Benjamin Fiske Barrett

“ All that is called freedom, which pertains to the will or love Hence it is that freedom manifests itself by the delight of willing and thinking, and thence of doing and speaking; for all delight is of love, and all love is of the will. To do evil from the delight of love appears like freedom, but it is slavery because it is from hell. To do good from the delight of love appears like freedom, and also is freedom because it is from the Lord. Slavery, therefore, consists in being led of hell, and freedom in being led of the Lord. ”

“ We see in it all that is worthy the supreme homage of men on earth and angels in heaven; not a shadow of imperfection—nothing but purest, sweetest, tenderest love, and this forever guided in its operations by infinite wisdom.
We shall not attempt to prove that the character of the Heavenly Father is such as is here delineated. There is no need of that. It is written on every page of the created universe; written in the experience, constitution and moral government of our race; seen everywhere in the Volume of inspiration also, when its true spiritual meaning is fully apprehended. ”

“ And although it is only the external humanity—the mere clothing of Divinity—that the child sees and learns about, the knowledge is none the less important for all that. It becomes in him the solid and enduring basis of the kingdom of heaven. It is like learning the literal sense of the Word. As this sense is the foundation and containant of all the higher senses, so the knowledge and love of the man, Jesus—the Lord's mere external humanity—are the foundation and containant of that higher knowledge and purer love to be unfolded in maturer years. ”

“ From love toward his human offspring, He came down into our natural human conditions and relations according to the laws of his own divine order—just as every babe is born. He assumed our finite nature with its vast accumulation of hereditary evil proclivities; had experience of its weaknesses and trials, its doubts and fears, its darkness and conflicts, its poignant griefs and agonizing sorrows; bore the assaults of all the hells by which humanity was ever assailed—and conquered them while glorifying or making Divine his assumed human. ”

“ He could enlighten them in their darkness, sympathize with them in their trials, strengthen them in their weakness, shield them in temptation, and so exert or make operative for them his redeeming love, as He could not before. From the hour when it could be said—was said—of that sublime work of glorifying the human, "It is finished," a new spiritual force became manifest among men. A new and Divine energy began to pervade the moral universe. A new light began to be diffused, and new life to pulsate in the hearts of men, especially of those who looked to Him in humble and confiding faith ”

“ I once heard an angel describing love truly conjugial and its heavenly delights, in this manner: That it is the Divine of the Lord in the heavens,—which is the divine good and divine truth,—united in two beings, yet in such a manner that they are not two, but as one. He said that two conjugial partners in heaven are that love,—because every one is his own good and his own truth, as to mind as well as to body; for the body is the effigy of the mind, because formed in its likeness. Hence he concluded that the Divine is effigied in two, who are in love truly conjugial ”

“ But the natural love of the sex as felt by the merely natural man, is a low animal passion, more or less defiled with impurity like all his other loves. But it is the germ or early blossom of something transcendently more beautiful and precious. The natural love of the sex is, by regeneration, purified, exalted, ennobled, and so changed into what Swedenborg calls "love truly conjugial," which is a spiritual and heavenly love, the sweetness and felicities of which transcend immeasurably the delights of the love immediately succeeding the earthly nuptials. ”

“ Love is life; and the stronger and more disinterested the love, the nobler and more exalted is the life—the nearer does the individual approach to the moral likeness of God himself, and the sweeter and more abundant his spiritual joy.
The great end of all God's dealings with us—the end of all his chastisements as well as his blessings—the end for which He reveals to us the laws of the soul's higher life—is, to develop within us a heavenly character—a pure and unselfish love;—to re-create us in his own Divine likeness. Truth, indeed, is important, but only as a means to this great end ”

“ A new Age is ushered in by the influx of new life and the revelation of new and higher truth. From underneath the cloud of the letter—out from the living soul of Scripture—the Sun of righteousness arises with healing in his wings. And thus, to humble and open minds, the incarnate God comes and reveals Himself anew—comes with new power and glory in the clouds. Agreeable to his own prophetic declaration: "And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." ”

