William White

“ And when we had again alighted from that perusal which strained every faculty to the utmost, it was as though we had been there before, so entire was the impression of self-evidence that was left upon the mind. Genesis and the Revelation were closely at one in this marvellous Apocalypse—thenceforth the most open of the Bible pages: the two ends of the Scripture called to each other; an arch of Divine light spanned the river of the Word, and the original Eden blossomed anew in the midst of the street of the holy city. ”

“ Faith is the perception and acknowledgment of truth from a right understanding of it. True faith is something that grows. It is not the gift of a moment. It is attained by leading a good life, and through obedience to the truth so far as we know it. In the course of time we find that a pure life is clearing our spiritual vision, and extending its range. Spiritual truths which we had laid up in our memories, and perhaps fancied that we had believed, are brought forth, are seen in new and striking light, are elevated into the understanding, and are in reality believed. ”

“ From my sixth to my twelfth year, it was my greatest delight to converse with the clergy concerning faith; to whom I often observed, that charity or love is the life of faith; and that this vivifying charity or love is no other than the love of one’s neighbor; that God vouchsafes this faith to every one; but that it is adopted by those only who practise that charity. I knew of no other faith or belief at that time, than that God is the Creator and Preserver of Nature; that He endues men with understanding, good inclinations, and other gifts derived from these. ”

“ Truth is ever an adversary to the evil. Elijah the prophet represented the Divine Truth. When he approached the wicked Ahab, Ahab cried: “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” “In the way with him” is in the present life; and the “prison” is the world of spirits, often so called in the Word, out of which we shall not be delivered until entirely divested of selfish affections, and false principles of thought. How practical, thus viewed, becomes our Lord’s advice! But without a knowledge of the world of spirits, and the spiritual sense of Scripture, it is quite mystical and unintelligible. ”

“ Why should bad be made worse? Bad is not made worse. It is for the peace of the evil themselves that they should be divested of all truth. The presence of truth with the wicked only adds to their torment by the continual protest it makes against their sin. It is also well that the evil lose all truth, for the sake of the good, whom they might trouble and disturb through the power that truth would afford them to assume an angelic appearance; to become wolves in sheep’s clothing; or as Paul states it, “Satan transforming himself into an angel of light.” ”

“ Well, then, might Swedenborg disclaim the authorship of the ideas in the Apocalypse Revealed, and ask: “What man can draw such things from himself?” Those who tell us that Swedenborg was self-deceived, must either know very little of what they speak about, or must be quite as ignorant of the capacity of the human mind and its powers of invention. For ourselves, we could as readily believe that Swedenborg created the world, as we could believe that the spiritual sense of the Apocalypse, and of the whole Word, was a fiction of his brain. ”

“ It has become the universal opinion that the world is moving onwards and upwards; yet how few understand why the world is so moving. Men have yet to learn that effects can [101] no more take place without adequate causes in the universe of mind than in the universe of matter. Nowhere out of Swedenborg can we find a description of those spiritual causes which are changing society and revolutionizing the whole world. We, who live in the dawn of the new era, can form, even in our highest states, but a faint conception of its coming glory. ”

“ Everywhere we are told by Swedenborg, that the joys and delights of heaven transcend the highest power of language to express; everywhere we are told that our highest ideas formed from natural things, fall indefinitely short of the common realities of the heavenly life. Yet we also learn that the common humanities and pleasures of this life are not lost in the next; and that as men and women we carry with us to our eternal home every faculty of thought and affection which we possess here. ”

“ But, furthermore, thought commences and corresponds with respiration. The reader has before attended to the presence of the heaving over the body; now let him feel his thoughts, and he will see that they too heave with the mass. When he entertains a long thought he draws a long breath; when he thinks quickly, his breath vibrates with rapid alternations; when the tempest of anger shakes his mind, his breath is tumultuous; when his soul is deep and tranquil, so is his respiration; when success inflates him, his lungs are as tumid as his conceits. ”

“ There is no trial encountered, no circumstance met, or cross endured, but has its eternal issue; and man’s conduct in relation to it is looked upon by the Lord with a love and interest infinitely transcending our highest conception. All has been foreseen; and these daily recurring tasks are appointed by that wisdom which guides the stars in their courses, and by that love which requires eternity to satisfy the ardor with which it would bless. [121] With what dignity does such a faith clothe existence! What earnestness and celestial patience must it infuse into life! ”

“ As conjugial love is the foundation love of all good loves, and as it is inscribed on all the parts and principles of man, even to the most particular, it follows that its delights exceed the delights of all other loves, and also that it gives delight to the other loves, according to its presence and conjunction with them; for it expands the inmost principles of the mind, and at the same time the inmost principles of the body, as the most delightful current of its fountain flows through and opens them. ”

