Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/130

A "thought of God" in God, is intelligible if He be conceived of as a Divine Man, a loving, thinking, acting person; but a "thought of God" out of God is a pure abstraction unless there be a recipient form. "A form of the Divine truth,"—what Divine truth? Divine truth in God, or proceeding out of Him? How formed, in the Divine Mind, or by the operation of the Divine Mind upon what has proceeded forth from itself? If the "thought of God" which man is, is God's thought in Himself, then every man is a part of God and all men are God; and this is pantheism in spite of all denial. The Doctor must know, when he stops to consider, that Swedenborg's doctrine of the Divine Proceeding and the existence of atmospheres and substances thence, and the creation of forms from those substances as the recipients of the Divine life, is the only conception which can avert the conclusion of pantheism; and that this doctrine being unknown to his readers, his very definition of man could only serve to call up the Christian Scientists' circle of reasoning: man is a thought of God; God is a spirit, therefore man is a spirit; to be in the spirit is to be in God; to think God's thoughts is to be God.