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187 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Swedenborg

trine of a trinity of persons resulting in worship and prayer to three gods, and of a vicarious atonement made by one god to appease 3. Doctrines another are declared to be human in-

of Christ ventions. The holy Trinity of Father,

and the Son and Holy Spirit is declared to be Scriptures. a trinity of person, not of persons, like that of soul and body and action in man, being essentially the trinity of the divine love and wisdom and operation in Jesus Christ glorified, " in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily " and who, having " all power in heaven and earth " is the only visible and true God and the only rightful object of worship in the Christian Church. In the sacred Scriptures the " books of the Word " which embrace the " law, prophets, and Psalms " of the Old Testament and the " four Gospels and Revelation " of the New are shown to have an internal sense throughout, being dictated by the divine spirit to the human writers without their intervention, and clothed in natural symbolic language exactly corresponding to the spiritual and universal truths within, just as nature is a symbolic clothing with matter of the forces and forms of the divine love and wisdom. The other books of the Bible are inspired and useful for the Church but are not the divine Word itself in the sense of the above named. By the Word man is brought into association with angelic societies in heaven who are in the spiritual sense, and by the same divine indwelling and association the holy sacraments of the church, founded in the Word, have their supernatural power.

The doctrine of life teaches that " all religion bas relation to life and the life of religion is to do good." The good of life, which is charity, is defined as consisting primarily in shunning all evils 4. Life and as sins against God and doing faith-

Faith. fly the duties of one's office. The decalogue in its external and internal sense shows what evils are sins, including not only outward deed but inward motive. Particularly the sin of adultery is shown to embrace fornication and all lust and practise hurtful to the holy bond and pure marriage love between one man and one woman. Saving faith is shown to be faith in the Lord God, the Savior Jesus Christ, and in his power to save those who look to him for strength to overcome evil in obedience to the divine commandments. With those who are in this effort and are fulfilling faithfully their duty to the neighbor in a life of use according to their station, the Lord implants a good and heavenly nature in place of the evils put away, and so man is regenerated and enters the heavenly life. Acts of charity, benevolence, piety, etc., are not properly good works, since they may be done equally by the evil, but they are the signs of charity and the means of its exercise for those who are in the effort to shun evils as sins and do good from God.

Other works published in Amsterdam are:

" Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment and the Spiritual World "; " The Angelic Wisdom Respecting the Divine Love and Wisdom " (1763); " The Angelic Wisdom Respecting the Divine Providence " (1764); " The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugal Love " (1768) ; " A Brief Exposition of the Doctrine of the New Church Signi-

fied by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation " (1763); and, lastly, the great summary of all his theology, " The True Christian Religion or Universal Theology of the New Church " (1771).

The works entitled " Angelic Wisdom " present systematically what may be called a spiritual metaphysics and ethics in distinction from the dogmatics and the exegesis of the other works.

"Angelic , The Thus in " Angelic Wisdom Respecting Wisdom.' the Divine Love and Wisdom "there is a spiritual philosophy of creation and of the discrete degrees by which the universe and man emanated from God without being continuous with God. It is the complement to Swedenborg's earlier cosmology, and in place of the formless infi nite there is substituted the divine man, a being whose esse is love, whose existere is wisdom, and whose procedere is use; whose first effulgence or man ifestation is through the sun of the spiritual world which emanates from himself, whose heat is love and whose light is truth; and which in succession, by its emanations, produces the auras, ethers, and at mospheres of the spiritual world. These again in their receding orbits become condensed and fixed in the forms of the material atmospheres and so of the visible and ponderable suns.and earths of our universe, every particle of which is actuated and put in motion by the particles or forces of the corre sponding higher atmosphere or aura of the spiritual world. In this way God, who is the only life and the source of motion and the divine Man after whose form all things are created, actuates and shapes all creation, without being himself nature; and because these degrees of creation, viz., God, spiritual world, nature, are discrete, like end, cause, and effect, and not continuous planes of matter more or less atten uated, pantheism is avoided and the human indi viduality is preserved. The universe is shown to be the theater of the divine altruism, the world deri ving its being from love's need of an object, which can freely reciprocate that love, man in his free moral nature being that object. The reciprocation of'the divine love by man is in the life of charity, that is, of love and service to the neighbor. Man's individual personality, being the reactive agent to respond to divine love, is never destroyed, and heaven is the perfect society of immortal personal ities. In the " Divine Providence " the laws are set forth by which the Lord leads man in freedom by reason out of his evils into lesser evils and into good, and how the Lord's providence, looking only to eternal ends, controls everything with a view to the greatest good.

In the " Conjugal Love," Swedenborg presents an ethics of marriage remarkable for its elevation and purity. The sex distinction and relation are as fundamental in the spiritual as in the physical na-

ture of man, resulting from the rela e. Marriage: tion of the volitional and the inThe Planets; tellectual faculties of the mind,

S"mmary' and marriage finds its high and holy source in the union of love and wisdom in the divine nature. The Christian marriage relation of one man and one woman is essentially holy and chaste and its bonds inviolable. It is " the purest pearl of human life, the most precious jewel of the Christian