THE LIFE AND MISSION
OF
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.—SWEDENBORG'S PLACE IN HISTORY.
Never had the outlook for Christianity been darker than during the period embraced by Swedenborg's life, from 1688 to 1772, In the time of Martin Luther the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church were possibly more flagrant,—although, says Mosheim, in the seventeenth century "the corruptions, both in the higher and in the inferior orders of the Romish clergy, were rather increased than diminished, as the most impartial writers of that communion candidly confess."[1] But in the determined and unscrupulous effort through the Jesuits to enslave the world, as witnessed in the cruel expulsion of Protestants from France in 1685, and in the persistent attempt to substitute its own authority with the people for that of the Word of God, as witnessed in the Bull Unigenitus,[2] 1713, the Church at Rome was clearly pressing on to its doom, as was seen by its best friends and lamented with piteous wail.[3]
In the Protestant Church, on the other hand, the very instinct of rational thought which had given it birth was now casting off all restraint, denying its creed, and on the point of rejecting even "the Headstone of the corner." The result
- ↑ Maclaine: Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii. § ii. part i. ch. 36.
- ↑ Appendix I.
- ↑ Appendix II.
I