“ It was from the love of imparting his own life, and so making other creatures happy, that God created man to be an image of Himself and a finite receptacle of his love. For the great end in creation was a heaven of angels from the human race;—a host of intelligent and rational beings, bright and joyous, and forever growing brighter and more joyous, in the reception and exercise of the Creator's love. And this beneficent end He has pursued with infinite wisdom and undiminished ardor from the beginning until now. ”

“ Divinity comes down, and speaks and acts and prays and labors and agonizes and suffers, and thus reveals Itself in humanity,—the Divine in the human, the Infinite in the finite, the Father in the Son; and this, in infinite condescension to our human wants and finite capacities. It is something like what a great and good man does, whose wisdom is beyond the comprehension of a little child, but who nevertheless comes down to the child's infantile state ”

“ They turned the light that was originally in them into darkness—God's love into hatred—just as the henbane and fox-glove convert the sun's light and heat and the sweet dews of the morning into malignant poisons. God's life in men thus became changed into its opposite—into the life of hell. ”

“ The work to be accomplished was something more than suppressing the insurrection of a single wicked community, state or nation. It was nothing less than restoring the disturbed equilibrium of the moral universe; resisting and restraining within due bounds the combined armies of hell; overcoming the gigantic power of legions of devils; antagonizing and driving back the malign influence of falsity and evil which invaded the souls of men, and threatened to destroy their power of discerning and their liberty of choosing between good and evil. ”

“ In other words, the true freedom is to yield ourselves willingly and joyfully to the prompting influences of heaven; to be led and governed in all our feelings, purposes and conduct, by the Lord and his angels, and not by self or the spirits that are imbued and swayed by the love of self. The true freedom, therefore, differs from the spurious, as hatred differs from love, good from evil, heaven from hell. ”

“ Why, indeed, but because new light has dawned on the world, making more and more manifest the things of darkness? Why, but because heaven has been opened, and the rejoicing beams of the spiritual Sun have begun to penetrate the dark corners of the earth, and compel the creatures of the night to retire to their hiding-places? ”

“ It is so constructed that the Divine can dwell in it in all fulness, as in seeds and germs and all things else in the realms of Nature. It is this, pre-eminently, which stamps it with the impress of Divinity. It is this which makes it God's Word, and a Divine medium of man's conjunction with his Maker. It is this which gives it its quickening and transforming power—a power over the human heart which no uninspired word, no utterance of human wit or wisdom however exalted, ever had or ever can have. ”

“ This is what it has actually accomplished for the human race: it has overcome the influence of hell to such a degree, that men need not now be its slaves unless they freely choose such bondage. Through the redemption that has been wrought, mankind are now able to understand the will of God, or the truth that reveals his will to them, and are free to serve Him if they choose—free to make their own election. ”

“ Works are the ultimate acts in which love in the will guided by truth in the understanding, terminates and rests as on a secure foundation, and without which it would have no permanence—no real existence in the soul beyond that of a shadow or a dream. ”

“ He pursues the vilest of his rational creatures; pursues them into the lowest haunts of degradation and vice; goes down with tender yearning to the most sinful and abandoned—yes, down to the very lowest of the hells,—and, veiling his ineffable brightness in merciful accommodation to their states, forever strives to save them from a lower depth, and to promote their greatest comfort and best welfare.
Such is the nature of God's love—forever seeking the highest good even of those who are enemies to Him by wicked works. Nor is his love a mere blind impulse. It is infinitely wise. ”

“ The light of the New Dispensation is gleaming all around us. Science, philosophy, literature, art, politics, morals, and even religion, have begun to feel the influence of the Second Coming. The old forms of thought have greatly changed, and are still rapidly changing. Old religious dogmas, old systems of philosophy, old theories of politics, old forms of government, old modes of education, old systems of medicine, old industrial processes, old methods of dispensing charity, old ideas on all subjects, are being everywhere summoned to judgment. ”