Page:The Other Life.djvu/280

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cause his æsthetic faculties are uncultivated or his ideas of beauty are narrow and conventional. Because his love of use has too large an element of selfishness and worldliness in it, for that grand spiritual ideal of use which gives a spontaneous insight into truth.

On this love of truth for its own sake and on the gradual emancipation of the human heart, by divine influences, from these inferior loves which prevent its discovery, the future progress of the world depends. These are the sturdy workmen who are clearing away the old and tough and unsightly weeds of error from the garden of the human soul, and who will plant in their stead the perennial flowers of beauty and love.

The human race will outlive and outgrow all its imperfect states of evil and falsity, by a great, organic and inevitable process. The divine fire from heaven which is kindling the Christian heart, will illumine the Christian mind to see the divine truth. And he who surrenders all the theology and philosophy in the world for the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, revealed through Swedenborg, will not lose his life but find it.

The doctrines of the New Church embody the highest truth, and are therefore capable of ravish-