the God manifest to the senses, and to the mental eye ever afterwards in the heavens. This truth had become completely obscured, as the heavens became shut, by the fall and degradation of man. Inwardly, he needed to receive the spirit of the Divine Humanity, by which he might reach through to the outward, which had become so encrusted and hardened with sin, that the ray of internal Divinity was all too feeble to penetrate to the seat of the disease. Christ, then, does this work for us. He is still a living, potential Saviour; and having taken up within his consciousness the whole of man's tempted and sorrowful experience, and in the thirty brief years of his earthly sojourn, lived through all, and suffered all, in quality and principle, that can ever be gathered into the sinning generations of men, He is now able to come, and does come, both immediately and by his ministering angels, with an influx and influence adapted to every individual case. He becomes a divinely human sympathetic Saviour. "We have not a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, for, in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” (Heb. 4: 15; 2: 18.) There is something divinely beautiful in this. He passed through all states, that He might save all. He clothed himself in infancy, that He might save infancy; (from the hereditary with which it is afflicted;) He clothed himself in youth, in manhood, and in all that old age could experience, (since "we live not by years, and figures on a dial,") that He might impart to all, his Divine-human properties, and save to the uttermost all who come unto Him. He was to help, not men only, but angels; to extend his divine strength to the highest up in glory and brightness around the Father's throne, and to the lowest down in the depths of earth's pollution. He was also to minister to the spirits of the under-world. The Holy Spirit which was so made to emanate from the Divine Humanity, is thus seen to be no third person in the Deity, but simply an afflux through a new and accommodated Medium, of the one, eternal God; -the

outraying sphere of the Father through the Son. The truth is, humanity had descended so low in sin and defilement, that it could not be approached directly with a power sufficient to save it, without perishing in the consuming splendors of the Divinity.

Let us now observe more particularly the process and operation of it as indicated by the analogies of nature, and a true psychology. It is a birth; note that. Now, a birth, that is, a natural birth, is not a birth from death, but from something analogous to it. It is a birth from previous non-existence, except in germ and potentiality. And it is manifest that a second-birth cannot take place, when it is to proceed through difficulties and obstructions, without the death of what constituted the first. The "old man must die, preparatory to, and continuous with, the creation and formation of the "new." And as before observed, all sin is in externals. It is in the natural mind. There is a spiritual principle which has been kept pure and uncontaminated through all the sinful experience of man. It has not come forth into action; indeed, it has been completely covered up by the foul incrustations which have been suffered to accumulate upon it, till only total corruption total selfishness, has characterized the degenerate soul. Such is the state of all, before regeneration. The natural man is wholly evil because wholly selfish. It may show many an outward virtue, but the germ within will be corruption. But it must not hence be concluded that there are no glimmerings of the better nature to be found among common men and women as we see them, who make no pretensions, and have scarcely any acquaintance with the Christian life. The truth is, by what the divine Saviour has done for mankind, there are many gleamings of the better life, all over the world, by those even who have rejected Him and his gospel. They have rejected. the form of the truth, as it has been presented in its perversions by the errorists of all times, but they have not been able to extinguish every vestige of the new life of Christendom.

Still, we ought not to hesitate to say, that our poor humanity did descend to that pitch where it could be said of the entire natural man," the whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint." "Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." (Gen. 6: 5.)

Still the spiritual principle dwelt within. But it was inoperative, dead, buried. Man's outer nature enwrapped him like a shroud enclosed him as a coffin. But it was a living death -the very breathing, active "body of death" which the apostle so wretchedly lamented.

