their own appropriate vestments,—the very forms which the Creator Himself has ordained for them.
Let us now look at the law which, according to Swedenborg, determines the whole character or aspect of the objective world in the Hereafter. If it is not susceptible of a complete demonstration, we hope at least to furnish strong presumptive evidence of its truth.
This law, as already stated, is that of correspondence, which means a relation similar to that existing between the soul and the body. It is in the nature of every spiritual principle to go forth and embody itself under some outward form. And the form must correspond to the living principle that enters into, creates and sustains it. We see this tendency of the human spirit constantly manifested here on earth; for even here the affections of every man are forever seeking embodiment, and they first create for themselves certain correspondential forms in the thought of the understanding. Thus their forms exist mentally, or in the world within man, before they attain a visible and tangible existence in the world without him. They are visible to the mental before they are seen by the bodily eye. This is true of everything that man creates—temples, houses, gardens, machinery, pictures, statuary, furniture, clothing, and the like. These things are the offspring of some desire or love with which they correspond as body with soul; and they all existed as objects of thought in man's spiritual world (his mind), before they existed as objects of sight in the natural world. There is nothing made by the hand of man which was not, in all its parts, visible to the eye of the mind before it was visible to the eye of sense; and nothing
