SWEDENBORG.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4637, 23 September 1876, Page 6

SWEDENBORG.

To the Editor of the Herald. Sib,—ln a late issue of your contemporary the Evening Star, 1 wrote asking for information relative to the teaching of Swedenborg. Air. i>. Coombes kindly volunteered to explain the matter in last night's Star. Having carefully read his letter over, I am really at a lass to know whether he is scouting and deriding the teachings of Swetieuborg or attempting to explain them. As I have no right to suspect his good faith I must take it for granted that he intends to give an explanation of the true teachings of Swedenborg. But if he really intends to do so he has most signally failed. He has aggravated every difficulty which lay between me aud an understanding of these doctrines. He has plunged them into such a depth of mystery, and wrapped thorn with such a mautle of Cimmerian darkness, that it would require the clue of an Ariadne to successfully extricate them, lie says : Swedenboig spoke with real men in the spirit world, and that asking such a question was "Jike asking a man if he had a mother." Permit me to remark that the miud that could see no difference in the quality of the evidences for these two things can have had no logical training and must be utterly ignorant of the nature and requirements of proof. There arc certain facts connected with, what is called "spiritual manifestations " that may not be easily aucounted for, but any inference based upon these facts must amount at the very utmost only to a probability. Surely the question, Had we a mother ? cannot be placed in the same category. Further Mr. Coombes says : It will be a real body that a man shall enjoy in the next world. If so, does he deny the truth of the text: "Flesh and blood thj.ll not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven." I hold this to be an absolute dilemma. The brain is the seat of feeling, through its medium we experience pain. It can be seen it is a necessary part of a human being. If in the next world we get an entirely new body, of course including the brain, auother person will be suffering for the deeds that an entirely different person committed. Again, I ask how did Swedenborg recognise a different person to be the same person whom he had known on earth. Mr. Coombes goes on to say : Our thoughts and actions are buildiug up something and that something is the real man, standing in the presence of the Creator of the universe. la this intelligible ? What is the meaning of it ? Thoughts—mere cerebral activity—an attribute of a particular mode of existence being not material, but a product of oryauis ation—to say that thought shall build up something is the sheerest folly, and most ridiculous absurdity I ever heard of. Thoughts, the thinking capabilities producing a man, ie equivalent to saying that the man is produced mentally, as an object of thought, but surely not as a real objective existence. Besides, a child who dies before its thought is developed cannot build up a body. Consequently, according to Mr. Coombes, will have to go without one unless it has a wooden one. Instead of supplying information in a candid courteous manner he has ridiculed my questions iu lieu of answering them. I asked : Does Swedenborg'e teaching include the devil, and if not why not 1 1 have got no answer to that question. The quotation from St. Paul ia scarcely applicable, Ist : because if the seed thrown into

the ground die, no wheat ia produced, and 2ndrr.tha<i -when'-wheat is: produced it htm something in common with itn producer. The new body cannot have anything in common with the body laid . in' the grave, or at any rate cannot stand in the relationship of cause and effect to one another. With apology for occupying so much of your space, T beg to remain, etc., Adam Surra. ! September 14, 1876.