set about an agitation to this effect, and accomplished it to some extent. What has been the result? Is the state of Christendom any better now than it was before? I admit that it exhibits an increase in piety of course; but what I ask is this, has its increase in piety produced any proportionate increase of human prosperity? Is the general life of man in Christendom one whit less miserable, one whit more elevated on that account? Every candid observer must answer in the negative. For it is the peculiarity of what is called "evangelical religion," to deaden men's sympathies for the actual and present ills of humanity, in favor of their possible future ills; and so to neutralize much of the energy which would otherwise have been available for the mitigation of human suffering. I joyfully acknowledge that the human mind has received an impulse of elevation within the last century, to which we find no parallel in the past. But what I affirm is, that the "evangelical" movement in the church is in no manner entitled to the credit of this achievement. It has always been hostile to it. For so far as its influence has extended, it has had the unhappy effect of disturbing the true rationality of the human mind, and so of withering its beneficent action. It has taught its subjects to regard God as the true author of calamity, and to spend their whole lives in deprecating his wrath and vengeance. It has taught them to regard nature as an unprogressive field, accursed by the arbitrary fiat of God, to be softened by no tears, to be enriched by no toil of its victims. It is essentially antisocial. It cares only for its own soul. The ameliorating progress of science accordingly in late years has met with nothing but obstruction from the progress of so called "evangelical religion." They are in fact the antagonist influences of the day.

Swedenborg was bound to reject piety therefore as the allsufficient remedy for the evils of Christendom. Still less sympathy, if that were possible, had he with the Romish error, now becoming English also, of the church being constituted by the Word and its sacraments. "The Church of God", he every where affirms, "is A MAN" in all the height and breadth of that much-abused word. Whosoever is internally a

man, by the conscientious rejection of evils from the life, is a church in its least, and therefore its purest form. And the church universal is a church, only because it is made up of veritable men. (6 The Lord's kingdom in the earths, says he, consists of all those who are principled in good, and who, though dispersed throughout the whole orb of earths, are still one, and as members constitute one body. Such is the Lord's kingdom in the heavens; there the universal heaven resembles one man, who is therefore called (maximus homo) THE CHIEF MAN." Whatsoever there be then of purity in human affection, of truth in human intellect, of beauty or beneficence in human action, these, according to Swedenborg, and a greater than Swedenborg, constitute the Church of God on earth. Men may inherit very various theologies, but charity in the life melts and fuses all these varieties into indistinguishable unity. Thus the church stands utterly aloof from persons and places. It disdains the generation of space and time. It is the marriage of Goodness and Truth in the human soul, and it becomes visible only in the legitimate offspring of such marriage, which are just or benevolent actions.

If the foregoing sketch be true to fact, as I think you must admit it to be, you will readily see how widely your idea of the church, as exhibited in your practice, differs from that of the new, or universal church. You are in fact only a new sect, with no organic difference from the old sects, save in your acknowledgment of Swedenborg's writings. You profess to believe in the same Lord now that you did before you ever heard the name of Swedenborg; the same Lord whom every christian sect professes to believe in just as truly, though not so intelligently, as your own. "Ah!" say you, "these sects merely acknowledge him outwardly, whereas we." Indeed you may well pause there. The inward acknowledgment of the Lord is not a theme for boasting. It involves I conceive something more than a belief in Swedenborg. It involves something more than any degree of light in the understanding. It certainly involves a state of heart totally alien to the unchurching of every sect but our own. Watch well your footsteps here. I lately had occasion to find a friend of yours, sensible man as he

is on all ordinary topics, a dupe of the shallowest sophistry on this. He talked of your body making an internal acknowledgment of the truths of the Word. But on questioning his assurance on this point, it turned out that he only meant to say that they made an acknowledgment of the internal truths of the Word. He had used the words so often and so heedlessly, that the "internal acknowledgment" of the truths, and the acknowledgment of the "internal truths," had come to stand for the same idea. You will admit that a man may make a very zealous acknowledgment of the internal word, and yet be very far from its "internal acknowledgment." If your people as a body are in both acknowledgments, why truly you are a happy people, and the more averse should you be to claim a monopoly of the distinction. But the supposition is absurd. Like all other sects professing the name of Christ, each with a vital difference, as it conceives, from every other, you have doubtless much that is good among you, and much that is evil. And yet for my own part I am free to confess that you appear to me to be free, as a sect, from many of the weaknesses which beset the others. While some of these bodies are occupying themselves with purely ecclesiastical extension, and compassing sea and land to make one proselyte; and others are pilfering the Romish church of its festivals and fasts, to make them grotesque and contemptible by a purely wilful observance ; and others still are fulminating the gravest anathemas against whist, dancing and the drama'; you in many respects are busy with questions of vital morality, on whose right adjustment the Providential destiny of humanity will ere long mainly depend. You willingly identify yourselves with many ideas that have a real human interest, and are to that extent aiding the empire of divine Truth. This could hardly be otherwise, considering your familiarity with the educative lore of Swedenborg. But it is none the less true that when on the ground of these favorable personal differences, you proceed to call yourselves "the church," and even to rob the christian ordinances of all "validity" as administered by the other sects, you do much to defeat the benignant influence you might otherwise exert upon society, and repel the sympathy of every generous mind.

