the number of which your own recollections will readily augment. Is not every one of them, taken singly, of sufficient magnitude to excite surprise, and to awaken serious meditation on the subject of its cause? But when such hosts
of them press on our notice together, are we not compelled to refer the cause to something of a very extraordinary nature indeed! Here are multitudes of phenomena which every observer sees and owns; and every one who observes them owns likewise, that "the most unthinking, as well as the most prejudiced, must be struck with the fact, that the period in which we live is extraordinary and momentous;" and not only, that "amongst the great body of the people an unparalleled revolution is at work,"—that "the fountains of the great deep have been broken up,"—but that the main "seat of the revolution is in the mental part of man,"—"that the intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds,"—that "it sits brooding on the mind of man,"—and this with such energy as to authorize the expectation, that "nature will be melted down and re-coined." Where, I repeat, can the cause of such a simultaneous alteration in human minds be looked for, but in the world of minds itself—in other terms, in the spiritual world, with which man, as to his mind, is most intimately connected? And what change could there be adequate to the production of so great a change as we are witnessing here, but the performance of the Last Judgment,—the entirely new state which is thence induced on the intermediate region of the spiritual world, the seat of man's most immediate spiritual association,—and the consequent outpouring from heaven of new streams of light and life into the world of nature? The illustrious Swedenborg, so long ago as the year 1758, declared that by the Last Judgment, then just accomplished, spiritual liberty was restored, and the state of servitude and captivity in which men's minds were previously held, in regard to spiritual subjects, was removed; and in the year 1763 he added that the efflux of divine energies from heaven into the world, which had been in a great degree intercepted by the presence of those called the dragon and his angels in the intermediate part of the spiritual world, was by their ejection restored. These assertions were made, when no remarkable effects of the change had yet begun to manifest themselves in the world, and when, consequently, they could not be corroborated by acknowledged facts; but how wonderfully have they thus been corroborated since, and what striking confirmation of them does every day's experience now bring with it! Am I then doing any more than anticipating thePage:The Judgment Day.pdf/201
