Emanuel Swedenborg

“ For upon a just idea of God, the universal heaven, and the church universal on earth, are founded, and in general the whole of religion; for by that idea there is conjunction, and by conjunction, light, wisdom, and eternal happiness. ”

“ The Apocalypse, however, in like manner as the rest of the Word, treats not, in its spiritual sense, of mundane things, but of such as are heavenly, thus not of empires and kingdoms, but of heaven and the church.
It is to be observed that, after the last judgment, which was accomplished in the spiritual world, in the year 1757, and which forms the subject of a small treatise published in London in 1758, a new heaven was formed from among Christians, from those only, however, who admitted the Lord to be the God of heaven and earth, according to his own words in Matthew xxviii. ”

“ Any one may see that the Apocalypse could no how be explained but by the Lord alone, since every word of it contains arcana, which never could be known without some special illumination, and consequent revelation ”