not heard. Man was himself a part of this revelation, and his actions became the expressions of this truth. The material universe was the stage, and the human race were the actors, in which every material thing and every act represented the Divine love and wisdom.

As man declined from his original perfection, and began to lose the perception of the spiritual and divine meaning of the various objects and actions, he made pictures of them, that he might have them before him to suggest their meaning. He attributed to animals organs which did not belong to them, as wings to lions and bulls, to express a quality more fully than was done by their natural forms alone. In time, men lost the perception of the spiritual meaning of these objects, and began to worship them. Hence arose idolatry and mythology.

As man had lost the true meaning of the created Word, and had entirely falsified it, it became necessary, in order to prevent him from losing all knowledge of the Lord and of spiritual things, that he should have a written revelation. This was given to him by the Lord, the only being who could give it to him, and it was given in the language of correspondences, woven into composed and real histories, in which every natural object, action, and relation, represented a spiritual principle or fact by the inherent relation which exists between spirit and matter.

The Lord himself spoke the word by the prophets, as they often declare. We continually find them saying, "The word of the Lord came to me," "The Lord spake to me," "Thus saith the Lord." Not all the books included in our Bible, however, were spoken in this manner, and though they are good and useful books, possessing about the same kind and amount of inspiration generally accorded to the whole Bible, they do not contain a connected spiritual meaning, and they are not, therefore, the Word of the Lord, and they do not claim to be. The books spoken by the Lord by the mouths of the prophets were the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, the Psalms, and all the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, the four Gospels, and the Revelation. These books are written according to the relation between natural and spiritual things. They have, therefore, a spiritual and divine meaning, which is entirely different from the natural. The natural his

tory, images, objects, and actions, are given to express the spiritual truth.

Every particular mentioned is the exponent of some spiritual truth. Even the numbers and proper names have a spiritual meaning; and their changes, as the insertion of h in the names of Abram and Sarai, and the calling of Jacob, Israel, were due to spiritual causes. The numbers three, seven, ten, twelve, and forty, are often used for this reason, and always with the utmost precision. It is well known that light and water represent truth, and that heat and warmth represent love. But it is commonly supposed that this is only in a vague and an indefinite way, as a figure of speech. But these natural substances always stand for their spiritual antetypes, wherever they are mentioned.

The whole Word is written in a universal language, a language of natural objects, and of human actions and relations, which is a divine style, and impossible to a finite mind. It differs from all books of human composition, as the Lord's works differ from human works. Its words are the embodiment of the Divine life. As our Lord says, "The words I speak unto you are spirit and life." Everything mentioned in the Word is the natural effect of a divine truth in a normal or in a perverted form. It is, therefore, like a seed: it can receive the Divine life, and bear spiritual fruit, as the seed of the grape can receive material life from the sun, and grow into a vine and bear grapes. The Lord's love and wisdom are embodied in the histories, prophecies, parables, precepts, and commandments, and are so connected with them that when they are received into the mind and cherished by the affections, they become the means of communicating the Divine life to man. They conduct that life as a wire conducts electricity. Consequently, Swedenborg says: "Man has conjunction with the Lord by means of the Word. The Lord speaks to man in the Word." It is not, therefore, of any consequence whether the prophets and apostles understood what they said or not, because it is not what they thought, but what the Lord thinks, and is, that he desired to communicate. Some of the Word in its letter has no clear and rational meaning. The greater part of it is a narration of natural facts and events which apparently have no reference, except in a most remote manner, to anything spiritual and divine. The

natural authors did not know that they had any other meaning than the natural one. David sang his own sorrows and joys, his own defeats and victories; and, in doing so, he sings the spiritual joys and sorrows, the despair, and hope, and trust, and triumph, of every human being, and of the Lord himself, in the assumption and glorification of his humanity. This principle applies to the whole Word. History, and prophecy, and parable, are given primarily to embody and communicate divine truth. They may be a record of things which took place in this world or not; those who wrote or uttered them might have understood them only in their natural import or not. That is of little consequence. The essential thing is, that every word spoken should be the natural exponent of a divine truth; and that the Lord always provided for. There is not a word in the wildest visions of the prophets, in the driest genealogy, or in the most natural precept, which does not embody a divine truth. The minute and precise directions given by the Lord for the ceremonial worship of the Jews has its cause in the correspondence of every substance, animal, form, and act, to the laws of divine order by which man comes into communion with the Lord. The essential service which Swedenborg has rendered to men consists in restoring to them the knowledge of the lost science of the correspondence between natural and spiritual things, by which they are introduced into a new world of spiritual truth, and the true nature of the Word is disclosed to them.

