gives the increase. But some are so impetuous that they encounter the full misfortune of their error; and for years, though once the tree was over their heads, must wait while brambles strive to choke the slender shoot sent up from some fragment of a root preserved there by the Lord.

When a man is heard to say that he has built up a strong society of the Church, where none existed before, or has kindled to life a sluggish one, or has himself in a day become a receiver of the Doctrines, beware, my friends, of letting him build up your society in a day, or of setting him to make your neighbors New Churchmen.

For a moment he may have lifted a society to heaven. But to produce this ecstacy he has put enthusiasm in the place of faith; he has injured, if he has not destroyed, the orderly growth.

He may plant the seed, and claim in a few days or weeks that he has an abundant harvest. Either he deceives you and himself, or he has done the soil an irreparable injury. Of these sad results the former is preferable, and through the Divine Care the former usually happens.

This is written in the endeavor to call attention to what is believed to be the true way of building up the Church in the individual and in the community. Let me use another illustration to point out this way: in the Old World there are cathedrals which have been generations in building. One man after another has taken up the unfinished work, has wrought his life upon it, and in old age has tottered aside to let a young man take his place. As he turns away to die, he sees that the great structure has changed but little for his labor, but at this, if he be a faithful servant, he is not disappointed. He has done what he could. In that great pile he sees some stones fashioned by his own hand, and set firmly in place, where they shall remain for ages, an important portion of the great whole. He cannot die while those stones remain. His name, cut in deep letters on the stone he fashioned, and set in place, shall be, so far as the earth is concerned, his immortality.

We

We are builders, and each has a place to labor in. labor upon the building of a great city. The New Jerusalem of the heavens was seen by John as a vision. We on the earth must give it form and substance; and it must be built of souls of men, of our lives.

We must take the places which are severally given us; and must gently, patiently, freely, put our lives into the work. Our lives, our honest endeavors to do good and be good,― these are the materials of the building.

That which some enthusiast builds in a day, must fall before the building can go on, or the whole would be insecure. That society which builds upon a man, giving its soul into his charge, will live to see the structure fall, or will perish in the ruins. Each man must put in place his own stone, the work of his life. The minister or friend may assist and encourage, but if he attempts to do the work, he will undo it. And if he hurries a friend, and makes him think his work is done, he does a still greater wrong.

What will be the result if we endeavor to live out Christian lives, and leave the rest to the Lord?

Swedenborg says (A. C. 3010): "Christianus nempe qui in vero ex bono." "A Christian is one who is in truth from good." He who is in the endeavor of living a good and useful life, having a real desire to serve the Lord and his 'neighbor, is a Christian, a faithful workman, of whatever people or language he may be. His life shines with the light of his love. Of such lives the Holy City is built. "And the building of the wall of it was of jasper; and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass."

Not to enter fully into the eloquent meaning of these words, we see that they establish what has been said upon the subject of building up the Church. Without this effort in his life, a man's soul is an opaque stone. By it, his soul is illumined with the light of heaven, and becomes like a jasper stone, "clear as crystal."

This then is the true way, and the only way,- to labor for the regeneration of others and of ourselves, believing that

every truly Christian life is one stone added to the wall, and that nothing else can be substituted.

We will not shout, and scold, and lash, lest we spoil, by our bungling, what the Lord Jesus planned, but we will teach, and will try to live, the Ten Commandments, asking only that we may be of some use in the Lord's hands, while He establishes the city. O thou, who art our God, our Saviour, and our Comforter, "Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion; build thou the walls of Jerusalem."

T. F. W.

THE GROUNDS OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

A Lecture delivered Jan. 19, 1871, before a Social Meeting of the New Church at Fall River, Mass.

BY BENJ. K. LOVATT.

"IT were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him."-LORd Bacon.

