George Bush

“ But the love is the life. If you would know what a man's life is, you have only to learn what his ruling love is, and you have an infallible clew to it. Now, as all true religion demands a good love, it must demand a good life of course, for the life is merely an exponent of the love. But the life which a man possesses here is the life, which he carries with him into the other world, and unless that life has been the native product of a pure and heavenly love here, it can by no means be a source of blessedness hereafter. ”

“ It needs but a moment's reflection to see what an immense gain to the cause of Christianity is secured by this unanimity—what a mountain load of reproach is rolled from the profession of a religion of love and charity by the harmonious faith of its disciples. We do not of course affirm that on minor points there may not be shades of difference of opinion, for an absolute identity of understanding or will, of charity or faith, of operation or form, does not exist in the universe. ”

“ The New Church is as far as possible from giving a quietus to the conscience in this way. It plants the essence of religion, not in a faith of imputation, but in a life of genuine charity and active use. If this be not the actual form which the principle assumes—if it do not ultimate itself in a pure, upright, exemplary deportment on the part of the professors of these truths; the fault is theirs, and not that of the system itself. It is because they are unfaithful to its teachings. The system makes the most ample provision, by its innate principles and its superadded revelations. ”

“ Is it not obvious that here is a powerful attraction to a pure and holy life, which does not exist under any other form of doctrine? Do we not learn a new lesson of love here? Is it not cause of everlasting gratitude to be freed from the perplexity which is felt in addressing worship to three persons instead of one, and then making use of one of the three as a medium, mediator, or intercessor, through whom to approach another? ”

“ Indeed the whole history of the race makes it evident that there is no stronger impulse in human nature than the religious, and at the same time none more liable to distortion and perversion, as it exhibits all phases from the rapt and seraphic worship of Gabriel down to the senseless adoration of stocks and stones, and the frenzy of self-immolation in the blinded devotees of Juggernaut. ”

“ It is love that produces faith, and not faith that produces love; for faith pertains to the understanding, and the understanding is evermore secondary to the love, as light is to heat.
The paramount importance of a good life, therefore, as the essential element of a man's hope of eternal blessedness, is a necessary result of the constitution of our being, and there is nothing arbitrary about it. Nor is the doctrine liable to the charge of establishing human merit as the basis of salvation. ”

“ It is immaterial how much faith he may have, or how much righteousness he may have imputed to him on the ground of his faith, his heaven is a delusion so long as he is lacking in a life's love that is in accordance with the Divine precepts, which are themselves an expression of the Divine love. To say that the works and fruits of a good life are, in the first instance, the effect of faith, is completely to reverse the true order of things, and to put the effect for the cause, and the cause for the effect. ”

“ The system opens a boundless range of doctrinal and ethical truths, and our object will be answered if we can succeed in attracting attention to the works in which it is embodied. We are well aware of the prejudices which array themselves against the candid investigation of the claims of this system. The very name of Swedenborg, the distinguished medium through whom these precious revelations of doctrine and life have been made to the world, has the effect with multitudes of minds, to transform the whole at once into an incoherent medley of visions and vagaries. ”

“ Nothing enters so deeply into the sanctum sanctorum of men’s interests as those views which take hold of God, heaven, hell, the soul, death, and their related themes. And though it may be said that all this with the majority of men comes rather into the category of sentiment than of principle, yet we see in it evidence that the Lord has determined to establish for himself a testimony in the interior recesses of our being, and to give a clear pre-eminence to those mental workings which relate more directly and intimately to Himself. ”

“ It ascends through them, says Swedenborg, as the pure juice ascends through a tree, and mounts to its top, and from that height looks around upon all inferior natural things, like one who, from a tower or mountain, looks downward and around upon the plains below. It is not to be understood from this, that as a matter of fact—of practical life—the religious principle does actually assert for itself this paramount ascendancy in the mind, and exert its legitimate control over the entire man. ”

“ And not only so; we now learn by the light of the New Jerusalem that it is a universal law of being—that all the spirits now in the spiritual world, good, bad, and mixed, were once men in bodies, and have passed out of bodies into the grand receptacle of souls, the world beyond the grave. Consequently, if there are sinless beings of the human race in any of the earths of the universe, they will successfully pass out of their corporeal condition into that of disembodied spirits in the world of spirits. ”

“ From the necessary relation between the affectional and the intellectual principles of our nature, or the heart and the head, it makes faith entirely subordinate to love, and stamps as worthless a religion which does not distinguish itself by a life of charitable uses. It is in this that the essence of the religious character consists, and no salvo is found in a fancied provision made in the gospel for a dispensation from the stringent demands of the decalogue. Life, life, and not opinions or faith, is the grand criterion of admissibility to heaven. ”

“ Those who listen to New Church instructions will find, at any rate, that so far from involving a mere farrago of mystical and visionary crudities, they do actually inculcate the necessity of a practical and life-pervading religion, and that our doctrines are not, as the impression often is, a peculiar mode of dispensing with all religion—a sort of quitclaim to all genuine devotion and piety. ”

“ The New Church would be grossly recreant to her own spirit and genius to pay undue reverence even to a messenger from the Lord of hosts, but it does not hesitate to honor, in his measure, the instrument whom the Most High has especially raised up to serve as the herald of that sublime dispensation that is now entering upon its interminable career. She would fain endeavor to conciliate regard to his person for the sake of his teachings, and with a paramount view to the spiritual behoof of our fellow-men. ”