The Word is also written from two points of view, a divine and a human one. Much of it, especially that which relates to the Lord's attributes and relations to men, is written according to truth as it appears to man in his fallen state, rather than according to the absolute truth. For this reason the Lord is represented as jealous, angry, and revengeful; as hating, punishing, and destroying men; as going, and coming, and changing, according to the changing conditions of men. But, in reality, he is love and wisdom itself, and, as he himself declares, changes For this reason there are many contradictions in the letter of the Word, as there are in common speech between scientific accuracy and the motions, qualities, and forms, of the material world as they appear to the senses, or as they actually exist. Thus the Word is adapted to all states from the simplest to the

not.

wisest. There is sufficient truth in plain precept and direct commandment for the guidance of all who live in simple obedience. It contains, also, in every part, truth for the acutest reason and the highest wisdom, if men will look beneath the surface of the letter. The Word of God, like the works of God, cannot be fully fathomed by a finite mind. It rises as we rise; it has something for every one in every state of spiritual progress, and, when it is known that it is written according to the immutable relations between natural and spiritual things, it will be studied as Nature is now studied by scientific men, and the Lord's character and relations to men, and the laws of man's spiritual nature, and the true methods of his regeneration and spiritual development, will be discovered. Man will rise above the appearances of the letter into the clear light of genuine truth; he will come into the true knowledge of the Lord, whom to know aright is life eternal.

CHAUNCEY GILES.

IV.

Ir is an old and accepted canon of interpretation that the terms of a record are to be taken in their plain and commonlyreceived sense; that figures of speech are to be interpreted with reference to the local peculiarities of the country in which the writers resided; that idioms are to be understood according to the genius of the language employed; that whatever is obscure should be explained by what is plain; that the scope of a statement should be considered in determining the meaning of any portion thereof; and that definitions should be sought in the record itself.

Precision of definition is difficult. The difficulty may arise from the limitations of our receptive capacity; from the poverty of human language; from the greatness of the thoughts to be expressed. Let us take three familiar words—life, thought, and civilization—and whoever attempts a satisfactory definition thereof will find that he has essayed a hopeless task. Yet, if words represent ideas, the former should be the complement of the latter. The Bible has a literary character in common with any other book, and its sense is to be judged by the ordinary rules of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. This is its human side. It is in

part history, poetry, biography, ethical and religious. I read Bible history as I read Tacitus and Gibbon, with one exception: I am confident of its infallibility of statement. I read the epic of Job and the Psalms of David as I read Homer and Milton, with one exception: divine truth is never sacrificed for poetic effect. I read the doctrinal teachings of Jesus as I read those of Sakyamuni, with one exception: the former are unmixed truth. And it belongs to my private judgment to decide who the sacred writers were, when and where they wrote, what they wrote, and what their credentials are. The Master said: "Search the Scriptures;" "Ye have Moses and the prophets;" "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not." Herein is the right of private judgment conceded; this is the Magna Charta of Protestant Christianity. Whether inspiration is fact or fancy, each must decide for himself, but always in the full light of the law of evidence, by all the aids of enlightened criticism, and with profound conscientiousness.

Our word inspiration has the double sense of in-breathing and breathing into, and from the latter comes the word inspire. Twice the term "inspiration" occurs in the Bible. In Job, Elihu is represented as saying, "There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding," denoting the divine agency in the creation of the human intellect, and in the excitation of the mind to understand truth. This word has its equivalent in Genesis, in the term breathed, which means the production of spiritual life. In the New Testament we have the oft-quoted passage, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God," the significance of which is not the creation of life, as in the case of Adam, nor of mind, as in the case of Elihu, but implies impartation. In this sense it is used in John: "He breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost." And the equivalent of this signification is found in the manifold expressions: "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me;" "The Holy Ghost shall teach you;" "I received it by the revelation of Jesus Christ; "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost;" "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day;" "I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write." The sum of all these expressions is in the word inspiration. This is something more than human enlightenment. It is divine illumination. It is not