Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence/"Thoughts About Christian Science" Examined
"THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE" EXAMINED.
The purpose of this essay is expository not controversal. But, as said at the beginning, the name of Swedenborg is often connected with metaphysical theories to which he gives no sort of countenance; and his doctrines are sometimes associated with foreign speculations in such a way as to mislead even those who are fairly well instructed in them.
In Dr. Holcombe's "Condensed thoughts about Christian Science," this confusion exists throughout; and the wide circulation of the pamphlet, the reputation of the writer and general impression that he is presenting the teachings of Swedenborg, whose name he freely uses, would seem to make an examination of it in the light of the foregoing doctrine an act of justice, as well as a useful means of applying the doctrine to the subject discussed.
The Doctor says in his preface:
"The psychology of Swedenborg will solve many enigmas for the Christian Scientist, and save him from many errors and extravagances.
"It will teach him the difference between God and man, and between man and nature; and also the difference between the real and the apparent, and that between the apparent or unreal and the non-existent.
"It will teach him the correspondences between the Spirit and matter, and the true reason why we can say that matter has no properties, no sensations, no independent existence."
This is true; but he had just said, "the idealism upon which Christian Science is based can be immensely re-inforced by the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg," which is not in the least true, as that idealism is represented by the Doctor in his subsequent pages. There is a philosophic idealism deducible from Swedenborg's writings, but there is in it no confusion of the Divine Spirit with the spirit of man, nor any confounding of the degrees of life, nor any denial of the reality of the phenomenal world of the senses, such as obtains throughout these pages, and belongs to the theories of Christian Science in general. And it will be seen that the very absence in Swedenborg of "the idealism upon which Christian Science is based," and the definiteness and reality of his distinctions between the Divine and the human, and between good and evil in the human mind and from the human mind in both worlds, is the only justification of the promise that his psychology will teach the scientist "the difference between God and man, and between man and nature: also the difference between the real and the apparent, and between the apparent or unreal and the non-existent."
The Doctor very properly begins with a "Statement of Being," and holds that the idea of God is always the beginning, and that it is necessary to "return to first principles, the absolute truth about God, and from that truth as a divine centre, to re-construct and re-state all our knowledge."
"No system or science can ever be true unless it starts from God as a centre; and a false idea of God will vitiate the whole. There is one God: even Jesus Christ. He is manifested by Life, Love, Goodness, Wisdom and Power. * * * * There is no space, or time, state or condition, spiritual or natural, in the universe, where this life of God with its attributes, Love, Goodness and Wisdom does not exist. This divine life, or essential being, expresses itself by Power, Order, Law, Intelligence, Use, Harmony, Beauty, Peace, Health and Happiness. The divine life is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent; to which nothing can be added; from which nothing can be abstracted. It creates nothing opposite or contrary to itself. It creates everything in its own image and likeness. All things from the atom to the Man, reflect their Creator. * * These are absolute truths; true everywhere and always."—Page 10.
This is true as far as it goes, though somewhat vague in its terms, especially when taken in connection with a warning given in the preface, and with its elaboration in subsequent pages. "There is one God: even Jesus Christ," is the doctrine of the New Church uniformly and consistently adhered to without modification or reservation by Swedenborg. He is Jehovah God in His Divine Humanity. He is not to be thought of as a Divine, all-pervading, invisible spirit of intelligence and power or other abstractions; but as the Divine Man, in whom is love and wisdom itself and from whom love and wisdom proceed; first as the sun of heaven, and thence as spiritual heat and light which are received as love and wisdom in the created wills and understandings of angels and men. The Lord from Eternity, who is Man, descended and assumed a human organic form in all its degrees, by birth of a virgin; and this also he glorified in all its degrees by putting off what was finite and infirm and putting on the Divine in the same degree, even to the corporeal or bodily degree which man leaves in the world, and rose with His whole body a Divine Substantial Human Form; from which is the Holy Spirit, which is the all of life, form, force and order in heaven and on earth. This is the doctrine of the New Church which Swedenborg expounds, explains, definitely and with many warnings to think spiritually and not materially, that is, from the Divine Human character and essence, and not from space and time, but without for a moment losing sight of the idea of a Man, and of the Human Form as the beginning and end of the thought of God. And the Lord Jesus Christ is He; there is no God out of Him; or apart from Him; His Glorified Humanity is the visible God in whom is the Invisible. It seems only a confounding and confusion of counsel, to a mind trained in this doctrine, to read the following:
"We must lose sight entirely of the historical person age—the Son of Man, and rise to the contemplation of the sublime fact, that Jesus Christ united to the Father is the divine humanity of the universe—the manifested Divine Truth—which includes all truths as the sea does its waves, which is no respector of persons or forms, and which cannot be limited to any ecclesiastical channel whatever. It is best, perhaps, to call him God—for he is God—and because He is God—He is also Jehovah and Buddha, and Allah, and the Great Spirit, and the Supreme Being, and every other name whereby man in his feebleness has struggled to express his perfections."—Page 5.
If this means anything it is a confounding of the Humanity of God with the humanity of the universe, and of the Divine which proceeds from God-Man with the concepts to which it gives rise in the minds of men. With this vague conception of the "One God, even Jesus Christ," one does not know how much truth may be intended, or what idea it may yield the reader. The Doctor's "Statement of Being" may however be construed in agreement with the following from Swedenborg, the meaning of which cannot well be mistaken: "There is an only essence, an only substance and an only form, from which are all the essences, substances and forms that have been created. That one only essence, substance and form, is the Divine Love and Wisdom, from which are all things that have relation to love and wisdom. It is also Good itself and Truth itself, to which all things have relation. And those are the life from which are the life of all things and all things of life. Also that the Only, from which all else is, and the Itself, which alone is, is Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent. And this Only and Itself is the Lord from Eternity, or Jehovah."[1] In explanation of this last proposition, Swedenborg says, "God is One in essence and in person, and this God is the Lord; the Divine Itself, which is called Jehovah the Father, is the Lord from eternity; the Divine Human is the Son conceived from His Divine from eternity, and born in the world; and that the proceeding Divine is the Holy Spirit." It is the Lord from eternity from whom are all essences, substances and forms, and it is the Divine proceeding or the Holy Spirit by which they are created, sustained, animated and actuated.
This "Statement of Being," however, does not explain the existence of evil, sin, suffering and sorrow, or anything contrary to the Lord from whom all things proceed. The Doctor however assumes that it does, and proceeds to rule out such things.
"Nothing of what we call evil, sin, suffering, sorrow and death can possibly have any source or causation in the divine life or any of its attributes, and there is no other origin for any real thing. They have, therefore no real independent existence. They are not negations of the Divine life, for that life is everywhere present and admits no negation. They are not perversions of the Divine life, for that life is infinitely perfect, and cannot be perverted. They are not living, real things at all, but false interpretations of the divine life, the creations of human fancy, the morbid products of the imagination—fantasies, shadows, dreams, nightmares, images, which seem to have life and power but have none. They produce on us all kinds of sensations as if they were real, but the sensations have no more real foundation than the sensations we experience in dreams."—Page 11.
Because evil cannot originate in the only good and true, which are in the Lord and from the Lord, therefore he concludes they are not; they are not negations, they are not perversions of the Divine life, therefore they are nothing. What is meant by the phrase "no real independent existence," does not appear; independent of what? He has not yet shown how anything exists independent of the only life, not even man with an individuality and consciousness of his own. If there is one only "life, love, goodness, wisdom, power," how does it operate, how manifest itself, and to whom? What receives it, and whence and how does that recipient exist? Just here is the key to the psychology of the New Church, and to the confusion of Doctor Holcombe's "Thoughts." Swedenborg answers these questions in the Doctrine of the Divine Proceeding, and of created forms; the Doctor does not answer them, nor does he keep Swedenborg's answer clearly in mind, but more often the "idealism on which Christian Science is based."
Every man is a thought of God—a form of the Divine Truth, born of the Father or the Divine Love, and destined by appointed ways to work out and ultimate the divine purposes. This is the true doctrine of predestination and of immortality, Truth is God thinking in us. Goodness is God feeling in us. All our movements from goodness and truth are God working through us. And yet we are not God—nor is this pantheism. It is the Christian's union with God. "That they all may be one: as thou, Father art in me and I in thee; that they may also be one in us—I in them and thou in me"—Page 12.
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.
