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BY

FREDERICK H. EVANS

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,

Some letter of that After-life to spell:

And by and by my Soul return'd to me,

And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell."

FITZGERALD'S OMAR

Reprinted by Dr Garth Wilkinson's youngest daughter

MRS FRANK CLAUGHTON MATHEWS

1936

First Published 1912

Reprinted 1936

Printed in Great Britain

by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh

UP-HILL

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A bed for when the slow, dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call, when just in sight?

They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI

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JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON

TO ask readers nowadays, when new philosophies, new religions abound, when Nietzsche, Bergson, Pragmatism, etc., etc., occupy thinking minds to the exclusion of all else in a philosophical direction, to ask such to turn back to a writer who was born a year short of a hundred years ago, whose books were practically all still-born, and are now mostly out of print, and whose percentage of readers is so small as to be negligible, is to court the rebuff of neglect and indifference. The world of religious thought has only time and an ear for the accustomed, the accredited, or some "new thing," some fashion of an hour.

And yet I am perversely proposing to arouse an interest in the writings of James John Garth Wilkinson, born 1812, died in 1899, author of some twenty-five works, all of which are completely neglected by the ordinary reading world, and known to but few among the super-intelligent.

What is the reason of this neglect? It is a safe dictum that no really good or great thing fails of a message, is lost or dies unsatisfied of a due audience. It must be from the fact that the basis of all Garth Wilkinson's non-medical writings is the message of Swedenborg, and that message has not yet become the fashionable religion. Its lot is slowly but surely to permeate all thought and progress; to be an undercurrent inspiration. Swedenborg himself always deprecated his message being made into a new creed or formula; his work was rather to depose creeds and make his inspired message of the new Truth the mainspring of all forms of religious expression.

But there is so much original philosophical expression in Garth Wilkinson's books as to demand notice on its own account; and further, no wise reader who values literature for the joy of style should neglect him.

It may seem a quaint idea to offer this very special and independent mental food of a religious kind to a medical journal;

but Garth Wilkinson's name ranks as one of the honoured pioneers in Homoeopathy, and that is of course a sufficient introduction to THE HOMEOPATHIC WORLD; and believers in Homoeopathy may conceivably have an inclination to trust and try a writer who was one of their founders, and to have a faith in the validity of his message, even though it be strange and contrary to ordinary orthodox doctrines, on the ground that one who had risked so much for an alien medical creed may the more readily be respected and given credence in an alien theological doctrine.

Some shallow-witted person once said, "When about to take down a new book, do not; take down an old one instead." This cheap undervaluing of new contemporaries is not real book loving, but fetish worship; names, not things, attract such superficial admiration. The wise reader is he who searches after and values the best of all times, whether it be from Ancient Greece or Modern Brixton. The greatest of authors were contemporaries to someone once;

and how small should a professed lover of literature feel if he finds at the end of life that he has been a contemporary of a George Meredith, a Henry James, a Mark Rutherford, a Joseph Conrad, a Turgenev, etc., and has contentedly passed them by as mere novelists, mere contemporaries, and known nothing of their absolute mastership in their art and seer-ship. It is the more forgivable to have passed over a Garth Wilkinson, as his books were inadequately treated by the critics, and were never vaunted into a fashion by some lucky magazine art icle under the name of some current literary ruler. All the greater is the credit due to those who have made friends of his books; for though the allusions to him in current reviews were always scant enough, yet they were generally of a sort to indicate to the discerning that the man was so far out of the ordinary as to make it a duty to look him up for one's self.

Garth Wilkinson himself was certainly not of the sort to pass over or undervalue his contemporaries, as his discernment of the immortal greatness of William Blake will prove.

In 1839, when but twenty-seven years old, he got published, at his own cost, in a slim, elegant post-octavo, the first type-printed edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience; prefacing it with a twenty-one page essay on Blake's art and poetry. To be the first to put into type poems that will surely live as long as the language, songs whose limpid lyrical beauty has never been excelled, only equalled indeed in spontaneity and lyrical intensity by our later Christina Rossetti, is indeed an honourable mark in a man's career; and it would doubtless have long ago made his name far more familiar to book-lovers in general, but for the mistaken but characteristic modesty that led him to send forth this little book with its Preface unsigned, and no more clue to its editorship or authorship than the address, "Store Street, Bedford Square, July 9th, 1839."

The same extraordinary modesty, willing submerging of self, is seen in the lack of signature to that monumental Introduction he made when editing, completing and re-issuing Clissold's translation of Swedenborg's Economy of the Animal Kingdom, in 1846.

These volumes are long out of print, but it would be a great thing if the Swedenborg Society could re-issue say, the chapter on "The Human Soul," with Garth Wilkinson's Introduction in front.

It is one of the anomalies of the business aspect of life that such things cannot be done because of insufficient profit; perhaps when we bask under a paternal Government's beneficent rays it will be a department's duty to keep all such treasures in print and cheaply accessible.

This preface to Blake's poems shows how early Garth Wilkinson gave signs of noble thought and fine style, a style full of weight and dignity, yet never heavy or exhausting to follow or read. Treating of Blake's spiritual drawings and visions, he says:

"Since every human being, even during his sojourn in the material world, is the union of a spirit and a body-the spirit of each being among spirits in the spiritual, even as his body is among bodies in the natural world-

it is therefore plain that if the mind has unusual intuitions, which are not included by the common laws of nature and of body, and not palpable to the common eye, such intuitions must be regarded as spiritual facts or phenomena; and their source looked for in the ever-present influences-divinely provided, or permitted, according as they are for good or for evil-of our own human predecessors, all now spiritual beings, who have gone before us into the land of Life. On this ground, which involves the only practical belief of the immortality of the soul, and the only possibility of the Past influencing the Present, it would be unphilosophical, and even dangerous, to call our very dreams delusions. It is still, indeed, right, that we 'try all spirits' at the judgment-bar of a revelation enlightened reason; yet, be the verdict what it may, it can never retrospectively deny that spiritual existence, on whose qualities alone it is simply to adjudicate."

Dealing with the more terrible of Blake's visions, the dreadful things he drew, as he declared, because he saw them, real and objective before him, he has this suggestive passage:-

"These works (Book of Job, Blair's Grave, etc., etc.), in the main, are not more remarkable for high original genius than they are for some self-possession; and show the occasional sovereignty of the inner man over the fantasies which obsessed the outer. Yet he, who professed as a doctrine that the visionary form of thought was higher than the natural one-for whom the common earth teemed with millions of otherwise invisible creatures: who naturalized the spiritual instead of spiritualizing the natural, was likely, even in these, his noblest works, to prefer seeing truth under the loose garments of typical or even mythologic representation, rather than in the divine-human embodiment of Christianity. And, accordingly, his imagination, self-divorced from a reason which might have elevated and chastened it, and necessarily spurning the scientific daylight and material reason of the nineteenth century, found a home in the ruins of ancient and consummated Churches;

and imbued itself with the superficial obscurity and ghastliness, far more than with the inward grandeur of primeval times . . . the artist yielded himself up more thoroughly than other men will do to those fantastic impulses which are common to all mankind; and which saner people subjugate, but cannot exterminate. In so yielding himself, the artist, not less than the man, was a loser, though it unquestionably gave him a certain power, as all unscrupulous passion must, of wildness and fierce vagary. This power is possessed in different degrees by every human being if he will but give local and free vent to the hell that is in him; and hence the madness, even of the meanest, is terrific. In his 'Prophecies of America,' his 'Vision of the Daughters of Albion,' and a host of unpublished drawings, earth-born might has banished the heavenlier elements of art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical. In the domain of terror he has entered, the characteristic of his genius is fearful reality. He embodies no Byronism-none of the sentimentalities of civilized vice, but delights to draw evil things and evil beings in their naked and final state.

The effect of these delineations is greatly heightened by the antiquity which is engraven on the faces of those who do and suffer in them. We have the impression that we are looking down into the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephilim, the Rephaim. Their human forms are gigantic petrifactions, from which the fires of lust and intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and vital, leaving stony limbs and countenances expressive of despair and stupid cruelty."

Blake had studied Swedenborg, with altering estimations at different periods of his life; but it is interesting to note how these tremendous and most dreadful pictures of his recall and illustrate Swedenborg's appalling doctrine of Vastation, on which Garth Wilkinson has this passage:

"Vastations, devastations; in their consequences wasting away. They are the gradual destruction of men as spiritual organisms, down to the level which the evil has successfully evaded, and to which the freewill has been voluntarily, by acts of life, extinguished.

All the great loves of the heart when thus completely denatured and perverted, become subjects of vastation; they are killed down, and die out. They are under the 'second death,' and malignant spiritual diseases and insanities occupy their places. Conjugal love, for instance, if wilfully perverted and outraged, is ultimately destroyed, and through various stages of monstrous lusts it burns its loins away into final apathy and gloom. So also the love of God and the neighbour, the love of use, all the affections which are human life. They are turned into hatreds and opposite to the first nature given, and then, according to their depth, into deaths and extinctions; this takes place by acts and efforts and habits of evil life, and by their repressions in their own hells. The man that is left is still a freewill; he freely chooses to be what he is, and calls round him the divine necessity of his state, to stay where he is. He cannot change because he will not, because with constant will he kills the faculty of change."

