AUSTRALIA.

(From the South Australian Register of July 19th, 1848.)

Our readers, we are certain, will be much gratified to read the following intelligence from Australia. Many emigrants and colonists are carrying with them the doctrines of the New Church, and in various parts of the world societies are formed for the purpose of extending, in the new settlements, the light of truth. The society at Adelaide was founded through the zeal and exertions of Mr. Pitman, who, from the report before us, has every reason to see and gratefully to acknowledge that the Lord's blessing has attended his labours of love in making known the true doctrines of Christianity. The report of the proceedings and speeches is too long for insertion in our pages, but we will give as full an abstract as we can of the speeches of Mr. Pitman and Mr. Holden :

"The fourth anniversary of the New Church Society in this Colony (says the editor of the newspaper entitled the Australian Register) was celebrated on Thursday evening last, in the large room of the Freemasons' Tavern. About six o'clock the members and friends began to assemble, and about 150 refreshed themselves at the tea table, which was amply and variously furnished with its usual adjuncts. At these meetings music forms a considerable attraction, and although the gentlemen forming the society lay no claim to clerical functions or oratorical powers, we must commend them for the ability which marked their addresses, and the clear and simple way in which they propounded their principles to the large number of strangers present, comprising, during the evening, about two hundred individuals. After tea a hymn from the society's collection was sung by the members, assisted by some of the members of the choral society, when

"Mr. Pitman first addressed the meeting. He said that they had met to commemorate the day on which an altar was first erected (four years ago) in the southern hemisphere, dedicated to the worship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as the only God of heaven and earth. According to the words of the Apostle,' He is the true God and eternal life.' The Lord N. S. NO. 114.-VOL. X.

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to the truth, and as every church was consummated and brought to its end through evils of life and errors of doctrine, so had the Lord, in divine mercy to man, made a fresh revelation of Himself, and that had always been effected through the instrumentality of men of like passions with ourselves, as Abraham, Moses, Elias, John the Baptist, Paul, and John. Seeing, then, that human instrumentality was necessary, he (Mr. Pitman) could perceive no reason for ridicule or wonder that in these apostate days the Lord should again raise up a human instrument to explain the Scriptures, and 'justify the ways of God to man;' and such a man he believed was the pious, humble, and enlightened Swedenborg, respecting whom much misrepresentation had gone abroad, some saying he was a good man, others saying Nay, but he deceiveth the people.' The speaker said that the time would not permit of his giving a biographical sketch of the life of Swedenborg; which if he could do, he was sure he should remove any false impressions they might have received. It was sufficient to say that Swedenborg, from his infancy to the day of his death, which took place at the age of 85, was a man of unsullied reputation; most aptly uniting in his person the profound philosopher and the humble Christian.-[Here Mr. Pitman descants at some length on the leading doctrines of the New Church.]-Respecting the Sacred Scriptures or Word of the Lord, the New Church doctrine taught that they were dictated by Jehovah himself, and were holy in every syllable; that within the letter there was an internal sense which treated of the soul of man, the spiritual world, the way in which the Lord glorified his humanity, and of the re-creation or regeneration of the human mind. The internal sense of the Word was like the vesture of the Lord, which was without seam, woven from the top throughout. Thus the Lord hath unsealed his Word and given us the 'key of knowledge,' by which, if we were good and wise, we might unlock its sacred stores, and find 'wine that maketh glad the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that strengtheneth man's heart.' Some were apt to imagine that to admit of such a principle of interpretation was giving scope to fancy, but it

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was the want of system and rule that left the imagination unbridled, and had led to the thousand heresies that filled the Christian world. What had tended so much to enlighten the human mind, and confirm it in the sublime truths of astronomy, as the discoveries of Copernicus and the domonstrations of Newton? It was science and rule that fixed the imagination, and the revelation of the internal sense of the Word was better calculated to convince the sceptic, the infidel, and the atheist, and prove the Word to be indeed a revelation from God to man worthy of its author. All religion had relation to life, and the life of religion was to do well, and the Word taught that whosoever believed in the Lord and lived well would be saved, whilst those who lived ill would be condemned. Those were what might be called the cardinal doctrines of the New Church, around which was clustered a bright galaxy of truths intimately connected with them, and forming one golden chain which held heaven and earth in conjunction, above which was exalted the Lord in his divine humanity, as King of kings and Lord of lords, and the first of which was the doctrine of the resurrection. Here was food for the mind-here was support in life and consolation in death. The New Church doctrine on this subject disarmed death of its terror by teaching men to be careful how they lived rather than how they died; for, said the speaker, if he understood the Word of God on that subject, a man's state in the eternal world did not depend on the manner of his death, but on the quality of his life. Death did not alter a man's character, it merely fixed him where he was, and sealed his probationary state; and where it was said a man is dead,' angels said 'a man is born.' Death, therefore, was not an extinction of life, but a continuation of it; and was wisely expressed in these words by the ancients :- Death is the gate of life.' The next subject on which Mr. Pitman spoke was the second coming of the Lord, which was a coming not in person, but in power and glory in the revelation of his Word. It was not a coming to destroy the heavens and the earth, but to preserve them, and the earth would continue to exist for ever, according to the testimony of the Divine Word, as the seminary of the human race, destined for the angelic heavens of the Lord. The New Church was no sect, but possessed within its own

