a perception of the light as light-there was light, for God was the cause of it: "God said"-" God saw""God divided"—" God called"—all was the word of God and the work of God. It was only afterwards when the doubt began to arise, "Yea hath God said,” that the foundations of doubt were laid for all future ages, hence also of unbelief. True distinctions began to be unperceived, Chaos came back again, and the authority and wisdom of man came to be substituted for those of God. Thus-" Democritus* held that there was nothing absolutely true; but because he thought knowledge or understanding to be sense, therefore did he conclude that whatsoever seemed according to sense, must of necessity be true (not absolutely but relatively) to whom it so seemed." All rational knowledge he resolved into opinion.

"If a Christian," says Locke,† "who has the view of happiness and misery in another life be asked why a man must keep his word, he will give this as a reason; because God, who has the power of eternal life and death, requires it of us."-He has a perception that it is a moral duty commanded by God; and this conviction of a divine origin is the ground of all moral law in the mind, all moral duty, and hence all moral responsibility. Let the duty be ascribed to any other origin, and certainty and assurance cease. Thus, some philosophers say, that man ought to be faithful to his covenant, not because God has said so, but because the public require it; some, because it is below the dignity of a man to act otherwise; * Cudworth's Intellectual System, iv., 120.

Essay on the Human Understanding, i., 36.

others, as Paley who repudiates the doctrine of a moral sense, would refer it to custom and public opinion. In all cases of this kind, it is not God that speaks, but man: the origin of the moral sense is no longer ascribed to God but to man. The light which once distinguished good from evil, right from wrong, has become obscure; and moral and spiritual truths become a matter of debate and human opinion, instead of being regarded with the certainty implied in the words-" God said."

6. "And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." In the midst of the waters-" that is," says the Glossa, "in the midst of knowledges, some of which are under the firmament, as being deduced from first principles; others above, as being given by revelation from God."-"The Sacred Scripture," says Augustin, "may be called the firmament; as may also the doctrine and discipline which divide the spiritual waters from the carnal."-In these cases, the term firmament is taken to express the first principles of knowledge which are firmly established. It is now however well known, that the original. signifies an expanse. In this case the expanse is a region of the mind; as when we speak of an expansion of the mind, expanded thoughts and ideas, an enlarged mind in opposition to a narrow, contracted, and limited mind. A narrow mind is a mind possessing few ideas: an expanded mind one possessing many, or enlarged ideas. In this case expansion is the same with development; faculties, like flowers, when developed are expanded. Locke

observes, that it* "is near as hard to conceive any existence, or to have an idea of any real being with a perfect negation of all manner of expansion, as it is to have the idea of any real existence with a perfect negation of all manner of duration." But the expansion of mind and the expansion of matter are as different from each other as mind is from matter. When it is said that the kingdom of heaven is within us, it does not mean the expansion of the sidereal heaven, but of the angelic; where distance is measured by state and is according to state, as when we speak of persons who are distant from each other in their minds, while yet they may be near in respect to their bodies. The creation then of an expanse between the waters is the perception of a distance, hence also of a difference, between the waters above and the waters below, that is, between spiritual knowledge derived from within, and natural knowledge derived from without; thus a distinction is perceived between the natural man and the spiritual man, the external man and the internal man, and this in consequence of a region of intervening ideas, or spiritual truths.

For, as Swedenborg observes, "Man,+ before he is regenerated, does not even know that any internal man exists, much less does he know the nature and quality thereof. In consequence of his immersion in corporeal and worldly things, he cannot conceive there is any distinction between the internal and external man; and the things in the internal * Essay on the Human Understanding, i. 187. † Arcana Celestia, art. 24.

man being lost in the same immersion, he forms one obscure confused mass out of two substances that are totally distinct." Thus, as an ancient writer observes, "There are those who do not make a good division between the waters; they cherish vice within under a semblance of virtue."

This view of the subject answers to that description of Chaos which we have already given. For if a state of nature be represented as "ratio mersa et confusa," in which reason and the senses lie commingled with each other, and there is no due distinction between sensuous appearances and rational truths, between physical and moral, God and nature, but all things are confounded with all: the only way of leading the mind out of this state is by enabling it to make distinctions; and as objects become more distinguished, so the mind becomes more spacious and expanded; and thus also the field of its contemplation. The telescope, by enabling the eye to behold new regions of worlds, and to encrease its powers of distinction, expanded the heavens and expanded the mind at the same time; by creating an expanse between the earth and the stars, thus being as it were a creator of space; and by being a creator of new ideas, thus of new heights and depths of human thought.

When the mind is thus expanded, the distinction is more clearly perceived between above and below, between heaven and earth. The truths which descend into the higher or heavenly region of the mind, are the waters which are above the heavens; and those which pertain to the external memory, are the waters which are below. To commingle these waters is to

return to the Chaotic state, to confound heaven and earth.

"The* knowledge of man," says Lord Bacon, "is as the waters, some descending from above, and some springing from beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by Divine revelation. The light of nature consisteth in the notions of the mind and the reports of the senses; for as for knowledge which man receiveth by teaching, it is cumulative and not original; as in a water that, besides its own spring head, is fed with other springs and streams. So then, according to these two differing illuminations or originals, knowledge is first of all divided into Divinity and Philosophy."

If this distinction holds good, surely they cannot rightly divide between the waters, who confound natural science with spiritual truth; or who make no distinction between the literal and the spiritual senses of the Word of God. Yet how common is this want of distinction in the present day! there are no waters seen above the expanse, nor indeed any expanse at all above that of merely natural thought. They all lie flat in the deep below; and any light in virtue of which any distinction may be made between the waters, is regarded not as light from God but as an ignis fatuus. The Spirit of God indeed is acknowledged to move upon the face of the waters, and this is called Inspiration; but the process does not continue onwards to the production of light, much less to a distinction between the waters; and so darkness still lies upon the face of the Scripture. "Wet may con

*De Augmentis Scientiarum-The Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human, p. 124. Montagu's Ed. Vol. ii.

+ The Sacred Record of Creation Vindicated and Explained, etc.,

p. 74.