ity. He speaks of them and prays to them as if they were one person. They deliver the message of God and go on their way, utterly ignorant, when they come to themselves, of the whole transaction.
A similar phenomenon took place when two angels or messengers, evidently two men (for the people of Sodom saw them also), visited Lot and saved him and his family from the fearful destruction which fell upon the cities of the plain. So also a man wrestled with Jacob all night so that he received a permanent muscular deformity, and Jacob exclaimed in the morning, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."
This theory that the persons who appeared to Abraham, Lot and Jacob were really men in the flesh, representing per force the Divine character, although not distinctly announced by Swedenborg, is fully accordant with his philosophy. Most of the cases of spiritual vision recorded in the Bible were of course openings of the spiritual sight; but in these cases there seems to have been no opening of the spiritual sight, and all the phenomena prove them to have really taken place in the natural world.
These appearances on earth were as strictly sym-