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writings, in connection with the Word of God, one complete body of divinity. The writings of this church had been often assailed, and their assailants had as often met with the most masterly refutations, as unanswerable as they were unanswered. It possessed its own printing, missionary, and tract societies; and the church was making rapid spread in all countries where liberty of thought and freedom of speech were enjoyed, especially in England and America. The speaker concluded by earnestly recommending those present to examine the writings of their founder themselves, exercising that birth-right which as Britons they all enjoyed, and which he himself claimed, namely, to think for himself.

"Mr. William Holden next addressed the meeting. He said it had been urged against them that social meetings like those were not intended to be merely commemorative, but were convened for the purpose of making proselytes. He admitted the charge. The members of the New Church were most anxious that men should abandon the creed of their forefathers, and adopt that of the New Church in its place, because they believed that the doctrines of their church were preeminently calculated to make men wise, intelligent, and happy. They did not expect that this glorious effect would follow every individual instance in which they might be received; but if it could be shown that those doctrines had descended from God out of heaven, then were they fully justified in believing that the effects which would follow their general dissemination would be as great, as glorious, as truly amazing as was the cause in which they originated. The great point upon which the members of the New Church were at issue with the whole Christian world was this, Are the writings of the New Church from God or of men? If the latter be truth, they contained the most fatal heresies, by which thousands and tens of thousands were most fearfully deceived. If, on the contrary, (as they solemnly believed) they were written under a state of peculiar divine illumination, the inevitable inference was that the whole Christian world lay in a state of utter desolation, and that unless Jehovah God, in His unutterable mercy, had fulfilled His promise by making His second advent, no mortal could have been saved. The writings of the New Church might all be arranged into four general classes, the first of which included

those works which treat of the doctrines of the church. Let, then, any sincere and intelligent Christian examine those writings from an earnest love of truth for its own sake, and with a mind elevated to that Divine Being who was the truth itself,-let him weigh with an impartial hand the immense amount of Scriptural and rational evidence which in those writings was brought to bear upon the great doctrines upon which they treat, and they would appear as self-evident as it was possible for anything to be.

"The second division of the New Church writings was that including those works which were professedly devoted to an exposition of the spiritual sense of the Word of God. That the Scriptures were of divine origin was admitted by all denominations of Christians; but wherein their divinity and sanctity consisted, and upon what principle their divine contents were to be interpreted, was not generally known, and what was very remarkable, in proportion as copies of the Sacred Scriptures had been circulated among all classes of the community, and the human mind had been putting forth all its powers for the purpose of ascertaining what the Scriptures really taught, in the same proportion had disputes, and divisions, and subdivisions arisen in the Christian Church; and in our day the question, 'What is truth?' was attempted to be answered by a thousand Babel tongues; and what was still more extraordinary, the very men who, from their piety, their erudition, and their earnest research, we should expect to be the first to arrive at a unanimous conclusion, these were the men from whom had emanated those antagonistic principles which were the peculiar characteristics of the Christian Church. The great difficulty with which the Biblical student had to contend was this he commenced his researches into the Sacred Volume with an earnest desire to take the Scriptures just as he found them, and to believe precisely that which was the obvious meaning of the language therein employed; he soon, however, discovered that he could not do this, since very many of its declarations stood in direct contradiction the one to the other; contradictions which no ingenuity could reconcile and no sophistry explain away. What then was to be done? To abide by the merely literal interpretation of the Word, was to make shipwreck of faith; and to abandon it, was to put to sea without a rudder or a compass. Now it