This obsession theory of Garth Wilkinson's to explain Blake's monstrous ideas and imaginings may perhaps find a contemporary example in the deceased English artist, Aubrey Beardsley, and some of his dreadful inventions. It does not seem possible for any youth of twenty-four or so to have had any social experience in our time capable of giving birth to such things. There are aeons of hell, of vice, behind them; sin indulged in till it becomes integral; the sole expression possible; and with an awful latent misery, a weary cruelty behind its mask of pleasure, that confirms Swedenborg to the core. Debased as some of Beardsley's intimates were in their confirmed erotomania, they would not account for the curiously ages-old whoredoms so many of his subjects revelled in, vivid living realities of sin and vice that only the irresistible obsession of some foul old spirit can account for.

On Blake as a poet our author has this criticism:-

"In his Songs of Innocence, Blake transcended Self and escaped from the isolation which Self involves; and, as it then ever is, his expanding affections embraced universal man, and, without violating, beautified and hallowed even his individual peculiarities. Accordingly, many of these delicious lays belong to the era, as well as to the author. They are remarkable for the transparent depth of thought which constitutes true simplicity-they give us glimpses of all that is holiest in the childhood of the world and the individual-they abound with the sweetest touches of that Pastoral life, by which the Golden Age may be still visibly represented to the iron one, they delineate full-orbed age, ripe with the seeds of a second infancy, which is the Kingdom of Heaven."

The conclusion of this remarkable essay is in these words: "If this volume gives one impulse to the new spiritualism which is now dawning on the world; if it leads one reader to think that all reality for him, in the long run, lies out of the limits of space and time, and that the spirits, and not bodies, and still less garments, are men, it will have done its work in its little day, and we shall be abundantly satisfied with having undertaken to perpetuate it, for a few years, by the present re-publication."

Garth Wilkinson calls it a re-publication, though he of course knew that the only previous publication, if it could be called so, was in the home-engraved and coloured copies prepared entirely by Blake's and his wife's hands, and sold privately to patrons; the issue under notice was therefore practically the first public edition.

Before dealing with some of the more special topics in Garth Wilkinson's teaching, I would like to urge his claims as a master of English; and I hope that the quotations I shall make in illustration of what he had to say to his day and generation will make many go to his books and explore their riches for themselves. They will be amply repaid in reading him for style alone; for it is a style almost unique in English literature; a style of such sonorous dignity and gravity that it affects one like great music;

but, withal, never in the least of an assumed importance; it is so manifestly spontaneous, honest and easy, as to convince and be accepted without hesitation or dubiety. It is never in the least preachy or sermonizing; it is the heartfelt speaking of one deeply earnest man to another with all the simple gravity his subject demands.

So manifestly in earnest is he that though we may start reading for style only, his matter is so vital, so heart-searching, that we are presently engrossed in that, though as charmed as ever with the expression of it. He indulges in no clichs of thought or utterance; he is uniquely honest and free from affectation, and makes an appeal of a freshness that no other theological writing does, with the one outstanding exception of Henry James (senior); and his style is the very opposite, though equally spontaneous and unaffectedly honest. Garth Wilkinson's style is of an epic grandeur, a slow-moving rhythmical succession of sentences that are more akin to the finest blank verse, though always strictly prose in construction.

Henry James's style is a witty, colloquial, argumentative, buttonholing sort; you feel suddenly arrested by an eager personality, tremendously in earnest, who is bent on convincing you at all hazards, and who will never leave you till you own up that you are convinced; he repeats his arguments in all possible forms, so that no aspect or version of them shall fail of an attack on you; you are almost breathless at a chapter's end. It is only after being thoroughly argued out and convinced, and you re-read for the enjoyment instead of the travail of the argument, that you realize how excessively brilliant is the genius whose company you have been enjoying.

But it is difficult, when philosophical theology is the subject, to create readers outside the special few to whom the promise of a superb style is an open sesame. Ordinary readers are repelled because they expect the customary barrenness of theological writing; so lacking in reality and in vital attraction is all such to the average man.

And he does not appeal to the professed student of philosophy as he does not offer a system of the normal fashion, with its quaint jargon and terminology, its strange unreal idiom that seems so alien from all that is actual and vital, and yet on a matter that affects man's deepest nature.

The only hope of a new audience then lies in the chance that the quotations I shall make will prove so stimulating to those who from mere curiosity read my halting exposition, that something of the extreme value and present-day importance of his teaching, his vivid and penetrating outlook on Life and its Consequences, will come home to them and cause them to study our author for themselves.

The freshness of the point of view, the practicality, the very real adaptation to the daily needs, the close relatedness to the daily experiences and difficulties, the absence of the usual narrowing orthodoxies, will all be quickly realized. In his great work, Human Science and Divine Revelation, Garth Wilkinson bids us realize that "there is no God like that which the Atheists deny;

that there is no Lord like Him whom the current Christian beliefs affirm." One quickly learns from him that there are no arbitrary rewards and punishments in the next life for the deeds of this; that God punishes no man thus; but that man punishes himself by making his virtues or his misdeeds to so become part and parcel of himself, that they will infallibly make the character of his continuing life a heaven or hell, by rule of simple consequence. What child's play it seems for any form of religion to offer to adults eternal slaps for earthly naughtiness and eternal jam for earthly virtues, and all to be inexorably settled by the stroke of physical death, all the evil being easily avoided and the good easily earned by the simple formula of death-bed repentance with an automatic future avoidance of sin -what is there in this that equates with real life?

A live man's prayer should be, deliver me not from consequences, even if it were possible; it is only by bearing the consequences of my voluntary acts and thoughts that I can possibly come to find my real self, to realize what I really want to be.

If a man's ignorance prevents him from choosing consciously and vitally for either good or evil here, his education must continue till he makes his own settled future; the man who consciously neglects good, runs the risk of losing the power of choice, and so drifts to negation. It is the internal, not the external and superficial aspect we are all so ready to class each other by, which is thus concerned; none of us is wholly good; it is the ruling tendencies, the foundational characteristics that we have to watch and judge our upward or downward progress by.

The essential condition, the rule of the next life, is, I like to think, that what a man desires, he must and shall have, be it good or be it evil; a very heaven of heavens for those who desire and work for the highest and best that is open to them; a very hell of hells for those to whom the opposite is the rule. No hypocrisies possible there, but only to know as we are known, the "simple life" with a vengeance.

Swedenborg was of course the first to convey this message to man, Swedenborg the complement of the New Testament; but Garth Wilkinson's expression of it is so much more beautiful, so much more human, so appealing to the homeliest and most exalted of our feelings and experiences, and so much more terrible because of the grandeur of his expression of it, that I find I re-read him far more than Swedenborg; the one seems comparatively remote, but the other gets round one's heart, a friend leading into full life.

It makes one all the more impatient with the official pulpit; for if our current preachers really believed that this daily life actually, and in too many cases, unalterably, makes the next life, not merely influences it, they could not preach so vaguely, perfunctorily, and unpractically as they habitually do. Men do not know, but they need in imperative earnest to be told, that every voluntary choice for good or evil here has an absolute and inevitable relative effect on the succeeding life.

What we prefer here we shall prefer there, and the preferring, the choosing, lies wholly with ourselves.

If this is believed and acted upon, one's creed and doctrines and formulas of belief may be regarded as mostly a matter of temperament, of training, of environment; if they are of actual adult conviction they are still of no more importance than as they react on our daily life in motive and action. What alone matters is that we realize that each day, each hour, adds a quality to the future, determines its general character.

From no writer can be gained the overwhelming conviction of this so fully as from Garth Wilkinson; he gets it all from Swedenborg, but his setting forth of it becomes a more tangible reality, which shall be shirked or avoided only at the conscious peril of one's soul. He compels us to realize that Life is something more than a mere variety of experiences; they are but the notes, Life is the tune we make of them; a recognition of what is the governing, underlying, essential driving power, making the real man in us.

Read how finely Garth Wilkinson puts this in a chapter in Human Science and Divine Revelation:

"The problem is of the greatness of good, and the greatness of evil, and their unalterable opposition; . . . the problem is immense, for revelation reveals good and reveals evil where they are not expected; they are the only substances of which it is the organon. It has revealed them from the beginning; and the Bible is nothing else than the divine light shining on them and at them. But this light has been so obscured, that its judgments on the acts of life, and on the thoughts and desires of every hour in every man, have been made to mean judgments of creeds, and to import salvation by creeds in an unknown future state. Hence good and evil have fallen out of churches and pursued their way in the kindness or cunning of the natural man. But through Swedenborg the cloud is lifted, and the divine light shines down again, this time with rational force, and with the sevenfoldness of the Divine Humanity, upon human character as its special mission.

