ie Lehre vom
Seelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe."

10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soul
has within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants were
Dobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H.
Hinton, London, 1849.

Religion," contain manifold statements and abundant illustrations
of every thing important bearing on his views of the theme before
us. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of the
essential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions of
criticism.

Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth
and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for
a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment
receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning
it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious
obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal,
and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of
man's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will is
disinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, then
man fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is a
spirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, is
humbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. But
when his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding is
falsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destiny
inverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he is
placed in freedom, on probation, between these two alternatives.

The Swedenborgian universe is divided into four orders of abodes.
In the highest or celestial world are the heavens of the angels.
In the lowest or infernal world are the hells of the demons. In
the intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited by
men, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls,
escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sink
to hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this life
man is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between the
influences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man is
full of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompanied
by swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him like
themselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediate
influx is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man's
thoughts and affections.