixed up with poetic fancies from John Milton and that doctrine of physical rehabilitation which formed the chief point of Joseph Balsamo's teaching for some thirty years of his life :3 the result is the strangest of theories, one wherein planes are confounded, and matter and spirit made interconvertible. The following points in answer to Mr. Berridge's objections will make this clear. 1. Swedenborg never intended us to infer that his internal respiration was identical with that of the Adamic men. He says "there is an internal with a scarcely perceptible external, which is sufficiently good then an internal without an external, which is better; finally, there is an insensible one, which is angelic. But these in general; there are still other genera, and an indefinite number of species, pertaining to different regions of the body and the determinations thence" (S. D. 3464). His own internal respiration, he there tells us, dates back from his early childhood, when saying his morning and evening prayers: afterwards, during the subsequent years, he was made conscious of it, in connection with absorbing speculations, "in which the breathing seemed to become quiescent, as otherwise the intense study of truth is scarcely possible. Afterwards, when heaven was opened to me, and I was enabled to converse with spirits, I sometimes scarcely breathed by inspiration at all, for the space of a short hour, and merely drew in air enough to keep up the process of thinking. He further states that "the design of all this was, that every kind of state, every kind of sphere and every kind of society, particularly the more interior, might find in my own a fit respiration, which should come into play without any reflection on my part, and that thus a medium of intercourse might be afforded with 1 Harris, "Lyric of the Golden Age," p. 112. 2 As in Comus, lines 456-466. 3 See his life passim. spirits and angels" (S. D. 3464). A still higher possibility and privilege were next attained; namely, the reception and perception of divine truth, celestial and spiritual, not from angels nor from spirits; but from the Lord God Himself, through His Word (Ď. P. 135). All this is beautiful, rational and orderly. 2. With the Adamic Church it was as follows. Not only was there an internal respiration without anything external save a tacit one, but there was no speech of words as there is to-day. Men spake by ideas, and these were expressed by innumerable mutations of eyes, face and features, but chiefly by the lips, wherein countless series of muscular fibres, at present no longer free, came continually into play. These could set forth, signify and bepicture as many ideas in a minute, as now would demand an hour's speech; and the variations were always conformable to true order, so that one could not put on a false face or dissimulate. This respiration proceeded from the navel towards the interior region of the breast, and was varied with each man according to his state of love and faith in the Lord; for men breathed with those angels in whose company they lived. Respiring thus from within and in consociation with a higher world, they saw only spiritual and celestial things when they looked at what was terrestrial and corporeal; nor cared they but for the inward things those outward ones represented. Finally, they were not instructed in doctrines, and required neither laws, rituals nor statutes (A. C. 607, 1117, 920, 4493). This also is beautiful, rational and orderly the difference between the two being commensurate with the difference between the most ancient Church and the Church of the second advent: the former of which was comparatively an infant, sporting in the sunlight of heaven; the latter a man in the regenerate, thoughtful maturity of intelligence and wisdom. For the New Church has to stand nearer the Lord in conscious intimacy than did even the Adamic Church of old; it must intuitively understand in seeing, while that only instinctively knew as it saw. 3. Mr. Harris incorporates the above two views, and, by the introduction of doctrine pertaining to the plane of merely natural thought, he produces a theory at once unlovely, irrational and disorderly. The chief object of his work on the Apocalypse is to demonstrate the New Church future of Internal Respirationists. It is shown that the veil of partition between the natural lungs and the spiritual is now reduced to extreme attenuation. Under the new conditions the influx of the Holy Breath will gradually wear away this partition in those subject to it. One result will be a thorough interpervasion of the natural by the spiritual breath. After due course of probation, extending from seven to ten years for the most part, those found faithful will receive their reward in a rebirth of the natural soul. This will bring men, according to their degree and signature, into relation with the inhabitants of the celestial, spiritual and ultimate heavens, universe and world souls, human races of earths and suns, fay races and atomic men. All the varied perfections of the previous states culminate in one in which a new nerve body is given as the habitation of the translated soul; and which, being an epitome of the rest, and surpassing them all, is called the Great Respiration. Contemporaneously with these growths, there is the development of aromal vision, the evolution of expanse-sight, radiative touch, the interioration of the organ of vision into the nerve spirit, the power of penetrating "into the seminal essences of stones, into the society of the stone embodied fays"-" to breathe with whom is to inhale longevity." Magic, finally, will be revived as a universal science. Space forbids details such as how "the removal of the obstruction between the spiritual and the natural lungs of man, by means of which the divine |