And the consequence is that the motives of men, left out hitherto, are the first tops on which it impinges; the ruling love being the life, the whole mountain chain of the man. Hence, in estimating heaven and hell, the regard is taken away from a multitude of godly church-going figures for the one, and a smaller band of criminals and blasphemers for the other; and is fixed instead upon the general assize of humanity. We are all walking by voluntary steps to the one or the other; the divine net which fishes for men, catches the whole race now on earth for separation and partition.

"It is not the breakers of law only, the thieves and murderers and violaters, who are included in the meshes of the hells, but all the selfish lives together which act intelligently here without any breach of the law of the land. The foundation of things in the heart apportions the future in the spiritual life. And therefore, the mass of evil men and women to be dealt with is not proportionately represented in the criminal classes, or in those who sit in the pews of churches, but comprises all to whom voluntarily the divine order of heaven is impossible all those whose greeds and practices would break it up;

all who therefore must be separated; and have a place provided for them in order that they may exist. . . ."

"The pains of hell are the pressures of evil against evil; selfishness restrained by surrounding selfishness. . . . No man is punished after death for the sins done on earth; but the pursuing vengeance of evil is, that it does over again what it has committed once, and runs into punishment by fresh excess."

The majestical beauty of these last sentences seems almost scriptural; so weighty and solemn in cadence as to compel its matter and meaning to be memorable.

It may be, indeed, too often is said, "Why should I bother myself about all this when I have neither knowledge of, belief in, nor desire for immortality? The theory which fully contents me gives annihilation as the end of this visible earthly life; and I have as yet had no sufficient evidence to disprove it."

A first rejoinder may well be that, in itself, annihilation is an entirely inconceivable thing; if I try to imagine it I find I am wondering what my sensations will be, what it will feel like, when I am annihilated; our consciousness predicates continued consciousness, and we ought to live with that as a basis. Maeterlinck says, in his interesting but inconclusive and narrow-viewed essay, "Death"-"To be able to do away with a thing, to fling it into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exists, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. . . . It is as contrary to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason, to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity." We think we experience a real loss of consciousness when we sleep, but this is a debatable and quite unproven point; we do awake from sleep, and as a rule very quickly and easily; the "sleep of death" should, therefore, be taken as a sister act to normal sleeping with an awakening elsewhere, as easily and naturally as we awake here.

In all the countless cases of suicide, how many can we think were driven to it in the desire or hope of killing the self? Indubitably the only desire and intention was to escape the intolerable conditions of life here - they might be better elsewhere, but they could not be worse.

Garth Wilkinson says of these: "If a man is a suicide in heart, his will to suicide is supreme; and this means that he is potently alive to killing a present state, but by no inclusion that he climbs behind his living free will and has any desire to kill himself. His free will feels its invulnerable life when he strikes his heart, and destroys the fleshly vesture of the day."

To ask for a tangible, physical experience as a basis of a belief in a next life is to ask an impossibility; the physical is the antithesis of the spiritual; the one cannot exist, as a mode of life, in the presence of the other. Utter, abject, unreasoning terror is the result of any approach to it; and the over-mastering horror that is common to all mankind in occult practices surely proves the existence of an invisible world, invisible to us, but very real to itself.

The physical instinctively resents the spiritual, knowing it to be its enemy, potent for destruction; it cannot exist in the full presence of the other, and in the partial presence of it, the reason will most likely be unseated and mania ensue. This makes the relative danger of all spiritistic sances, and the absolute danger of occult practices. And whatever enlightenment or new knowledge may have been gained from them, it cannot be put to any earthly use, it is never of any practical avail. Garth Wilkinson says somewhere, that the sceptic often believes more with his backbone, his "creeps," than with his mind; no flesh is immune from this horror of the invisible, whatever strength of mind and reason may be brought to bear; the flesh knows better and will have none of it.

And, after all, if one obstinately says he will really know or not believe, what is there we do really know?

Knowledge is a purely relative term, it means much or little according to one's training, but it never means all.

The common man says he can at least believe in solidity and brandishes a bar of iron, but consider the smile of science at that when it knows that the solid bar of iron is in reality in a constant state of motion in all its particles, no one of which even touches the other!

Beyond all, the immortality theory provides the best working hypothesis; for it may be true, and if it is, the belief will have been all to the good in the effect it will necessarily have had on the future life; conserving powers for enjoyment, those that would otherwise have been injured, perhaps destroyed. No one can seriously believe in a succeeding life to this without moulding his behaviour here with a view to that mysteriously interesting next life in its wonderful unknown conditions. And should the impossible prove possible, and annihilation be the end of man, still the refusal to believe it is a gain, not a loss, for it will have led us to achieve more love, and so secure a more abiding memory with our fellows. The annihilationist argues sometimes that if he is right, then it is only common sense to live wholly for this life, to get every fraction of pleasure and profit out of it;

that the purely self-seeking life is the only justifiable one. But surely this is but to argue backwards; for the entirely, or even mainly, self-seeking life is not the richest in free enjoyment. Selfishness implies essential solitariness; for it is only satisfied by coercion of others from the power given by wealth or a position of authority or a determined disregard of others' rights or feelings. Man's natural instinct is to avoid being alone, to seek congenial company; but that is impossible without some unselfish regard for others; and as that is the law of heaven, if we put it into practice here, we may as well believe in a heaven where it is brought to perfection.

Determinedly to live the most selfish life possible, is to court a hell hereafter, logically true, believe it or not as may be chosen; and that is best described in Garth Wilkinson's memorable words: "The pains of hell are the pressures of evil against evil; selfishness restrained by surrounding selfishness." Truly a formidable future to work for;

societies of selfish people, whose only end is to prey on each other, restrained only by punishments, i.e. the immediate results it effects; the hardest of hard lives on earth is surely preferable to that.

The familiar text sums it all up: "But what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The answer can only be, nothing; for the world he thought he had gained fails him altogether in the article of death, and the impoverished, the bankrupt soul may go on to live and on hopeless terms.

Garth Wilkinson has an exceedingly beautiful passage in Human Science and Divine Revelation, on this immortality question and the theory that the physical is all: "The influence of the body upon the mind is often cited as a convincing argument that the mind is but a condition of the material organization. So also the decline of faculty in old age, and the obliteration of memory then, and when disease weakens the frame.

"But the body is indeed the medium and instrument which incarnates the mind, and through which the mind works. If you vitiate the instrument, the work is marred; but that only proves that the worker has his hand on it imperfectly; not that the instrument is the worker. If the flute is cracked and tuneless, the flute-player is limited by its imperfections; he may be discouraged if he can get no other flute, but his powers are independent of and above the present flute, and he has to bide for a better instrument. So a brain, once sound and sane, may fall into ruins, and the mind that played thoughts through it will produce but fragmentary and disordered touches of thought where clearness and coherence were once the rule; but the mind is all there, when the ruined cerebrum is either cured or discarded; and being itself the essential brain on which the other was but the mortal plating, its capacities are unaffected and will recur in a second life in higher forms."

This "I don't know" attitude also over-looks and ignores the facts of the experiences of others.

Garth Wilkinson has it, that, "Ignoring is a dangerous desert to a being who worships experience and thought."

It may happen, it has happened, that a sudden experience will open a door hitherto unsuspected and into an undreamed-of world of cognition; but an experience that is too intensely intimate and personal to be shared or passed on; it is singly one's own, and yet is as valid and real as if it were an universal. Garth Wilkinson speaks thus on it: "The doctrine that death is the annihilation of the man, contradicts experience, and dares not face it. It is superfluous to say that the position is correlated with nothing, because it is of nothing, and is nothing. It asserts nothing as its end. More absurd than the glory theory, more superstitious than the grave theory, more false than the necessary progress of the species theory, it is, if held in heart and not in mere intellectual impotence, the crowning dogma of the fool."

These references to the "glory theory," etc., need further quotation in explanation.

"The blind faith that imperfect men and women from the world by laying hold of Christ can in dying be at once translated into 'glory,' corresponds to nothing wise or good; and common sense rejects it. Such a change in faculties would violate and destroy all faculty; and personal identity, including freedom, would melt away on the instant. There is no process in it, as there is in everything Divine; consequently, no truth, or reference of the past to the present and the future. It correlates with juggling, not with salvation. In the spiritual world, men are led on by stages, swift, or slow, according to their states, towards final conditions of good or evil; they are led by divine management to put off their apparent selves, and to come into their most real selves; and for every state a corresponding place is prepared; they are led by processes which strictly equate with their first education in this natural world, where the appearances of good are indispensable to command success in life; only that in the upper world this world's ideal is realized, and it is the realities of good which gain the prize.

Thus, it is all work in both worlds, the shunning of evil and the doing of good. . . .

"Besides the 'immediate glory' party, the church has in it another, which may be called the party of the immediate grave; implying virtually the sleep of the man till the (a) day of judgment and the resurrection then of the dust into the man. This, it is obvious, corresponds also to nothing. There is no knowledge in the grave, and nothing but morbid dogmatic fancy in such an idea of non-existent existence. The truth is, that the man rises by process immediately that his fleshly heart ceases to beat; he is indrawn into the other world by the Lord; his spiritual senses are unclothed of mortality, and are opened to perceive the universe then about him; just as his natural senses as a baby were opened at first to the natural world. This is experience, and here is continuity of being with only a difference of degree. . . . The judgment on men is not at the end of a sleep in the grave in this world, but being a judgment on the spirits and purposes of men, commences by processes as soon as death takes place.

