Appendix B: Warren Felt Evans
Before 1872 Evans had published several books. Two early ones on Swedenborgianism entitled The Celestial Dawn and The New Age and Its Messenger were written just before and just after his visit to Quimby. They were filled with familiar yet freshly felt Swedenborgian doctrines: “Heaven is a spiritual state . . . the conscious indwelling of God in the soul.” “Though heaven is not a material world, but a spiritual realm, it is far more real than this earth. . . . The things of earth are only shadows projected from heavenly substances.” “Nature is a transcript of the divine Mind.”1
Swedenborg’s teaching, “the science of sciences,” is said to show the exact correspondence between earthly things and heavenly truths as unfolded in the Bible.2 The divine Mind, however, is “deeply vailed” in the letter of the Scriptures. “It is only by the divine Comforter, that we can gain anything more than a mere surface knowledge of the Gospel.”3 The Old Testament, writes Evans, was the age of the Father, the New Testament the age of the Son: “The next, which we doubt not has had its birth, will be the age of the Holy Spirit, when Christ will come as the Comforter, the Paraclete.”4
1 [W. F. Evans, The Celestial Dawn; Or Connection of Earth and Heaven (Boston: James P. Magee, 1862), pp. 18, 190–191, 209.]
2 [W. F. Evans, The New Age and Its Messenger (Boston: T. H. Carter, 1864), p. 24.]
3 [Evans, The Celestial Dawn, pp. 142, 259.]
4 [Evans, The New Age and Its Messenger, p. 7.]