# The Other Life/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI.
WHY ARE THESE THINGS NOT BELIEVED?
THE theo-philosophy of Swedenborg is the most beautiful, comprehensive and perfect system ever presented to man. It is the only system in the world which is based upon the Word of God, and claims to have been derived from heaven. The claim itself is so stupendous as to paralyze curiosity by exciting suspicion of insanity in the man who makes it.
"He is mad!" exclaimed the leaders; and for a whole century the church turned its face away from the great light which is to illumine and gladden it for ever.
But readers and believers are found. The strange doctrines pass into all countries, like the seed of heavenly fruit, borne by the four angels who hold the four winds of the earth; and already they are received and loved and lived by thousands of earnest, intelligent and practical men.
"There was method in his madness!" suggest the defenders of the old faith.
​"Was he mad at all!" asks some independent thinker, who has been delighted with the doctrine of correspondences, and the wonderful result of its application to the abstrusest problems in philosophy and science.
"He was the messenger of God!" murmurs the Christian who has seen the spiritual sense of the Divine Word break forth in dazzling splendor from his pages.
These questions may not be settled to every one's satisfaction within the next century. But in less than half that time the popular estimate of Swedenborg and his teachings will be very different from what it now is. Why are his disclosures not accepted now? When this philosophy and theology of the angels is presented to intelligent and Christian men, scientists, philosophers and theologians, all earnestly engaged in the study of or search after truth, why is it not immediately recognized and acknowledged?
Something else is needed for the recognition of truth besides its mere presentation.
Our question will be readily answered by recalling some of the profound psychological truths which Swedenborg himself has given us.
A man's love is his life. The delight which he ​feels in the exercise of his loves, is the joy and essence of his life. Thought proceeds from love as surely as light from heat. We have no thoughts which are really our own, and which abide with us, except those which flow from, represent and correspond to our affections. We believe what we love and we love what we believe. To change a man's faith you must change his affections. His faith will follow his affections as surely as the shadow follows the moving object. We may change our wills, we may control our emotions, we may substitute a higher love and a nobler passion for a lower, or vice versâ; but we cannot control our belief. We will involuntarily confirm whatever agrees with and corresponds to our emotional states; we will reject all else as false.
What affections of the human mind cause the spiritual darkness which the heavenly light of the New Church finds it impossible at present to dissipate?
Outside of the Christian sphere, there are two great classes who cannot see the truth of the heavenly doctrines:
First: Those who are immersed in sense or in states of external self-love. Men who are devoted to the acquisition of money, to the pursuit of glory ​or power, to the aggrandizement of themselves, to the displays of fashion and the pleasures of the senses, whose delight is in these things—all such are spiritually turned away from the Lord and heaven, and cannot see religious truth however clearly presented. If angels were to appear daily in the streets and preach to them, their ideas would go in at one ear and out at the other; for there are no heavenly affections in their souls to seize upon divine truths and clasp them to the heart as the very pearls of wisdom for which they had been searching and sighing.
Secondly: Those who are filled with the spirit of self-culture, which is only a more interior and subtile self-love. These believe in human development unaided by revelation, in nature and progress independent of Christ and his Word. They are the positivists, the rationalists, the communists, the spiritualists and others of the present day—a vast and increasing class. They may extricate themselves from the bondage of a gross sensualism, but it is only to fall victims to the Beelzebub of spiritual pride and the self-conceit of scientific culture. These are blind to the heavenly doctrines of the New Church, which teach us the deep-seated evils of our natures, the utter finiteness of our powers, ​and our absolute helplessness for good, except as we look believingly to the Divine Man—Jesus Christ.
Surely these doctrines, so full of Christ and his Word, so beautiful, so tender, so true, so holy, will ere long find a recognition and a warm reception in many circles of the faithful and pious children of God.
There are two great classes in the Christian church who reject the Lord at his second advent, and justify themselves with apparently strong reasons for doing so.
