And the same writer, speaking of society as it exists at present in a country which illustrates better than any other, perhaps, the real state of the Christian Church, says:

"It is now lying like a long buried corpse, which the air has not yet reached, and its lineaments seem perfect, and the body sound; but if it should please God in his anger by some shock to lay it bare, it will crumble to dust. Let the State withhold its artificial support from the Church, and with the exception of that large portion which is beginning to be impregnated and held together by a true revivifying spirit, the body which calls itself the Church will fall to pieces."-Ibid. P. 245.

Bishop Warburton, in his letters to his friend Bishop Hurd, written during the latter half of the last century, used language like the following:

"If you live, you will effect what I attempted, to make revelation understood, which we are ignorant of to a degree that will hereafter appear amazing to you.

"The divine lyre is almost silenced-the great moralities, the measures of duty, and the distinctions between the true and false in real life seem to be dissolved or dissolving among us. A true taste, it must be confessed, is wanting, but far more a true faith.

"This, as you say, is an age of real darkness, or at least of false lights. “If you should die in the present state of things, darkness will be the burier of the dead; there will not be light enough left to see and apprehend our loss."

The Rev. Dr. Arnold, the distinguished master of the Rugby School, and one of the best thinkers and best men that the Anglican Church can boast of, writes to the Rev. Mr. Blackstone thus:

"I believe that the day of the Lord is coming,' that it is the termination of one of the great ass (Ages,) of the human race- - whether the final one of all or not, that I believe no created being knows or can know."

And to the Rev. Mr. Tucker :

"As parties, the high churchmen, the evangelicals, and the dissenters, seem to me almost equally bad.”

be

And to the Rev. T. E. Tyler:

"The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save."

These are the honest confessions of honest minds; and it would easy to fill a volume with extracts from the various theological and ethical writers of the day, similar to those just quoted. There are multitudes on both continents whose hearts respond to the sentiments here uttered. And what does this indicate but a prettv

wide-spread acknowledgment, even among Churchmen themselves, that "the glory has departed from Israel"-that "beauty has fled from the daughter of Zion," and that "the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet" has indeed fallen upon the Church? If there be ground and reason for what these writers say concerning the Church as it now is, then we can, without much difficulty, believe what Swedenborg said of the Church at the time he wrote. We can believe that the first Christian Dispensation had been lived out, and that the Church established under it, had consequently come to an end.

But by the spiritual consummation of the Church is not to be understood the destruction or abandonment of the external things belonging thereto - its places and forms of worship, and religious ordinances. All these may be preserved, and everything belonging to the externals of religion be most scrupulously observed, while the spirit of Christianity-the essential, living principles of a true Church-genuine charity and faith-may be wholly wanting. The symbols of Christianity-the outward signs of a church

have ever existed since its establishment. But do we not know that the outside of a church may appear beautiful as a whited sepulchre, while dead men's bones and all uncleanness are within? This was the case with the Jewish Church at the time of its consummation. None were more remarkable for their external piety and religious devotion than the Scribes and Pharisees of old. They made broad their phylacteries, and enlarged the borders of their garments, and made long prayers. Yet what severe denunciations did the Lord utter against them! (See Mat. xxiii.)

It is the motive that determines the quality of men's deeds. If they are done for show, and thus from a selfish motive, their internal quality is corrupt, however good the deeds may be in appearance. Therefore the persons who do them may be a Church outwardly, but not inwardly, hence not really; i. e. they may have faith, charity, piety, and worship in their outward life, which appears before men, but nothing of these in their hearts or inward life, which appears before God. Like the Jews at the time of the Lord's advent, they may make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, while within they are full of extortion and excess. They may pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, but omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: and while building the tombs of the prophets, and garnishing the sepulchres of the righteous, they may be witnesses unto themselves,

by virtue of their internal quality, that they are the children of them that killed the prophets.

We see, therefore, that the external form of a church may exist, after the internal principles of heavenly life have become extinguished. Its body may remain awhile, after its spirit has fled.When the fountain ceases to flow, the excavation which received and contained the water, does not suddenly disappear. The spiritual fig-tree is a fig-tree still, though it bear no fruit: yet ever is it accursed of God, while it brings forth nothing "but leaves only."

What we mean by the consummation of the Church, must now be well understood. When the leading doctrines of the Christian religion-doctrines concerning the Lord, the Trinity, the Atonement, Redemption, Resurrection, the Sacred Scripture, Regeneration and Life, have become so wide of the truth, that they do not enlighten but darken the human understanding; and when men, reading the Scripture under the influence of these darkening doctrines, do not receive therefrom genuine truth, but truth falsified; and when, on account of fundamental false doctrines, the Divine Word is so misunderstood and falsified by the great body of the Church, (especially by those whose province it is to teach in spiritual things,) that it can no longer be the means of enlightening men in the pathway to heaven, then the Church is consummated. And we submit for the consideration of reflecting minds, whether anything less than a New Revelation can remove these false doctrines, and thus prepare the way for the establishment of a New Church.