“ But with men the essence of uses, in the most general sense, is the good of the whole human race, both spiritual and civil; in a sense less general the good of their country; in a particular sense the good of society, and in a singular sense the good of each individual; and whereas those goods constitute their essence, love is their life, inasmuch as all good is of love, and in love there is life: in this love is every one who is delighted with the use in which he is for the sake of the use. ”

“ Suppose, farther, that, as the conversation proceeded, and higher and more sacred topics were gradually broached, and inquiry pressed upon the borders of the world unseen, he should discover an equal familiarity with that as with the natural world, even to the minute details of its phenomena and laws—that the heaven and the hells, angels and devils, and everything of this class with which the human mind intensely yearns to be acquainted, were evidently within the compass of his amazing intelligence. ”

“ But of late years science, apart from revelation, has clearly established that death had reigned among the animate orders of creation for myriads of ages before man had been ushered into being and made a denizen of this terraqueous globe. ”

“ I am well aware there are few who will believe that any one can see the things which exist in another life, and in consequence thereof be enabled to give any account of the state of souls after death, because few believe in a resurrection, and of the learned fewer than of the simple; they profess indeed with their lips that they shall rise again, because it is agreeable to the doctrine of faith, but still they deny it in their hearts ”

“ But we not only deduce this distinguishing feature of the New Dispensation from the mental and moral economy of our being—it is brought home with most impressive power by the tenor of the revelations of the other life with which we are favored. The life of love, as we have seen, ultimates itself in the works of love, and the works of love are uses or utilities to the neighbor, and to the Lord's Church and Kingdom. ”

“ The doctrine taught in the New Church makes known to us that one God is to be believed in and worshiped, in whom is a Divine Trinity, and that Jesus Christ in his glorified or Divine Humanity is that God. According to this doctrine the Creator and the Redeemer of the world, are not two persons, but one, and consequently, that the Tripersonality of the Godhead is nothing but a fiction, and a phantasy, while yet the doctrine of a Trinity, true and Scriptural, is most emphatically maintained. ”

“ Moreover it has been given me to discourse with the angels as man with man, and likewise to see the things which are in the heavens, and which are in the hells: the reason was, because the end of the present church approaches, and the beginning of a new one is at hand, which will be the New Jerusalem, to which it is to be revealed, that the Lord rules the universe, both heaven and the world; that there is a heaven and a hell, and what is the quality of each; that men live also as men after death, in heaven those who had been led of the Lord, in hell those who have been led of themselves ”

“ The New Church disavows every claim of merit in its good works, while at the same time it insists upon the works as a sine qua non. But, together with this, it assures us that our loving, willing, working power is not our own, but the Lord's, though we are still to be active and co-operative, as if the ability were inherent in us. ”

“ God has made it indigenous to the soil of the human mind. Even if you suppose a man intent, like Paine or Voltaire, upon undermining a prevalent faith in Revelation, still it is the religious sentiment, mistaken and perverted, which prompts him to the task. He will strenuously contend that he is battling with human errors for the glory of God. Deism is still the verbal acknowledgment and professed worship of the Deity, though involving the rejection of Christ and the Gospel announced by Him. ”

“ If then we have arrived at the epoch when a new dispensation was to be ushered into the world, there is nothing incredible in the idea that a human instrument should be raised up and supernaturally endowed to disclose the character of that dispensation, especially by unfolding the interior sense of the Word, which must constitute the nourishment of the life of the Church of the latter day. ”

“ I say by its innate principles, for, according to these we are taught, that love or affection is the ground-element of our being, and that the outward works are, in all cases, when free and unconstrained, the expression of the inward moving power of the love. ”

“ On this head, it will not take any candid man long to be corrected in his opinion, if he is willing to be disabused of an error. He will learn that the New Church preaches a religion of the most earnest and exacting kind—a religion founded upon a change of heart, that is to say, upon regeneration; and when strangers drop in from time to time upon our worship, there is no point on which we are more anxious to have them informed, than in regard to the importance which the New Church attaches to the regenerating process. ”

“ A false estimate of character ceases to be innocent when the means of forming a true one exist, and at this day no man can urge a dearth of data relative to the illustrious Seer of the New Jerusalem, or justly assert a lack of motive to an examination of his claims. ”

“ This is then, in one word, the law of development of all created spirits, just as much as it is a law of the vegetable world that a flower shall not be unfolded without bursting its bud, or the chick in the egg be matured into a fowl, without breaking and casting aside its shell. ”

“ Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; but he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”
But, notwithstanding all these solemn caveats, still the haunts of heresy are visited from Sabbath to Sabbath, and multitudes find their way into New Church places of worship, often, it may be, merely to gratify a transient impulse of curiosity, yet often too to seek a solution of the question, What is truth? “Wherewithal shall a man come before the Lord? Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his way?” ”

“ It is not in my power to place others in the same state in which God has placed me, so as to be able to convince them, by their own eyes and ears, of the truth of those deeds and things I publicly have made known. I have no ability to capacitate them to converse with angels and spirits, neither to work miracles to dispose or force their understandings to comprehend what I say. ”