SWEDENBORGIANISM.
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NOBLE’S APPEAL in Behalf of the Views held by the New (or Swedenborgian) Church. Second edition, 1845. Boston: T. H. Carter & Co.—Otis Clapp.
ESSAYS by Theophilus Parsons. Boston: Otis Clapp, School-st. 1845.
THE CORNER STONE or The New Jerusalem, by B. F. Barrett. New York: Bardett and Wellford, Astor House; John Allen, 139 Nassau-street, 1845.
The claim to be the New Church, or peculiarly the founders of a New Jerusalem, is like exclusive claims to the title of Orthodox. We have no sympathy with it. We believe that all kinds of inspiration and forms of faith have been made by the power that rules the world to coöperate in the development of mental life with a view to the eventual elucidation of truth. That ruling power overrules the vanity of men, or just the contrary would ensue. For men love the letter that killeth better than the spirit that continually refreshes its immortal life. They wish to compress truth into a nut-shell that it may be grasped in the hand. They wish to feel sure that they and theirs hold it all. In vain! More incompressible than light, it flows forth anew, and, while the preacher was finishing the sermon in which he proclaimed that now the last and greatest dispensation had arrived, and that all the truth could henceforward be encased within the walls of a church—it has already sped its way to unnumbered zones, planted in myriad new-born souls the seeds of life, and wakened in myriads more a pulse that cannot be tamed down by dogma or doctrine, but must always throb at each new revelation of the glories of the infinite.
