Society the Redeemed Form of Man

The struggle is inherent in man's creatureship 20 His spiritual creation exacts his previous natural formation 22 To what creative excellency is this exaction owing ? 24 LETTER III. The meaning of Infinite Love 26 It means, freedom from self-love, and hence stamps self-love unreal 28 Inferiority of science to philosophy as an intellectual culture 30 Man unreal in se, and made real only by natural redemption 32 Primacy of the heart in belief 3i LETTER IV. Divine truth has first to create the intelligence it afterwards en lightens 35 Its force purely regenerative 33 Persistent Judaism of the Church 39 "Professional" religion the true Antichrist 40 Ritualism, revivalism, radicalism 42 IV CONTEXTS. LETTER V. Sudden demoralization of the writer 43 Almost complete moral imbecility 46 Charm of English landscape 47 Growing delight in nature, and disgust with oneself 48 A friend's account of Swedeuborg 50 I am much interested 51 I resolve to read him 52 LETTER VI.

therefore admits no witness but that of life or consciousness 100 LETTER XI. Objection to miracle 104 Miracle is bad science, but very good philosophy 106 My own intellectual attitude towards miracle 112 Infirmity of the critical or sceptical understanding 118 Swedeuborg an out-and-out realist 124 LETTEE XII. Creation a spontaneous work 125 Nature unreal and impersonal 127 It is a functioning of Divine Love towards our spiritual manhood 130 The educative use of our natural experience 132 Genesis of this absurd cosmological " Nothing " 134 Creation as a letter an immense fallacy 136 Creation has no locus in, quo but the human consciousness 138 Its sole and total method : Redemption 140 LETTER XIII. God the sole subject in creation, man the sole object 141 Creation only a philosophic name for our natural redemption . . . 144 What do we mean by the term Nature ? 146 Nature a strictly subjective, or metaphysical existence 148 Concrete uses of the word 150

Creation essentially miraculous 194 LETTER XVI. Our selfish and worldly loves made evil by the influence of proprium 195 The excess of them even not hateful to God, because he utilizes it in the hells 198 The only intolerable evil to God is proprium, selfhood, or self- righteousness 200 Tor this is spiritual or living evil ; and fatal, if allowed, to the human race 201 The church alone produces this desperate evil in men 204 Conscience the evidence of an infinite and a finite struggle in our nature 206 The church a mere rudimentary exponent of conscience 208 Change of plan 210 LETTER XVII. Laws of the spiritual creation 211 Spiritual creation inert without the creature's natural constitution 214 CONTENTS. vii I indication of nature in creation gives it all its interest to the heart 218 Spiritual creation interpreted by the doctrine of evolution 220 Difference between the philosophic aud the scientific idea of it 222

Evolution relatively a spiritual flower ; involution its natural stem 224 Science essentially ministerial, not magisterial to the mind 226 Nature neither begins nor ends anything 228 LETTEE XVIII. The forte and foible of science 229 Nature's first lesson to the intellect 231 Difference between physical and natural existence 232 The philosopher has no call to look at nature outwardly 234 Science has no perception of the spiritual ends of nature, and therefore confounds nature with physics 236 It claims that natural existence is identical with spiritual being . . . 240 Professor Huxley as a philosopher 242 "What protoplasm symbolizes to the intellect 244 Physicism a providential gospel 246 LETTER XIX. Swedenborg's philosophy of nature 247 Good and evil the mere earth of the finite consciousness 250 Heaven and hell have only a subjective truth 252 Subjective genesis of hell in man 254 Hell is always heaven to the evil man but when he is forced not to do evil 256

out so decrepid a doctrine of the Divine name, and our Unitarian or rationalistic pulpits in their turn reply to it in so scant and penurious a strain, that the common mind has grown altogether tired of the senseless jangle, and prefers to take its very unexacting religion and philosophy at the hands of a poet, and that too a pantheistic one. But you don't belong to the common or scientific crowd of men, shut up like so many gregarious sheep to the pens of sense. You are a person first of all of sincere, original thought, taking nothing on trust from other men, despising the servile limits of sensuous obser vation by which their intellect is bound, and think ing out your own conclusions according to the free range of sympathy and intelligence God has given you. And you accordingly can never permanently consent to sell your Divine birthright of freedom, for the paltry mess of pottage these respectable senti mentalists offer you under the name of " destiny." Besides, so active an intellect as yours ought by this time to know that we can have no positive but only a negative action upon this destined life of our race, because our race interests belong exclusively to God, and He is absolute over them. We have no power to promote our race destiny, but by our spiritual regeneration. Every man who becomes regenerate ly abstaining from the commission of evils, in virtue