Now let us turn to Swedenborg. Reverting to the general doctrine, it will be remembered, he teaches that the first proceeding from the Lord, who is the Itself and the Only, is the sun of the spiritual world, which is pure love from Jehovah God in the midst of it. It may be well here to state in summary the order of creation from that sun. Let it be remembered that this is the order in which the "One only essence, substance and form," who is the Lord from eternity, "produces from Himself all the essences, substances and forms that have been created." They were not created out of nothing, but from His only essence, substance and form; they are not in Him, but produced forth from Himself by orderly derivations according to degrees, as already explained.
1. God is Man; and from Him proceeded and proceeds the sun of the spiritual world, which is the first sphere of His Divine love and wisdom; spiritual fire and light emanating from Him, in the midst of which He is, and by which He creates and sustains all things.
2. From the spiritual sun He produces spiritual atmospheres of several distinct degrees. These atmospheres, at first most pure, fine, fiery and active, as they recede from that sun and become gradually coarser by concretion and compounding, and so cooler and less active; become at length substances at rest, capable of re-action and thus of becoming formed and actuated. Thus was the substantial spiritual world produced; and by influx of the Lord's life of love and wisdom from that sun through those graded atmospheres it is continually sustained. All this in the spiritual world.
3. From the Divine love and wisdom, or Divine heat and light of the spiritual sun, were created the natural suns, our sun and the fixed stars, which are the first created centers of natural worlds; and from each natural sun, is produced natural atmospheres around it, first the finest, hottest, most active; then as they pass off into the distance from the sun, they become more compounded, cooler and less active, and finally substances at rest, thus water and then earths.
Here, then, is a universe created by the Lord as a Man; a universe that is two-fold, spiritual and natural, the spiritual within the natural and connected with it, as the soul is within and connected with the body; and it is continually sustained and conserved by Him, flowing in with His life from its first, highest and inmost beginnings through the spiritual world as a soul, into the natural world as a body. In this two-fold universe, internal and external, active and passive, the one is within the other, as the essential within the formal, the operative within the instrument. And the universe is two-fold because the spiritual sun is so; and it is so because the Lord from whom it emanates is so; that is, active love and reactive wisdom.
There is humanity inhering in this universe, therefore, from the essential humanity of the God-man who creates and sustains it; and every possibility of human form and use, and every spiritual and natural form and function corresponding to human life and need in this world and the other, were involved in the proceeding of creative life through the other world into this. That is, Divine life in its creative outflow to ultmates in the world, involved in their initiament and held in potentiality all forms to be developed, when the basis and re-action should be reached in the earths.
4. Given such a two-fold universe, with the spiritual world as its active soul and the natural world as its re-active body, and God in the inmost as the intelligent producer and mover of all; then life flows in from God through the sun of the spiritual world into the natural sun, and by its atmospheres to the earths carrying the spiritual impulse and endeavor to form its substances into "rock-ribbed" foundations, and overlay them with mould and earths, and to form these substances into cells or eggs for the reception of vegetative seeds. In the spiritual world at the same time, are produced the active spiritual forms with an impulse to clothe themselves with material forms. Thus the first productions of the material world while it was still recent and in its virgin state, were seeds; the first endeavor could be no other. There is, in the mineral kingdom, a constant tendency to vegetate; that is, it receives from the common influx of the spiritual world through the sun's atmospheres an impulse and motion disposing its substances into recepticals, into which the vegetative soul or seed from the spiritual world may flow. Towards this result, however, the heat and light and atmospheres of the natural world contribute nothing except to clothe the heat and light of the spiritual world, and supply the material to make it visible, useful and fixed in the natural world. Beginning thus, in the mineral kingdom, and in the simplest forms, and proceeding by successive modifications of forms and their vivification from the spiritual world, existences came forth successively through the three kingdoms of nature, each in effort to prepare for, and to supply forms to receive and bring forth the higher. But the only part that nature can play in the production of these ascending existences is to supply matter, and thus receptive forms, for the active spiritual seed and soul that flows in from the spiritual world. In the whole chain of existence not a mineral crystalizes, or a seed forms, or a plant grows or an animal is born, or a man lives and becomes regenerate, except by spiritual influx from the spiritual world adapted to produce that result; and such influx proceeds each and every moment, in every case, whether to produce or to sustain, by continual mediations from the love and wisdom of God. And when thus the kingdoms of nature were developed, and the corresponding kingdoms of the spiritual world, the Lord operating through both worlds produced man as the end involved, and the crown and consummation in the whole divine chain of development.[2]
Swedenborg's definition of man, as a substantial organic form recipient of the life of love and wisdom ought now to be intelligible. He is "a thought of God," indeed; but not a "projection into nothing" as would be the case if he were not by created forms separated from the Creator in order that he may be a personal existence. As was shown in the general doctrine, "life must have an organism to operate a function; and the organism must be two-fold, spiritual to receive life, and, at first, material to give permanence to spiritual forms, and react upon the inflowing life." It was shown that this necessity calls for two suns, a living and a dead, and two worlds; and without birth into this world, spiritual organic forms, such as are the will and understanding of man, could not be given and developed.
Now consider in this connection the following: "That the Lord has created man, and afterwards forms with him, a receptacle of love which is his will, and adjoins to it a receptacle of wisdom, which is his understanding. That these forms, which are the receptacles of love and wisdom first exist with man at his conception and birth. That from those forms by a continuous principle are brought forth and produced all things of the body from the head even to the soles of the feet. That those productions are effected according to the laws of correspondence, and that therefore all things of the body, both internal and external are correspondences." "That no angel or spirit is given nor can be given who had not been born a man in the world."[3] Moreover this spiritual organic form, which man is, is a series of forms in discrete degrees. There is an internal mind with its two receptacles, the will and understanding; an external mind, corresponding to the internal, with its will and understanding; a spiritual body with its brains and its heart and lungs, corresponding to the will and understanding; and a physical body corresponding to the spiritual body and to the minds within it.
This is somewhat more specific and thinkable than the metaphysical abstraction suggested by the Doctor's phrase, "A thought of God." Swedenborg teaches everywhere, that "the will and the understanding is not any spiritual abstract principle, but a subject substantiated and formed for the reception of love or wisdom." "Man's soul, which lives after death, is his spirit, and is in complete form a man; the soul of this form is the will and understanding; and the soul of these is love and wisdom from the Lord; these two constitute man's life from the Lord alone, yet in order to man's acceptance of Him He causes life to appear as if it were man's own."[4] This appearance can be given, and thence rationality and freedom, because man as a created form has an inmost entrance and dwelling place of the Divine life, an internal will and understanding corresponding to the love and wisdom of the Lord, an external will and understanding corresponding to the internal, and a spiritual and natural body corresponding to the will and understanding.
How real these organic receptacles are, may be conceived in that they are "substantiated and formed," and that the mental processes of which we are conscious are defined, not in the least as abstractions, but as mutations of actual spiritual substances and forms. "The changes of their state are affections, the variations of their form are thoughts, the existence and permanence of the latter and the former is memory, and their reproduction is recollection; all taken together are the human mind."[5]
All life is the Lord's and from Him alone; but man is not the Lord, nor his affection and thought the Lord's love and wisdom; because he is a created receptacle of them, and life as received by him on any plane of his faculties becomes what the form is. Life is brought down into and through the discrete degrees of his mind by correspondence. Because the higher will and understanding correspond to Divine love and wisdom they receive it and bring it down as affection and thought to the lower will and understanding. The correspondence by organic form of the brain with the will and understanding brings these down as inhabitants into the brain as their temporal home; the correspondence of the heart and lungs, by form again, with the will and understanding, brings them into commerce of motion with the body; and the human spirit from within by correspondence with the corporeal human form makes the man a citizen of the natural world.[6]
Any approach to a confounding of the Divine life which is "All in all," with any or all things which it has created, such as may be traced on almost every page of the Doctor's pamphlet, may be set down as one of the "errors" not "repudiated" by him. God, spirit and matter are not to be confounded: (a) God is life, substance and form in Himself; (b) spirit is created substance and form, receptive of life; and (c) matter is created substance and form, in itself dead and reactive to life.
In like manner God, man and nature are distinct: (a) God alone is the creator of recipient forms and the giver of life; (b) man is created a spiritual, substantial form, coordinate with the spiritual world, clothed upon with a dead, passive and reactive body co-ordinate with the material world; (c) life from God flows immediately into man's organic will and understanding, imparting and maintaining power to love and think and do, and also mediately through the spiritual world according to the quality of his love and thought and deed; thus (d) man lives by immediate influx from God but by mediate influx through associate angels and spirits, and by the reaction of the natural world, he lives in freedom and rationality.
