something of caution in his prediction, concerning the number. This, it may be foreseen, whatever hopes may be excited among the members of the New Jerusalem Church, in regard to the increase of believers, will give them opportunity, in the end, to make great limitations, in what now seems to imply a number indefinitely large, but intended to bear a comparison, far from contemptible, with the rest of the christian community.

The great burden of evidence in favour of the divine commission of Swedenborg, we are told by his disciples, is to be found in the doctrines of the New Jerusalem. It is therefore internal; and it requires (if we rightly comprehend some of the full believers) something like a prior faith, to go sufficiently far into the revelations of the great prophet, to become illuminated and spiritualized. Now if it be the doctrines of the New Jerusalem, that claim for their immediate author a divine commission, it must be what is new, and not what was already well known. Before touching however upon any thing which is peculiar and novel in doctrine, we would first. remark, that what strikes a novice in regard to the supposed new prophet with most surprise is, that he knows and imparts more, concerning what is beyond human ken, than the Son of God himself; to say nothing of the ancient patriarchs and prophets. This is so extraordinary, that it cannot be rendered credible, but by the excellence and the practical utility of the truths revealed. The truths too should be of such a kind, that they cannot be ascribed to a fervid imagination, without the intervention of a power above. When Swedenborg tells us every where in his works-This is what the Lord revealed to me on such a subject-this is what the angels said-I assisted in the heavens at a conference held in the temple of wisdom-I have been at one of the schools-I have heard such and such things debated—I heard such things decreedI have seen in the spiritual world, Pythagoras, Socrates, Luther, Calvin, Xenophon, Sixtus Quintus, Louis XIV, Newton, Wolf, Hans Sloane, &c.', our first feeling is not so much that of incredulity, as it is of the ludicrous. That this learned Swede, if he had not lost his wits, should talk more familiarly of Deity, and angels, and prophets, and philosophers in heaven, and of his intercourse with them, than of the occur rences and people in the dwellings and streets of Stockholm, is New Series, No. 5.

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so wonderful, that no slight evidence can persuade us of its truth.

To a large proportion of our readers, probably, we shall communicate something new, by selecting some passages from Swedenborg's visions. For, if we mistake not, his followers are not, either in their writings or conversation, very apt to acquaint us with many of the minute particularities contained in them, concerning the spiritual and celestial world.

In his vision concerning creation, he heard a dialogue between the Satans, upon God and nature; in which they maintain that God is but a name, if, by that name, nature is not intended.' We present our readers an abridgement of it.

At their own desire those Satans are permitted to mount from the darkness of hell into the world of spirits, which holds the middle place between heaven and hell. Two angels descended from heaven to sustain the dispute, and I was present there. “Ye simple ones," says one of the infernal spirits, " with your belief in God!" And then he goes on with his argument to identify God and nature, though the scriptures tell us, the devils believe there is one God, and tremble. The angels made a reply, which it must have puzzled the Satans exceedingly to understand, and we are not told what effect it produced. He next tells us of another Satan who came from hell into the world of spirits with a prostitute, and gives a disgusting dialogue, in which it appears that these personages had no notion of lawful wedlock. After a conversation, which proved that the Satan knew neither what he was, nor what he had been, and that he had forgotten he had lived and died on earth, and that he had not heard any thing in the world of spirits; I tried,' says Swedenborg, to recall it to him, to speak to him of God, of angels, of heaven; he fled, laughing immoderately, and treating me like a fool.

Then an angel approached me and said, "Your meditations and discourses on creation have gained you great applause, and secured your reception into our society; I will now show you the figurative type of the creation and teach you how God created animals and vegetables of every kind." The angel then conducted his guest to an immense verdant plain, where he saw successively all kinds of birds and beasts, and fruit-trees and fruits, and shrubs and flowers, and trees of the forest, &c. &c. The vision then continues :

All these objects you have seen, says my guide, are so many correspondences of the affections of love of the angels about you; and he made me know the affection to which every thing

corresponded, assuring me that every thing which struck their eyes, houses, utensils, tables, food, garments, metals, precious stones, that every thing in fine was a correspondence to the angels, and enabled them to know the internal state of each other. By this type, he added, you may see the creation of the universe. God is love and wisdom; the affections of that love, the perceptions of that wisdom are infinite; and all created objects upon earth are correspondences of those affections and perceptions. Correspondences, like those of our natural world, exist also in the spiritual world for angels, who receive the God of love and wisdom; with this difference, that the correspondences of the spiritual world are created at the moment, according to the interior of the angels, and that in the natural world they were created at the beginning, so as to be renewed by generation and reproduction. In our world it is instantaneous, and in yours it is durable, by means of generation; because the lands and atmospheres of our world are spiritual, and the lands and atmospheres of yours are natural. Natural gold was created to conceal spiritual, like the skin to cover the body, bark the trees, &c. In the hells, objects are seen opposed, which are correspondences of the affections of evil, and of perceptions of falses, &c. &c. As we conversed about the hells, the noise and odour which proceeded thence began to annoy us, and the angel quitted me, after having enjoined it upon me to publish on earth, what I had seen and heard in the spiritual world.'

