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948 [Doc. 313.
SWEDENBORG’S WRITINGS.
4. The origin of the firstborn or Adam, pp. 28 to 35.
5. The infancy of the firstborn, pp. 36 to 66.
6. The love of the firstborn, pp. 67 to 120.
Part II.
The marriage of the firstborn.
Respecting this work Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson says in his
biography of Swedenborg (pp. 62 et seq.) : " The Worship and Love
of God is a centring of all that he had previously elicited from his
studies, and an attempt, moreover, to carry them into another field.
As the title prepares the reader to expect, it is an end in his
scientific march. He began from God as the fountain of sciences ;
the wisdom of creation was the desire and wisdom of his labours;
and here he ended with his beginning, carrying God’s harvest to
God. Apparently he did not know that his literary life was closed,
but stood amid the sheaves, contemplating the tillage of future years
in the old domain ; although trembling nevertheless in the presence
of an undisclosed event.
"In The Worship and Love of God, Swedenborg gives an ornate
scientific narrative of the creation of our solar system, dropping the
mathematical form of the Principia, and telling the story of the
world in a physical and pictorial strain. The method runs from
the general to the universal, making use of nature as a vast tradition
that speaks to those who understand her, of the whole past by the
present. Thus as the sun is the material sustainer of the system,
so this sustenance demonstrates a parental relation, and hence the
sun was originally its material parent. Further as all growth and
springing take place in spring times, so the vernal seasons of all
things point backwards to a primordial universal spring, the ocean
of every rill of geniality, the germinal warmth of the world. This
parentage with its conditions is unfolded ; the conception and birth
of the planets near the bosom of the sun from his own body and
substance; their incubation in the great egg of the universe; their
exclusion therefrom, and their entry into space for themselves. The
first kingdoms of nature are also described, and their difference from
all others, for they were pregnant with all ; moreover the general
spring resulting from the nearness of the earth to the sun, and
from the rapidity of its revolutions, whereby all the seasons were
blended into one as to their temperate and delightful mean, night
also being melted into, and mingled through, day, as winter through
summer. And as the mineral was parturient with the vegetable,
and the vegetable with the animal, so the innermost of the vegetable,
the tree of life, bore the transcendent ovum of our race, and there
H
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