This action and re-action takes place in the natural or external mind, which is therefore the recipient of two opposite influences: heaven with its love and wisdom flowing in by the spiritual mind; and the natural world with its conditions and appearances perceived in the plane of the senses. These two influences acting and re-acting upon one another serve to keep man in a state of equilibrium, or of freedom of determination and action. So far as the natural mind re-acts upon the influx from the spiritual mind it is in a state of correspondence; and is capable of development in the direction of the acting force, or the inflowing Divine love and wisdom. But so far as it re-acts against the spiritual mind the spiritual is closed and the natural mind develops in the direction of the acting force from below, or the affections and persuasions of the senses. The natural mind as a recipient form is thus capable of acting in correspondence with the spiritual mind, by which the one only life, love and wisdom flow in, or of acting in opposition to that influx; in which case the recipient form is not destroyed but perverted into its opposite. In this equilibrium and consequent freedom of willing and thinking is at once the condition or angelic development and the possibility of evil creations. It is a balance which the Lord continually maintains and a freedom which He continually imparts; because it is essential to individual and conscious manhood or angelhood; and in the right or wrong use of it are the issues of good and evil.
Swedenborg teaches, that, "Man was created to love himself and the world, his neighbor and heaven, and also the Lord. Hence it is that when he is born he first loves himself and the world, then his neighbor and heaven, and afterwards in proportion as he grows in wisdom, the Lord; when this is the case he is in reality led by the Lord though he is apparently guided by himself. In proportion, however, as he is unwise, he stops short in the first degree, which is that of loving himself and the world; and if he loves his neighbor, it is for the sake of himself in the eyes of the world. But if he is altogether void of wisdom, he then loves himself alone, or the world and his neighbor for the sake of himself; and with respect to heaven and the Lord; he thinks slightingly of them, or denies them, or even hates them in his heart, if he does not do so openly in words. These are sources of self-love and the love of the world, and because these loves (out of subordination to the higher) are hell, the origin of hell is evident. When man has become a hell, the interior or higher principles of his mind are closed, but the exterior and lower are open; and because self-love directs everything of thought and will to itself, immersing them in the body, it therefore inverts and forces back the exteriors of his mind, which, as was observed, are open, and the consequence is that they have an inclination and tendency downwards, and are borne away to hell. But because he retains, notwithstanding, the faculty of thinking, of willing, of speaking and of acting—a faculty which is in no case taken from him, because he is born a man—and is, at the same time, in this inverted state, receiving no longer any good or truth whatever from heaven, but rather what is evil and false from hell, he therefore procures for himself a kind of light, by confirmations of evil based in falsity, and of falsity based in evil, in order that he may still be eminent above others. He imagines that this is a rational light, though it is from hell, and in reality full of foolish delusion, producing a vision like that of a dream in the night, or a craziness of imagination, from which things that are appear as if they were not, and things that are not, as if they were."[7]
Here then is a rational account of man's life from the one only life, also of the freedom whereby he perverts it into a real evil and continuing life of delusion and insanity. He has life from the only life, because he has been created and formed that he may be a receptacle of it. He receives the Divine love into his will, and the Divine wisdom into his understanding; and this in such a way by the very constitution of these receptacles that the love and wisdom appear to be his own, and he to act as of himself as the Lord does act of Himself. Whence it follows that he determines the inflowing life in freedom of will according to his thought; and that the recipient forms, or the will and understanding become conformed to the use he makes of the inflowing life. By virtue of the understanding he is an image of God, and by virtue of the will a likeness of God; and because these receptacles are from creation, and formed with every one in the womb, and are indestructible, when they are closed above and opened below, man is still an image and likeness but an inverted one, and his life a perverted one. He is still a recipient of Divine life; it flows in by the unconscious inmost soul, and the closed internal mind. But when it reaches his conscious will it is turned into its opposite corresponding love and in his understanding perverts every known truth into a corresponding falsity. Of such is hell. These evils and falsities pressing into nature originate every evil form, disorderly force, and injurious combination known to nature. Evil, therefore, in man and in the spiritual world and in nature, is not the "negation of the one only life," but the perversion of created recipient forms into corresponding opposites.
The Doctor says "there are two factors in the production of phenomena—God's will and man's will"; and proceeds to explain as follows:
"When we desire a selfhood and to possess things with a supreme ownership, we try to separate ourselves from God and lead an independent life. But we cannot do it. We produce merely a vast tissue of self-deceptions. The first step in this self-deception of the race is the creation of the devil—the father of lies—who abides not in the truth. In this effort after a sense of independence and ownership, we externalize our thoughts and so pervert our affections and falsify our understandings; and thus weave a fantastic, unreal thread into our whole web of being. We are then cast out of the spiritual garden of Eden, and generate by our own thinking a change in our material environment, to which we give false interpretations innumerable."—Page 13.
Now it will be seen from the foregoing exposition of the doctrine of recipient forms; that this is an inadequate account of both the process and the effect of man's desire to "lead an independent life." It is the more misleading because it is partially true so far as it goes, but is neither wholly true nor the whole truth. What that desire did in the origin of evil was to close the will and understanding above and open them below; and since affections and thoughts are changes in the state and form of the spiritual substances of the mind, this was an inversion and perversion of the receptacles "substantiated and formed" with man. The result, which the Doctor calls "a vast tissue of self-deceptions," was indeed wrought into the spiritual tissue of the mind itself; wherefore it became organic, and transmissible as a perverted organism by the laws of heredity. It did not indeed "produce a new life different from God's life," for man can produce no life, good or evil; but it did produce something more than "a dream," an inversion in the substantial organism of the mind, a perversion of functions, turning of the good of life into its opposites, and thus an inflowing good into a real and continuing evil. Any jugglery with the words "real" and "unreal" is folly here. Since man is nothing but a recipient form, a perversion of the form is organized and substantiated; and it is a real perversion in every customary sense of the word, that is a substantial and organic fact however disorderly; and because he is still a recipient form, though perverted and disordered, the life received and qualified by that form, is a real life though insane and evil. And moreover this evil condition existing is not to be escaped by any denial of it, but by "re-formation;" that is by actually living the receptacles of the will and understanding back into their true form and order by obedience to the truth of God, or the Word brought down to man's apprehension. Evil is so real that there is no escape from it, except by real regeneration, by "shunning evil as sin against God," and "combatting it as from hell" which is the inversion and opposite of heaven. There is an unreality and phantasy pertaining to every perverted will and understanding; but the perversion of the receptacles, which is the origin and determining cause of these insanities, is most real. "A real thing," says the Doctor, "has a definite projection or objectivity, dependent upon some underlying cause, in harmony with the Divine laws of creation and manifestation." Precisely that evil and disease are; and their existence, manifestation, control, subordination and removal, are dependent upon the "divine laws of permission which are also laws of divine Providence."
The fifth "Error" to be repudiated, upon the repudiation of which the whole scheme of Christian Science rests, is not an error according to Swedenborg. The Doctor states it thus:
5th Error.—That evil, sin, suffering and sickness are real things, genuine entities and existences, involving the whole world in mental and physical conditions of disorder and wretchedness; and to be resisted and combatted by all the means, internal and external, which we can command, and not to be destroyed, as Christ demonstrated, by the word of truth."—Page 20.
The only way in which Christ "destroyed" evil, sin, suffering, and sickness by the "Word of truth" was through man's co-operation, in the acknowledgment of them and in repentance and faith by obedience. Such is the teaching of Swedenborg throughout. He says:
"He who would be saved must confess his sins, and do the work of repentance. To confess sins, is to know evils, to see them in ourselves, to acknowledge them, to make ourselves guilty, and to condemn ourselves on account of them. This, when it is done before God, is the confession of sins.
"To do the work of repentance, is to desist from sins after a man has thus confessed them, and from an humble heart has made supplication for remission, and to live a new life according to the precepts of charity and faith. He who only acknowledges generally that he is a sinner, and makes himself guilty of all evils, and yet does not explore himself, that is, see his own evils, makes confession indeed, but not the confession of repentance; he, forasmuch as he does not know his own evils, lives afterwards as he did before. He who lives the life of charity and faith does the work of repentance daily; he reflects upon the evils which are with him, he acknowledges them, he guards against them, he supplicates the Lord for help. For man of himself continually lapses towards evil, but he is continually raised by the Lord, and led to good. Such is the state of those who are in good; but they who are in evil lapse continually, and are also continually elevated by the Lord, but are only withdrawn from falling into the most grievous evils, to which of themselves they tend with all their power. The man who explores himself in order to do the work of repentance, must explore his thoughts and the intentions of his will, and must there examine what he would do if it were permitted him, that is, if he were not afraid of the laws, and of the loss of reputation, honor and gain. There the evils of man reside, and the evils which he does in the body are all from thence."[8]
Moreover he teaches that "no one can shun evils as sins, so as inwardly to hold them in aversion, except by combats against them."
