this subject, through any medium the Lord may provide.
In attempting to explain a few fundamental principles in regard to the nature and laws of the spiritual world, it may be remarked in the first place, that that world, considered in regard to its essential principles, is totally unlike the natural world; and yet that these two worlds are intimately related to each other, from the fact that the natural is an effect from the spiritual, and therefore corresponds to and represents it. This principle has already been explained to some extent. This correspondence between the natural and the spiritual, is the origin, as will easily be seen, of the twofold use of language—the one designed for natural, the other for spiritual things. As, for example, the word light may be understood either in a natural or in a spiritual sense, the subject always suggesting which sense is intended.
Considered in their essential nature, there is nothing in common between the light of the natural sun and the light of truth, and yet the mind instantly sees a correspondence between them. In the same manner, nearly all the language that we use in describing spiritual things, has a primary application to natural things. This is most readily observed in poetry, much of the peculiar. beauty of which, arises from a perception of the correspondence here referred to. And the ready perception of this correspondence, both in poetry and prose, arises from the fact that the spiritual mind sustains the same relation to the natural mind that spiritual things sustain to natural things. In each case the one is the internal and the other the external. Our first ideas are in regard to those things which are observed thro' the medium of the external senses. The ideas thus obtained are treasured up in the éxternal memory, and are expressed by words and other signs. But the mind soon begins to perceive that there are spiritual as well as natural things, and is delighted to find that its ideas of those things can also be expressed in the same language, which in its primary signification, refers to natural things. And at length
