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TESTIMONY OF REV, EDWIN P. HOOD. 57

all persons who have not known the great change the birth out of Nature and above Nature — the birth, of which the birth and life of Jesus was a type and an illustration. . . . Swedenborg maintains the reality of this new birth. It is [as he explains it] just what it is by Jesus Christ declared to be; it is the birth of a new manhood beneath the old; it is the ingermination of the divine Spirit of all Truth by its Author and Fountain; it is the inflowing of a new life, or life in a new degree and in new manifestation. This is the new birth — one of the most clear, beautiful, rational doctrines of our holy faith, in spite of all that superstition has done to encumber it with falsehoods; in spite of all that infidelity has done to bring it into odium, derision and contempt. . . .

" Regeneration, in the sense of our writer, is not a work of faith. Faith may be operative in producing it; but it alone can no more produce the New Birth, than the solving of a mathematical problem can create a planet; neither is it merely that change of life which may result from change of ideas and impressions, and from enlarged intelligence. . . . Regeneration itself, in the estimation of many writers and speakers, is not so much a fact as a shadowy and mythic event in human history. The reality has not been felt as Swedenborg felt it, by most writers. It has been the doubtful land of Theologic opinion per-

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