We come most completely under the sphere of evil spirits when we deny their exsitence, for they can then flow into and excite our disorderly mental forms in such way as to make evil seem good. The enjoyments of hereditary evils allure the thoughts and banish reflection, wherefore, if man did not know from some other source that they are evils he would call them goods, and from freedom according to the reason of his thought he would commit them; when he does this he appropriates them to himself. To deny the reality of evils in the thought without acknowledging their source in hell and from evil spirits, is not to shun or remove them, but to close the eye of the mind to them while cherishing the unacknowledged inward love from which they flow forth. But to acknowledge evils and falsities in one's self as flowing in from hell and through the agency of evil spirits, to repudiate them as contrary to the Word, to reject them to hell from which they proceed, to refuse them volition and act because they are wrong, and combat them as of one's self in the name of the Lord,—this is to remove evils in the external man and open the door for the Lord to come in and remove the lusts of evil in the internal, and dispose the evil spirits and their inciting sphere. This is to deny, not the reality of evil, but the reality of its pleaded rights and powers. And this denial takes place in the thought, from the will to shun evil and live according to the Lord's Word. Evil spirits rejoice and exult when they can induce man to deny the devil and the reality of evil, for then they can work where they love to work, in the dark; and flowing from the dark into man's hereditary love, lead him where they will. But if man, when any evil is presented in thought, will say, "I see this and know that it flows in from evil spirits into the inclinations of my self-love, but because it is contrary to the Lord's Word I will not do it," then the evil spirits are compelled to withdraw; the truth adopted as a principle of action is appropriated; the will of good is internally strengthened; and an advance in spiritual life is achieved.
This is in brief the doctrine of life for the New Jerusalem. And it is based upon the doctrine of Redemption, which is, that the Lord took our nature upon Him, with its hereditary evil, or disordered recipient forms, that in it His love and wisdom might be assaulted by evil spirits, and by combats against them subjugate them to the Divine Truth and keep them in subjection to eternity. He did more than take on "all the functions of our externalized human nature," more than to "enter upon our false and terrible dream," whatever the Doctor may mean by these vague expressions. He actually took our nature, all of it, with its hereditary perverted forms, so far as they could be assumed through the mother without a human father; "He was tempted in all points in which we are; yet without sin," for He did not "enter upon our false and terrible dream," but drove back the assaulting spirits by the assertion of the Divine Truth against them and the operation of its power upon them; thus suffering their assaults without accepting their evils and fantasies, and reducing them to the limitations of order in hell; and thus, without denying their reality, destroying their power over man.
At the same time, and by the same combats with evil spirits and victories over them, he "put off every thing derived from the mother," and put on the Divine Human even to ultimates, making His very body Divine Good and Truth, the very form of the Invisible God and "the power of God unto salvation," to all who will approach Him immediately and assert the commandments of His Word against evil in His name. His redeeming work was not, and is not any imaginary and idealistic dispersion of "race-errors and race-illusions," but an actual conflict with evil spirits who were and are the embodiment of those errors and illusions, and the victorious assertion of His Divine truth against them, whereby they were reduced to order within the limitations which the Lord in mercy and wisdom allows them in hell. "The Divine Nature is not susceptible of evil; wherefore, that He might overcome evil by His own proper strength, which no man could or ever can do, and that thus He might become Justice, He willed to be born as another man. Otherwise there was no need that He should be born; for He might have assumed the human essence without birth, as formerly He had occasionally done when He appeared to the Most Ancient Church, and likewise to the Prophets." This was by filling an angel with His Divine, or taking on His own in the angel, and thus the angelic form, in which He could manifest Himself and through which He could speak. But redemption involved a combat with evil and necessitated the assumption of the organic human forms of the external man in which it inhered. Therefore, "in order that He might put on evil, to fight against it and to conquer it and that He might thus at the same time join together in Himself the Divine essence and the human essence, He came into the world."[9] "The battle of the Omnipotent God was with the hells, upon which battle He could not have entered unless He had before put on the human. But it must be known that the battle of the Lord with the hells was not an oral battle as between reasoners and wranglers: such a battle effects nothing at all there. But it was a spiritual battle, which is of Divine truth from Divine good, which was the very vital principle of the Lord; the influx of this though the medium of sight, no one in hell can resist. There is in it such power that the infernal genii flee away at the mere perception of it, cast themselves down into the deep, and creep into caverns that they may hide themselves."[10] Because there was no longer an ultimate love of the Divine good and truth of the Word with men; that is a love and will of obedience to its commandments such as to serve as a medium of Divine enlightenment and power, the Lord himself took on the natural human, lived the Word into it, made it the Divine truth in ultimates, and the medium of Divine power to men.
What the Lord did by the power of the Divine truth in His human, He continues to do through the Word, and gives man by the power of the Word to do in His name,—drive evil spirits back to hell, reject evils from himself, both hereditary and acquired, to those who have confirmed themselves in the appropriation of them. The rejection of evils by a denial of them in the thought, is no rejection nor removal of them; but the acknowledgment that they are from hell and the repudiation of them as belonging to evil spirits, is both a rejection and removal of them, for then the Lord's redeeming power operates by the Word to remove the evil spirits and thus the source and inspiration of the evils. This is Christianity; and known and embraced in the will, and practiced in the day's life, faithfully to the end, it is a Christian Science indeed, omnipotent for eternal life, and for the organic removal of disorder by successive processes of actual life, and the promotion of health in natural life also. The formula of its practice is laid down by Swedenborg as follows in the Doctrine of Life:
| I. | All religion has relation to the life, and the life of religion is to do good. |
| II. | No one can do good, which is good, from himself. |
| III. | So far as a man shuns evils as sins he does good, not from himself, but from the Lord. |
| 1. | If a man wills and does good before he shuns evils as sins, the good that he wills and does is not good. |
| 2. | If a man thinks pious thoughts and speaks pious words, and does not shun evils as sins, the pious things which he thinks and speaks are not pious. |
| 3. | If a man knows, and is wise in many things, and does not shun evils as sins, yet he is not wise. |
| IV. | So far as any one shuns evils as sins, he loves truths. |
| V. | So far as any one shuns evils as sins he has faith, and is spiritual. |
| VI. | The decalogue teaches what evils are sins. |
| VII. | Murders, adulteries, thefts, and false witness, of every kind, with the lust after them, are evils which are to be shunned as sins. |
| VIII. | So far as any one shuns murders, of every kind, as sins, he has love towards the neighbor. |
| IX. | So far as any one shuns adulteries of every kind as sins, he loves chastity. |
| X. | So far as any one shuns thefts of every kind as sins, he loves sincerity. |
| XI. | So far as any one shuns false witness of every kind as sin, he loves truth. |
| XII. | No one can shun evils as sins, so as inwardly to hold them in aversion, except by combats against them. |
| XIII. | Man ought to shun evils as sins, and fight against them, as from himself. |
| XIV. | If a man shuns evils for any other reason than because they are sins, he does not shun them, but only prevents their appearing before the eyes of the world. |
It seems unnecessary to enter further into the Doctor's affirmations and denials. When he proceeds to speak of "Disease and Its Cure," he speaks much more in harmony with the teachings of Swedenborg than with the idealism of his preceding pages. He says the cause and cure of disease are always spiritual, and operate by Correspondence.
"The cause and cure of disease are always mental. The apparent external causes of disease are emblems or correspondences of the real interior and spiritual causes. When the external is applied, it is really the internal which acts. Ipecac does not produce vomiting because men think it does, or because it has any vital property whatever, but because it corresponds to the sphere of disgust, loathing and rejection, which is spiritual vomiting."—Page 38.
He might have said that the "sphere of disgust, loathing and rejection " is its vital property by Correspondence. As was shown in the general doctrine, all poisonous things in nature are produced from corresponding principles in the hells. When ipecac, therefore, is introduced into the human system, the evil spirits who are in that principle to which it corresponds, communicate their sphere to mind in connection with the body and operate upon both mind and body.
"An evil sphere is a concrete atmosphere of falsities, as real as our terrestrial atmosphere, emanating from souls or spirits who are in evil conditions. A similar sphere emanates from every one of us, so far as we are in evil, and the whole race would be simultaneously plunged into sickness, insanity and death, if angels and good spirits were not adjoined to us, whose spheres of goodness and truth counteract the evil spheres, and hold us in the equilibrium of health and rationality."—Page 40.
