fore, we are bound to believe, that african slavery in this country has been permitted, in the Lord's wise and merciful providence, for some ultimate good.
Certainly members of the New Jerusalem should not entertain any doubt on this subject. They know that the Africans are of a celestial genius.[1] Even now, in the
- ↑ This, doubtless, will be to many the most startling of our assertions. And certainly, to all appearance, the assertion is most untrue. Africans, as we see them in this country, are a degraded race. The bondage in which they are, is a correspondent of their mental and moral degradation. Their enslaved condition is an outbirth of their interior evils, and, as a reaction on them for their correction or restraint, is a sort of penitentiary punishment of their defects of character. The mere fact of their being slaves, also, produces a prejudice against them; and, by the association of ideas, their color, their woolly heads, and their every peculiar and distinctive feature, are connected with all that is low and debased in humanity. Hence to say they are of a celestial genius, shocks the common sense of men around us. But in rightly estimating any form of our common humanity, we must look with philosophic eyes, and "judge righteous judgment." And thus, in estimating the peculiar genius of the african race, we must send our intellectual vision through outside, deceptions appearances, to their interior qualities; or we must apprehend the exterior forms or types of those qualities by that revived science of correspondences which makes effects exponents of their causes. But let us first learn what is meant by celestial, and what is the distinguishing characteristic of the celestial man.
"To know what is true by virtue of what is good, is celestial." "Man is called celestial, if the Lord's divine good is received in the will part—spiritual, if in the intellectual part." (A. C. 5150.) "The celestial man is one who, from the will principle, is in good, and thence in truth; and he is distinguished from the spiritual man in this, that the latter, from the intellectual principle, is in truth, and thence in good." (A. C. 6295.) "They who are in the Lord's spiritual
mankind, in the abuse of their rational and voluntary faculties, has become.] Thus it is providence alone which governs; for previdence, or foresight, is thus changed into providence, and thus evils are so previded as to be changed into good: since, if the foreseen [designs] of evil spirits were permitted, they would tend to the destruction of both men and souls. Wherefore the evils intended by evil spirits are turned into such things as are permissible." (Diary, I., p. 334, n. 1088.)
"The Lord foresees and beholds all and singular things; and provides for and disposes of all and singular things: yet in some cases by permission, in some by admission, in some by leave, in some by good pleasure, in some by will." (A. C. 1755.)
