If, from Swedenborg's position, it be contended that man contains nothing of the Divine, since he is not eternal save through influx, and, furthermore, that he is unable to create, the Ancient Wisdom rejoins that even his physical components are deathless. The fleshly form disintegrates, but its atoms persist, and are ever usable in other bodies. As for the act of creation, nothing can be added to a universe whose total is God. Creation results from the moulding of old materials into new shapes. Because a being from God, man is a potential creator on the way to full realization of his powers.

Darwin published a theory of evolution, and Swedenborg, a doctrine of discreet degrees. Three of these are create and finite, and pertain to the natural world and its creatures, while, above these, three are uncreate and infinite, and are proper to the heavenly world and its angels. Man originated from the spiritual principle in these high degrees, and the animal and the vegetable kingdoms from that in the lowest of the three. After death, every human being eventually gravitates to the altitude of his discreet degree, there to remain fixed forever. The Ancient Wisdom enumerates and describes seven continuous degrees or principles; four proper to the lower planes, and three to the higher planes of our septenary world. The seventh degree or principle, intermingles with the sixth, the sixth intermingles with the fifth, and so on to the basic degree. In this procedure, these degrees resemble Swedenborg's discreet degrees.

Unlike the six discreet degrees, the seven continuous degrees separate into almost innumerable subdivisions. Increasing possibilities of use reside in the lower and lower, and therefore more and more complex degrees, and in this they are like the six of Swedenborg. An ancient teaching is, that while every human being, and every evolving creature, eventually finds his permanent subdivision; within that section innumerable opportunities await him. The total of wisdom to result from this procedure, will duplicate the contents of the Divine Mind. To the above, let us add the following: Swedenborg asserts that before the Lord's assumption of the Human, the natural or basic degree of the heavenly world existed not like the celestial and the spiritual degrees, but only in possibility. On the other hand, the Ancient teaching is, that the three highest degrees or, in other words, Atma-Buddhi-Manas, ever existed as a perfect trinity.

Swedenborg states, as a truth never before made known to the world, that angels and men have an inmost and supreme region of the soul into which the Divine Sphere of the Lord first flows, and which is His most immediate dwelling-place in them. A quite similar but more comprehensive idea is revealed in these words from the Bhagavad Gita: "There dwelleth in the heart of every creature, Ishwara the Master."

It is generally assumed that Swedenborg's writings contain no hint of that physical, mental, and spiritual evolution, which the Ancient Wisdom enlarges upon. We contend that such a hint is in the following: "In both the animal and the vegetable kingdoms there is an image of creation, and an image of man, also an image of Infinite and Eternal." No doubt such images would operate as urges towards realization of what they represent.

Swedenborg assures his readers that a distinguishing sphere of affections and thoughts emanates from and surrounds every being, both in heaven and in hell, and the correspondent of that sphere envelops every world, creature, and thing. The divine original of these spheres is the Spiritual Sun, that emanation wherein the Lord Himself, dwells bodily. The Ancient Teaching much resembles the above, since it declares that a sevenfold aura, whose prototype is the Spiritual Sun, envelops with its graded ethers of seven colors, every world and every atom, and every form of life between these extremes.

According to Swedenborg, man has an individual book of life: to wit, his brain and his whole body. From the Ancient Teaching it is learned that upon the radiant aura which envelops a man, his every thought, word, and action are recorded, to be reproduced at the proper time.

Swedenborg claims that from the angels he learned that after death an evil man cannot be reformed by instruction, because his natural plane of knowledge and affections has been permanently closed, and so he remains forever in his ruling love; in fact it were easier to change a night bird into a dove, than to change a subject of hell into an angel of heaven. This dogma, as uncompromising as any ever formulated by the most rigid theologian of the Christian church, drew from Emerson the exclamation: "To what a perversion had Gothic theology arrived that Swedenborg admitted no conversion of evil spirits." On the other hand, through its doctrine of rebirth, the Ancient Teaching promises to such a man a new opportunity in the natural world, that instruction, reformation, and progress may ensue.

Swedenborg's theory that posthumous man's free will is unyielding, and his ruling love persistent, evidently makes the hells eternal; whereas, an ancient teaching can be paraphrased thus: The material worlds, those emanations from the physical sun, shall yet return to its bosom. Likewise, the souls of all men shall be gathered to their source in that heart of creation, the spiritual sun.