The Doctor might have added that the angels and good spirits, inflowing into corresponding things in nature, operate by what we call natural laws, atmospheres, substances and forces external to the body, to keep intact this equilibrium of health, and to restore it when disturbed. The efficient causes are all spiritual, both for good and evil; but they operate both directly and indirectly, upon the mind and through corresponding things in nature; and thus through the mind into the body, and into nature and by reaction upon the body. As heaven conspires through the angels attendant upon man to keep the will in equilibrium, so all heaven conspires in and through its corresponding ultimates in nature to keep the body in equilibrium and health.
"Disease is a disturbance of that equilibrium, and all its phenomena are strictly representative of spiritual states and their variations. Germs, microbes, bacteria, etc., are always in the first place the products or effects of disease, the representative forms of the evil spheres. Being once produced, they may become carriers of the sphere and evoke it again into action in those persons in whom it is latent. Where the spheres are not latent, the earners will be absolutely innocuous."—Page 40.
The truth here is, that all disease-producing conditions originate in the spiritual world. Their cause is in hell; their active centres are evil spirits and societies; their corresponding forms in nature have no power to produce disease, only they are planes of influx for the producing spirits. When these natural correspondents of evils are introduced into the body, evil spirits infest these substances and operate upon the body to disorder its functions; and at the same time they communicate their sphere to the mind, and exciting its corresponding evil forms, whether hereditary or acquired, occasion mental disorders which again carry themselves down into the corresponding bodily organs and their functions. This is what the Doctor means, or should mean, in the saying that where the evil "spheres are not latent the carriers will be absolutely innocuous." The "evil spheres " can enter into perverted and disordered mental forms; and these by heredity belong to all, until they are by real regeneration corrected and re-formed. Of course those who are in actual sin are more susceptible to the sphere of evil spirts, and consequently to the diseases they induce through infectious germs and such like, which the Doctor happily calls "carriers of their sphere." But not always the evil suffer most from such causes, for they by their evil selfhood may for the time be more alert and observant of those ultimate laws of bodily order, which are the correspondents of heavenly order, and thus receive into their natural life that "common influx" which preserves their external in health and beauty. The main point here, however, is that diseases are in all cases caused by the operation of evil spirits, and that their operation is in and by means of spiritual conditions either of the mind's life or induced upon it. As Dr. Wilkinson says: "Wherever a swamp and putridity of circumstance lies, they are congenially attracted, and godly and godless folks are smitten if they dwell upon that region."
This is an answer, also, to the question, "Why are good people sick?" Dr. Holcombe says "the evil elements in so-called good people are only suppressed, not eradicated, and are ready to burst into activity as soon as the conditions are supplied;" and he names as one of the conditions, "false thinking." It is true even that with regenerating people, who look to the Lord alone and seek to shun evils as sins in their daily life, the great mass of their hereditary evils with their fears, lusts and cravings, hide behind their ignorances and fallacies and can only be dislodged by the truth, seen and asserted in the Lord's name. Few have the requisite knowledge of truth concerning themselves, and their relations to the Lord, and to the hells, and few could stand the test of fidelity to the naked truth upon these subjects, which could alone uncover and subdue the varieties of hereditary evil which lurk under our common notions and practices. Latent there, or in unjudged activity, each lust and craving "married to its own proper stupidity and imprudence, and embodied in life-long habits," these constitute a body of weakness, ignorance and disorder, into which the infernal spirits operate to "take away man's vital happiness, make his sleep sordid, and entering by intimate correspondence into his organs, debase their lives, and make their functions vicious and disorderly."
This is also an explanation of the effects of our anxieties, fears, and unbelieving flutter and fuss over unresisting and impressionable children. We surround them with a sphere of distrust and foreboding that invites and attracts the evil spirits who love to iuduce what we anticipate, and are thus able to possess their mortal brains and bodies. We therefore take them out of the care of their angelic guardians, and immerse them in evil spheres. This explains also why a calm, confident, trustful ministry from physician or nurse will restore the spiritual equilibrium, with manifest effects in the condition of the body and the equilibrium of its functions. It explains also the Doctor's assertion which presumably all will admit.
"Imagination, hope, expectations, magnetism, faith, mind, spontaneous recovery, have always been the most potent factors in every cure made by the medical profession, no matter what was the school or the theory of cure. The doctor's highest power is personal, social, magnetic, spiritual, not medicinal."
In turning now to examine some of Dr. Holcoinbe's suggestions in regard to the cure of disease, and to turn the light of the doctrine of Correspondence upon the whole problem, two quotations are offered as embodying such plain good sense, as to constitute a canon of criticism. The first is from an able article on "Psychopathy" by R. N. Foster, M. D.
"In all departments of organized being, conscious or unconscious alike, there is operative a constant connatus toward a harmonious state of being, a connatus, which incessantly and spontaneously, or voluntarily and intellectually, as the case may require, acts to supply all want, to ward off all danger and to repair all injuries."—Mind in Nature, Vol. 1, p 50.
This endeavor and effort in nature and in spirit is the influx and operation of the Divine love and wisdom in and according to the correspondence of all things with the Lord, and their harmony with each other; conspiring to universal order, and restraining and governing all disorder by corresponding opposites. The second quotation is in distinct acknowledgment of this Divine source and spiritual cause of all health and healing by the means of both mental and physical, and of both ordinary and unusual conditions. It is from the pen of the Rev. John Worcester, in the New Jerusalem Magazine for 1883, in an article full of valuable suggestions on "the use of poisonous drugs," and reads as follows:
"All healing power is from the Lord, just as much now as when He was visibly present, and just as much when medicines are used, as when He employed only the simple means of His touch. In a sense all healing is miraculous, because it is from the influence of the spiritual world into the natural, in the sense in which Swedenborg says: 'The things which appear in the three kingdoms of nature are produced by an influx from the spiritual into the natural world, and, considered in themselves are miracles, although on account of their familiar aspect and their annual recurrence, they do not appear as such.' Cures appear more miraculous when they depend merely upon changes of mental state, than when a medicine also is employed. But in reality one is just as miraculous as the other. The healing life in both cases is the Lord's life; and in both it is increased and preserved by the acknowledgment that it is His." (1883, p. 155.)
Keeping these two truths in mind, it is not only easy to see why, as the Doctor admits, all systems of cure "have done service to humanity," and that "they will continue to do so until the Lord comes," but also that He comes in and by means of them according to the laws of Divine order, which turn even evils to use and over-rule all disorder for good.
"Man as he lies stretched upon his pallet, is still both a soul and a body and he is subject to the influence of spiritual forces operating by correspondence into the distinct planes of the soul and of the body, to restore the equilibrium of the one and of the other, and of one to the other. The fact that diseases are spiritual in their origin, and that the efficient cause of cure is in the spiritual world, "is no hindrance to a man's being healed naturally, for the Divine Providence concurs with such means of healing."[11] In the process of repairing injury or maintaining the status of health, the means employed are varied according to the nature of the injury or the special demand of the condition given; and with these means spiritual forces concur in such wise as to adapt ourselves to the varying correspondence. "The brutes," says Dr. Wilkinson, "know better than to resign themselves to doing nothing under natural afflictions; they lick their sores, and seek their herbs; and the domestic animals bring their sorrows of this kind to man, and assume a kind of patience under the treatment he enjoins. We therefore reckon that any medical practice which has had a few precedents to correct it, is better than that profession of nothing, to which some of our brethren have directed their hopes. It is equally true that many cases would have recovered better by simply watching, and the application of a few obvious means mostly suggested by the patient's feelings, than where a large apparatus of drugs has been employed." Nevertheless, drugs, as well as the simpler alleviating means, have their use; and one of the uses assigned to them by Swedenborg is, "that they conduce to absorbing malignities, thus also to cures"[12] This is the key to the theory of cure which probably led the Doctor to write the following:
A paradox indeed the above must appear standing as it does unexplained; and it may be doubted whether there is not a fallacy lurking in this form of statement. But to those who have grasped the general doctrine of Correspondence the fundamental idea may be easily explained, and will throw some light upon the fact that Divine Providence does concur with both Allopathic and Homeopathic treatment, while yet all efficient causes of disease and cure are wholly spiritual.