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Swedenborg looked upon sectarianism or separatism as a crying evil of Christendom. He thought that a difference of opinion on doctrinal subjects, ought never to divide those who were intent on reducing the divine commandments to life. He thought that various opinions on these subjects were not only inevitable, but desirable, as more fully attesting the true living unity of the church. But your separatism has a peculiarly odious aggravation. The ordinary sects justify their exclusiveness on the plea that others reject some doctrine of the inspired word, which to their eyes is palpably present in it. You put this paltry zeal to the blush, by excluding from your fellowship all those who do not acknowledge the writings of Swedenborg. You exclude not only those who professing to admire the writings of Swedenborg, disagree with you as to their interpretation, but the far greater number of those who actually knowing nothing of your doctrines, have never had any opinion about them one way or another. This is a sectarianism that makes all the other sectarianism of the day, almost seem like true christianity. It is to exclude from the "new church," the most exemplary and divinely attested men in Christendom, for no other reason than that they have either not heard of your favorite author, or having heard calumnious statements only, do not in all honesty care to make his acquaintance. I can pardon the aptitude which ignorant or frivolous people shew to rank Swedenborg among the fanatics, when those who know the perfect humility of the man, and his total destitution of personal pretension, do not hesitate to render him this sickening idolatry. I have actually seen an elaborate attempt made in one of your periodicals, to exalt Swedenborg's infallibility into an article of faith ; and I have never yet heard the slightest disclaimer of its propriety. Has puerility a lower deep than this?

According to Swedenborg (Last Judgment) the new economy was to supervene not as a new visible sect, but as a spirit of freedom and rationality in the old sects. It has come, or rather is now coming, as a spirit of Love among all the sects, flinging a veil of obscurity over those obtrusive doctrinals, whose fruit has always been disunion, and bringing into light those hidden charities whose only possible issue is peace. And if you had

wished to exhibit this spirit in your embodiment for public worship, thus to afford the world some living illustration of the church that is coming, your course would now have conciliated the unmingled approbation of every friend of human progress. "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another." How blessed a distinction had it been for you to commend to all the sects this "new doctrine" of charity, as one which had been all along involved indeed in their acknowledgment of the Lord, but had never got the hearty recognition it was so amply entitled to: to commend it to them not only by studied words of eulogy, but by a diligent practice of its requirements, above all in your social or public worship. But no, you say, this does not suit us. The newness of the church by no means consists in doing its Lord's will. It is wholly a personal and local affair. It consists in a new baptism, [a new faith, then, also], a new infusion of vigor into the old ordinances, [why not new ordinances outright?], a new ministry, a new ritual of worship, in short a new visible corporation or sect, defined by a uniform baptism, and the maintenance of precisely similar religious opinions. Thus, consistently, you forbid me to take the Lord's supper, until I shall have undergone this conventional baptism, and admitted this sameness of religious opinion. And thus do you dishonor that new and universal church, whose distinctive glory lies in its opening wide its arms of love to the good of all religions, Christian and Mahometan, Jew and Pagan alike, and degrade its majestic herald into the mere minister of an upstart and conceited ecclesiasticism.

I speak with no unrighteous warmth. Who in view of the light which is pouring into the world at every inlet, and inciting men to an ardor of philanthropic inquiry and action such as they have never before felt; who that beholds the vigorous and searching criticism of our social evils which now abounds, — sure precursor of their speedy disappearance!--and witnesses in our legislative halls, in our scientific and literary assemblies, how the popular heart warms to every avowal of manly or charitable sentiment; who in short that witnesses the new birth which faith and hope and charity now find in every breast, and