But let it not be inferred from what has been said, that we believe, or that Swedenborg teaches, that there are no good people no genuine Christians who profess the doctrines of the now consummated Church. On the contrary, our illumined scribe authorizes the belief that there are great numbers in all the sects in Christendom, who have in their hearts and lives a much purer theology than that which is usually found in books or taught from the pulpit. He teaches that there are many individuals nominally of the Old Church, who, because they have the good of life as an end, and shun evils as sins against God, are not permanently injured by the false doctrines of the church to which they belong. Thus he says:

"Such is the quality of good, that evil cannot be adjoined to it, for good shuns evil, and evil dreads good, as hell heaven; wherefore no conjunction of them is given: but as to what concerns truth, it is of such a quality, that the false may be adjoined to it, yet not the false in

which evil is, but in which good is, such as appertains to infants and to boys and girls whilst they are yet in innocence, and to well-disposed Gentiles who are in ignorance; and such as appertains to all, who are in the sense of the letter of the Word, and remain in the doctrine thence derived, and still have the good of life for an end; for this good as an end, drives away all the malevolence of the false, and by application forms it into some resemblance of the truth." - A. C., 9809.

He further says "that the Church of the Lord is with all in the universal terrestrial globe, who live in good according to the principles of their religion ;" and that "the greater part of those who are born within the churches where the doctrine of faith alone and of justification thereby is received, believe no otherwise than that faith alone is to think concerning God and salvation, and how they ought to live; and that justification is to live before God;" hence "their faith and life are from the Word." Ap. Ex., 233.

We will now direct our attention to the new doctrine announced by Swedenborg on this subject, with the view of ascertaining how far it is in agreement with the true import of Scripture.

And we remark first, that the texts in which the consummation of the Age and the second coming of the Lord are announced, belong to the prophetical parts of the Word. Now one of the acknowledged canons of criticism among biblical commentators, is, that the precise manner in which a prophecy is to be fulfilled, is never understood until after its accomplishment. If, therefore, this rule of criticism be a sound one, it would follow that the prophecies concerning the consummation of the Age, and of the Lord's second appearing are to be fulfilled in some manner different from what the Church has expected. For to say that they are to find their fulfillment in the destruction of the material world and the personal appearing of the Lord upon the material clouds, is to deny this rule of criticism, and to insist that the precise manner in which a prophecy is to be fulfilled can be known beforehand.

Now in order to ascertain whether this rule be a correct one, we have only to consider how it was with regard to the predictions. concerning our Lord's first advent. Were they understood before their fulfillment? The whole Jewish nation expected a Messiah ; but did they form right conceptions concerning his character, or the nature of the kingdom he was coming to establish? They read in Isaiah that "The Prince of Peace was to be born among

them, who would take the government upon his shoulder, and would break "the yoke of their nation's burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the days of Midian;" and that, "of the increase of [his] government and peace [there would be] no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth even forever.”—(ix. 4, 6, 7.) And in Jeremiah, "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth."(xxiii. 5.) But did they understand what kind of a King and government were here denoted? By no means. They interpreted these and similar texts agreeably to their own carnal conceptions and selfish desires. Accordingly they expected a Messiah in the character of a great warrior, who would deliver them, not from the dominion of evil lusts, for they panted after no such deliverance but from the thraldom of a foreign government, and who would make their nation victorious over all the nations upon the earth. So little indeed did they understand the true meaning of the prophecies concerning Him-so gross and literal was the interpretation of them by the Jewish Rabbis, that they did not know the true Messiah when He appeared, but persecuted, rejected, and put Him to death. And even the twelve apostles, whom He selected to be his immediate followers, were so deeply imbued with the prevailing idea of their countrymen, that, on one occasion, they disputed which of them should be the greatest, or should enjoy the most honorable post in his kingdom- evidently supposing it was an earthly and temporal kingdom that he had come to establish.-(Mark ix, 34.) Nor did they wholly abandon this idea at the time of his crucifixion. For even after his resurrection, we find them inquiring, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel ?"-(Acts i. 6.)

And when the Apostles had received the gift of the Holy Spirit, even this did not at once communicate to them a true understanding of the prophecies, nor all the truths of the first Christian dispensation; for they remained for a long time under the persuasion that the gospel was to be preached only to the Jews. It was not until seven or eight years after the Lord's ascension that Peter was brought to believe that it was to be preached to the Gentiles also; and then it required a vision and special revelation to induce him to believe it. (See Acts x.) And it was not until nearly ten