"Allied by subject only, not opinion, to these two parties is another class of minds, who will have it that in both worlds there is a steady necessary progress of mankind towards divine ends; that the human race is always on the advance upwards and onwards. This is as contrary to experience as the glory theory; history is against it; for even if there was no fall at the first, as these people insist, the record of mankind is full of nothing but mighty falls since. Falls of great organic systems of minds; whole faculties swept away, and supplanted by others; falls of churches and empires; falls of individuals all around us in the battle of life. Therefore, this creed, of the necessary progress of the species, is correlated with no experience, and contradicted by all circumstance. When man insists on self, and on being left to himself, he falls, and having a free will, has a right to fall; he falls individually and collectively; when his collective fall is complete, the Lord intervenes;

reduces the fallen state to order that it may not propagate ruin further; introduces a new divine 'state,' in which those who choose have a fresh point of departure; and thus Himself ensures another progression, but not on the basis of any 'progress of the species,' but rather on its proclivity to retrograde. All this is attested in sufficient measure in the natural world, it corresponds to history, and fatherhood, and statesmanship."

This leads to a profoundly suggestive page on the dogmas of the atonement and the trinity. The Trinity is, of course, a true doctrine in itself, but not as a trinity of persons; man is a single person, but he is also a trinity in essentials; man has a body and he has a mind, there are two elements; but unless he puts these to use, he may as well not exist; the going forth of these into speech and action constitute the third element, the real man; the triune person is then complete.

"The 'three persons' in the Godhead are perturbation to the unity of nature.

The descent of the second person into incarnation to save the human race from the vengeance of the first by a death on the cross, satisfying justice vicariously, is like nothing in human justice, stands alone in the faculties of mankind, is attested by nothing but the votes of churches, is no hypothesis, still less a theory of the letter of scripture, and it is impossible to show how any but a vicious redemption could be wrought by it. As for any attestation from the history of our race, such substitutions of the innocent for the guilty give the guilty immunity and make them worse. . . . The weight of the faith also corresponds to nothing divine. It is alleged that the man who implicity believes these mystical dogmas is saved by his faith without the works of the law; that in a wicked world it is to a great extent impossible to do right, to carry religion right down, and by it regenerate all life; and, therefore, faith in Christ's work is vicarious for human virtue, and faith alone saves. Here again there is no correlation, no correspondence with anything human, natural, or divine.

It is an attempt to escape out of the window into the sky, when gravitation presses, and the earth is the only footing. In human work, ceasing to do evil, and learning to do well, are the modes of true life, and apply throughout. Faith in something else than this ceasing and this learning is irrelevant. There is no conscience in it; or only a compulsory conscience proceeding from the same authority as the faith. There is no nature in it; for all her processes are downright, careful, exact work carrying principles and ends, and faithful to performance as their reason of being. There is nothing divine in it, unless you first create your divinity, and then put this into his exactions. It is against all the Lord's doing; for His whole life was a battle of deeds, and He became divine justice and judgment, not by alone believing in the Father, but by practically, through resistance to evil after evil, and falsity after falsity, and temptation after temptation, conquering earth, hell, and heaven, and reducing them to divine order."

And again: "The poor estate of the theist, reverently believing there is a God, and hoping and aspiring to think out something of Him from nature and the mind. . . .

". . . The aspiration of theism to a creed of God is impossible to adjoin to a scientific hypothesis of the world for that such a fabric as the visible formal universe should be created by a benign God, which the supposition is, and that a conscious mind, male and female, with large religious faculties, should be, so far as we have experience, the crown of it, and that He, the All-possible, should have left Himself unmanifested, a prey to imagination and conjecture, when yet shape and form for every other thing are His representative creatures; His easiest manifestoes, is an anomaly to the human heart and intellect. It declares that the rest of things can be definitely known, but that the exact God or fashioner is a guess; that He who has a divine heart cannot show a divine face."

One would think that this nobly beautiful and inspiring passage must have been familiar to Robert Browning, for the following quotation from his poem, "An Epistle of Karshish the Physician," is an almost perfect poetic parallel:

"The very God! think Ahib: dost thou think?

So, the All-great, were the All-loving, too-

So, through the thunder comes a human voice,

Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself!

Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine,

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,

And thou must love Me who have died for thee!'"

For further confirming of this, and in the most striking fashion possible, I must here quote one of the most penetrating and inspiringly beautiful passages in Henry James's works. It occurs in Christianity, the Logic of Creation (pp. 213-15), a book I cannot too strongly recommend my readers to make their own.

"Christianity eternally explodes the naturalistic conception of Deity as a being essentially disproportionate to man and therefore inaccessible to human intelligence, by identifying Him with, conventionally, the meanest and humblest of men, with a man who was so genuinely humble and insignificant as actually to feel no personality apart from the interests of universal truth and justice, who had not spirit enough to be angry at the grossest of personal insults, or to resent the cruellest of personal wrongs;

but, on the contrary, habitually and patiently endured degradation, which any rustic pedagogue at the present day would be parochially disowned for submitting to for a moment, and which would drive the most sonorous of your English bishops to doubt the Divine existence, if he were even so much as threatened with them. Yet He, adorable man of men, bore unflinchingly on, nor ever ceased to eat the bitter bread of humiliation, until He had made His despised and suffering form the adequate and ample temple of God, and so for ever wedded the Infinite Divine perfection to the most familiar motions and appetites of our ordinary human nature. Jesus vindicated His prophetic designation as above all men 'a man of sorrows,' because in the historic position to which He found Himself born, He was exposed on one side to the unmeasured influx of the Divine Love, and on the other to the equally unmeasured influx of every loathsome and hellish lust of personal aggrandizement. . . .

View His personal pretension as literally true and just, as having an absolute basis, and you can imagine no more flagrant dishonour to the Divine name. To suppose that the universal Father of mankind cared for the Jew one jot more than for the Gentile, and that He cared for one Jew also more than for another, actually intending to give both the former and the latter an endless earthly dominion, was manifestly to blacken the Divine character, and pervert it to the inflammation of every diabolic ambition. And yet this was that literal form of the Jewish hope to which Christ was born. This innocent babe opened His eyes upon mother and father, brother and sister, neighbour and friend, ruler and priest, all stupidly agape at the marvels which heralded His birth; and no doubt as His intelligence dawned, He lent a naturally complacent ear to the promises of personal advancement and glory they showered upon Him.

"I find no trace of any man in history being subject to the temptations that beset this truest of men. I find no trace of any other man who felt himself called upon by the tenderest human love to loath and disavow the proud and yearning bosom that bore him. I find no other man in history whose profound reverence for infinite goodness and truth drove him to renounce the religion of his fathers simply because that religion contemplated as its issue his own supreme aggrandizement; and whose profound love to man drove him to renounce every obligation of patriotism simply because these obligations were plainly coincident with the supremest and subtlest inspirations of his own self-love. No doubt many a man has renounced his traditional creed because it associated him with the obloquy and contempt of his nation, or stood in the way of his personal ambition; and so no doubt many a man has abjured his country because it disclaimed his title and ability to rule.

In short, a thousand men can be found every day who do both these things from the instinct of self-love. But the eternal peculiarity of the Christian fact is that Christ did them utterly without the aid of that tremendous lever, actually while it was undermining His force, and subjecting Him to ceaseless death. He discredited His paternal gods simply because they were bent on doing Him unlimited honour; and shrank from kindred and countrymen only because they were intent upon rendering Him unparalleled gratitude and benediction.

"What a mere obscenity every great name in history confesses itself besides this spotless Judaean youth, who in the thickest night of time-unhelped by priest or ruler, by friend or neighbour, by father or mother, by brother or sister, helped in fact, if one may so consider it, only by the dim expectant sympathy of that hungry rabble of harlots and outcasts, who furnished His inglorious retinue, and still further drew upon Him the ferocious scorn of all that was devout and honourable and powerful in His nation-

yet let in eternal daylight upon the soul, by steadfastly expanding in His private spirit to the dimensions of universal humanity; so bringing, for the first time in history, the finite human bosom into perfect experimental accord with the infinite Divine Love.

For my part, I am free to declare that I find the conception of any Divinity superior to this radiant human form inexpressibly treasonable to my own manhood. . . . I shall always cherish the most hearty and cheerful atheism towards every deity but Him, who has illustrated my own nature with such resplendent power as to make me feel that man henceforth is the only name of honour. . . . In short, I worship the God-man, that peerless and perfect soul whose unswerving innocence and sweetness gathered up the infinite forces of Deity as wheat is gathered up in a sheaf, and for ever linked them with the natural life of man. . . ."

This is surely the most triumphant attestation of a man's belief that is possible; and how good it is to remember that such a mind and writer found full kinship while on earth with Garth Wilkinson;

the ideal of appreciative friendship must, indeed, have been reached when they talked together or read each other's books.

