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or aromas of things in nature. The aromas of flowers, those of the wild moorlands and woods, of the rocks and minerals in the bowels of the earth. All these, and waters, fountains and seas, have their aromal creatures, which somehow acquiring life, finally travel up to heaven and obtain salvation; though it may only be through centuries of labour in their respective departments of nature, that they become impersonal creatures in heaven. See pp. 129 to 139. There we have the Necks and Undines of northern and Germanic mythology, who obtained salvation through connection with men as Mr. Harris's aromal spirits are but the dryads, naiads, and fauns of the Greeks revived. In every country too, the aromas of good or bad deeds, of tragic or benign histories, produce aromal flowers. So in France, an aromal flower lives that grew from the dust of Joan of Arc. The Wickliffe blossom, a disc of purple and gold, springs glorious in the aromal air of England. The martyrs of the Cevennes and the Alps have given birth from their dust to an airy flora. Italy bears a queenly plant that commemorates the virtues of Savonarola. Imperishable nature holds the dust of the saints in honour, and represents through them an ever-springing life, in worship of Him they worshipped, in sympathy with the great cause they served. p. 132.

This is all very poetical, some of it extremely beautiful, and in the sense of a living pictured memory in the spirit of those scenes, true. But as put forth by Harris as matter of sober fact, and as matter of revelation from the highest source of inspiration, is but the out-pourings of a sensitive poetic imagination excited to the verge of insanity. It is a wild, fantastic, and bewildering dream of beauty and morbid sentiment, as different from the simple and practical truth of Christianity as renaissance finery is to classic grace.

That we may not be misunderstood, let us now speak a few words on the inner breathing. This is, no doubt, a great and substantial truth: but not as Harris inculcates it. We hold it to be a universal and inalienable function of every living soul: not the capriciously bestowed boon which Harris represents it. We are persuaded that no living spirit could continue to live without spiritual breath, any more than an animated physical body can exist without breathing physical air. Every view afforded us by physical or spiritual philosophy assures us that the spirit is the active force which creates for itself the body. Swedenborg in the first instance, and the whole of psychological experience since, maintain the assurance that all evolution is in an outward direction from the inner or spiritual world. The soul proceeds from God the original and eternal centre of all causation, and the soul originates by energies with which God has endowed

it, its outer covering or body adapted to its condition in a physical state of being. In the Ontology of Dr. Doherty, a truly sound and spiritual system of physio-spiritual science, this is lucidly expressed in few words:" The spirit forms the body in utero, by collecting and associating particles of matter from the blood of the mother to form organs; and it sustains the physical organism during life by a constant interchange of atoms with the external world," p. 137. This being the case, it is the soul which orginates the body, and adapts it to its own special functions. The function of breathing, therefore, obviously exists in the lungs of the soul and operates outwards through the lungs of the body. Spiritual and physical breathing must necessarily go on together, as all other functions of soul and body, the soul being the directing, willing agent-the body the co-operating servant. Every fact of psychology which has ever come to the actual observation of men regarding the soul or spirit, confirms this view. Every assertion of spirits in séances pronounces the spirit the real man, and the body the merely compliant envelope. Every apparition of a spirit is that of the real man, not only in appearance, but with all the members and portions of a man. Nothing, therefore, can be more certainly proved than that spirit and body breathe simultaneously, and in precisely the same mode, but not breathing the same atmosphere, each respiring its appropriate one. The idea of Swedenborg, then, that the inner breathing proceeds from the navel towards the heart, and so by the Eustachian tube to the mouth, is simply absurd; as is his idea that the people of the first ages down to the Flood possessed this inner breathing, and by it expressed themselves without articulate speech. That this inner breathing gradually decreased with the love and faith of the people, and that such as possessed it near the time of the Flood were choked by its cessation, but that some surmounted this crisis, and then outward respiration began, and with it outward and articulate speech, is as much as to say that the ante-diluvians were destitute of articulate and resonant speech, and conversed by the changes and expressions of the countenance-a thing contrary to the whole history of those times. See Swedenborg's Arcana Calestia, Vol. II. Genesis, chapter x. pp. 6-7. See also his Spiritual Diary, 3,464.

In several excellent papers on Internal Respiration in the Spiritual Magazine, Vol. III. under the signature of Respiro, the writer says "Swedenborg was the first to bring internal respiration before the world, not from any historic record, but purely in his capacity as a seer, a matter of revelation." But this is only another proof, in addition to those pointed out by Mr. White, of the too great reliance on him as a seer. Jacob Böhme very

N.S.-III.

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long before Swedenborg taught the same truth. In his 46th chapter, 39th verse, he explains what is the flesh and blood of Christ, which if we do not eat we have no life in us. That it is the Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, and in his Threefold Life, v. 50, and Clavis, 106, he asserts the Sophia to be the pure element of the Holy Spirit. And again in Aurora I, 15 and 16, that "every time we breathe with entire abandonment of self, and full trust in the loving-kindness of our Divine Master, we receive the sacred body, which is everywhere, and we saturate our hearts with the pure element in which and by which alone. we can be born again to a new life." This doctrine of Böhme's was noticed by St. Martin, and declared by him " an important truth, generally hidden from man." See St. Martin's Correspondence translated by Mr. Penny, pp. 119 and 120.