One class is blinded by strong affection for the doctrines of their church, which they believe to be essential to the salvation of their souls;—doctrines which were imbibed in childhood, which have been implanted in their hearts and embalmed in their memories, and sanctified by the associations of the past and the hopes of the future. Men who love their doctrines with a spiritual ardor which would brave martyrdom for their sake, cannot possibly see any truth in a system which controverts the fundamental positions of their cherished faith. Intensity of affection, however, proves nothing to be true; for pagans and heretics and enthusiasts of all kinds have been just as earnest and just as ​blind; but it is a sufficient reason why the divine truth now revealed, is not received by those who in heart and life are nearest to its spirit.
The second class in the Christian Church who are impenetrable to the rays of the new light, consist of those whose affections are more external; who love their Church as an outward organization, its ritual, its ministers, its people, its history, its learning, its influence and the whole sphere that emanates from it. This feeling is near akin to party feeling in politics, and to national feeling in different countries; a feeling that weakens if it does not destroy all genuine catholic and cosmopolitan sentiment. It has indeed a certain necessity and a certain use, as political parties and separate nationalities have; but its inordinate sway leads to bigotry and narrow-mindedness. People of this type are utterly averse to the consideration of any spiritual matters outside of their traditional sphere of thought and feeling. The bare suspicion that Swedenborg may be right, never crosses their minds.
Each of these types is an enemy to the spiritual truths taught in the internal sense of the Word of God. Sometimes two of them or even all are combined in the same character. Imagine a man ​whose soul is wedded to the dogmas of the old theology, who is thoroughly devoted to the external things of some evangelical Church, who has a high degree of pride in his own spiritual knowledge and culture, and who has a keen eye to his own temporal interests. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for such a man to comprehend or believe the truths of the New Age.
Truths are received into the memory as food into the stomach. They will be found indigestible and unassimilable, and will be rejected, unless there is something in the emotional nature which has an affinity for them and draws them to itself and incorporates them with its own being. Truths can never be made a part of a man's faith and insinuated into his life, until they have become the objects of his affection.
How is it possible, then, for the heavenly doctrines of the New Church to be implanted in the affections of men?
There are three universal affections insinuated by the Lord in some degree into all men, the basis of our knowledge, the sources of our happiness, the badges of our spiritual life, distinguishing it from that of the brute. These affections are the ​love of truth, the love of beauty and the love of goodness.
All our advances in knowledge come necessarily from the love of knowing, of comparing, of analyzing and of understanding. The delight in the acquisition of truth is a primal and necessary delight in the human mind. The pursuit of truth is frequently prosecuted from selfish ends—the love of glory, the love of power or the love of wealth. The truths acquired are also perverted or sectarianized so as to be accommodated to the state of the affections. But there is such a thing as a love of truth for the sake of the truth, without regard to its source or associations.
This affection of knowing, comparing, analyzing, understanding and believing or disbelieving is not only fundamental but it is irrepressible. It will finally lead men to examine Swedenborg and his doctrines. They will not be contented with hearsay. They will not be influenced by prejudice. They will be animated by that purer, superior, abstract love of truth, which precedes and will finally dominate the inferior and concrete loves of sensual and external things, of traditions and dogmas and churches. Swedenborg will be studied as a phenomenon; explored as a new continent; ​analyzed as a new substance. The misrepresentations about him will be detected; the exaggerations discarded; the rubbish cleared away; and the facts brought out into full view.
It will then be discovered that the science of correspondences is the key to all other sciences, and that a spiritual sense pervades the Word of God, elevating the minds of men into somewhat of angelic light. It will be made so plain that none can question it.
This clear-cut, geometrical demonstration of the truths of the New Church will be, however, only the first or preliminary proceeding. It cannot make any man believe them or love them until some affections of the soul are excited to sympathetic relations with them.
