95 
whose views “ merit fuller treatment.” They describe his system, 
uot m its scientific character— (though he “ foreshadowed, if he 
did not anticipate, many of the scientific doctrines of the present 
)> but in its “ mode of viewing the spiritual world ” if 
not the moral (pp. 38 and 43). 
According to Swedenborg (pp. 38 and 43), “Man, consi- 
dered in himself, is nothing but a beast.” His distinction 
fiom the beast is that “the Lord dwells in his will and 
understanding, and never leaves him.” At his Swe aen- 
birth man puts on his body, and at his death he bor £’sviewas 
puts it off, “ retaining only the purer substances of nature, 
nature,” his faculties and functions. “The natural world cor- 
responds to the spiritual collectively, and in all its parts ” (p. 39). 
As to God the Father, the teaching of Swedenborg is verv 
explicit. “ He is invisible, and, being invisible, can neither 
be ., th ^ ght 0t , nor love(i ” (P- 40 )- Apparently we have to do 
with Christ alone, as representing the Father. 
Swedenborg also believed in particular Providence, and in 
1 urgatory, in the sense of an intermediate state, whence souls 
are drafted off to heaven or hell (p. 40; comp. p. 30). The 
spiritual world is related to the natural throughout, as cause 
and effect. 
if This say our authors “is the system of a profound 
thinker. “ It is one thing however” (they add) “to admit the 
beauty, the philosophical completeness, and even the possible 
truth of many of his statements ; and auother to believe that 
he actually conversed with the inhabitants of another world 
in the way he said.” “There is no reason to suppose 
Swedenborg s speculations to be anything else than the product 
of his own mmd ” (p. 41). In relation, however, to the doctrine 
ot a future life, or invisible or spiritual world, Swedenborg’s 
position (p. 43) is “that that world is not absolutely distinct 
from the visible universe, and absolutely unconnected with it 
as is frequently thought to be the case, but rather is a Universe 
winch has some bond of union with the present.” With this 
view of the doctrine of the Unseen Universe, as taught by 
Swedenborg, our authors conclude their historical epitome as to 
the belief m Immortality. They add, that a line of argument 
similar to Swedenborg’s in this respect (p. 43), is to be de- 
veloped m the following chapters of their book. 
12. TV e pass on then to the Second Chapter. 