was when the mind was in this dilemma that the New Church writings were found of preeminent advantage; since they proved, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the law according to which the Word of God was written, was as immutable as its Divine Author, and that although considered merely as to its literal interpretation, it abounded with difficulties and discrepancies, yet that in its internal sense there were arcana of wisdom too profound for either human or angelic intellect ever fully to explore. By what means, then, did Swedenborg obtain a knowledge of the stupendous wonders which he had made known to the world concerning the nature of the Holy Word? If it were said that he collected what he' wrote from the works of others, they replied that, if they searched all the commentaries in existence, no trace of it could be found. If it were said that it was infused into his mind by evil spirits, they replied that Satau did not cast out Satan; that the tendency of his writings, from beginning to end, was to elevate man from sin to holiness, from earth to heaven; that he had dragged vice, and hypocrisy, and every evil from their lurking-places, and exhibited them in all their native deformity-as filthy and disgusting as the fiends of hell. If it were said that what he wrote was the result of his unaided intellect, they asked, in reply, What becomes of the charge of insanity so often brought against him? members of the New Church were sometimes taunted with idolizing Swedenborg; but in this instance the very reverse was the fact, since they simply acknowledged him as an instrument in the Divine hand for good, whilst his opponents gave him, by implication, credit for a greater in-. sight into the Holy Word than all the theologians in the world besides. The only satisfactory account which could be given for the existence of the second division of the New Church writings, was that which the author had himself given, namely, that he did not derive his knowledge of the internal sense of the Holy Word from either man or angel, but from the Word alone, whilst devoutly reading it.

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"The third division of the New Church writings was that in which the author described the nature of his intercourse with the beings of the spiritual world. When a man came before the public and declared that he had been permitted to hold communication with spirits and

angels, it was perfectly natural and consistent that they should receive with extreme caution what he had to advance. The members of the New Church were most anxious that this subject in particular should be thoroughly investigated, knowing as they did that truth had nothing to fear from the most rigid scrutiny; no, it was error, hypocrisy, imposture, which dreaded this work; truth ever courted it. Well, then, Swedenborg, at the age of 55, made the very extraordinary announcement that he had been permitted by the Lord, for the sake of the church which should arise upon the earth, to behold the wonders of the eternal world, and to converse with its inhabitants; at the age of 60 he protested solemnly to its truth; at 70 he reiterated his assertion; at the age of 80 his testimony was the same; and from Ferelius, the Swedish minister in London, who attended him upon his death-bed, and administered to him the Holy Sacrament, they learnt that, in answer to questions which he put to him upon the subject, Swedenborg raised himself in his bed, and, laying his hand upon his breast, said, 'All that I have written is as true as that you now behold me; I might have written much more had I been permitted by the Lord, but after death you will know all.' Either, then, Swedenborg was himself the victim of delusion, or he wilfully deceived others, or his assertions were the words of truth and soberness. If, then, he was selfdeceived, how was it that all his writings exhibited evidences of a mind in which order and arrangement were preeminently conspicuous? If, when writing upon one subject, his mind was not deranged, how could insanity be predicated of the same mind when writing upon another subject? But might he not have wilfully deceived others? If he did, he must have been one of the most depraved characters that ever breathed. But his writings, from beginning to end, evinced that the great object which he had at heart was the spiritual and eternal good of the human race, and all who personally knew him declared him to have been a devout and humble Christian. But it might be asked, What information does Swedenborg bring from the eternal world? They replied, Nothing, to satisfy an idle curiosity; but to the man who was in earnest about his eternal state, all that his heart could desire.'

"The fourth division of the New Church writings included the author's miscella

neous works, in which the most capacious intellect might find satisfaction:- The Being and Attributes of God;' 'the Order of Creation;''the Origin of Evil;' 'the Laws of Divine Providence;' and 'the Nature of the Human Soul.' These subjects were discussed in a manner indicative of a mind as far removed from wild enthusiasm as could well be conceived. Let, then, the New Church writings be thoroughly analyzed, and if found to be erroneous, let them be scattered to the four winds of heaven; if true, let every man who professed to love the truth embrace them as a gift of heaven.

"Mr. Pitman concluded the evening's proceedings by giving out a hymn from the New Church collection, which was sung by the society, assisted by some members of the choral society."

CONSECRATION OF THE NEW JERUSALEM

TEMPLE, ST. HELIER'S, JERSEY.
(From the Jersey News, April 14th.)

"On Sunday morning last, the New Jerusalem Temple lately erected in Victoria-road, St. Helier's, was consecrated and opened for the public worship of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the one only true God and eternal Life, by the Rev. Thomas Goyder, from England, assisted by Mr. T. Brown, the much respected leader of the society. The church is a neat Gothic building, chastely fitted up, and supplied with an organ. It is capable of containing about 300 persons, and was well filled with sedate and devout hearers. The consecration or dedication of the temple to the worship of the Lord, according to the heavenly doctrines of the New Jerusalem, was felt by the people as a very impressive service, and as the dawn of a bright day or state of spiritual truth in the minds of men. We trust, and we are not without hope, that the divine blessing will accompany every effort, however humble, to extend a knowledge of the truth, that peace on earth and good will to men may hold a ceaseless and uninterrupted reign. At the close of the consecration service the Rev. Thomas Goyder ascended the pulpit, and, it being Easter Sunday, he delivered a most impressive sermon on the resurrection of the Lord, from Matt. xxviii. 10. It is impossible in this notice to follow the rev. gentleman through the whole of his interesting and instructive lecture, which went to elucidate those two great facts, the death and resurrection of