If, then, man dies spiritually, he must die on the outside. His whole external natural man must be put to the crucifixion, that the internal spiritual principle may ascend into new life, and permeate the whole natural with its pure and blessed effects. There is a profound philosophy here which deserves to be better understood. Considering the human soul a substantial organism, or more properly speaking, the man himself, which gives to the physical form all its proportions, it is then easy to conceive the terrible and destructive work of sin. It has deformed the external of that spiritual body. If we could see it, as a purely spiritual being can, we should see that it was unbeautiful, sin-smitten, and marred. All its little vesicles, which are receptacles of the divine influx, are turned and twisted in every wrong direction. This is the significancy of the word depravity. Depravus, to twist from, or become crooked. Phrenology and Physiognomy show us this even in the body. It is just so in the spirit. It is the inner that has shaped the outer. And it is here, in these outer coatings and encasements of the spirit—rather, in the natural mind which surrounds the spiritual, that old Adam has done his dreadful work. The natural mind in itself considered, when unperverted, is not evil. It pertains merely to the things of outward nature to the world and its objects, and it is admirably fitted for our existence in this life of the body.

But being so near the earth, it is liable, before spiritual

things get fully established in it, to become seduced by its vanities, and to make its tangible things of pre-eminent value. It also delights to reason from the senses alone, and is thereby involved in downfall and ruin. Here, then, is the whole cause and region of sin,—in the natural mind. And it being in itself a substantial organism a part, in fact, of the whole man, the organic effect of sin is to twist and turn away the tissues and vessels of the spirit from their true upward spiral form, which is the form of heavenly receptacles, so that heavenly influxes can no longer descend into them; and then the man becomes, in all the convolutions of his active spiritual organism, turned downwards and outwards, and thus open to sensual and external impressions, and influxes from the hells. The natural mind thus becomes, also, hardened and coarse, unyielding and mutilated. The depravity here is thorough. But let us thank God, there was one receptacle into which the horrid monster could not enter. That was the DIVINE INMOST, or that sacred and inmost tabernacle of the soul, in which Jehovah Himself proximately dwells, where the divine influx is first received, and from which it disposes the other interior things, which succeed according to the degrees of order with every man. The celestial and spiritual minds also, or the two inner degrees which relate more properly to man, are there in potency, though not opened and active till regeneration. Here, then, is a region of purity in the midst of corruption. It has been forever sacred and undefiled in the sight of heaven; the fall of man has had no power utterly to extinguish it; and were it not for this, God himself would have no power over him to save him. As for all the rest of man, that is, as to his natural man before any regeneration, we speak but the psychological fact, and proclaim the Scriptural truth—“The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot, even unto the head, there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores." (Isa. 1: 6.) This is proclaimed of the

spirit of man as it appears in the light of heaven to the angels who so look upon him.

The Lord then came to regenerate the natural man, or to cause that to live the life of heaven, which before was dead in trespasses and sins. When the natural is made truly alive, then the spiritual acts through it, and by it, and the external is reduced to correspondence with the internal. How much of truth, the philosophy of which has never been fully comprehended, is there yet to be found in these old verbal petrifactions of the church: 66 the crucifixion of the old man' "the death of the natural man"-"the putting on of the new man." The truth is, as we attain to a true and comprehensive psychology, we shall systematize our ideas of divine things accordingly. The natural mind is regenerated by influx into it through the spiritual, and through heaven, from the Lord. And the natural being the outermost plane, it is the plane where the influx terminates. If then, that natural be full of evil and false things, each of them formed into substantial accretions, when the influx reaches there it is not freely received; for heavenly good and truth cannot enter into such perverted receptacles, and it is thereby dissipated or turned into evil. But when the old natural has become as nothing- has been made to die the death, then the spiritual can flow out into it and be received. And it does so gradually, as each evil is crucified and slain. The whole old man is thus rejuvenated with a new life; the health and sweetness of heaven come coursing joyously through all his veins; new tempers, new dispositions, sacred and beautiful affections, now take the place of unclean and hateful things, and God is glorified and man is saved.

We have said that this subject of the New Birth may be illustrated from the analogies of nature. By the seed, which is dropped into the ground, and which does nate or have life, till the external is dissolved and changed. It first undergoes an apparent death. It is real, so far as the

not begin to germi

4