Page:Evolution and Natural Selection in the Light of the New Church.djvu/11

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IN THE LIGHT OF THE NEW CHURCH.
11

portant subject, to study carefully and impartially Swedenborg's magnificent work entitled "Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom;" for in its pages, and not in the writings of Darwin or his disciples, will be found the true Key to the mysteries of Creation. This information is chiefly contained in the section which treats of the two suns,—one spiritual and living, and the other natural and inert or dead,—and in the section which explains the doctrine of Degrees.[1] The philosophy contained in this work also teaches that all things in the material world—mineral, vegetable, and animal, with their wonderful and beautiful variations of form and structure—are created by God for man's use, and that through the orderly use of all things by man there is conjunction between God and man, and thence with even the least things of creation. The monad, fish, bird, and other animals, the wondrous flower and majestic tree, the everlasting mountains and hills, the mighty ocean and mysterious firmament, may all exist spiritually in each human soul; and if each affection and thought, to which these things correspond, be kept in their proper place by a loving and active obedience to the Lord's commandments, all things, under the Lord's Divine Providence, will be adapted to each man's use in the process of his regeneration, until he stand forth a finished structure—a perfect man. Only by this spiritual system of progression or development can man attain unto the "fulness of God," unto the "measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."


  1. These subjects are briefly explained in the Appendix.