of their own, and so disqualify science. But because miracle is disowned by science as an answer to her physical interrogations, we are not justified, nor ever shall be, in excluding it from philosophic recognition, as in truth the most efficient factor in the history of human nature. For philosophy unlike science has no interest in physics as a literal fact, but only as a spirit ual symbol, and is no way disconcerted therefore when you deny miracle a place and function in physical order. She has never been disposed to assign it such place and function, but on the contrary has expressly relegated it to spiritual or metaphysical uses. No man of philosophic genius, that is, no lover of truth for truth's own sake, has ever dreamt of finding a place or function for miracle in reference to physics, or the fixed statics of the mind, and has allowed it at most in reference to history, or its living dynamics and outcome. Every such man unfeignedly reverences miracle under this reserve, because in the long spir itual night of the mind when all knowledge of Divine things was obscured under the pall of men's mental and material penury, it alone shone as a feeble but prophetic day-star from on high to lift men's faith and hope out of an every way lifeless and ignominious present, and fix them on a living and radiant future big with God's unimaginable mercy. Thus miracle has always spoken to the free or spontaneous mind of

descendants of the church, thus styled Adam or Man, as inclining to selfhood: that is, desiring to become instead of an internal man an external one. But he does not fail to characterize this change of genius in it, though relatively unfortunate of course, since everything deteriorates in proportion as it becomes remote from its source, yet as by no means absolutely so; inasmuch as selfhood, though regarded in itself or absolutely it is unmixed evil, is yet the indis pensable condition of man's natural development, or race-evolution, and consequently of that redemptive achievement in our nature which constitutes God's true or eternal spiritual glory in creation. This rising inclination to selfhood is the inevitable dawn of the natural or race-mind in us, and as such of course is noway evil, though viewed apart from that subordination it is the fountain of all the evil known to the universe. We don't get angry with the infant, although we feel bound in the interests of his own maturity to correct him, when we see him instinc tively exhibiting the traits of his future natural man hood; on the contrary we are secretly diverted by his arch and graceful ways of self-assertion, because as yet they are full of innocence or innocuous. Ex actly so we may say there is no ground for moral disapprobation in these nascent or unconscious ego tistic inclinations on the part of the early church,

Protoplasm means intellectual chaos ; means the resolution of the existing cosmos into absolute form lessness or disorder. That is to say : you cannot arrive at protoplasm experimentally or livingly, ex cept by disowning our present cosmical form and order, except by eliminating all that you organically are, with all that is contingent upon your organiza tion, namely : all your experience of life and con sciousness, every fact of appetite and emotion, of reason and imagination, of passion and action, every thing, in short, that constitutes you a living person and so stamps you of the slightest moment to phi losophy. Protoplasm, in truth, as an intellectual symbol, means the extinguishing of the soul or life or being of things, and the permission of mere bodily existence to them, without any source either for them to exist, or go forth, from, but what is essentially in ferior to themselves. For no one will pretend that TO THE INTELLECT. 245

God's spiritual perfection ! To think hereupon what a stupid dreary thing the human soul is reduced to after it has undergone scientific manipulation, and been run into a mere pruritus of the senses ! Ham let the play with Hamlet the person left out is noth ing in comparison. The melancholy thing in this case is — not that one's bread of life becomes mere unleavened dough, for one can exist well enough, if bare existence contents him, on unleavened bread ; but that any considerable number of men should be so lacking in the sentiment of infinitude within their proper nature, as willingly to make sense, in which all animals are superior to them, the sovereign arbiter of truth in intellectual things ! I beg however that you will not think that it seems to me vitally important in what sense the existing battle between religious faith and science is settled. Neither party is contending for the interests of the living God, so spiritually active at present within the precincts of human nature, but only and at best for those of some traditional deity now deceased; the deity, for example, of orthodox ecclesiastical culture. The worship of this time-and-space deity at this day, and especially in this land, where human nature is vindicating with startling emphasis and iteration its immaculate Divine dignity against all manner of finite private or personal pretension in men, seems to me a