Swedenborg explains that one purpose of the Incarnation was the subjugation of the hells, a task accomplishable through the Lord's assumption of the Human, that antithesis of His spiritual Being. Because of this assumption and conquest, the hells eventually sank to their proper place, never more to infringe upon the lowest degree of the heavenly world. In respect to the hells, the Ancient Wisdom teaches that when incarnating as an Avatar, every great soul can and does ameliorate hellish conditions; hence, evil is being gradually transformed to good in a becoming, universal as that which Hegel sought to demonstrate.

A cardinal doctrine of Swedenborg's system is that of Conjugal Love. From the union of Love and Wisdom in God, proceed love in woman, and wisdom in man, and the marriage of love and wisdom on earth results in conjugal love. This marriage corresponds with that of Christ and his church. Conjugal love begun in the world, is continued with the angels, all of whom are from the human race. Emerson's criticism of this doctrine: "Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls," accords with the ancient teaching that the mutual love of husband and wife, and parent and child, are but the necessary beginnings of a love destined to include all beings.

Swedenborg tells of three judgments, the first in the time of Noah, the second when Christ was on earth, and the third which he himself witnessed in the spiritual world in 1757, and which he identified with the Last Judgment foretold by John, the Revelator. Of this third he said: "There will be no more general judgments, because the way to the final state is now laid down forever, and the outward man can no longer differ from the inner when he passes to the spiritual world." The Ancient Wisdom describes certain prehistoric and historic judgments consummated through the cyclic operation of Karmic Law, but it foretells others yet to be brought about through that Law.

Swedenborg's saying that every society in heaven has its opposite in hell, and that every kind of good has its antithesis, is parallelled by the Ancient Teaching that for every positive in the universe, a negative somewhere exists. Finally, since further pursuit of the matter might weary the reader, as a scientist, Swedenborg conceived of an elementary vortical particle much like that known to the teachers of the Ancient Wisdom, and whose description almost applies to the structure of the Atom as now understood.

Examination of the entire body of Swedenborg's doctrine would discover constantly both those similarities which identify his system with that of the Wisdom Religion, and those differences which separate the two. Concerning similarities and differences, our explanation is as follows: Though not a minor avatar, Swedenborg had developed almost to the condition of one; so he had not rounded into the perfect seer who always interprets correctly whatever he sees and hears on the higher planes. In him, certain ideas concerning Jesus were too deeply ingrained; besides, his attitude toward the "Papists," both in this world and the next, reflected his unconscious participation to some extent in the narrow sectarian prejudices of his time. As for his estimate of his mission, it appears in the following: "The manifestation of the Lord through me, and my introduction by the Lord into the spiritual world as to sight, hearing and speech, is superior to all miracles, for it is not stated in history that such intercourse has been granted to any other man."

Swedenborg's departure from the traditional was in many ways a radical one, as witness the following: "Adam was not the first of mankind, but by him and his wife is represented the first church, and by the Garden of Eden, its wisdom, and by the Tree of Life, its looking to the Lord who was to come, and by the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, its looking to self alone."

Again, while the discovery of things spiritual is affected through the conjunction of man and higher powers, certain heavenly conjunctions - outwardly astronomical - are necessary to the seer's understanding of such great matters as Swedenborg attempted. Although he taught of the consummation of the age, and the end of the Church then existing, and the establishing of the New Church which would succeed the Adamic, the Noahic, the Israelitish, and the Christian churches, and would endure for ages of ages, it was not the Swedish seer's privilege to appear in a cycle necessary to full comprehension of Truth; hence his half-truths which now almost reveal, and then quite conceal, Truth as it is.

As Emerson said: "Sweden borg's theological bias fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature? As one result of this, the correspondences constantly used by him were very much overworked in his efforts to connect, directly or indirectly with the dogmas of the New Church, what he believed to be the interior meaning or spiritual sense of the books of the Old and the New Testament. Nevertheless, in reviving the ancient doctrine of cor respondences, so long absent from the world, Swedenborg, to no little extent, prepared mankind for those deeper and wider ones which, during the last forty years, and especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ancient Wisdom has brought to the outside world.