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port to those notions whatever. They afford no support to the doctrine of the pre-existence of angels, because the sinning angels spoken of are not those who are imagined to have fallen before the foundation of the world, but those who were supposed to have transgressed with the daughters of men. They afford no countenance to the notion that angels are a different race of men, because the apocryphal story referred to is founded upon what is now acknowledged by all to be a misconception of the relation in Gen. vi; for no one will now pretend that "the sons of God" there mentioned were angels of any kind. They afford no support to any doctrine whatever; because they are mere allusions to a forged and apocryphal book, addressed to the reader in the way of an argumentum ad hominem; as Paul sometimes quotes both from apocryphal and heathen writers. This is the way in which the learned account for Jude's express citation* from the book of Enoch; and unless it be admitted, the two Epistles must themselves be regarded as apocryphal; as was done by many in ancient times, and by some (especially as to that of Jude, which is rejected by Michaelis) at the present day. I am by no means inclined to consider them spurious: many parts of them exhibit, I am satisfied, the enlightened mind of an Apostle but no one, surely, will assert, that an allusion to an apocryphal tale about angels who took wives of the daughters of men, affords any proof of the pre-existence of angels, and the fall from heaven of Satan.

The next text cited against us is John viii. 44: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." How this text can be supposed to prove that angels existed before men were created, and that some of them fell out of heav

In

en, I cannot understand. Even upon the common theory, how can the devil have been a murderer from the beginning, supposing him to have begun his existence as an angel of light? But it is supposed that his pre-existence as an angel of light is implied by its being said, that "he abode not in the truth." the original it is, "he stood not in the truth :" which does not necessarily imply that, having first been in the truth, he did not remain in it, but rather, that he never was stationed in the truth; and that this is the true intention of the phrase is rendered certain by its being added, “because there is no truth in him ;" or, more literally, "because the truth is not in him." If then we understand a personal being to be spoken of, who, having orig* Ver. 14, 15

inally been in heaven, fell out of it, we must understand the cause of his fall to be, that he could not help it. He was a devil from the beginning, created an alien from the truth. Who will impute the production of such a being to the Creator? Understand these words of a personal being, and they involve a blasphemy; you either impute the origin of your personal devil, as a devil, to the Creator; or you suppose the devil to be an Anti-god, uncreated and self-existing. But understand the devil here to be the principle of evil in the abstract, or rather, to be a personification of the root of all evil, which is the love of self; and all becomes consistent. It is the evil of self-love, or self-love when made the sole or governing spring of action, that prompts to all deeds of violence and deceit, that makes murderers and liars. In divine language, all personal beings are named according to their qualities: hence, because this horrid principle reigns in hell, its inhabitants, singly, are also called devils; hence Judas is called by the Lord a devil;* and hence, likewise, all individual devils, considered as forming one aggregate evil power, are denominated the devil. But when, as here,

the devil from the beginning is spoken of, it must mean the principle in its deepest ground, in its merest abstract nature, when it first began to operate in the breast of man, and before they who became personal devils by cherishing it had passed from this world into the region of the spiritual world called hell. "Whereupon are the foundations thereof (the earth) fastened? or who laid the corner-stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Jehovah himself is the being here represented as speaking: but would He, who knows infinitely more of the truths of astronomy than ever man discovered, describe the earth, if his words were intended to be literally understood, as being founded on a corner-stone? Here is demonstrative proof that the passage is not to be literally interpreted. The words, evident. İy, are highly figurative, and purely symbolic. As well might we quote these words in refutation of Newton, and argue from them that the earth is not a round ball suspended in ether, but is a plane or cube propped by a great stone, as quote them in refutation of Swedenborg, and argue from them that angels were pre-existent to men. Their proper reference, no doubt, is, to the spiritual creation, or the regeneration of man: they may, however, be taken as a general figurative description even of the natural creation. Then, by the corner-stone on which are fastened the foundations of the earth, we evidently must understand, not any material basis and fulcrum, but the unknown power by which the terraqueous globe is suspended in Job xxxviii. 6, 7.

*John vi. 70.

space. In the same manner, by the sons of God cannot be meant any personal beings, but the heavenly worlds; that is, the interior or spiritual spheres of creation, constituting the kingdom prepared for the saints from the foundation of the world. As the production of the material universe was the middle end of creation, with a view to the existence of man and thence to the peopling of the heavenly worlds, which is the final end of creation; therefore, by a beautiful figure, the heavenly worlds, personified as the sons of God, may well be said to have shouted for joy when the earth came into existence.