THERE are three classes of persons who profess an interest in the visible New Church. One has its type in the young man who is interested in some young lady, or circle of young ladies, connected with the Church, or attendant upon its worship. He thus acquires a subordinate — though ofttimes apparently deep-interest in the Church itself. But when his interest in the young ladies comes to an end, his interest in the Church ceases, and people wonder why he no longer comes to worship with us. The second class consists of those who are attracted by the social sphere of the Church, or are charmed by the goodness, personal influence, or æsthetic qualities of particular individuals. In some cases, they become permanently connected with the Church, and from association they venerate the appellation of "New Church," but know little about it, except the words and glosses of the leaders they follow; and when the plain teachings of Swedenborg are put in other language, by persons destitute of the personal magnetic sphere of the respected individuals referred to, they do not recognize them as New Church truths, but believe them to be false, and

sometimes cannot see any distinction between a philosophical essay, and a personal insult. The third class are affected by no social or magnetic sphere, are followers of no man, follow truth wherever it leads-whether to apparent beauty or deformity and recognize the New Church as the great requirement of the age, a philosophical religion, or a sanctified rationalism. The two former classes will find nothing interesting in what I have to say-disrobed, as it is, of all sentimentality-and to the third class only I offer for consideration some remarks upon The Grounds of Religious Belief.

The origin of human knowledge is referable to four sources: perception, intuition, reason, and human testimony. I use these terms in the sense in which they are employed by approved writers. In this sense perception is the observation of the senses, or the impression made upon the brain by the phenomenal world through the medium of the senses. Swedenborg, however—as he is translated— uses this term in a manner to confuse and embarrass the general scholar who reads his writings for the first time. In his works, perception has no relation to the bodily senses, but signifies the highest faculty of the mind-that faculty which is above the reasoning powers, which sees truths as axioms, like a flash of lightning, which modern philosophical writers call intuition, or judgment, and Emanuel Kant and the German metaphysicians, by a strange misuse of language, call the

PURE reason.

It is evident that perception alone, unaided by any other power of the mind, can give little, if any, knowledge of the truths of religion. Intuition, however, at times, plays a very important part. Swedenborg tells us, that the people of the Most Ancient Church saw spiritual truth by intuition, He also tells us that the angels of the celestial, or highest, heaven, never reason, but see all truth intuitively when presented to them, and therefore are unfit to be teachers; instruction being given by angels of the spiritual, or sec

ond, heaven,* and thus the angels of the lower heaven frequently teach the angels of the higher. When the golden age comes again upon earth, as we are told it will, it is probable that the human mind will be developed to such a state that intuition will not only be, as now, the highest faculty of the soul, but will become almost the sole agency of the mind for receiving truth, and reason will thus become in a great degree extinct. But at the present day, so little is known of intuition in the world, that some persons are inclined to doubt its existence. In the inflexible, external division of the soul into male and female, the feminine mind has a much larger share of intuition, as the masculine excels in the power of reason. Woman, therefore, receives a new truth more readily than man, provided that, from associations or otherwise, her affections are once interested in the subject.

There are some truths that seem scarcely possible to be acquired by the arguments of reason, which are by many persons, sooner or later, seen by intuition. The spiritual sense of the Word, according to the system unfolded by Swedenborg, is one of these. After he has told us of the existence of a spiritual sense, many logical considerations present themselves which suggest a strong probability of some such thing; but they lead to no moral certainty thereof, much less any certainty that water signifies truth, or that any of the correspondences revealed by Swedenborg are correct; and the only course for the inquirer is to examine the system, and wait till the intuitive conviction comes to him.

I am inclined to believe that the existence of a life after death is also a truth of this character. And I am confirmed in this by the fact that Swedenborg, although he is full of series of reasonings on minute, and apparently trivial points, and accommodates the Atheist by arguments to show the existence

*From the connection, we suppose, the writer uses teachers as synonymous with preachers; and if so, his statement seems to be opposed to what Swedenborg says: "All the preachers are from the Lord's spiritual kingdom," not spiritual heaven.-H. H. 225,