Our readers are here introduced to the doctrine of correspondences, which forms so distinguishing a part of the theory of the New Jerusalem. But before we proceed farther on this subject, we cannot forbear selecting a few short specimens more of the visions and supernatural communications to be found in the writings of Swedenborg, which we think will go far to settle the weight of internal evidence in favour of the truth of his new doctrines.

In his vision concerning heaven, among other things, he says;

The new-comers were conducted into different quarters of the celestial city, and were shown an auditory, a public library, books, paper, ink, quills, manuscripts, and scribes who copied them, museums, colleges and literary exercises, officers, governors, artists and various works. Virgins brought them presents of stuffs embroidered and woven with their own hands. As they departed they sung to them, after an angelic mode, an ode which expressed the affections and thoughts which corresponded to the use of the presents they made.'

Again.

During my meditation I was transported in spirit into a celestial society, placed at the left, towards the east, of which Pope Sixtus Quintus is the chief. In our conversation, he told me that his society was composed of the most judicious and reasonable among the catholics, and that he had been placed at their head in the heavens, for having believed, six months before his death, that the pretence of the pope being the vicar of Jesus Christ was an invention of the pontifs, to gratify their lust of domination. He told me, in fine, and enjoined it on me to announce it to men on earth, that those who maintained a faith contrary to that he had now declared, would become dolts in the world of spirits; that after some time they would be united to those like them, and would fall into the hells, where they would become maniacs, living like beasts, while they would think themselves gods. I did not conceal from him that these things appeared to me very hard to be published. Write them, he replied, I will subscribe them, because it is the truth. Immediately rejoining his society, he subscribed a paper containing those assertions, and sent it as a bull to those of his former communion on earth.*

Once more:

'One day,' says Swedenborg, in his vision relating to writing in heaven, while I meditated on celestial truth, a leaf of paper written in Hebrew characters, like those of the ancients, was sent to me from heaven; the lines appeared to me curved, and full of accents placed above the letters. The angels around me said, that by a single letter they grasped the whole sense; that they discerned it especially in the curves of the lines, and the flexion of accents, of which they explained to me the different significations, according as they were joined or separate. They told me that the letter H. added to the names of Abraham and Sarah, signified infinite and eternal. They explained to me by the letters alone the true sense of a verse in one of the psalms. They taught me further, that the writing of the third heaven was composed of letters differently inclined, each of which contained one sense; that the vowels served there only for the sound corresponding to the affection, and that, in this heaven, they could not pronounce the vowels i ande [the German i and e we suppose] but in their place y and eu. They told me that the vowels a, o and u were, on account of their full sound, used in the third heaven, and that there were no harsh consonants employed there; every thing there is sweet, and hence it is that many Hebrew letters in use

there are pointed internally, to indicate that they are to be pronounced with sweetness. These angels added, that harshness of letters and of pronunciation might exist in the spiritual heaven, whose inhabitants are in the truth, but not in the third heaven, whose inhabitants are in the good, or in love.'

Such, and a great deal more, similar to these examples, are the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg. They are often very minute in the dialogue, giving the names and the exact words of the interlocutors, and very minute details of persons, and employments, and administration in the spiritual world. Some of the visions are ingenious and amusing fables, and some of them are too doting or childish even to deserve this eharacter. We have given these specimens without searching for those which are most improbable or most frivolous. But they are such, it seems to us, as completely justify the first impressions which every rational man receives, from being made acquainted with the grounds on which a prophetic character is claimed for their author. We say first impressians, because the disciples of Swedenborg allow, that the writings of their great teacher do not always, if ever, approve themselves to the judgment and understanding of a novice. They tell us we must read and read, till our spiritual man is enlightened. We do not profess to have searched very deeply into the mysteries of this new faith; but from what progress we have made, it seems to us that the reader must either be more and more wearied and disgusted as he advances, or, after being awhile bewildered in the mazes which lie between sense and nonsense, become as visionary and brainsick as the apostle of the New Jerusalem church himself. Now if these spiritual visions be the basis of all the spiritual knowledge of Swedenborg, which will not be denied by his followers, since it would take away the only proof on which they can rest, it may be safely presumed, that the great body of readers will regard them as so utterly unworthy of a supernatural origin, that they are not bound to examine any of the theories and dogmas that are founded upon them.

Among the most remarkable theories and dreams of Swedenborg, are those concerning correspondences, particularly as connected with the internal sense of scripture, and Heaven and Hell.

The science of correspondences, as it is technically called, is the key which unlocks the internal or spiritual sense, and thus