Garth Wilkinson says somewhere, "Heaven and Hell are only other names for Good and Evil." I have often wished we could expunge that dread word hell from our vocabulary. It connotes so wholly an arbitrary condition, a spatial allotting in man's destiny; whereas Heaven and Hell are states, not places; hell is but a generic name for the more or less unhappy societies man will drift into if he will not work for a right to be in the happy and useful societies that heaven consists of.

"The pursuing vengeance of evil is, that it does over again what it has committed once, and runs into punishment by fresh excess. . . . Short of crime, evil has its own freedom; when crime is committed in hell, as on earth, the criminal is reduced and punished. . . . Stripped of its delusions, the estate is lean and barren, like the interior mind of wickedness here on earth. . . .

Universal evil is housed in a compulsory cosmos; is separated from good by divine justice and mercy."

And again: "For all practical purposes, we are going into a harder and sterner world than this has been; in the past, evil has been hard, and good has been soft; in the battle between the two these conditions will be reversed, and while love and charity will have a new tenderness to their own children, their great executive functions will be carried forward by edges of truth which will search, judge and prevail."

But for those who essentially love, that is prefer, to work for God, none of these educative hardships of experience will appal, or hinder, or frighten into relinquishing the struggle. So long as there is no farcical society as here, with its hypocrisies, its castes, its absurd and unfair money basis, its unrelatedness to real progress by its pitiful lack of opportunities to those who most need them, its multitudinous temptations arising solely from unfair conditions, which, though not answering to a real love of evil in the man, are not resisted because of the pressure of the unjust conditions-

any radically honest form of visibly progressive education, of training into instinctively right choices will surely be welcomed as a relief from the incongruities of this life. And the growth in right choosing will hardly be difficult, for it will be so different from what obtains here, where experience is always too late to be a guide. We sin, most often because we are insufficiently warned, yet the loss is absolute; we may learn enough not to sin again in the same way, but we were unable to avoid the sin before, by lack of sufficient warning. We learn too late to profit by it; but it will all, of necessity, be remedied in those just, those searchingly spiritual trials we shall rejoice in then, if only we can, while here, keep alive our desire for good.

We can hope for this future for all those who have kept their religious sense; but what percentage is there of the great average that can be said to own any vital religious sense? (55) To attack the idea of a religious sense to the majority of the people we pass in the streets is patently absurd; if they exhibit any sign of being alive to it on a Sunday it has no further, no continuous hold on them, and they live happily without any reference to it. But if it cannot be possible that they are absolutely devoid of it, why has it so completely ceased to have any practical evidence, and why has the need for worship in all classes so largely ceased? It must be that the Churches and their ministers have lost hold, by their manifest unrelatedness to daily life, their unreality, the impossibility of making their doctrines real and valid in practice.

The fact that its professional exponents wear a uniform, a special dress, marks them as men apart; whereas there must be no professionalism in goodness, in religious life or occupation. If the garb means only that they are teachers, then let it be the universal uniform of all teachers; to profess goodness, or be set apart for it, takes the common humanity out of men, the religious sense and exercise must be common, not special.

The current feeling towards any religious expression is that it is in instinctive antagonism to the business and workaday life; its sentimentalities, as they are really considered, are so alien as to be impossible of serious or practical thought from Monday to Saturday.

But the practical religious sense, a living for and in communion with the invisible, must be made to invade, to permeate the business life, impossible though it seems while competition and a money-caste is the foundation of the social fabric. Religion is not business and business is certainly not religion; a pair of innocents like Dickens' Cheeryble Brothers would be bankrupt in a month of today, when cut-throat competition is the rule, and we all live on instead of for each other.

Therefore do I welcome so intensely this profoundly searching and most noble yet simple teaching which Garth Wilkinson gives us from Swedenborg. A very workaday gospel to fill the real need of all men, and more especially the average, the common man, who makes up the great bulk of humanity, and of whom it is almost a sacrilege to expect any reverent sense of a vital religious belief or cognizance, but who may be made to know of the existence of the invisible world and his connection with it.

Its commonsense practicality, its non-sentimentality, its essential justice, should have an instant appeal to him; to waste no good force or initiative, but to yield to and work it; to pursue no evil tendency; to despise the illicit; to live for the future with a constant eye for consequences, not as rewards or punishments merely, but as self-limitations, or self-enlargements, self-robbery of powers of enjoyment, or the widening of such to limitless bounds; to realize that no success is worth anything if it will not carry over to the next stage of life.

The average man can then go on at need and will to gain a philosophical understanding, a theological reason why; to get an insight into the real mission and work of the Divine-man, Jesus Christ, to realize the eternal import of the Divine-Natural Humanity.

It is probable that many will call this mere morality; not a saving faith; just what is indeed possible to any mere heathen, but anyhow it is a good beginning for any heathen, English or foreign. And no essential choosing of and delight in Good for the sake of happiness in Good, can be other than a preparation for heaven, which is the home of Good. To be in heaven we must be of heaven, there is no other way, pace whatever creeds or formulas or faiths may be insisted on as vitally necessary. It is certainly better than a professed faith minus any application of it to the daily doings, for it is essentially related to ends, what Swedenborg calls the Divine Doctrine of Uses.

And, if accepted on the mere ground of expediency, a making the best of both worlds as a safest policy, that merely implies that the man has no interior use in or love for it, and it is an hypocrisy that will shrivel away and reveal the nakedly mean soul in that searching life where, as Garth Wilkinson most wonderfully has it, "all thoughts and affections are sensibly communicated on the atmospheres, so that each is in constant blazon to his fellows, and their hearts to each other are visible acts of gesture."

The absurd talk of an angry God also ceases when we thus realize that the only anger that can arise is in ourselves at ourselves, over unhappy but just consequences. If a man does badly here from a faulty environment or a poisoned heredity, that is not conscious determinate sin, and is remediable in further light when freed from the physical determining taints that predisposed, almost forced him into sin here.

Garth Wilkinson says: "The punishments of the spiritual world are of two effects, reformatory, where reformation is possible, and vastative, devastating, where it is not. The first consists of temptations, trials, victories; long and great sufferings under severe circumstances from which escape is not given; . . . revelations of hell within and despairs; falling and rising states; and through all the voluntary detachment of the man from the evils of his life and nature; until the divine charity and wisdom of the Lord with the man's free will unimpaired dare admit him purged and purified into Heaven. . . .

In the evil it is dire punishment, no arbitrary sentence of God, but organic necessity of association. . . . In both cases, good and evil, appearances are put aside, and reality is reached; and the man is, not as he was to society, but as he was and is to God; a heaven in the least form, or a hell in the least form. . . . The impetus of his past life and the force of acquired character will drive him on to repeat the deeds done in the body, to continue his life; and he must be made aware and ware of this, and act on it, if he would escape from his own hell."

It may seem a terrible sort of future life to be born to; but the punishment really connotes an enforced education, which is lastingly painful only for those who prefer evil to good. No one of us is free from sin, all have faults, unacknowledged mostly, but demanding reparation and abandonment; it is surely but cowardly to call these enforced experiences (to thus prove ourselves) a punishment really only comes when sin is persisted in against all warning, and it has to be kept in bounds.

And the experiences that prove painful are of our own making; we shall go on living the life we have come to prefer, with the simple difference that while its effects may here be deferred or avoided, there they are instant in application. For those who really desire to know themselves and to progress to the full of their capabilities, such experiences are only their growing pains; and we can mitigate them to what extent we will by the voluntary, deliberate choices we make here in the earth-life.

On Free Will in this connection I will again quote Garth Wilkinson: "The belief that the wicked actually die out, evil having thus no true existence, is humanely meant, but after all, it is terrible, a kind of divine suicide. For it forgets the true ground of immortality, which is free will, and can give little reason for a man's enduring life that does not apply to animals. The reason of hell is the

immortality of hell; that reason is that men freely will hell.

No man is there without intensely willing it. He does not wish limitation, and pain, but he does will and delight in evil, and that always means that he can come out of hell but will not."

Also, if determinism (that shallow refuge in escape from the problems of life, insoluble by any other than the Swedenborg message) were a true theory, and no man is responsible for his thoughts and actions, and liable for their necessary consequences-how is remorse to be explained, the remorse that impels a man to public confession to gain quietude of mind; the remorse that is something more than lip-sorrow; a real sense of personal guilt of interior origin? No man ever really accuses any other than himself of his sins, be they peccadilloes or inhering vices; to himself, he owns them, "the purposed ways of the lifetime," and accepts their responsibility. Environment and circumstance limit and condition our choices; but in the actual deciding between these (however limited or extensive) choices, man has a very real free will, personal and peculiar to himself;

hence his innate sense of responsibility, a sense that no man has ever honestly shirked or denied.

