inst them.
An out-of-the-way situation is as undesirable in a spiritual, as in a
commercial point of view. In their church government they are
Episcopalian, and meet at certain great occasions in synod. At one time
they much favoured the lot, but now that is rarely used, and their
marriages are not arranged by it as was formerly the case. A bishop is
an elder appointed by the synod to ordain ministers of the church. The
latter are sent to a congregation, but it exercises a veto. The
congregation is ruled by a committee chosen by the communicants. They
claim not to be Dissenters; it was the opinion of Archbishop Potter they
were not. They trace their pedigree from Zinzendorf to Huss, from Huss
to the Greek monks, Theodorus and Cyril, who in the ninth century
introduced Christianity into Moravia and Bohemia. But after all they
chiefly glory in the fact of preaching, to use one of their own hymns--

"That whoe'er believeth in Christ's redemption
May find free grace and a complete exemption
From serving sin."

CHAPTER XIII.
THE SWEDENBORGIANS.

If the reader be told that there exists in this enlightened age a sect
who believe that the day of judgment is passed, that it took place nearly
a hundred years ago, that the Christian dispensation is at an end, that
Emmanuel Swedenborg daily visited the spiritual world, and made
acquaintance with its inhabitants, that he was directly appointed by God
to describe to men the scenery of heaven and hell, and the world of
spirits, and the lives of their inhabitants, and that through him the
Lord Jesus Christ makes his second advent for the institution of a new
Church described in the Apocalypse under the figure of the New Jerusalem,
at once you exclaim, this is "one of the things no fellah can
understand." Nevertheless, such actually is the fact--nay more, it may
be observed, that the number of Swedenborgians is on the increase; that
they have a hundred chapels in England, and a larger number in America,
and that this sect, while it has excited the rude laugh of ignorant
folly, has attracted to itself some of the greatest intellects of the
day. Emerson claims for Swedenborg that he was a "colossal soul;" and
Mr. Kingsley speaks of him, though not very correctly, as a "sound and
severe and scientific labourer, to whom our modern physical science is
most deeply indebted." The Swedenborgians, says Theodore Parker, have a
calm and religious beauty in the