and rightfully demand the wages of the service, or continuance of life; but it is annulled, and death takes place, when from any cause such service becomes impossible.
Correspondence is, then, first, co-ordination by creation; and, secondly, adoption and inauguration into analogous uses. The lungs are delineated by the soul, as a bodily form capable of communicating, when the time arrives, with its future understanding; the understanding is a spiritual organization co-ordinate with the lungs, and which, as it comes into being, by harmony of end flows into them, and by continuous harmony into the body. In the Divine Idea, which contains the soul or first end, the understanding generates the lungs, which are but itself according to matter; in human nature, the lungs come first, and the understanding afterwards; and then the two are co-ordinate, and the understanding, as a motion, generates the distinct animations of those organs, or the pulmonic functions. In creation, therefore, while there is absolute correspondence or causation, particular as well as general, subsisting between the Divine Ideas and universal nature, there is on the other hand a modifying power assigned to man as always becoming a partaker in the Divine End, whereby the Creator consents to actualize in the world all the forms, whether good or bad, which man evolves in his mind; precisely to maintain inviolate the creative law of correspondence, whereby the world is the exact habitation of humanity. As a great authority has said, "God passes through man into the world, and has nothing in common with nature excepting through man; whence the perfection of nature depends upon the perfection of man. For God, the Author and Builder of nature, disposes the world exactly according to the character of man, the medium whereby he communicates with the world." In the earliest ages, indeed, the whole creation corresponded, as far as possible, to the Divine Idea, and the first men also; but as the times ran down, and man decayed, then the creation corresponded to our fallen race, as their only dwelling and their best education. Thus the primary as well as the secondary world corresponded at first to the will of God; the later or subversive world, to the realized waywardness of mankind itself, free to