What are these affections? In the first place, the love of the beautiful. Who does not know the sweet and pleasing sensations which are created in the perceptive faculties by the beauties of nature, by the sight of flower-gardens and green lawns, of the blue mountains in the distance, the far roll of the emerald sea, the golden sky of evening, and the boundless dome of night crowded with its celestial fires? There are similar sensations of delight in the contemplation of great truths. The ​abstract truths of geometry impart a positive pleasure to many minds. Every science has its special delight comparable to the odor of flowers or the charms of music. And a great System of Truth, embracing all things, spirit and matter. God and nature; a system vast, sublime, coherent, harmonious, fills the soul with delight in proportion to the conception it forms of its grandeur and symmetry. This delight creates faith.
"The harmony of a science," says Lord Bacon, "where each part supports the other, is the true and short confutation of all the smaller objections."
The rational faculty grasps truth; the æsthetic faculty enjoys it; but there is a higher faculty or power, seated in the heart or will, and that faculty uses it for the ends it was designed to accomplish; and that use of the truth is attended by a spiritual delight, the joy of angels which passes all understanding.
The love of goodness is, in the last analysis, the love of use—the delight felt in adapting the wisest means to the best ends. This celestial love is given us by the Lord in proportion to our living faith in Him and our charity to the neighbor, or according as we have religiously kept the divine commandments. This heavenly affection enables us to per​ceive, intuitively as it were, the causes and qualities of things better than the intellect can know them. He that has this divine love of use in his heart, recognizes the doctrinal truths of the New Church very clearly, for he perceives their power to regenerate the individual soul, to renovate the church, to re-organize society on heavenly principles, and to restore, by means of the spiritual sense of the Word, the lost communication between angels and men.
The three great affections, the love of truth, the love of beauty and the love of use, are at work in all men and at all times with different degrees of power. They are all at work in every individual mind which examines the heavenly doctrines; and there is no man, however bigoted and sectarian, who will not be forced to cry out occasionally over the pages of Swedenborg, How rational! how beautiful! how pure and elevating!
Why cannot the sectarian see the doctrines of the New Church in all their truth and all their beauty and all their adaptability to the needs of the soul? Because he loves his dogmas, his church, his minister, his people, better than he loves the pure truth, which he can never see until he is ready to sacrifice all these and everything else for it. Be​cause his æsthetic faculties are uncultivated or his ideas of beauty are narrow and conventional. Because his love of use has too large an element of selfishness and worldliness in it, for that grand spiritual ideal of use which gives a spontaneous insight into truth.
On this love of truth for its own sake and on the gradual emancipation of the human heart, by divine influences, from these inferior loves which prevent its discovery, the future progress of the world depends. These are the sturdy workmen who are clearing away the old and tough and unsightly weeds of error from the garden of the human soul, and who will plant in their stead the perennial flowers of beauty and love.
The human race will outlive and outgrow all its imperfect states of evil and falsity, by a great, organic and inevitable process. The divine fire from heaven which is kindling the Christian heart, will illumine the Christian mind to see the divine truth. And he who surrenders all the theology and philosophy in the world for the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, revealed through Swedenborg, will not lose his life but find it.
The doctrines of the New Church embody the highest truth, and are therefore capable of ravish​ing the soul with the keenest sense of beauty and leading to the most thoroughly practical uses of life. There is a knowledge-loving faculty in man which must be gratified and which seeks to know truth for its own sake. There is an æsthetic sense which is delighted with harmony, symmetry and beauty in nature or in art, in philosophy as well as in poetry. There is a love of use, born of goodness in the soul, which recognizes the fitness and qualities of ideas as well as of things, and which seeks and finds them for the good they may do. These are the causes which are for ever silently at work, preparing mankind for the reception and acknowledgment of the doctrines of the New Church; which are therefore inevitable:
"Inevitable as the life that starts From the deep bosom of the wintry snows, And bursts serenely on the blossoming air; And shines through all the green and silver spring; And makes the glimmer of that golden light With which the perfect Summer crowns her brow."
THE END.