worlds than his predecessor Swedenborg himself. "I stood in the Celestial Heaven, in a wheat-field, and observed an angel," &c., p. 16. "I was conducted to the earth, Mars in spirit," p. 14. "I saw one resembling Richard Arkwright in the world of spirits," p. 44. "I saw an attributal man of the first type on the orb of Jupiter," p. 47. "I saw Alexander Humboldt with Kepler and Copernicus in one of the provinces of the Upper Earth of Spirits," p. 78. "I saw in the depths of the Intermediate Hell a mighty man of the eighteenth century,' p. 87. In the 7th illustration, beginning p. 112, he saw the spirits of a lot of novelists, and a demon who pretended to have communicated to Charles Dickens all his works: also those who claimed the originals of the novels of Fenimore Cooper and Lord Lytton, all these being, according to them, mere pretenders to what they had only received from them. "I was translated to a broad, luminous landscape in the Spiritual Heaven," p. 122. "I was in the World of Spirits on a certain occasion," p. 148. "I was at a synod of trans-terrestrial men . . . in the Ultimate Earth of Spirits," p. 154. On another occasion in the World of Spirits he met some Swedenborgians, who found things so different from what their great seer taught them to expect that one of them exclaimed, "There must be some mistake," p. 159. "I met a man in Hell," p. 164. "Let down into the lowest Earths of Spirits, near the Hells, I saw there many men and women who go down there by night to absorb a virus from the pit," &c., p. 166. "Held up between the two world-souls of Mars and our own globe," the Almighty came to him, and breathing on him, said, on him, said, "Receive my spirit with power to be continued in the Ultimates;" and he adds, " I then received instructions from Him concerning the means and measures to be taken to initiate relief for infantile humanity," p. 167. Then the Virgin, encompassed by children, came to visit him, and said, "Oh, servant of God, I am sent to visit you. the times of the revealed Apocalypse, such visitations have not taken place.' Which assertion, by the way, is as much as to say that all the accounts of the appearances of the Virgin to saints and saintesses in the Catholic Church, are mere lies. He then perceived that he was in the Celestial Heaven; the desert Earth far below and he saw an archetypal mansion, and over its door was written in golden fire, "INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE NEW LIFE," &c., &c. "I saw when present through the body of the nerve-spirit in the inner mineral kingdom of the globe, the unborn basis of the new Earth," p. 183. At p. 243, we find him in the heavens of ancient Israel and ancient Syria, in which latter, oddly enough, he found John Bunyan and Mrs. Bunyan. At p. 378, in what Till "at place may be imagined, he was attacked by six demons personating Kosciusko, William Penn, Martin Luther, Sidney, Wilberforce, and Washington. One of them confessed that he was "infesting the ghost in the world of spirits who was called 'Lord Macaulay." Again he was in heaven, and heard a great voice from the east crying, "New bread." Then he was conversing with an angel about St. Paul, p. 384, and anon, a Sabbath of sorcerers in Infernus," p. 385. After all these travels and interviews, varying through all classes of spiritual society from the very highest to the very lowest, he received a renewed commission for his great work of establishing the New Brotherhood on the earth from the Most High, through one G. W.-George Washington, of course-in these words:"You were sent for because the day of the Lord is at hand, and it is appointed that you be initiated into the work, which devolves upon you in the earth, but first rest," p. 388. We say a renewed commission, because on other occasions he had told us that he is the appointed expounder of mysteries. So at p. 230, "Bear, O sisters, with a brother's voice, speaking as an exponent of Divine Oracles." We trust that we have made sufficiently manifest what a superb commission has been conferred on Thomas Lake Harris, by no less an authority than the great King of Kings himself, if we are to accept his own assurances of the fact, and what a magnificent preparation for it; a free admission to, and most ample travels through, all the regions of heaven, hell, the middle states, the interior of this earth, and the worlds of material space, with all the teachings and revelations of the wisdom of ages and of the innermost realms of life. No great founder of a new religion, that we can call to mind, had anything like a tenth part of so magnificent an education and enrichment with the arcana of wisdom for that purpose. Even our Saviour was but trained in the workshop of a carpenter, and suffered forty days' temptation of the devil in the wilderness. Even Mahomet, with all his visions, makes but a poor figure in comparison with Thomas Harris in this respect; Joe Smith with his angel and his golden tablets, suffers utter eclipse; and Swedenborg, his typical forerunner in the same supernatural path, grows dim and diminishes before him. If all this be true, what a man we have had amongst us! We feel wholly overcome by the sense of the awful seer, saint, prophet, and delegate of the Divinity who has been dwelling amongst us shrouded in the darkness of a most solemnly sacred sanctuary. No wonder that so august a personage, who had recently Trod on shadowy ground, had sunk Deep, and aloft ascending, breathed in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones, should not condescend to renew an acquaintance with men and women of ordinary mould. But may not all, or a great deal of the gorgeous drama thus evolved before our eyes, turn out to be very much of a phantasmagoria; a dream of transcendental glories, and little more? Mr. William White has shown us most demonstrably that Swedenborg, when he thought that he was conversing with the Almighty and his highest angels, was often grossly mistaken. To a certainty the Divine Spirit whom Swedenborg claimed as the communicator of his revelations, never told him that the Quakers were a most vilely sensual and debauched people, and never pronounced to him the reality of eternal damnation. If Swedenborg, then, stumbled on these heavenly plains, who shall assure us that Thomas Harris is any more to be depended on? For we have only his own word for the grand array of personages and things that he has displayed before us. Now giving Mr. Harris every credit for the most