The Secret of Swedenborg

prejudices. You both alike maintain in truth, whatever you may do in fact, that nature is the hmit, not the starting-point, of creation ; that it is the controlhng end, not the servile means or pliant method, of the creative power: the consequence being that you, ]\[r. Mansel, from your point of view, have no occasion for a god who is not the jealous and implacable rival of nature ; nor you, Mr. INlill, from your point of view, any occasion for one who is not its unlimited servant, its idle and abject tool." The regeneration, then, which Swedenborg's spiritual dis- closures bring to faith and to science quite equally consists in a totally new conception of the creative power, whereby, on the one hand, nature, or the cosmos, is turned from an objective into a subjective work of God, which alone it is ; and man, on the other hand, is turned from a subjective work of God, which he is not, into an objective work, which alone he truly is.