ture as the symbol of all of
harmony and beauty that is known to man, must we still talk of the
super-natural, not as a convenient word, but as a different order of
world, an unintelligible world, where the Reign of Mystery supersedes
the Reign of Law?

This question, let it be carefully observed, applies to Laws not to
Phenomena. That the Phenomena of the Spiritual World are in analogy with
the Phenomena of the Natural World requires no restatement. Since Plato
enunciated his doctrine of the Cave or of the twice-divided line; since
Christ spake in parables; since Plotinus wrote of the world as an image;
since the mysticism of Swedenborg; since Bacon and Pascal; since "Sartor
Resartus" and "In Memoriam," it has been all but a commonplace with
thinkers that "the invisible things of God from the creation of the
world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."
Milton's question--

"What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like more than on earth is thought?"

is now superfluous. "In our doctrine of representations and
correspondences," says Swedenborg, "we shall treat of both these
symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things that
occur, I will not say in the living body only, but throughout Nature,
and which correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things, that
one would swear that the physical world was purely symbolical of the
spiritual world."[4] And Carlyle: "All visible things are emblems. What
thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly speaking is not
there at all. Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea
and body it forth."[5]

But the analogies of Law are a totally different thing from the
analogies of Phenomena and have a very different value. To say
generally, with Pascal, that--"La nature est une image de la grace," is
merely to be poetical. The function of Hervey's "Meditations in a Flower
Garden," or, Flavel's "Husbandry Spiritualized," is mainly homiletical.
That such works have an interest is not to be denied. The place of
parable in teaching, and especially after the sanction of the greatest
of Teachers, must always be recognized. The very necessities of language
indeed demand this method of presenting truth. The temporal is the husk
and framework of the eternal, and thoughts can be uttered only through
things.[6]

But analogies between Phenomena bea