We fully agree with Böhme, Swedenborg, St. Martin, and Harris in the substantial truth of the inner breathing; and that, through this, in conjunction probably with the nervous system, our communication is opened, or, rather, kept open with the spiritual world, and with the Sustainer and Nourisher of all things that live. But we take a very different view of its endowment on men from Harris. We cannot believe that it is conferred partially and only on a few. That when it comes to impure or evil persons, it instantly burns up their interiors, and that they fall down dead. We cannot believe it to be a function tending towards narrow sects, and little exclusive Agapemones, or Brotherhoods of the New Life, as exclusive. We believe that, like all the rest of God's gifts, it is a universal gift, seeing that He is no respecter of persons, but sends His sun to shine alike on the just and the unjust. As He desires the regeneration of all, He patiently leaves the means of it open to all. To the good, the respiration will be from the atmosphere of heaven--to the bad, the atmosphere of hell. That by it, and by other psychical functions, we are open to spiritual influxes of beneficent, and also of deleterious natures. That those who aspire heavenwards and towards the love of God, inhale larger and fuller draughts of this divine ether, and are proportionately fed and strengthened by it. That none of the apostles possessed this interior respiration, as asserted by Harris, is plainly untrue. According to his own definition, this breathing is the quintessence of the Holy Ghost, "the tides of the Divine Spirit, which roll as never before, uplifting, illuminating, strengthening, and giving peace.' And therefore, as Christ himself breathed the breath of life upon them, and said, "Receive the Holy Ghost," they consequently received the inner, divine breath. They were filled with the fulness of the Holy Ghost, and, therefore, of the breath of God. Without this there could, according to Harris himself, be no

regeneration; for it is by the operation of this inner breath that the process of regeneration is carried on and perfected; or, as he says, the old soul is destroyed, and a new celestial soul introduced and built up; and not by a parcel of fays working away at the old materials of the old natural soul, as Harris would persuade us, like a possé of bricklayers clearing away an old house, and erecting a new spiritual-natural soul, with fresh and pure materials. See Apocalypse, pp. 21 to 24, 135, &c.

It is deeply to be regretted that a man of the fine faculties and the high poetical endowment, the extraordinary eloquence, and long spiritual experience of Thomas Lake Harris, should thus have become the victim of his imaginative temperament, and have disfigured and overlaid with a pile of merely florid imagery the great and solid truths of spiritual science. Had he introduced his fays, and atomic men, his aromal men, and aromal flowers as the machinery and drapery of an avowed poem, we might read it with the same pleasure as we once read the Rape of the Lock, Darwin's Loves of the Plants, or the Arabian Nights: but truth, and above all spiritual and divine truth, is too solemn a thing to be disguised with the airy flowers of a fairy land and surrounded by the swarming nonentities of a visionary. With what a sublime, and at the same time practical grace, simple, unadorned Christianity stands beside this meretricious system of spiritual ontology and theosophy. The principles of Christ are at once clear, concrete and universal in their nature. There is no tendency in them to monkery either Popish or Protestant: to exclusive New Brotherhoods, or Agapemones. On the contrary, they look outwards, onwards and upwards. Open in a grand lucidity to the plainest intellect, they are at once accepted as divinely consolant by the common heart of humanity. They spread their vitalizing rays over all lands and peoples like those of the sun. Instead of a multiplicity of senses and breathings we find in the plain terms of the influence of the Holy Spirit operating on and renewing the heart and soul, and in the simple declaration that in every nation they who fear God and work righteousne shall be accepted, a divine charter of salvation which the poor child of humanity can fully comprehend and lay hold the most cultivated and masterly intellect must ins adore. In a word, we infinitely prefer the Gospel the Gospel of the New Brotherhood, and the oper Holy Ghost as in and on the Apostles, to all the wi multiplied inner meanings, and the almost innumere of the system of Thomas Lake Harris. The poo Wordsworth taught only by God in solitude, had a nobler conception of communion with his Maker the mediumship of fays, atomic and aromal m

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butterflies presented by angels as "the pleasures of sensation sporting in the ether of the region which corresponds to the left lower jaw," Apocalypse, p. 405. This poor youth, knowing nothing of the contents of and peoples of Jupiter, Mars, or the lower hells, had caught the substance of true worship as saints and spiritually-minded men and women in all ages have done. A herdsman on the lonely mountain tops, Such intercourse was his, and in this sort Was his existence often times possessed. O then how beautiful, how bright appeared The written Promise! Early had he learned To reverence the Volume that displays The mystery, the life which cannot die : But in the mountains did he feel his faith. Responsive to the writing, all things there Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving: infinite; There bitterness was not; the least of things Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe-he saw.

We believe that such a simple God-embracing heart has reached the substance of divine respiration, that he respires with the angels and with Christ,-a substance we are in danger of losing sight of, and letting slip, amid the sparkling verbiage and the phantasmal visions of the writer of this so-called Arcana of Christianity.

THE LAND OF REALITY.

ALPHONSE KARR, in his Voyage autour de mon Jardin, one of the most charming and right-thinking books in the French language, was very nigh to the truth when he wrote the following 54th chapter of his second volume:-"Oh, my friend! I have returned from a beautiful country! How shall I be able to recall all the wonders that I have seen? At the first glimpse, I saw the trees bearing fruits, which exhaled unknown fragrance. Some of them had flowers of fire; and in these flowers revelled bees of gold, the murmur of which was an enchanting music.

"Scarcely had I entered these happy regions, when I perceived the influence of the climate; I was light and joyous; I no longer walked, but leaped: I alit on the summits of the

trees.

"There I found all that I believed that I had lost by death, or by forgetfulness. I found them all living-all happy, and alĺ loving me with a delightful tenderness. They were all young and beautiful. There I beheld all things that I had ever dreamed of, or desired, and which I had expelled from my

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