In the system of Swedenborg it not only is excluded altogether, but it is so driven out before the brightness of a more heavenly gospel that it looks too dingy and death-like ever to return. Swedenborg unfolds with scientific precision the doctrine of DEGREEs of life. The spiritual world into which men enter at death is not a sublimation of the natural, not matter attenuated and rarefied, but a world discreted from this, having bodies differing in genus from natural ones, but a world more substantial, phenomenal, and brightly real. That is the substance, in fact, while this is only the adumbration of its realities, and shows them in dim types and representations. The soul itself of every regenerated man, even while yet in the flesh, is ultimated. in a celestial body, the exponent and image of its own intrinsic life, and the flesh only clogs and conceals its bursting glories. Heaven is already entered, and the celestial body put on, and death only takes the concealments of the flesh away. Just the opposite takes place with the souls that love and do evil and put on corruption. They shape to themselves a spiritual body, the exact effigy of their spiritual state, not to be burned in literal fire, but in the deforming lusts which even now waste the beauty of form and degrade it towards the bestial. And all this appears openly when the flesh falls off, and the man is drawn to his like in the other world. The bodies we shall wear eternally are not manufactured, but put on from within, even as the forms of tree or flower are the ultimations of its evolving life, or as the forms and the dress of the angels are the outshaping and the outrobing of the Christ who has been received within. Swedenborg does not make matter essentially evil and poisonous, as the Gnostics did; but he, like Paul, makes spirit-substance and spirit forms in the heavenly state the shapings of a more plastic life, in the transparence of a purer atmosphere, and the flush of a more celestial beauty, so that to come back to the earth in quest of the "flesh" we have put off, would be like the insect glit

tering in the morning light coming back to find the scales of the larva it had lost, and the loss of which gave freedom to its wings.

The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh has been so shattered and dishonored, and is so utterly destitute of scientific basis, that it is seldom asserted now in its full grossness and literalism. But it is adhered to "in a sense as important. It will not be given up readily, and never in express terms. The reasons of this it is not very difficult to

perceive.

The resurrection of the flesh is an idea which enters essentially into a system of theology, and it could not be taken out without great danger of loosening all the stones of the building. A general judgment of the assembled universe, a second literal coming of Christ, the conflagration of the world, its renovation for the abode of the risen saints in the millennial era, and in a terrestrial paradise, the punishment of the wicked in a local material hell, all these are concomitants of the resurrection of the flesh. Not only so: the whole scheme of salvation is made to hinge upon it. Men in material bodies can be admitted to a localized heaven or excluded from it, not according to what they are, but according to what they believe. They can be punished vicariously, and the whole plan of a substitutive atonement here comes in. All that kind of preaching which may be called scenic · appealing to sense or a sensuous imagination, and which undoubtedly has been most effective with the popular mind requires the doctrine as a part of its machinery. In short, the resurrection of the natural body, under Christianity, even as under Judaism, and under the Magian religion, connects itself organically with a system of naturalized theology.

On the other hand, if man rises in a spiritual body at death, never more to come back again to the natural plane of existence, who does not see that the doctrine gathers and organizes around it a cluster of higher truths of transcendent

importance? There can be no vicarious atonement, no artificial appointments to heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are formed and developed from within; we are putting on now the beauty of the one or the deformities of the other, according to the shape into which our spirit-forms are growing and maturing every day. A good life is perfecting the one, an evil life is hastening on the other. Christ saves us from within, as we receive and obey him, and from within outward clothes us in linen clean and white. The spiritworld is not a shadow, but a great reality; we are in it now, the veilings of sense only hide it; we draw the angels around us as we become like them, or the fiends as we become like them, and death will lift up the curtain to show us the awful gulf between, and remand us to the society we have chosen. Christ cannot save us vicariously, but only as we receive his life in living worship and manifest and live it, and so put on the angel from him. He will come to judgment, not at the graveyards a thousand years hence, but in the spiritual world we enter at death; not with the blare of literal trumpets, but the influx of his truth, that explores us and shows our quality, and separates us, not by an outward rule, but by a spiritual law, to heaven or hell, as one or the other has been formed within us. In short, this other doctrine of the resurrection connects itself organically with a spiritual Christianity.

So long as men live in sense, and judge spiritual things by sensual, they will have a sensualized religion, for they can have no other. When they can believe that the soul is a more intense reality than its dress and concomitants, the spirit-world more substantial than the material which is its type and shadow, that it is already within us, and "broods over like the day," then spiritual Christianity will exclude its old corruptions, even as the spiritual body excludes the flesh as its death-robe when it needs it no more.

s.

WINTER SUNSET.

By graceful scrolls of ice-like, pearly blue,
And streaks of violet-red, like new-born flame,
Damp heaps of gathered stubble leaping through,
Pale gold in lengthening bars, and many a hue,
Shifting too suddenly for eye to mark,
On leaden-colored wave-clouds, thick and dark,
As nearer still the hastening sunset drew,

I knew when dreary, wild November came.

With musing heart I watched the beautiful sight,
While the gold brightened, while the young fire blazed,
Till all had vanished, twilight sunk to night,
And star by star hung out its lonely light
O'er fields of dark to stretch a monarch ray,
Like beacon-light across the mariner's way;
But ere the evening glory took its flight,
Some peaceful thoughts breathed on me as I gazed.

Dread not of earthly change the wintry might;
Be faith in God thy bosom's constant guest;
Go not self-panoplied to stormy fight,
Nor stay encastled in presumptuous might;
Thy God's pavilion stretches o'er thee still;
In coming darkness he will work his will;
With lifted eye behold the clouds now bright
With hues that harbinger the pilgrim's rest.

Warm-housed, with curtains down and fresh-trimmed light,
Or hurrying home with mantle-shielded eyes,
Shivering and chattering, we miss the sight
Of beauty in the wintry sky, more bright
Than in the spring or summer time we see;
And as a vision came these thoughts to me
In the fair eve of that November night,
When looking on that sheen of numberless dyes.

R.

RANDOM READINGS.

LOOKING FORWARD.

EIGHTEEN hundred and sixty reminds us of our promise, one year ago, to the readers of the Monthly Magazine, to do what we could to furnish a religious periodical for family reading, to cheer, admonish, quicken, help along in the pilgrimage of life, and make the light of heaven shine more visibly upon it. So we have tried through one year's experience, and we set out anew with fresh resolves.

We believe our readers must understand now what we wish to do, and how we wish to do it, and we shall not take up time in defining positions, or turning aside to answer any one's misapprehensions. We have seen misstatements enough about our humble efforts, which we thought it best to disregard and ignore. We shall probably do the same in future, aiming to teach Christ positively and not controversially, and with all the individual freedom which is needed in an ever-progressive life and an ever-brightening faith.

Hail to the New Year! "Hope rules a land forever green." So the land looks to you, reader, from this new peak of time, from which you see a little farther down the avenue into the eternity that is before. But the future, in outward contingencies, will be as the past. Sorrow, disappointment, and death are there, as well as delight, fruition, and joy. But let us bear this in mind, - our real future is folded up within us. What we shall be must be the development of what we are, and by pausing here for strong resolve and earnest prayer for a newly consecrated life, we may be sure to render the present hour a most auspicious omen of the bliss to come.

S.

THE GOSPEL THE LIGHT OF OUR YEARS.

We find in a writer, who is as suggestive as he is paradoxical, as profitable to quicken as he would be unprofitable to control our thoughts, we mean John Ruskin, the following significant paragraphs:

"These are much sadder ages than the early ones,

not sadder in