this sublime banner of human love, a continual reminder that essentially all humanity is one, and that the goal to which we travel is the same for all. Without this recognition of Brotherhood all science is useless and all religion is hypocrisy. Deeper than all diversity, mightier than all animosity, is that Holy Spirit of Love. The Self of each is the Higher Self of all, and that bond is one which nothing in all worlds can avail to break. That which raises one raises all; that which degrades one degrades all The sin and crime of our race are our sin and crime, and only as we save our brethren can we save ourselves. One in our inception, one in our goal, we must needs be one in our progress; the "curse of separateness that is on us it is ours to remove, and Theosophy alike as religion and philosophy will be a failure save as it is the embodiment of the life of Love.

"

Ir may be asked, "Have we not enough of Churches, and why another one calling itself the New Church?" Well, there never was a new movement which did not begin as a Church; the more secular fraternities of the politician and the reformer are to them as Churches are in religious matters. And as regards the New Church our claim is that it explains the problems which have so long vexed mankind.

Turning then first to the Philosophical Aspect of New Church teaching, our primary attitude is not things as they are, but my relation to them; not, "Do things exist?" but, "What must I, as a rational human being. from the constitution and laws of my nature, believe?" Not primarily whether my belief is answered or matched by existing things, but, "What is it that I am constituted, and thus that reason compels me, to believe?" This is our starting-point. The facts of human nature are the best interpreters of man; if we come down to them and let them speak for themselves, we shall get clear and explicit answers. But men seldom allow reason, as such, to speak, or the facts of their own nature to declare, as they would with unmistakable voice, the things that are true for it, and which that nature is bound, because constituted, to believe. Primarily, for example, I am not concerned with whether God exists, but with whether I ought to believe that God exists as the outcome of my constitution. Afterwards, the question may come as to whether my conception answers to the facts. You may always be sure, however, that what a man acknowledges himself as bound to believe, he will equally declare to be an existing fact. Man then must have a creed, because he has a nature; he has a right to know what his nature can tell him, and he is bound to follow its teachings, whatever they be and wherever they lead him.

Materialists say: "Some things we know. We know that man is matter. We don't know that he is anything else." But have we a right to assume that, inasmuch as we do not see mind acting without matter, therefore mind is the result of matter? We have no such right. These two are simply, so far as we can tell, co-existent; and, being so, scientific inquiry should itself prevent us confounding things that differ. Nobody knows, 23 3 matter of fact, that mind comes from matter.

But what is it that constitutes matter or substance? "Qualities! qualities !!" the materialist says. "Destroy a man's organism,—put him

in the fire, for instance,—and where is he? you call soul, immortality? They are myths.

What then are these things

Don't you see that when

you destroy the qualities the man is gone, and gone for ever?"

I accept the position. Qualities constitute "things"; and the qualities of a material thing constitute a material thing, and the qualities of an immaterial thing constitute an immaterial thing; and there's the end of it. Take the principle and follow it up, and where does it lead? To spiritual organization. How is that? In this way. The qualities of a stone constitute a stone; of a chair, a chair. Suppose you take the qualities from the chair. How can you do that? Put it in the fire; the chair and its qualities have gone. Of course there is a residue of dust and gas, having qualities of their own; but the point is, whether the destruction of the qualities of any body is not the destruction of the body itself. Reason I and fact answer, "Yes." In man there are two forms of substance. "No," says the materialist, "I deny that." Well, look at the facts, so far as reason can show them. Abstractly speaking, immaterial properties or qualities, if there be such, constitute immaterial things, just as material But are there any such qualities as

I qualities constitute material things.

immaterial qualities? Is thought a material quality? Is feeling a material quality? Surely neither thoughts nor feelings are material. They are not subject to the laws of gravity or cohesion; they cannot be weighed not measured; and they do not admit of being seen, smell, tasted, heard, or felt. They are, therefore, immaterial properties or qualities, no matter whence they exist as to origin. A series of qualities, known as material, constitute material substance; and (we must not hesitate) a series of qualities known as mental, constitute mental substance. Mental and material qualities are side by side in man.

The mental-or, if you do not object, the spiritual-directs the material; the directed matter is the agent, the means by which the mind works here in a material sphere. Man is a spiritual being at work in a material environment. It appears then that the materialistic position is really undermined, and that another position has taken its place. You put it in a nutshell thus: Qualities constitute substance. There are immaterial qualities; therefore there is immaterial substance.

:

In what way are we to think of the Infinite Cause, or God? Our only idea must be anthropomorphic-we cannot help ourselves in the very nature of the case it must be so. Man is bound to think that God must be as man is. Don't you know that if a dog could think of God, it would think of Him as a dog, and that a horse would think of Him as a horse ? And if you are thinking of God, once more our point is, "What am I, as a human creature, bound to think and believe concerning this Cause, but that He is essentially like me, that He is not less than humanthat He is infinitely what I am finitely." Yes; and your reason declares that God is like you. You have emotions and feelings; and God has these, has intellect, has energy. God is the origin of man. "God created

man in His own image and likeness." It was from an efflux of the Divine nature passing forth to the external world, and fitting there to itself a material organism taken from dust, that man was brought forth.

