III.
I743-I772.
Before the last important scientific work of Swedenborg had come from the press, he had an experience so unusual as to be almost unique, that changed the direction and character of his studies for the rest of his life. What this experience was, is best described in his own words. In a brief Autobiography which he prepared, near the close of his eighty-second year, he says:
"But all that I have thus far related, I consider of comparatively little importance; for it is far transcended by the circumstance that I have been called to a holy office by the Lord Himself, who most mercifully appeared before me. His servant, in the year 1743, when He opened my sight into the spiritual world, and enabled me to converse with spirits and angels; in which state I have continued up to the present day. From that time I began to print and publish the various arcana that were seen by me, concerning Heaven and Hell, the State of Man after Death, the True Worship of God, the Spiritual Sense of the Word, and many other important matters conducive to salvation and wisdom."
The same year that he wrote the foregoing, one of the Swedish bishops had given orders for the confiscation of his work De Amore Conjugiali. Swedenborg addressed a memorial to the king upon the subject, in which he complained, among other things, that he had been treated as no one had ever been treated before in Sweden since the introduction of Christianity; and in the course of his remonstrance he gives a more detailed account of what he regarded as his illumination.
"I humbly beg," he says, "to make the following statement:—That our Saviour visibly revealed Himself before me, and commanded me to do what I have done and what I have still to do. And that thereupon He permitted me to have intercourse with angels and spirits, I have declared before the whole of Christendom; in England, Holland, Germany, and Denmark, in France and