But if any cannot relinquish the notion of angels shouting at the creation of the world; let them confine their idea, as they always do, to the creation of this world; and it cannot be denied that the fact is possible enough. This world is reckoned to have existed about six thousand years; which, as to its hu man inhabitants, is probably its true age: but that other worlds existed, and angels from them, myriads and myriads of years before, cannot be doubted. Philosophers assure us, that some of the stars discovered by the telescope are so remote, that the light emitted from them, traveling with its known prodigious speed, would be hundreds of thousands of years in reaching our world: it has reached us, however, or we could not see them; hence, in the circumstance of their being visible to us, we have sensible demonstration, that they have been for hundreds of thousands of years in existence. Consequently, if it must be believed that angels were literally present, shouting for joy at the production of our earth, there were worlds in abundance to supply them, without our having recourse to the fiction of angels created such in the ethereal regions.

The above texts fail, it is plain, to support the notions for which they are quoted: but a stronger reason remains, which is thus stated by the writer under review. "Besides what is already advanced," he modestly says, "there is one special ar-. gument which might puzzle even a Swedenborgian; and which is comprehended in the temptation and fall of our first parents. Now Baron Swedenborg himself allows that the serpent tempted Eve; and all reasonable people are decidedly of opinion that the devil was in the serpent, and actuated and influenced him during the whole of the temptation. The question then is, Where did this devil come from, seeing that no one had ever died up to this time?' And if no one had died, then there must have been a devil who was not the spirit of a departed wicked man. ""*

To frame this "special argument," the writer assigns a notion to Swedenborg which he knows that enlightened character

* P. 64.

did not hold; and the premises being still too narrow, he ekes them out with a gratuitous assumption. He makes Swedenborg allow that the serpent tempted Eve; and yet he afterwards adduces, as specimens of that writer's commentaries on Genesis, extracts from his explanation of the second and fifth chapters, in which the whole history of Adam and Eve, and their immediate posterity, is shown to be a pure allegory! So, he affirms that all reasonable people believe that the devil, meaning a certain personal being, was in the serpent; though neither Moses nor any other inspired writer belonged to the class of such reasonable people, for none of them give any intimation of such belief. John the Revelator indeed informs us, not that the devil was in him, but that the old serpent was the devil: but how is this consistent with the idea of a personal devil, when Moses assures us that this serpent was one of the "beasts of the field ?" Indeed, the history is so palpably a pure allegory, that it is truly astonishing how any can continue to bind their notion to the literal relation. If the serpent either was the devil in person, or had the devil in him, how came the punishment of the temptation to fall upon the race of common serpents? Why were they condemned to go upon their belly, and to eat dust, (which latter command, by the by, they have not obeyed), while no punishment whatever is denounced on the real culprit? Well might Milton's Satan (to whom he often gives more rational ideas than belong to the theologians who frame their doctrines from the literal sense of an allegory) ridicule the whole transaction, and the application of the punishwrong victim: "Man," he says,

ment to the

"by our exile

Made happy; him by fraud I have seduced
From his Creator; and the more to increase
Your wonder, with an apple! HE thereat
Offended (worth your laughter) hath given up
Both his beloved man and all his world

To sin and death a prey:

True is, me also he hath judged: or rather
Not me but the brute serpent, in whose shape
Man I deceived."

Thus the belief that any personal devil was the agent in this transaction is beset with irreconcilable inconsistencies. But consider "all the beasts of the field" to be types of all the affections that have place in the natural part of man, and the serpent to denote that part of the human constitution which is the seat of the sensual conceptions and carnal appetites, and which, when separated from the higher faculties, is so truly depicted by the serpent under the curse, going upon its belly, and eating dust; and we have a view of the subject which re

moves all difficulty, and reads a lesson of instruction most important and impressive.

The "special argument" has, however, another horn to it: let us see whether that is any more formidable than the former. "On the other hand," proceeds its author, "I find it plainly recorded, that there were good angels, before any one, good or bad, had died, as the following passage will show. 'Therefore

the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life!' (Gen. iii. 23, 24). Now, if, devils and angels are none other than the departed spirits of men, as Baron Swedenborg would teach us to believe, then I demand of those whom it behoves to answer, whence came the devil that tempted Eve, and those 'cherubims' who were placed at the gate of Eden with a flaming sword, seeing no one had ever died up to that time?"* In regard to "the devil that tempted Eve," the "demand" has already been complied with: but before we comply with that part of it which relates to the cherubims, we would humbly request to have it proved, that "cherubims" are angels.

In the most holy place in the tabernacle and temple, upon the covering of the ark, were placed two cherubim: can we suppose that an image representing a mere created nature could have been allowed to such a station? The only part of the cherubim made by Moses of which any description is given, is their wings, which reached quite across from one side of the most holy place to the other, but we never read that angels have wings; they owe that appendage to the pure benevolence of their painters. But the most particular description of cherbim is in the magnificent vision seen by Ezekiel, chs. i. and

X.

He beheld the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: They had every one the likeness of a man: and every one had four faces: and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet: the sole of their foot was like a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the color of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides. - And as for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on their right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.— As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps; it went up and down among the living creatures. And the fire was

* Pp. 64, 65.

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