of Bible-reading.

A visitor to one of the Shaker communities describes the men and women as
engaging in the most preposterous play of making-believe; performing upon
imaginary instruments as they marched in procession; going through the
motions of washing their faces and hands as they surrounded an imaginary
fountain; and, finally, plunging bodily into this spiritual fountain, by
rolling over on the grass! To an exclamation of surprise at such childish
doings, answer was made that thus they were becoming as little children,
in order to enter the kingdom of heaven![30]

Luther sat disputing with Zwinglius the doctrine of trans-substantiation,
and to every argument of his rational opponent answered by laying his
sturdy finger on the words, "This _is_ my body." The most powerful Church
of Christendom bases itself upon this prosaic reading of a poetic saying.

Many a mysterious dogma would simplify itself at once by remembering that,
in the language of the imagination, "the letter killeth, but the spirit
giveth it life."[31]

We are not to rush from this extreme into the opposite error and turn into
mystical and marvellous meanings the plain sense of the Biblical writers.
Imagine the result of putting all sorts of mystic glosses on the
straight-forward accounts of men and things in ordinary writings. Such is
in reality the folly of turning the sober statements of Biblical prose
writers into allegories, parables, symbols, types; and of finding
underneath the plainest meanings a double, triple and quadruple sense.

In the hour of Christ's approaching arrest he warns his disciples, in His
usual figurative manner, that they must now learn to provide for
themselves; since he would shortly be taken from them. "He that hath a
purse let him take it; and he that hath no sword let him sell his garment
and buy one." And his disciples, being very unimaginative folk, or being
perhaps stupefied with wonder and anxiety by His strange words and actions
on that night of sad surprises said--"Lord, behold here are two swords."
The Master answered, with a weariness of their obtuseness that we can feel
in the curt reply, "It is enough." And the wisdom of the Roman Church sees
herein a type of the temporal and spiritual power of the Papacy!

I am solemnly warned against such learned puerilities every time I turn to
my shelves and encounter Swedenborg's "Arcana Coelestia." In ten goodly
volumes he interprets Scripture history after this fash