Recall these truths: that all things in the three kingdoms of nature which are poisonous and hurtful to man are produced from hell; that like things are in the hells and flow forth by correspondence from the evils of those there; that evil spirits have thus by correspondence not only conjunction with such things in nature, but that their evils animate them and give to them their essential properties. Recall further, that all disease is produced by influx from the hells, either through man's active evils into his body, or into conditions therein existing from hereditary or imparted disorder; that certain drugs introduced into the human system do produce morbid states similar in their symptoms with those of disease, because evil spirits corresponding to them have in them a plane of influx through which they can operate.
Then it follows, that given any state of disease which is a correspondent and plane of influx for certain evil spirits, the introduction of a drug which carries with it opposite symptoms furnishes a plane of influx for spirits of an opposite nature; and in their conflict and opposition, equilibrium is restored. This is what the Doctor calls casting out evils by Beelzebub; and is described by Swedenborg as a common phenomenon of the hells, and a fundamental principle of government there.
If, on the other hand, in any given set of symptoms a drug be introduced which carries with it similar symptoms, it furnishes in the bodily organism a lower plane of influx for like spirits; and by the law of the life of the evil that they are congenially attracted and gravitate into their lowest corresponding ultimate, the drug "absorbs their malignities," and the system gathering up its forces by the law of resistance to disturbance rejects both drug and infestors. The Doctor might, however, have found a more pointed Scriptural illustration of this process, in the case of the demons obliged to leave the man, begging to be allowed to enter into the swine. Influx from heaven into corresponding functions of the body produces a resisting sphere even in sickness, and operates as a mandate upon infesting spirits as soon as a lower form to which they correspond is presented to them; for that they shall animate it when presented is the law of their life. The smaller the quantity of the drug, and the finer its state of subdivision the less resistance it offers to the connatus of living forces for its expulsion, after "malignities are absorbed."
This explanation is purely inferential; though it has long been accepted by many students of Swedenborg as a sufficient, or at least suggestive, answer to the question, How is it if all causes belong to the spiritual world that drugs do facilitate the removal of disease? When the science of Correspondence is better understood, this matter will become clearer; and we may hope that a "science of medicine" will take the place of empiricism. In the meantime the suggestion may stand as an attempted explanation of the fact that "Divine Providence concurs" with the use of herbs and simples to the cure of man's immediate distresses.
And what of mental states, imagination, hope, expectation, faith, and the direct production of such states by the influence of mind upon mind, which has been the physician's stronghold in all time, and in all schools of practice? "The Doctor's highest power is personal, social, magnetic, spiritual, not medicinal." Are there possibilities of useful development in this power? Dr. Holcombe defines three forms of this influence.
"It is Mind-Cure when one person of strong will and magnetic power, operates by thought-transference from a positive standpoint, upon the mind and nervous system of a patient made negative by sickness, fear, ignorance or debility. By a species of mental induction, he produces a new state of thought, which through the correlation of the nervons system brings about a condition of health. It is a species of mesmerism."—Page 43.
This is what we are all the time doing, one for another, or one against the other,—namely, producing "by a species of mental induction a new state of thought," thus calling forth new states of the will and its affections, and an altered flow and endeavor of all the human forces. "The human world is full of powers in a state of balance and indifference; change the posture of anything therein and the whole has to re-adjust itself to a new balance,—a rush of forces takes place, and currents pass to and fro until the equilibrium is recovered." "The moral and physical are both under this statical law." Hourly and momentarily, by touch, by sphere, by speech, by simple thought, human beings are thus affecting and moving one another, consciously, or unconsciously, for good or ill. The power of one will and mind over another, by the use of thoughts manifested in words, looks or acts, directed to the judgment and understanding, or to the feelings of fear, ambition or hope, is the common fact of all social contact. Why should it not be exerted then for the useful ends of healing? "If ever it has been good to be under a course of murcury" asks Dr. Wilkinson, "shall it not be better still to be under a course of humanity?" The sphere of a sound, believing, use-loving person directed to the mind of a sick, ignorant, fearful, discouraged one, is simply a direct application of human forces, changing the states of the mind, the whole adjustment of spheres, and thus the influx and movement of forces according to the correspondence of mind and body. Every good man is required by the "law of love," to carry about with him a sphere of trust, courage, and determination to all things orderly and useful; and to will his "goodwill toward men" not only in general but in particular, and with regard to the individual states of those to whom he can be useful so far as he can know them. Why should not this power of mind over mind, which belongs to the obligations of neighborly love, be studied and practiced on the same grounds, that make any of the more remote and indirect means of alleviating physical suffering allowable?
Mesmerism, as the control of the will of the patient, voluntarily yielded or compelled, is indeed capable of abuse in many ways. Ill-disposed persons may use it to acquire an influence for bad ends. It may be abused by patients by being resorted to as a kind of opiate to compensate for want of moral determination. But these possible abuses are not reasons against its use as a curative agent by suitable persons in indicated cases, any more than the possible abuse of opiates and stimulants preclude their use. The danger should be clearly understood, and all "must know that there is no patent outward means that can be a substitute for sanity of will; that sooner or later they must exert themselves, and waken from their delusions, and that every dose of their mesmeric opium over and above what was required, is a vehicle of weakness which will cost them a fresh struggle to conquer, whenever the time when they must arise shall come." The normal exercise of mind upon mind, of the healthy will and thought upon the morbid, but still consciously responsive will and intellect of the patient, is not open to the same dangers, nor need it therefore be so strictly confined to professional practitioners.
It may be said in general, that the more immediately spiritual the means used for relieving abnormal conditions, the more directly they are exerted upon the mind of the patient, the greater the possibilities of injury to the mind while relieving the body. Errors may be impressed, superstitions confirmed, false persuasions and insanities induced and fixed, by the very manifold processes of mental induction which through change of spheres and alteration of the flow of human forces into the body enables it to recover its equilibrium of function. But diseases are constantly being induced in the same way through the unconscious influence of one mind upon another, and its appeal to selfish affections and their congenial stupidities and errors and falsities. The presence of such mental powers and the fact of their unconscious transference, simply calls for a science of mind-cure and a conscious and intelligent application of the same powers to the healing of the sick.
This science of mind-cure so far as it is attained at all, will be obliged to light its lamp with the doctrine of Correspondences; because it reveals the law of the relation of states of mind to their symptomatic manifestations in the mind and in the body; and because it involves also those Laws of Order, which are the laws of Divine Providence, and reveal what by the will of God and in the nature of truth and goodness man may do for fellow-man, and what must be left for man to do for himself in freedom according to reason.
One thing a man cannot do for his fellow-man is to regenerate him; he can only lead him by instruction to co-operate by his own will and endeavor with the laws of regeneration; one man cannot repent of sin for another; he can only help him to see the sin in the light of its consequences, and the Lord's will with respect to it. But one may surround another with a sphere of intelligent desire for his repentance, reformation and regeneration, while leading him in freedom; one may exert such powers of will and of thought upon another as will counteract his bondage to disorderly conditions, his ignorance or fantasy, and restore him to freedom to exert his will and think sanely; much more then, surely, may one by the sum of his influence exerted upon the imagination, hopes, intelligence and ambitions of the sick person, labor to induce a "sound mind in a sound body," which is itself the very fundamental condition of that freedom and rationality which is the primary object of divine care. The great obstacles to progress in this humane work are ignorance of the nature and laws of the mind on all hands; and, on the part of many well-meaning aspirants to mind-cure, ignorance of the body and its laws; while on the part of professional physicians, whose knowledge of the human organism should specially qualify them and inspire them for this study, there is the bondage of tradition and weight of materialism. One thing may be affirmed, namely: That those who aspire to the study of mind and its correspondence with the body, must be students also of the bodily organism; and those who would practice from a love of use to men, the art of mental healing, should approach it through a study of mind and body, and add to the most complete physiology attainable the psychology revealed for the New Jerusalem. Approached by such avenues of preparation it will probably be found that most pathological conditions, and even physical changes of structure, "are only organic insanities or spells which only require the right word of the physician to dissipate them; and that, although if they went on they would kill by their virulence, yet are they amenable by a simple impression from without," that is, from an outside personality as the centre of a re-adjustment of spheres. Meanwhile, "next to the self control of the patient, which is the top of mortal medicines, we may reckon the mental control of the doctor, who makes use of his own health and knowledge to give faith in the moments when it can be received."
The so-called "faith-cure" demands treatment as distinct from "mind-cure." In this, prayer is the agency by which a new sphere is created, and this sphere is often strengthened by a cordon of prayers. Dr. Holcombe says of it:
"Faith-Cure is effected by an exalted state of the mind, in which hope, expectation and imagination are the chief factors. That it is a mental cure and not a truth cure, or a Divine cure, is evident from the fact, that cures of this description have been made in all ages and countries and among devotees of every and any religion. The cures are sometimes very extraordinary."—Page 43.
