I beg to say that when I speak of ‘old cerements’ being put off, I pre-suppose a living body in resurrection.  Also, I don’t call marriage, for instance, an old cerement.  We must distinguish.  With regard to the common notion of a ‘hell,’ as you ask me, I don’t believe in it.  I don’t believe in any such thing as arbitrary reward or punishment, but in consequences and logical results.  That seems to me God’s way of working.  The Scriptural phrases are simply symbolical, it seems to me, and Swedenborg helps you past the symbol.  Then as to the Redemption and its mode—­let us receive the thing simply.  Dr. Adam Clarke, whose piety was never doubted, used to say, ’Vicarious suffering is vicarious nonsense.’  Which does not hinder the fact that the suffering of the Lord was necessary, in order that we should not suffer, and that through His work and incarnation His worlds recovered the possibility of good.  It comes to the same thing.  The manner in which preachers analyse the Infinite, pass the Divine through a sieve, has ceased to be endurable to thinking men.  You speak of Luther.  We all speak of Luther.  Did you ever read any of his theological treatises.  He was a schoolman of the most scholastic sect; most offensive, most absurd, presenting my idea of ‘old cerements’ to the uttermost.  We are entering on a Reformation far more interior than Luther’s; and the misfortune is, that if we don’t enter we must drop under the lintel.  Do you hear of the storms in England about ‘Essays and Reviews’?  I have seen the book simply by reviews in abstract and extract.  I should agree with the writers in certain things, but certainly not in all.  I have no sort of sympathy with what is called ‘rationalism,’ which is positivism in a form.  The vulgar idea of miracles being put into solution, leaves you with the higher law and spiritual causation; which the rationalists deny, and which you and I hold faithfully.  But whatever one holds, free discussion has become necessary.  That it is full of danger; that, in consequence of it, many minds will fall into infidelity, doubt, and despair, is certain; but through this moral crisis men must pass, or the end will be worse still.  That’s my belief, I have seen it coming for years back.

‘The hungry flock looks up and is not fed,’ except with chopped hay of the schools.  Go into any church in England, or out of England, and you hear men preaching ‘in pattens,’ walking gingerly, lest a speck of natural moisture touch a stocking; seeking what’s ‘sound,’ not what’s ‘true.’  Now if only on theology they must not think, there will be soon a close for theologians.  Educated men disbelieve to a degree quite unsuspected.  That, I know of knowledge.

No!  Swedenborg does not hold the existence of devils in the ordinary meaning.  Spiritual temptation comes, he says, through disembodied corrupt spirits, out of this or other earths.  The word Satan, remember, he conceives to represent a company of such evil spirits.