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not seen, and crowns them with renovation, holiness and eternal life.

These and many other things of a like nature are the interiors of that doctrine; the exteriors which do not gain admission, are valuable sayings concerning charity, good works, acts of repentance and exercises of the law; yet these are accounted by them merely as slaves and drudges, which follow their mistress, faith, without being permitted to join in her company. But forasmuch as they [the clergy] know that the laity account these things equally necessary to salvation as faith, they carefully subjoin them in their sermons and discourses, and pretend to conjoin them with and insert them into justification; this, however, they do merely to tickle the ears of the vulgar, and to defend their oracles, that they may not appear mere riddles, or like the vain responses of soothsayers.

In order to confirm the above assertions, I will adduce the following passages from the Formula Concordia [or Form of Concord, Leipsic edition, 1756, an acknowledged authority in matters of doctrine by the Protestant churches of Swedenborg's time], lest any one should think that these things have been unjustly laid to their charge: That the works of the second table of the decalogue are civil duties, and belong to external worship, which man is able to do of himself; and that it is a folly to dream that such works can justify, pages 84, 85, 102: that good works are to be utterly excluded from the business of justification by faith, pp. 589, 590,