Is this transcendent? It is rational. Nothing is more transcendent than the simplest facts of life.

Well, but He may not exist after all; it may be only my idea! Trust the idea which your nature impels you to hold, and all else will come right. Be loyal to the facts of reason, and things as they are will not be far from reason's way.

declares for

Then what No; there is a mistake in the Cause is the stoppage of suc

But I hear another voice, which cries, "You say the mind cause, and you lead the mind up to God as the Cause of all. caused God? Is not God caused too?" reasoning. Sequence is simply succession. cession; and your idea that God may be caused is really a denial of cause i and a reintroduction of sequence. You take nature's idea of sequence, and read it into Cause. In cause there can be no such succession; there' is the beginning of successions. When, therefore, man declares that there is a cause of these successions, the last for him has been reached; and he cannot now, to be true to his nature and reason, apply the law of succession to the Cause, for therein he will be denying what he has already affirmed.

Men have had religion after its kind; and now men have science after its kind; but the two must go together, if there is to be any religion or science worth the name. What evidence, then, does the scientist demand for the knowledge any man would confer upon him? In brief, the evidence of experience, his own or another's.

Turning now to our second point (the Spiritual Aspect of the New Church, that is, the sort of evidence which the New Church presents concerning man's future, the evidence of the senses), I have not seen into that other world, I cannot let you see it; but such is the evidence given. The Lord, as we think, when He would unfold heaven to earth, unfolded it, as He must and could only do, through a man prepared for that purpose. He made it known through that man. I know that it is a risky thing to say here, but I am bound to tell you what I believe. Swedenborg, the man I speak of, says: "I have for thirty years been in open communication, by the Lord's mercy, with the spiritual world." And he gives us its laws; and, curiously enough, the facts interpret the laws, and the laws the facts and a study of these things impresses the mind with the conviction that here there is no crazy enthusiast, but a man of science, prepared through his science, through all the knowledge the world could give him, for this wider emancipation, this opening of thought and knowledge into the interior sphere, that he might bring forth the facts from thence, and make them known. And now they stand in black and white for the men of to-day to read and ponder and comprehend.

The New Church, then, believes that there is a God acting through the

spiritual world into the natural world. Where is the spiritual world? It is in the natural world as the soul is in the body; and as the soul is the centre and source of all human activity, so is the spiritual world the source and centre of all natural growth and life. The idea of the spiritual world in the natural world affords a key to much which the isms of the day leave out. The mission of Swedenborg was to lay open the spiritual world — the causal world—to our apprehension, so that the world of causes and the world of effects might alike be unfolded to the rational apprehension of humanity. Swedenborg explained the facts and laws of both worlds, and the results are at hand for our study.

Third. The Doctrinal Aspects of the New Church.

The Bible is not

to us as to others. We do not accept it because it is literally true, because the miracles are established, because the prophecy is conclusive. It is not rational that such external things should produce belief, which is an internal matter; it is not rational to perform a miracle to make one believe. Swedenborg has been the means of unfolding this book, the Bible, to us in a way which has never been done before; he says that there is in the books constituting the Scriptures proper-not in all the books which are now bound up with the Bible-a real coherence from one end to the other, and such as could never have been in a merely human construction. Our Church holds the doctrine of the "spiritual sense of the word" which is discerned as men progress from being, spiritually, "big boys" to grown-up men." If revelation was closed ages ago, we are now "left out in the cold." To the very questions disturbing men now there may be found an answer in the "spiritual sense of the word." [The difference between the literal and the spiritual meaning of Scripture was illustrated by referring to a casket with a beautiful exterior, but the gems which the interior held appeared far more beautiful.] On the lines thus laid down, the Bible was provable to be God's book, but on no other lines.

As to the doctrines derived from the Bible, they consider that there is nothing in the Bible to warrant the belief in a Trinity of Persons in the Godhead; that is simply impossible; it is an absurdity; three in one is a thing contrary to reason. A trinity of essentials, however, there may be in God. There is a likeness to this in nature; e.g. from the sun emanates heat, light, and energy; and there is a trinity of powers in man. The New Church considers the Father to be the Divine Love; the Son the Thought and Wisdom by means of which all things proceed; and the Holy Spirit the Energy sustaining all things. It wholly disclaims the ordinary idea of the "Atonement." The Atonement properly means "at-one-ment," ie. reconciliation of God and man, not the reconciliation of God to man, but man to God; and this was brought about when God assumed humanity as the Son, and led men from matter to spirit, from death to life. This is an awful thing to say, but the conception possesses rational harmony. The "resurrection of the material body" we do not believe in, inasmuch as en men go into the spiritual world they will