Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 2.pdf/245

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of evil, and helps to cast it out; and thus he raises them from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, and blesses them with new thoughts, new desires, new affections, and at length gives unto them a new quality, a new name.


July Eighteenth.

SPIRITUAL FREEDOM.

"If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."John viii. 36.

THE reception of the doctrines of the New Church has probably been the means of placing every person who is brought under their influence, into such states of freedom and rationality as were never before experienced. It is hardly possible that this reception should not work a great change in the receiver's views and feelings, both in relation to the nature of freedom, as well as the means of discriminating with clearness its exercise. Although the light has broken through the darkness of the last century, and has gradually released the mind, in a great degree, from the religious intolerance and persecution of former times and left it in a state preparatory to rational freedom; still there was wanting that unerring guide—that true declaration of rights written upon two tables, one for God, and one for man—which should serve, not only as a passport to the free outgoings and ingoings of the men-servants and maid-servants of the natural man, but which should secure the fundamental principles of all true freedom, in the acknowledgment of its source, and thus place human volition, and the rational prin-