If the healing of the body can be brought about through the states of the mind, prayer as one of the means which powerfully effect the states of mind, must be regarded as a means for accomplishing such result. As practiced by the "faith-healers" it is usually grounded in an utterly false and pernicious notion of the use of prayer, and induces states of enthusiastic persuasion which invite insane and deceiving spirits, whose sphere, if it dislodge the evil spirits flowing into the diseased parts, induces a far more serious disease of the mind. The notion is that the Lord has promised to answer the prayer of faith, and that if we are only firmly persuaded that He will do a certain thing, He is pledged to do it. Accordingly, all arts are used to induce this confidence in the patient and in all present, creating thus a consensus of spheres, and a powerful persuasion that the Lord will presently answer. Such a set of conditions connot fail to invite enthusiastic spirits, and they, by the very delight of their life, inject insanities, pervert the truths of the Word, and perform magical miracles with them. There are spirits in the other life who by the knowledge of truths, and by the power of truths in the ultimates of the Word, induce changes of state in others, lifting them into enthusiastic imaginations, bringing them into new relations, and subjecting them to their power for infernal ends. The faith that they induce is a mere persuasion, and the truths of the Word which they recall are merely for confirmation of falsities and the securing to themselves power over the spirits of men thereby. An intrepretation of the Lord's words, "whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing ye shall receive," as meaning that He will give whatever we have undoubting confidence in asking, and that He will directly interpose to heal those who ask Him in humility and confidence, and prove their confidence by persistent importunity, is a direct invitation to such spirits. Healing of the body may follow, at least a change of its state which passes for healing; but the mind is held in the power of such spirits and the blind lead the blind, till the last case is worse than the first. The chemical laboratory is rather to be preferred, than such faith and prayer.
But there is a true faith directed to the Lord Jesus Christ as the God of heaven and earth, which is an internal acknowledgment that His will is good-will to men; that He operates His will according to the laws of Divine order revealed in His Word and its doctrine; that the divine order of His goverment conspires to health and usefulness, and the removal of all obstructions to these consistent with man's spiritual welfare. It is in harmony with this faith to feel that health is a good thing which the Lord has abundantly showed His will and power to give, with the prayer that we may come into a state to receive it. Such faith causes the Lord to be present, and when there is in it the love of Him and of having His will done, the love conjoins. Such acknowledgment of faith, and prayer to the Lord in such faith, moves heaven and disposes the soul, and affects the world of spirits, and increases the power of all orderly means of healing, both mental and physical.
It comes to this then in regard to faith and the prayer of faith as agents in healing, that there is a true and spurious faith and a right and wrong kind of prayer; that so far forth as inducing states of mind and thence of body are concerned, either may contribute to the effect of relief from bodily ills, and the spurious sometimes more quickly and manifestly than the true; but that healing secured by a false faith and selfish prayer is at the expense of a spiritual bondage which is worse than sickness. But this is a warning and appeal in behalf of a true faith and a right prayer as against what is false and wrong, not against the place and value of such means in the healing of the sick. In general it may be said, that a true faith always involves the acknowledgment that the Lord's ends are eternal, and that we do not know what temporary states and circumstances may be best for us; and the spirit of its prayer, whatever the petition, is always "not my will but thine be done."
In this spirit and acknowledgment, prayer for health and restoration to active usefulness may be offered for one's self, or for others; and it is impossible to overestimate its possible effect. It is an active agent in a spiritual world where space is an appearance, where thought brings presence, where love conjoins, and good-will is felt. Directed to the Lord Jesus Christ, as the visible God in whom is the invisible, it penetrates heaven; carrying the case of another in love and thought to Him, it brings that other into the sphere of faith in which it is offered; it affects all in the spiritual world within this circle of personality—the spirits about us and about the person who is the subject of our desire and thought. Swedenborg tells us that "supplication, although tacit, with those who supplicate from the heart, is heard as a cry in heaven. This is the case when such only think, much more when they groan from a sincere heart." Think, then, of all the influences of goodwill, enlightenment, power and healing, waiting in heaven to flow down through the world of spirits to man, by every way that opens. The source is inexhaustible. The impulse is continually towards us. The flow is measured only by the truth, the sincerity, the spirituality of man's desire. Into that fountain of influences true prayer ascends as a cry. It is heard as such, felt as such, responded to as such. We do not know how many ways of influx it may open, nor how powerfully they may affect all our spiritual associates, including those who are present in our desire and thought. We only know that if offered in acknowledgment and submission to the Divine will it is in harmony with Divine order; and that the revealed laws of spiritual association and influx are manifold, including ourselves and all whom we can pray for; and that the movements of these laws are exact, and the atmosphere in which they operate is more quick and alive than that electric fluid, which, every time you make connection by the faintest impulse at any point, reports the tick at every station in a circuit of a thousand miles.
The question, therefore, is not as to the influence of mind upon the body, nor of the effect of one mind upon another as a means of reaching and affecting bodily disease, nor as to the efficacy of prayer as a means in this change and re-adjustment of mental and thus of bodily states; but only as to the orderly use of these means, which, we affirm, can only be learned in its fullness from the laws of Correspondence and the principles of theology now opened to the church from the Word, and by means of "things heard and seen" by the servant of the Lord chosen and prepared for this very purpose. We turn now to consider, finally, in the light of these revelations the claims of Christian Science as set forth by Dr. Holcombe:
"The Christian Science cure is not an answer to the prayer of faith, nor is it only the operation of mind upon mind. It is the operation of absolute or divine truth upon the individual mind. It recognizes truth as a spiritual force to be called into activity, as any other latent force is evoked, by suitable conditions. It is based upon the idealistic interpretation of nature and the omnipresence and immanence of the divine life. Its motto is, God is the only life; Spirit is the only substance; Love working by Truth is the only law."—Page 43.
There is something attractive in this form of statement to a disciple of Swedenborg who only thinks in general ideas; for being accustomed to the thought of the supremacy of the spiritual over the natural, and of the Lord as the only life, and of His goodness and truth as the verimost substance and form, such a statement seems to be in general agreement with the truth. But the agreement disappears when it is analyzed as to the particulars involved.
What is this "absolute divine truth" which operates upon the individual mind? Is it the truth which God is,—the Word, which is God? Then Swedenborg affirms and shows that it does not operate upon any individual without a medium. "It is a law of Divine Providence that man should be led and taught by the Lord from heaven through the Word and doctrine and preaching from it, and this in all appearance as by himself."[13] The Word is such a medium of divine truth to man and of its power with him, because it is written in Correspondences, and while man reads it in its letter the angels of heaven perceive the spiritual sense of what is read, and man is thus brought according to his willingness to be instructed and led by the Lord within the sphere of divine truth as it is with the angels of heaven.
But the Lord thus leads him by correspondence and influx "according to the truths that are with him, and does not immediately infuse new ones."
What, then, is meant by "the absolute truth?" If it be said the truth of the Word is meant, and the Doctor at least does probably mean this, then it is answered that according to Swedenborg the truth of the Word is not absolute truth but accommodated truth. It is in the letter accommodated to all sorts and conditions of men, and "is not understood without doctrine;" in the spiritual sense truth is accommodated to the angels of heaven, and to the apprehension of instructed and spiritually minded men. But even to the angels truth is clothed in appearances, and is absolute only with God.
If it be said that "absolute" is not used in this technical sense, but only as equivalent to genuine truth and as distinguished from falsity and sensuous fallacy, then we have to inquire whether or not Christian Science has any knowledge of genuine truths. The fact that "people have been cured of longstanding diseases which have resisted all forms of medication" counts for nothing in this inquiry; for any mental persuasion may effect this, and, as we have said, a false persuasion may be more immediately effective than the truth, because stronger in appeal to hope and ambition. What are the truths upon which Christian Science relies?
"The omnipresence of God, his perpetual immanence in the soul, the power of truth and of faith, the force of ideas, the curative efficacy of thought, the ubiquity of mind—the silent transference of thought regardless of time and space, the supremacy of the spiritual over the natural, of the real over the apparent; these are the factors of Christian Science. Disprove them and it perishes. It stands or falls with these eternal verities."