Garth Wilkinson says on this point "There is not a paragraph in Swedenborg's works that has any other end or object than to make men and women more personally responsible for their actions here, and thus-wise more capable of receiving happiness hereafter. . . . The loves, which are the lives, of men are continuous, and their apparent death is their instant resurrection, and they go to their own fathers, that is to say, to the great affectional societies with which they were in correspondence by acts of life here; the conscience of everyday is the metaphysic that is needed, and the knowledge of the affections of the heart is the tutor of life. The revelation, from heaven and from hell, of what the affections lead to, and of what they are, is thus of prime moment in the conduct of a man. And those theologies which obscure this revelation, and teach that human seeds do not grow into human trees, but are miraculously brought into something else after ages of sleep in another way, leave human nature as they find it, but with, a bias deepened to self and the world."

This very practical gospel seems also to simplify the difficult question of how to talk religion to young children. Let them understand that explanations will come later; all they now have to realize is that they are born to live for ever; that death only means the wearing-out of this body; that this earthly flesh body will be succeeded by one of a finer sort suited to the finer and more beautiful life we shall live after we leave the earth; that they now have a flesh body, a muscle body, a nerve body, a bone body, all one in the other, and finest of all they have a spirit body, so fine as to be invisible now, but which will be as real in the next life as the flesh body is real now. That the Lord Jesus is God the Creator made visible; who came long ago to the earth to make known to us the best way to live, and that if they want to live with Him in heaven, with all the happy people, they must be good and happy here;

bad habits, and bad temper making the spirit body deformed and ugly here, as they always do the physical body there.

Garth Wilkinson beautifully says: "Children can now be taught whatever is needful of life and death. . . . They can know that life is definitely continued, and that in every duty and lesson they are being prepared not only for an earthly but also for a heavenly home; the child can learn that if he dies young he will grow up under angelic tutorship in the spiritual world . . . that children who die grow up to an immortal youth, as old good men die and grow back to the same maturity; that heaven is unfading youth, because true love and life are in the freshness of the Lord's eternal morning. . . . Education on these principles is totally different . . . to where the knowledge is vague and the grave blocks the way, and dims the sight of the little enquirer."

Garth Wilkinson has a very wonderful chapter on "Prayer and Miracle" in his Human Science and Divine Revelation:-

"It is thought today that if there be a God, He is unalterable, that He changes His face for no solicitation, that consequently all events take their natural course, and that prayer is a nullity as an appeal to the Divine nature. They say it may alter the praying man, but by no means the Being prayed to. Certainly it does alter him who prays, and often supremely, changing despair into hope, confusion into steady light, timidity into confidence, cowardice into courage, hatred into love, and the genius of compromise into the spirit of martyrdom. In short, it makes men of those who were not men, it changes ignoble conditions into the highest figures and occasions which the world has seen. . . . The inspiration of the successful prayer state is that it is not a success of the art of the selfhood, not a pious fraud of ego practised upon ego, but a divine gate between the Lord and man opened by human prayer. . . . There is no experience to contradict this; no professor praying as a dodge has ever bettered his case or proved his point though it is on record that scoffing has been overmastered by prayer, and an altered mind come to the man on his knees.

For the divine mercy loses no occasion to regenerate. In this case it is not the imposture which succeeds, but the imposture which recedes like a beaten demon before a new point of sincerity opened, with some permission of his own, in the praying man. . . . Prayer, constant prayer, in a mind, when answered below by a corresponding life in the day's work, opens the mind to God, and in full trust communes with Him as a divine friend, and brings on, and brings down, new states in that mind which alter it entirely."

It is supremely interesting to remember here that finely spiritual saying George Meredith has in his Feveral: "Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered." All this implies, of course, real prayer, true self-surrender in the utterance, in the appeal, in the communion; one needs not to kneel to accomplish it, a mere ejaculation, a momentary expression, can be as full of meaning as the longest prayer; and if it savour at all of the perfunctory, it is a dead thing and void; saying prayers is not necessarily praying.

On this necessary unalterability of God Garth Wilkinson has these further thoughts: "On the side which He turns to man, called love and mercy, He alters His face to every condition of His creature. He would be no Lord if He did not Govern, no supremely wise Lord unless He governed according to the momentaneous state of His subjects. . . . Every perpetuated law is an everlasting alteration according to the circumstances of the case. The sum of instantaneous alterations is the law in process. . . . How shall He not divinely change to meet every want of His creatures? He could not be infinite, eternal, and unchangeable unless He dealt in detail ineffable with every contingency and every course of mankind and the world; unless He played upon every moment of every mind with the stops of His fingers."

This is followed by an application of it to the legislator as ruler; though it would surely puzzle us to find an historical or contemporary parallel to it; being indeed the ideal:

"In human affairs, the higher every man is in function from true exaltation of character, the more fixed in his principles, and the more far-seeing, and the more powerful the legislation, which issues from him, the more the action under him changes to suit the national freedom which he guides; and his face of each day is a modification suited to the whole face of affairs. The day when there is no change in him and from him according to the wide want and woe beneath him, that day he dies to office, and mortal change passes over him. His public essence alters when his heart curdles, or his wide hands fall into disuse. The simile is applicable to the Lord from whom all power comes. He is the Lord because He rules yesterday, today, and for ever; and in so ruling has a different nexus or connection with every hour since the first.

"Love means this, and mercy means it, and wisdom means it, and truth means it. And these are the divine things which must be thought of, or God is not thought of."

As needful a lesson as any to be gained from these eloquent pages of Garth Wilkinson, is the enforcement of the Swedenborg message of the omnipresence of the Spiritual World around us, continually influencing us. Mankind is not alone in this realm; man is not the sole denizen of these atmospheres; for they are peopled by countless hosts of our predecessors. The nearest are those who have failed to make progress owing to the overwhelming attraction of, and their contentment with, the old earth-life. Those who insist on finding their entire enjoyment in what the earth-life grossly provides, not living in the spiritual side of this life's activities, must, when they enter the next life, find themselves semi-bankrupt, they have left behind all they found life in. They tied up their affections so wholly here that they find it almost impossible to escape when dead to it, and their intensest delight is to get back into it through the yielding personality of some one of us here who is akin to them. This largely accounts for the easy puerilities so prevalent in spiritualistic seances;

the mischievous and vicious, the idle and frivolous, being closest, have the greater ease in gaining an entry: the more advanced see the generally hopeless folly of such communications and seldom attempt them.

As Garth Wilkinson has it: "Spiritist informations tell us nothing. They are only continua of the earthly senses, which are nowhere continuous with the spiritual or heavenly. They are brainless for the upper realm."

One of Garth Wilkinson's most wonderful passages is where he pictures Man in this after life: "The human race is practically and really One Man. . . . Each individual man is separately conscious, and is sufficiently alone to be himself, but in that very soleness he is also conscious that he is part of a greater Manship, and that without being in it he would perish. . . . At death every member of it enters a corresponding spiritual world; and carries along with him, so to speak, his own spiritual world. He is still part of the One Man, but on new conditions; he is a member of some one of the vast societies of the spiritual world. . . .

There are ways for all the virtues there . . . there are ways for all the vices; paved ways, smooth with the granite of the customs and habits of the Will in the life-time. This Soul-Region is the World of Spirits, and the ways in it, like the Life-Ways of this world, lead up to Heaven, or lead down to Hell. Through this Soul-Region, Heaven and Hell communicate with the Natural man, with the Natural mind, with the Natural universe. Heaven is the final Kingdom of God, and Hell is the ultimate Dominion of Evil. . . . These Realms are super-real as compared with nature. There are gulfs there that cannot be bridged, and that no imagination can overleap. There are mountains that no foot of thought can climb, though Gospel-sandalled feet may tread them."

And on Space and Time Garth Wilkinson is equally noble in utterance: "God makes Space, which is just as finite as my writing-desk. I cannot see the ends and sides of space by my senses, for they are immersed in space, and wherever they travel they see space.

They are not senses of the ends of space. Another set of faculties, which have not manifest outward senses here, are required to show us how and where and when space ends. . . . As to how space ends, our removal from it is How. We die and leave it as an inheritance to others. It can also end by the connection and spiritualizing of our intuitions. For the when, it ends at Death with us all. For the where, there is no where in the case, for where is of space, and would carry space over into the new condition where there is no space, but yet the appearance of it. Space, which floods the senses of the natural man and mind before death, is limited by regnant spiritual ideas after death; and to these ideas States of Life govern spaces, and correspond with them." And again: "The World of Spirits is the World of roads to Heaven and to Hell; the World of Angels is Heaven; the World of Devils and Satans is Hell; there are the three great spheres with which we are linked by this correspondence. Out of their vast societies, our lives forming our characters, perpetually, momentaneously, select and invite their own similar spirits with whom they associate us.

This is an association most swift and inevitable, for in the Spiritual World similarity of Love and liking is presence, which cannot be contravened. You cannot love the same evil without having its infernal crew for your intimate bosom companions and lords; you cannot love any heavenly good without those who love it in heaven being close to you and uniting with your affection."

May not this inescapable surrounding of spirit influences, malign and beneficent, form a sort of explanation of genius and inspiration? A genius is one who is abnormally sensitive and open to influx has a finer receptivity. Man makes nothing of himself; we say we "make" this or that; or so-and-so creates such and such a part; but we only form, give body and appearance to what already exists latently, or is given us from other-where. God alone creates, really makes; for He not only creates the form and appearance, but provides the stuff, the material also.

