Saturday Evening Gazette/June 7, 1856/Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg.
Emanuel Swedenborg was no vulgar fanatic. He was distinguished by his social position, his eminence in science and literature, his active pursuits as a man of the world, and his high personal character during his whole life. He was the son of a Lutheran bishop, and was born at Stockholm in sixteen hundred and eighty-eight. He distinguished himself in the physical sciences and the practical arts connected with them; and his various works in mathematics, chemistry, and physiology, hold a high place in the literature of the day. He received honors from the principal scientific bodies of Europe, and was appointed by Charles III. Inspector-General of the Mines, as a reward for important services rendered by him to the king. The royol favor was continued to him by Charles’s successor, Queen Ulrica, by whom he was ennobled, with the title of baron. Such was his life till three-score and ten, when he suddenly renounced the world, resigned his public offices, and began to proclaim his celestial mission, which, according to his own account, he had received some years before. In the preface to one of his mystical treatises (De Cœlo et Inferno) he says: I was dining late at my lodgings in London—(this was in seventeen hundred and forty-three)—and was eating heartily. When I was finishing my meal I saw a sort of mist around me, and the floor covered with hideous reptiles. They disappeared; the mist cleared up; and I saw plainly, in the midst of a vivid light, a man sitting in the corner of the room, who said with a terrible voice, Don’t eat so much. Darkness again gathered around me—it was dissipated by degrees, and I found myself alone. The following night the same man, radiant with light, appeared to me and said: I, the Lord, the Creator and the Redeemer, have chosen thee to explain to mankind the inward and spiritual sense of the Holy Scriptures, and I shall dictate what thou art to write. That night the eyes of my inner man were opened, and enabled to look into heaven, the world of spirits, and hell; and there I saw many persons of my acquaintance, some dead long before, and others recently. He spent the latter years of his life in publishing, in quick succession, a multitude of works, reporting his conversations with God, angels, and spirits of the dead, and describing visits, not only to the planets of our solar system, but to the fixed stars in the remotest regions of the universe. He always speaks as an eye or an ear witness: Such is what the Lord hath revealed to me, Such is what the angels have told me. He relates with minuteness his dialogues and disputations with the beings of other worlds; describes their personal appearance, habits, and manners, in a familiar and matter-of-fact way, which reminds us of the writings of Defoe; and uses the same style in describing the things he saw and heard among angels and spirits, and even in the presence of God himself. All these revelations are given as the proofs and illustrations of the mystical doctrines which he is commissioned to teach, and he claims for them all the authority due to communications from heaven. His visions, and the mystical system founded upon them, excited curiosity, heightened by the eminence of his name. They began to act upon the imagination and command the belief of many educated people—for his books were written in Latin; till the Swedish clergy took the alarm, and obtained from the government a commission to inquire into his heresies. Nothing, however, came of the inquiry, and Swedenborg was allowed to go on in his own way without molestation. He lived very quietly in a small house in Stockholm, where he had many visitors drawn by his writing from other countries as well as his own. In his reception of them he exhibited a good deal of the charlatan. His chamber was hung with mystical pictures; and, when a stranger, after waiting a due time, was admitted, the sage was discovered in profound meditation, the sage was discovered in profound meditation, or, unconscious of mortal presence, engaged in colloquy sublime with some invisible visitant from the world of spirits. His life, however, is admitted on all hands to have been irreproachable; his habits were simple; and, being in easy circumstances, he does not seem ever to have turned his divine mission to any worldly account. He died in England of apoplexy in seventeen hundred and seventy-two, at the age of eighty-five, and his remains rest in the Swedish church in Ratcliffe Highway.