The central inquiry here is as to the idea of God. Swedenborg says "thought concerning God as Man, in whom is the Divine Trinity, opens heaven; on the other hand, thought concerning God as not Man, which is presented apparently as a cloud or as nature in her smallest principles, closes heaven; for God is Man as the universal heaven in its complex is a man, and every angel and spirit is thence a man. Therefore it is that thoughts alone concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, as being the God of the universe opens heaven.[14] There is one unvarying teaching in Swedenborg's writings—"that the idea of God in heaven is the Lord;" that the only true idea possible to man is that of a Divine Man; that the "idea of an invisible God is no idea, and is not separable from the thought of the principles and forces of nature, and cannot communicate with heaven and the Lord, but falls back upon itself and perishes. Contrast with this the teaching of any and every work on Christian Science that you can find, and you will see that its "absolute truth" concerning God is just this which Swedenborg declares to be no truth, and which he says every naturalist and denier of God shows himself in the spiritual world to have confirmed in his life on earth. The idea of God with which Christian Science expects to "renovate the spiritual character as surely as it remodels the physical system," is the thought of a universal Spirit, proceeding from no Divine Person, and omnipresent by virtue of its ideal presence as the central and pervading life of all persons and all things. All its reasonings play hide-and-seek around two notions: God as the spirit in man; and man as the thought and manifestation of God. This, then, measured by the doctrine revealed for the use of those who will be of the New Church, will not answer as the absolute or genuine truth; and in the light of Swedenborg's revelations of the future life, a man would refuse such medicine at any price.
Other factors of Christian Science are "the power of truth and of faith, the force of ideas, the curative efficacy of thought, the ubiquity of mind." The power is not denied; but the power for good, that is permanent spiritual good, will depend upon the quality of the faith, ideas, thought. Is it the truth of the spiritual sense of the Word that is to exercise this beneficent power? If so, is it discerned by the Christian Scientist interpreting the Scriptures by a few Correspondences and many more preconceived notions? Any one who knows anything about it, will not mistake the fanciful speculations that are offered as the spiritual sense of the Word for the genuine truth. Swedenborg says that hereafter none will be permitted, even by a knowledge of Correspondences, to enter into the spiritual sense, except they be principled in genuine doctrine, lest it be profaned. Are these genuine doctrines known to Christian Scientists? Dr. Holcombe will scarcely claim that they are; and it has been shown that a great many notions to which he seems to lend his sanction are directly contrary to the genuine truths revealed by the Lord through His servant, Swedenborg.
But granting that genuine truths are known and acknowledged in their divine rational authority, we have still to inquire whether the principle on which Christian Science claims to work with them is a valid one.
"Whoever can plant the absolute truth in the center of the human soul has a lever which can move, unconsciously to the individual, the will, the understanding, the imagination, the sensations, the brain, the heart, the lungs, the blood; and can determine the chemical or nutritive interchanges and metamorphoses of every molecule of the body.
Hence it is that divine truth renovates the spiritual character as surely as it remodels the physical system. It works from center to circumferences."—Page 47.
Can absolute or genuine truth, being known be planted at the center of a human soul "unconsciously to the individual?" Not by any human being; not at all in any other sense than that it is present from the Lord in the inmost—always and to eternity; and in the internal heavenly mind in the form of "remains," waiting to be consciously accepted by the individual acting in freedom according to the truths "of which his understanding is composed." The internal has no power to come forth except as the individual learns truths from the Word and consciously and freely determines his life according to them. If truth in the internal could work these wonders that the Doctor enumerates, the angels who are already associated with men and touching these spiritual "remains," would work them for all men without help from man. But, on the contrary, Swedenborg shows throughout, and by every fact and reason of Divine Providence, "that the Lord does not without the use of means, teach man truths either from himself, or through the angels; but by means derived from the Word, from preaching and reading, from conversation and intercourse with others, and from private reflections arising out of them; and man is then enlightened according to his affections grounded in use, otherwise he would not act as if from himself,[15] The only way, therefore, in which one can plant genuine truths in a human soul is by instruction and appeal to his affection and the conscious determinations of his own will and life. It is "to teach truth and lead by truth to good," not blindly, but as one leads another through his understanding.
Another fallacy in this principle of "truth-cure" as it is called, is that divine truth "works from center to circumferences." It leads to the supposition that if implanted in the center of the soul, or awakened there, it will work from within out, secretly and even "unconsciously" to the individual. The Doctor ought to know that the whole doctrine of Correspondence and Influx is against this notion. It is a law of divine order "that the Lord acts from inmosts and from ultimates at the same time, because only thus are all things held together in connection." It is shown by Swedenborg throughout that the operation of divine and spiritual forces is simultaneously from centre and circumference to order intermediates; not therefore by virtue of interior will and thought without outward obedience, much less by influx without instruction in truths, is man healed as to his spiritual character. Any secret influence exerted "unconsciously to the individual" if it were allowed, would only be an obsession of his will, which no angel would attempt, which evil spirits dare not, and which men ought not to practice.
A true Christian Science will assert the cause of all disease as spiritual; but it will not ignore its organic and functional effects in the disordered forms it induces in the spirit first, and thence by correspondence in the body. It will rightly refer the root and origin of all that afflicts man in mind, body or estate, to man's evil will and way; but it will not ignore its actual reality and infernal contagion until arrested and removed by repentance and regeneration, involving man's final judgment and promotion to his own place and perfect environment in a spiritual world made and governed to that end. It will rightly assert the omnipotence of the Redeemer over all manner of sin and sickness; but it will not ignore the laws of divine Providence by which the Great Physician ever works through man's free will and co-operation, and this by organic processes and for eternal ends.[16]
The one legitimate end and effort for man is to come into divine order, by an observance of all revealed laws, spiritual and natural. The possibility and the obligations of such a life of order are greatly increased by the revelations of the laws of Divine Providence and of the spiritual world, and of man's nature and relation to that world. As these revelations are studied and understood we may expect the doctrine of regeneration to shed its light upon the intercourse between the soul and the body, and to inaugurate for men a science of health and healing. The science of Correspondence, which Swedenborg calls "the science of sciences," when studied in the acknowledgment of the doctrines of spiritual life and in connection with physiology will prove to be the "key" to a new medicine as it is the lamp of a new life. It has been my hope to win some minds to the study of this better way, and to steady some who are already trying to walk in it, and who are sometimes deceived by side lights which are only the ignis fatui of naturalism, miscalled idealism.
While the principles of a true Christian Science of mental and bodily health are being studied from the facts and doctrines of the revelation made through Swedenborg, they will not go far astray who remember religion is of life, and that our chief concern is to live the principles of true religion as revealed in the Word and its doctrine, trusting the Lord as our Heavenly Father, who will lead us and teach us, and as an Almighty Redeemer who, if we "continue in His Word," will deliver us by His truth. When man will thus look to the Lord and do what He teaches, living in the reality and power of spiritual things; concerned only that evils should be brought to light that they may be repented of and put away, trusting the Lord to overrule all things for good to them that love Him, then all things will work together to bring his life into order; one thing with another, and all together with a view to the harmonious whole in heaven, which is the divine end in the making of us. The more simply and trustfully any one is in this life, the more he will regard disease as a disorder and a manifestation of evils, and the more he will rise above it, not by denying it, but by seeking only to know and do the Lord's will, and to come into obedience to the laws of spiritual and bodily health, and the more he will enjoy inward tranquillity and peace. They are right, therefore, who assert the supremacy of the spiritual life; for so far as we come into that orderly life of the spirit, which is regeneration, we are protected from the sphere of evil spirits, brought within the sphere of angelic association, and into the stream of that divine influx and operation which worts all things for eternal ends. This spiritual state lifts from the body at once the chief cause of its ills and makes way for happy usefulness day by day in the circumstances which are the best possible preparation for our entrance into the soul's own world in its own body; a body which is fashioned in the image of the soul's ruling love, and is free in a world where to think is to see, where to wish is to have, where to will and purpose is to be and do. "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God!"
- ↑ Divine Providence, n. 157.
- ↑ See Dr. Burnham in N. C. Messenger, Vol. 27, pp. 291, 303.
- ↑ Divine Wisdom in Apoc. Exp. II. and VIII.
- ↑ Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 394.
- ↑ Divine Wisdom, Apoc. Exp. V.
- ↑ See Wilkinson's Greater Organs and Issues, etc., p 278.
- ↑ Athanasian Creed, n. 43.
- ↑ Heavenly Doctrine Nos. 159-164.
- ↑ Arcana Cœlestia, n. 1573.
- ↑ True Christian Religion, n. 124.
- ↑ Arcana Cœlestia. n. 5713.
- ↑ Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 336.
- ↑ Divine Providence, n. 154.
- ↑ Athanasian Creed, n. 6.
- ↑ Athanasian Creed, n. 67.
- ↑ The New Birth, p. 122.