When we listen to a Beethoven slow movement (e.g. that of the Op. 97 Trio) we feel instinctively that though it is certainly by man, it is as certainly not of man; the inevitable question is, of things as great as this, whence got this man these things? New doors have been opened for us; new things told us; and how can they be explained except on the hypothesis of an invisible world, with which we are in constant nexus? Man is successful or not according to the measure of his openness to this influx and to his obedience to this inspiration. This does not in any sense rob man of any virtue or force of personality; these things become ours when we have fashioned them, even though their suggestion is from a deeper source than our own personality. But why need we claim any maker's rights in them when they are once achieved; our joy is sufficient in having been the chosen vehicle for them, and they then become independent entities. Our sole virtue is not in making our little plot of ground, but in cultivating it; the fulness with which we make it yield.

We say how "gifted" a man is; the very word implying an outside source as giver of the gifts; but the only virtue we see in the man who owns them is in the use he puts them to. Great indeed are the responsibilities of those who are rich in such receptivity and in comparable powers of expression: "Whosoever hath," says the Scripture, "to him shall be given"; dreadful, in truth, is the parable with its nemesis of completion, "and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have," so the faithless owner of the gifts shall be worse off than those faithful to whom less has been given.

Garth Wilkinson says again: "It is the aim of these pages throughout to bring the spiritual world into the arena, and to show it as a constant father-force operant upon earth, on the evil side wherever any corruption exists and supplies it with a womb."

Like unto like, it is the willingness to evil that attracts the evil suggesting spirit. Nothing grows without its proper soil, and the fruitful soil for sin is our willingness to it, a gladness in it, instead of an instant repulsion.

"Good and evil, which are merely other names for Heaven and Hell, are known to the religious mind to be the most potent factors in man's higher destiny. We derive all good, in will, thought, and action, from God; and all evil from the Devil and Satan, which are the names of the Collective Human Hells." And again: "The aim of all spiritual life is to descend into bodily life; the aim of the life of the over-brooding heavens, is to enter man by his free soul and spirit, and to fill him with good affections and true thoughts; all his pure life comes to his organism thus. The aim of the life of the hells, and of the evil congregations of persons not yet fixed but between us and the hells-the World of spirits first entered by man at death-is, by ceaseless endeavour, and sensual pressure, to possess the bodies of men and the upper faculties thereby; to cancel free will and to dominate the natural life. Those aims we receive and further so long as we are of sound mind, on one side, or the other. . . ."

"Every man's ruling love is his life, and maintains itself continually by attracting its own successions from the spiritual world, just as men and women here fortify and enlarge themselves by association with 'kindred spirits' in the worldly sense of the expression. The ruling love dictates the life which is the behaviour of the individual. The ruling love is the behaviour of the free will. Get rid of the idea of life as any other than the action of your own will and understanding, into which comes correspondently the tide of your past deeds, and from the societies above and below whatever you solicit at their hands."

The more one broods over this aspect of life and its meaning, the more practically and perfectly it equates with all experience; but if any still deny or doubt, Garth Wilkinson has these words for them: "To suppose that they (the denizens of the spiritual world), of like creation and familiar face with ourselves, are nothing, because we do not see them, is tantamount to denying their existence and granting death as their end- all.

No Church does this. But what no Church has been strong to do, until now, is to discern that spiritual existence, that is to say, Men and Women in the Spiritual Life, as a Cause, are not only spiritual but bodily; and that the sphere proceeding from them is indeed psychological but in the next degree, physiological also. In a word, the connection of the spiritual world with the natural is, on the grand scale, the case over again of the connection of the soul and spirit and mind, or will and understanding, with the body. . . . Is it conceivable that they are of none effect because our powers cannot measure their effectings? . . . they care for us with a good and with an evil care, and would fain have us for heaven or have us for hell."

Many have objected to these teachings as giving too strenuous a plan of life; the laissez-faire, even the laisser-aller is the easier aspect; and after all who is Garth Wilkinson, or who is Swedenborg that they should have such positive pronouncements? But to think in such fashion is to shut up all doors of new knowledge, to close in one's horizon, to limit one's outlook.

The attitude should rather be, is there anything in all this that really conflicts with or opposes my own experiences; or do I object to it because it is limiting me, forbidding me things I like and want, discovering error and wrong in my current ways of thinking and living? If it does oppose my deepest intuitions and experiences, then I am bound to reject it; but if it growingly agrees therewith, and is daily finding more and more corroborative proof in my knowledge of life, how can I refuse to accept it, to live up to it, and in turn pass it on to others?

Garth Wilkinson says of it: "You are to take nothing for granted; only to keep your mind open to the Good, and the True, and the Useful. You need quash no criticism, provided, on this ground of openness it proceeds from the dubitative affirmative not from the dubitative negative bias of the heart."

Surely the finest ideal is to have a constant sense of judging, of criticizing, ourselves; instinctively feeling of each act, thought, or speech that one feels is deliberate, individual, or even impulsive-how shall I look back on that, will it bear remembering, or do I wish it could be forgotten here and now?

And we have to realize that an absolute forgetting is impossible; our memories, inextinguishable and persistent, are our future judgments; their future effect will be the result of how we then either condone, or justify them, or accept their lesson in repentance and reformation. Swedenborg's gloriously true Doctrine of Uses becomes thus the daily ideal; no theory is of any good to us unless it can be and is put to Use; knowledge is merely dead power, Wisdom is the living power.

It has been objected also; "but does it matter much, if I shall eventually come out all right, though through far more stringent experience and trial, to which indeed I am quite willing to agree as the price of greater indulgence here?" "Why should I deny myself any experience, however selfish or sinful, if with an eventual repentance and abandonment its serious consequences can be done away with?"

But consequences are inevitable or they would not be consequences; and the dire result of this plan of campaign is the probable loss of the faculty and the power to change; what we so deliberately adopt and choose becomes Us; and the love or desire for good may become impossible. The death of the physical body exerts no remedial action on the man; he simply goes on living his chosen and preferred life, though with less chance of change than here.

The punishment of sin seems largely avoidable here on earth; a moral burn is not so great a deterrent from repetition as a physical burn is. But in the spiritual world the punishment, the effect of re-committed sins, is as real and visible and instant as the physical results of playing with fire are here. And a cardinal feature, therefore, of that entrancingly free life is that sin and evil is, as virtue is, at last licit and free; the ever condemning feature of sin here is its illicit character, its inborn necessity for hiding; great shall be the day when for us the reign of the illicit shall be over, hypocrisy an impossibility.

Though too terrible for general reading, there are, for those who can bear them, dreadful details of the consequences of sin given in Swedenborg's volumes of his Spiritual Diary; they are wholly human and reasonable and logical; but absolutely uninventable by any man.

And prosaic and commonplace though it may be considered, too cheap, easy, and obvious to have any stress laid upon it, the mainspring of a beautiful life is still the Golden Rule really lived. No abiding selfishness flourishes in its presence, for it is a seeking of the good of others, the Love of the Neighbour; and selfishness inevitably leads to essential loneliness; and as man is essentially an "alone" being, who is driven to seek company to realize himself fully and objectively, it is of course fatal to any real happiness to cultivate that which intensifies loneliness; the terror of that in the spiritual world must be great indeed, but what is it but the necessary consequence of the selfish, the self-seeking life?

The actively unselfish life is also the chief enemy to that deadliest of vices, what Swedenborg calls the Lust of Power;

the desire to control, to dominate others; the delight of being in, and of exercising authority; of imposing one's will on others, regardless altogether of their independent rights or desires. Half the cruelties of life are due to this Lust of Power, and dreadful indeed must its consequences be when it lands its victim in Societies composed only of such devotees, each preying on the other with instant punishment when successful.

When an active belief in a spiritual world of this national and logical order is constant with us, how it increases the vividness of daily life here, how palpitatingly real it makes everything that concerns us; what a looking forward it gives! With what eagerness, almost (though mixed with involuntary turptitude and shrinking) does one await the adventure of adventures! Death is, indeed, the one privilege no one can rob us of, the Gate leading us into the Unknown but only life really worth living; progress and realization at our own will; and, oh, but it does seem due for some of us!

Garth Wilkinson has this noble passage on this point of view: "The natural body throughout life is impregnate by creation with a spiritual body, which is the man himself, the autocracy of his character which he is forming day by day in the womb of all his intentions, thoughts, and transactions in the natural world. Here and now this character, this quale, is enveloped and partly concealed in a body of death, in a sand of matter, space, and time. When this body has served its use, or when by disease or accident it ceases to correspond to that use, and carries it out no longer, the living (spirit) body is drawn away from the merely animated body, and the man, woman, or child is said to die.
But what dies? Death does not die, life does not die. The two are separated. The relationships of earth pass away in their present shape; you no longer see the face of them sensuously. Yet as the whole man lives, nothing dies. The body never lived except inductively, and by correspondence with the soul.

The thing which survives is the ruling love, whether it be good or whether it be evil; for 'the love is the life of the man,' and determines his enduring character as the master of his spiritual body."