perfect honesty, the most perfect faith in the reality of the manifestations which he believes to have been made to him; we think there is a much simpler and more probable way out of the mystery. Mr. Harris is a poet, and one of no mean endowments. He possesses a vivid imagination, a flowery style, a luxuriant fancy, and a tender, and almost feminine temperament. That he has seen all that he so authoritatively states we do not for a moment question; but he has seen them as visions. That he has had them spiritually communicated, we as little question, but to our mind they were communicated by the very class of spirits which he so much delights to denounce as the deceivers of séances. To such spirits, what could be a richer treat than thus filling his imagination with all the teeming, and often most fantastic creations which this volume of the Apocalypse displays? Every religious enthusiast and projector of new systems firmly imagines himself the sole elected instrument of the Divine will. Butler describes such an one: He could deep mysteries unriddle, For as of vagabonds we say, That they are ne'er beside their way: That none see by, but those that bear it. The portrait is not less striking in another feature: This grand inquisitor has chief And manners: can pronounce a saint When superciliously he sifts Through coarsest boulter others' gifts; Whose talents jump not just with his. This latter trait is particularly conspicuous in these volumes, especially wherever Spiritualism and Spiritualists, or even Revivalists are mentioned. The fact is, that Mr. Harris, notwithstanding his great and excellent theory of the abnegation of self, as the ground of genuine Christianity, has, undoubtedly, a most eager ambition of being the projector and head of a new church. Probably, to some extent he is not aware of this, but mistakes the aspiring passion for godly zeal. He has, however, very well described his own condition, as it strikes us, as shewing itself in the opposite sex:-" When ambition has entered into the heart of one of the female sex, and the thougth to become a foundress of an ecclesiastical institution, she generally succeeds in convincing herself that the sources of her impressions are supernal, or even of the infinite; but having the sphere of her sex, which is one of pliant absorptiveness, she teems with conceptions which cannot become fully embodied fantasies, without the assistance of the masculine element. Hence she seeks disciples, who shall serve as reservoirs of spiritual magnetic vitality; drawing through them an important element of life, and through the male influx, a subversive order, becoming pregnant with ideas. When such syrens find access to those who are becoming spiritual-natural, and can conjoin themselves so as to produce faith in their pretensions, the slavery which ensues is rigid, and may be long protracted. The most honest and conscientious, who are physically open to an extreme influx from foreign bodies, will be very liable to this form of bondage." Apocalypse, p. 97. Apply this to the prophet himself, and to the sort of American Agapemone, which he has established, and the correspondence is striking. But what of the moral and religious quality of the works themselves under notice? They abound with great spiritual truths which will have the full assent of all sound practical Spiritualists, because they are the truths which Mr. Harris has learned in the school which he now condemns, and in his progress through those marvellous and faith-inspiring manifestations which he now affects to treat as ultra-demoniac. His grand "Deus ex Machina" is the doctrine of the inner breathing, and the smaller work, "The Breath of God with Man," may be read with nearly unalloyed satisfaction, for it is sober and rational, and contains some passages so true and beautiful that we should have liked to quote them. The larger work, the Apocalypse, is a continuance of Swedenborg's comments on portions of Scripture. As Swedenborg chiefly took in hand Genesis, Harris has undertaken the Revelations; but this volume of 487 pages, runs riot into so many regions of thought, and amongst so many personages, that it only gets through a portion of that mysterious work. The spiritual truths in it are so thickly overlaid with a chaos of wild fancies that they become very much lost sight of. Many of the meanings given to the text appear to have no more connection with it than if they had been attached to any other words: but then, we are told that they are an inner and truer meaning, for which, not having had the same assumed enlightenment in the inner heaven, we are wholly at the mercy of the expounder for. This however, is the less to be regretted, as he tells us that there are no fewer than seven inner meanings to the same texts. In the course of his revelations Mr. Harris assures us that the body of Christ when on earth was inhabited by legions of fairies, or fays. As a child he attracted all races to him through his breath. These resolved within him, and thus densely peopled he moved from place to place. When he was upon the cross he broke his own fay body, and dispersed the fay souls of which it was composed throughout the humanity of the entire orb, so that we are now all as densely inhabited by fays as a pigeon-cote with pigeons, the air of a summer evening with midges, or an ant-hill with ants. "The fays who were in the seven spheres of the Lord's natural body followed him up to heaven, and are now called divine fay-angels. So vast were the human extenses within the natural body of our Lord, that the fays who dwelt therein, and who followed him to heaven, were as the small dust for number. Before the day of Pentecost they began to return, and were the tongues of fire seen on the apostles' heads." See 1st illustration from pp. 16 to 24. Every atom of the material universe, Harris assures us, is "an atomic man." Many of these are still inwrought into the bodies of the demons of the lost orb, and await their new combination in a human race which shall replace that which fell. "The atomic man in the inmost of the atoms of the human frame make war against the accretion of atomic nebulæ in the human system which is undergoing regeneration," &c., p. 52. The fay-men pass through our bodies in any direction at will: the world-souls exist in pairs, male and female, throughout the universe, presiding over their individual worlds. Besides these, there are the aromal men; that is, beings constituted of the essences |