a Behmenite, or a Lawite. The sayings and thoughts of all great and true men are precious to me, and I hope I can both receive them and retail them without parting with myself.

In truth I would that we had heard the last of these ists and ians, although they form so great and formidable an empire. How is it that when we meet with a good and worthy teacher, we presently adopt his name, his costume of thought and expression, like a label round a bottle, or a collar round a dog's neck? How is it that we proclaim our intolerance of all light, except what flows through the one channel? Why not absorb the light he can give us, and walk on? Yet I never met with a man who could hold all the tenets of Calvin although avowing himself a Calvinist, or one who knew or held all the ideas of Wesley, although calling himself a Wesleyan. We are only able to receive benefit from even the greatest teachers, when, while regarding them with affection and veneration, we yet deny to them the right to swallow our individuality in theirs.

Of course it can matter very little, nothing indeed, to any person, to any reader of this book, to know the light in which the writer wishes to be regarded; but it does matter something to the writer that he should not be misunderstood. And therefore he wishes to say, that he conceives he has derived much benefit from the study of the works of Swedenborg— much reason has he to be grateful to that illustrious, venerable, and much misunderstood and comparatively unknown man, although very many of his communications had passed, by anticipation, through his own mind, from previous study of the Word of Truth. Frequently have letters been addressed to him, and the inquiry put, who was Swedenborg? what did he teach? And at last these questions appeared so significant that he determined on publishing this book, especially as no popular exegesis existed in England of the Life and Opinions of this remarkable man: for Mr. Wilkinson's able and eloquent book is not popular, and is more remarkable for its intellectual than its moral sympathy with the subject of the memoir.

It was the intention at first to have published a work far more voluminous at a less price, but that idea only lasted while the writer supposed that the majority of the Disciples of Swedenborg might possibly be interested in publishing his opinions, or in hearing what the member and minister of another church had to say about him. Of course there are very very kind exceptions to this nonchalance. But it is best that they have not treated the book too kindly, it at any rate preserves its utter and entire independence, and is what it at first purposed to be, an Exposition, rather for those outside of the New Church Circle than in it.

And the matter has been much curtailed; in the

scope of the book it was originally intended to give a more extended and yet compendious Key to the Correspondences-to have shewn the entire antagonism of Swedenborg to the Sabellianism with which he has been charged-and the mighty bulwark he reared against Antinomianism in an Anti

nomian Country and Age-a chapter on Swedenborg in his relation to Behmen, and Campanella, and some of the earlier and later mystics, and to have fortified his positions with very numerous citations from the Ancients, from the Fathers, and from the Universal Church. As it is, the book goes on its pilgrimage a very deficient and inadequate performance, but with the hopes of the writer that it may at any rate have a candid reception from the New Church, and the Old.