He further says we need "a new Church, not born of the corrupt human will, but by truths of Use assailing it and compelling it to a new departure. Any Church which stops in the controversial regions of the human mind, whose human centre is not Charity and its mind not Rationality, that is to say, which is not a perfect Revelation from Heaven, of Truth with the New Commands of Love in it, cannot come down into the huge practical affairs which now press for solution. Such a New Church penetrates to the last facts about us. It shows that every man is going to Heaven, or to Hell, in every act, thought, and intention, every day of his life. That Christ has redeemed him, i.e. vanquished the enemies of his free will, so that his will is his own for ever. That by this stupendous thing Man is his own destiny.

"Such a Church commands life, and handiwork, and the inner thoughts of the heart; and is separate from, and ever separating itself from, the natural selfhood and the hereditary streams of family, matter, space, and time; as Heaven is separate, and ever separating itself, from Hell."

If our current churches, all too busy though they are, in their own narrow limitations, their creed-bound idlenesses, could but embody this New Church, not to become a new sect, but to give a new teaching and influence, what a change might be wrought in society; how this unlovely life, full of lovely possibilities as it is, might be transfigured; how the children, the coming generation of workers, might be cared for.

When one thinks of the poetry, the romance, the love, hidden in us, denied any real fruition here in this hard, fixed, ununderstanding world; when one gets from some others the aching glimpses that Wells's magically fine story The Door in the Wall gives;

when one looks at an evening sky and has that poignant sense of home-sickness that so realizes for us that other-where, the dire unreality of this and the sheer home reality of that-is it any wonder that one turns with dismay from the man who talks of no immortality, of no future life, being possible or even probable; and so retreats into one's self and one's own dear knowledge of it, and takes up again with a sigh the dull bearing of the writing till the due time comes, whispering to oneself, with Hamlet, "The readiness is all."

NOTICES

POSITIVE COMTE has thought that religion and its theology are a childhood which the world has now outgrown. These things are indeed a childhood, but a permanent childhood, large-eyed and immortal. They belong to that childhood which the Lord put in the centre of His Disciples, when He told them, by the person of a little child, that they must receive the kingdom of God in that form of innocence and purity, or they could not have part in it. Nature, in all that is good in her, is a necessary part of such kingdom, although it is only the footstool to the throne: the footstool, however, can only be read as a part of the throne.

All the ages and histories of man are with him still, either in present effects or direct survivals. The grand survival for him is his childhood: this is called in the Word the Remnant or Remains. Providence is the Treasurer of these. In every mind that has had a real childhood, and which is, not spiritually destroyed, these remains are stored away by the All-Father, and are brought out in regenerating men in the deeps of their circumstances, or in the profounder trials of life. They are the early receptions of the knowledge of good and evil from mothers and fathers, impressed on a memory like no other memory: for the world, the flesh, and the devil are as yet unmixed with it. They are the infantine seed of conscience, and can never be abolished excepting by deliberate depravity chosen as the way of life. The "survival of the fittest" fits them well.

In this sense, and in this only, can religion be relegated to the childhood of the individual and the race: and here it is the ideal of all Manhood, the midst of all discipleship: and pursues us into old age with compunctious visitings, and with an ever-freshening voice of warning and of love. It is our human mind's very mother, and God is its Father.

And every new state and epoch of Man, where he begins with good resolves, is in a larger and less quiet stream owning up to this fountainhead, and is to be named as childhood from it: it is a revival welling out of these precious Remains, and heeded as such; which brings us again to the truth that religion, with its intimate heart-knowledges, does indeed belong to childhood, and that only in the nursery and consummation of the Home above will its full childhood be reached at last.

We can be boy and girl again

In that metempsychosis.

Extract from Garth Wilkinson's fine preface to his book, Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death.

His daughter adds these lines as a motto of his life:

'Tis Religion that can give

Sweetest comfort while we live,

'Tis Religion must supply

Surest comfort when we die.

A brief notice which appeared recently in the obituary column of the Whig announced the death of James John Garth Wilkinson. To the majority of readers the announcement will convey little, for at the great age of eighty-seven years Dr Wilkinson had outlived his generation and his fame, which at one time was considerable.

A personal friend of Emerson and Carlyle, a profound scholar, and a man of unique literary power, such an interesting character ought not to be allowed to pass from among us without some recognition.

The son of James John Wilkinson, Judge of the County Palatine of Durham, he adopted the profession of medicine, and practised as a homoeopathic physician for many years in London. But it is as a philosopher and man of letters that his name will go down to posterity. An ardent admirer of Swedenborg, he devoted the best energies of his long life to the translation of his works, and the advocacy of his philosophical and theological principles. It is especially as the translator and exponent of Swedenborg's scientific and philosophical works that the world is indebted to him. Fifty-six years ago he published an English translation of the Peplum Animale in two volumes, and in 1845 and 1846 he edited the Rev. Augustus Clissold's translation of the OEconomia Regori Animalis, adding a most valuable introduction of his own. He also edited Latin editions of other works and prepared some smaller translations. It was these works that called forth such unmeasured praise from Emerson. In
Representative Men the latter wrote:

"Swedenborg wrote his scientific works in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Dr Wilkinson, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigour of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has produced his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg after a hundred years in his pupil is not the least remarkable fact in his history.

Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetical justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Dr Wilkinson has enriched these volumes throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into the shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds." In English Traits he returns to the subject. He says: "Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigour, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armoury of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters."

An interesting letter of Dr Wilkinson's was published a few years ago, in which he referred to his relations with Thomas Carlyle. "When I read Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution," he wrote, "as they appeared, I was so much incited by them that I wrote a long letter to him (Carlyle), with a copy of Swedenborg's Last judgment, begging him to read that work. The result was a beautiful letter to me, in which he said, among other things, that some friend had sent him Sampson Reed's Growth of the Mind, and that, hearing that the author was a Swedenborgian, he (Carlyle) found that he 'did not know Swedenborg, and ought to be willing to know him.'

"When my tiny sketch of him (Swedenborg) came out he (Carlyle) read it, and gratified my wife by telling her that it was a 'star-bespangled book.'"

Another intimate friend of Dr Wilkinson's at this time was Henry James, sen., who himself was a disciple of Swedenborg.

Though acquainted with his works for many years, it was only quite recently that the present writer was privileged to have any personal intercourse with Dr Wilkinson.

The commencement of this intercourse was the receipt of a very kind and flattering letter with reference to a humble literary effort of mine in the same direction as his own. In this letter he invited me to visit him, and last summer I gladly availed myself of his invitation. I found him feeble in body, but bright and active in mind and full of new projects for further work. Having lately seen two books through the Press, he was engaged in reading up the new subject to him of Egyptian hieroglyphics with the intention of writing something upon it. It is to be feared that his demise will rob the world of this his latest effort unless, as is scarcely probable, he has been able in so short a time to carry out his design. Among his many published works, besides the translations above referred to are: Emanuel Swedenborg: a Biographical Sketch, The Human Body and its Connection with Man, The Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death, Human Science, Good and Evil, and its Works, and several works on classical and Scandinavian mythology.

G. T.

Two days ago there died a veteran English writer and remarkable man, Dr James Garth Wilkinson, head of the Swedenborgians. I remember hearing Dante Gabriel Rossetti speak (it must be fifteen or twenty years ago) of Garth Wilkinson as one of the few who wrote a noble and beautiful prose style. To many Dr Wilkinson was only a leading spirit in Swedenborgianism; to a larger number he was a famous physician; to the literary world he was a remarkable, forcible, and profoundly eloquent writer. There are a few (and Rossetti was among them) who above all else esteemed his strange and Blake-like (some say almost Blake-like in their "mystical madness") volume, Impressions of the Spirit.

This green little duodecimo book has long been so excessively rare that collectors hardly ever encounter it, and fancy sums can always be obtained on the very rare occasions when one is negotiable. My own copy was given me by Garth Wilkinson himself seventeen years ago, and is marked, "This is the last copy of my book." He died at his house in Finchley Road, at the great age of eighty-seven-a strong personality to the last.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WILKINSON, J. J. G. 

The Human Body and its Connection with 

Man 1851

The Ministry of Health, etc. 1854

Human Science and Divine Revelation 1876

The Greater Origins and Issues of Life 

and Death 1885

Swedenborg; a Biographical Sketch 1886

The Soul is Form and Doth the Body Make 1890

(A Commentary on Part 5 of "The Divine 

Love and Wisdom," by Swedenborg) 

Swedenborg Among the Doctors 1895

JAMES, HENRY (senior) 

Moralism and Christianity, or Man's Ex- 

perience and Destiny 1850

Lectures and Miscellanies 1852

The Nature of Evil 1855

The Church of Christ not an Ecclesiasticism 1856

Christianity the Logic of Creation 1857

Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and 

Religion in their Relation to Life: an 

Essay on the Physics of Creation 1863 

The Secret of Swedenborg; being an

Elucidation of his doctrine of the Divine

Natural Humanity 1869

Society the Redeemed Form of Man, and the

Earnest of God's Omnipotence in

Human Nature 1879

The Literary Remains of the late Henry

James; with an Introduction by William

James 1885