“This mysterious link between Heaven and the smallest atoms of created matter constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum, and his treatise on the ‘Celestial Arcana’ in which he explains the correspondences or significances of the Natural with, and to, the Spiritual, giving, to use the words of Jacob Boehm, the sign and seal of all things, occupies not less than sixteen volumes containing thirty thousand propositions.  ’This marvellous knowledge of Correspondences which the goodness of God granted to Swedenborg,’ says one of his disciples, ’is the secret of the interest which draws men to his works.  According to him, all things are derived from heaven, all things lead back to heaven.  His writings are sublime and clear; he speaks in heaven, and earth hears him.  Take one of his sentences by itself and a volume could be made of it’; and the disciple quotes the following passages taken from a thousand others that would answer the same purpose.

“‘The kingdom of heaven,’ says Swedenborg (’Celestial Arcana’), ’is the kingdom of motives. Action is born in heaven, thence into the world, and, by degrees, to the infinitely remote parts of earth.  Terrestrial effects being thus linked to celestial causes, all things are correspondent and significant.  Man is the means of union between the Natural and the Spiritual.’

“The Angelic Spirits therefore know the very nature of the Correspondences which link to heaven all earthly things; they know, too, the inner meaning of the prophetic words which foretell their evolutions.  Thus to these Spirits everything here below has its significance; the tiniest flower is a thought,—­a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition.  To them Adultery and the excesses spoken of in Scripture and by the Prophets, often garbled by self-styled scholars, mean the state of those souls which in this world persist in tainting themselves with earthly affections, thus compelling their divorce from Heaven.  Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.  Torches, shew-bread, horses and horsemen, harlots, precious stones, in short, everything named in Scripture, has to them a clear-cut meaning, and reveals the future of terrestrial facts in their relation to Heaven.  They penetrate the truths contained in the Revelation of Saint John the divine, which human science has subsequently demonstrated and proved materially; such, for instance, as the following (’big,’ said Swedenborg, ’with many human sciences’):  ’I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away’ (Revelation xxi. 1).  These Spirits know the supper at which the flesh of kings and the flesh of all men, free and bond, is eaten, to which an Angel standing in the sun has bidden them.  They see the winged woman, clothed with the sun, and the mailed man.  ’The horse of the Apocalypse,’ says Swedenborg, ’is the visible image of human intellect ridden