Unless a New Church be established by the Lord, no one can be saved. This is meant by these words: “Unless those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved.” Matt. xxiv. 22. The reason why no flesh could be saved, unless those days should be shortened, is, because the faith of the present Church is founded on the idea of three Gods, and with this idea no one can enter heaven. Not that all who are believers in the doctrine of a tripersonal God are lost; but that, unless a New Church were provided by the Lord, and spiritual truth revealed, man, wanting truth, could never become regenerate, could never enter heaven, and thus the end of his creation would be defeated. In spite, however, of false doctrine, men are saved by the laying hold, as it were, of the truths leading to a good life, which exist in the most corrupt faiths, and goodness always contains an internal acknowledgment and love of truth, although false doctrine may fill the memory. Yet it is true, nevertheless, that false doctrine perverts, discourages, and in the end destroys all inclinations to live well. For this reason, then, the First Christian Church has come to its end, or has been consummated; and the Lord is raising up a New Church, endowed with truth capable of leading the world in the way of life, and to heaven. The opening and rejection of the tenets of the faith of the present Church, and the revelation and reception of the tenets of the faith of the New Church, is meant by these words in the Apocalypse:—“He that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things new; and He said unto me, Write; for these words are true and faithful.” xxi. 5. The New Church about to be established by the Lord, is the New Jerusalem, treated of in chapters xxi. and xxii., which is there called the Bride and the Wife of the Lamb. Such, briefly expressed, are the heads or leading ideas of the little work, “A Brief Exposition of the Doctrines of the New Church,” a treatise which, as Wilkinson truly remarks, “is unequaled among Swedenborg’s works for its destructive logic.” “The Intercourse Between the Soul and the Body,” is a small treatise designed to illustrate a subject which has puzzled many minds from time immemorial. Various have been the theories of philosophers on this subject; but few could satisfy the intelligent mind, or explain the varied phenomena of being. Swedenborg, in many of his previous works, had, with greater or less fullness, explained the nature of the soul’s union with the body, and this treatise is, to some extent, but a repetition of what he had elsewhere written,—cleared, however, from extraneous matter.