“ True it is, that, until Swedenborg came, any but the most general knowledge of the nature of the future life had been withdrawn from mankind since the days of primeval innocence; yet not from anything hurtful in the knowledge itself, but simply because the sublime facts of the future state transcended the apprehension of men immersed in worldly loves and cares, and denying and ridiculing every idea which was not an object of sensual perception. ”

“ It is impossible to give a description of the horrible forms of the spirits of hell. No two are alike, although there is a general likeness in those who are in the same evil. They are forms of contempt of others, of menace against those who do not [127] pay them respect, of hatreds of various kinds, and of revenge; and in these forms, outrage and cruelty are transparent from within; but when others commend, venerate, and worship them, their faces are drawn up, and have an appearance of gladness arising from delight. Some of their faces are direful and void of life, like corpses ”

“ These common but crude and unscriptural ideas have afforded the best subjects for scoffing at the Christian religion which the skeptic could desire. For he triumphantly asks, How can so vast a heaven, and so many stars, with sun and moon, be destroyed and dissipated? And how can the stars fall from heaven upon the earth, when they are larger than the earth? How can men’s bodies, eaten up by worms, consumed by putrefaction, scattered to all winds, absorbed by vegetation, and again incorporated into other men’s systems, be re-collected for their souls? ”

“ In this respect we do well to compare Swedenborg with many whom the world in its ignorance associate with him. At no period of his life was he a cold self-righteous ascetic, looking abroad upon men with a bitter and accusing scowl. At no time did he insult his Maker with upbraidings that his fate was to live in an evil world, and with a wicked generation. He received life with thankfulness, partook temperately of all its lawful pleasures, did his duty, and took care while living with the world to keep himself unspotted from its evil. ”

“ If, especially, he has vexed and worn himself in reading the profitless controversies and lucubrations of learned divines on the Trinity, his fretted and heated mind will experience a spiritual relief similar to the natural one which results when patience has become exhausted in vain endeavors to unfasten a lock, and a skilled mechanic draws near, takes the work out of our hands, and with dexterity and ease accomplishes the task in a moment. Swedenborg lays his hand on the tangled mass of mysticism and perverted Scripture, and straightway the Gordian knot is untied. ”

“ From all that has now been said, it will be very evident that heaven is not a gift of immediate Divine mercy, to be obtained by a verbal confession of faith at the hour of death. If man could be saved by immediate mercy, all would be saved; even the inhabitants of hell, and hell itself would not exist; because the Lord is Mercy itself, Love itself, and Good itself, and wills the salvation of all, and the damnation of no one. But man’s spirit is substantial; and if formed to evil, to change it would be equivalent to annihilation. ”

“ I am a Fellow, by invitation, of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm: but I have never sought admission into any other Literary Society, as I belong to an angelic society, wherein things relating to heaven and the soul are the only subjects of discourse and entertainment; whereas the things which occupy the attention of our Literary Societies are such as relate to the world and the body. As for the world’s wealth, I have what is sufficient, and more I neither seek nor wish for. ”

“ Any view which we take of the Divine Providence that does not recognize this life as a beginning, a progress, and not a consummation, is necessarily erroneous. Life here is but a discipline, an apprenticeship. It is a school wherein we are scholars, learning such lessons as will fit us for uses in a higher and eternal sphere. Were life consummated by what men call death, we might have reason to complain that the comforts and pleasures of existence were so unequally distributed ”

“ Whilst elucidating subjects commonly supposed to transcend human ideas, and yet which humanity is ever restless to discover,—reverence is in nowise deprived of its exercise. It is a great mistake, yet a common one, to associate mystery with true reverence; to talk of “ignorance” as “the mother of devotion.” Let any one ask himself whether the reverence of Sir Isaac Newton for that God whose operations in the universe he was favored to discover, was inferior to that of an ignorant devotee, or an illiterate peasant. ”

“ A wise man might well suspect the soundness of any system of morals which did not take into careful consideration the conjugial relation. Marriage—the most important event in life, the relation which occupies the whole thought of one sex, and the most serious regards of the other, the institution around which all that is highest find holiest in life groups itself, family, home, all that human hearts hold dear—must ever hold a prominent place in a true code of moral and spiritual laws. How then could the subject be omitted from the heavenly writings of the New Jerusalem? ”

“ The scenery of hell, like that of heaven, is in perfect correspondence with the states of those there. It is an outbirth from the minds of its inhabitants; and as they are deformed and full of every pollution, so their scenery is full of horrors and things abominable. “In hell there is no sun, but the inhabitants roam in darkness corresponding to themselves, for they are darkness: their light is artificial, as of coal fires, meteors, ignes fatui, and the lights of night. ”

“ Humanity was thus hastening to destruction, and final extinction. But the Lord Jehovah interposed. Clothing himself with an arm of flesh, he met the powers of hell on their own ground; and rendering himself accessible to their attacks, in a series of the most direful temptation-combats, He reduced Hell to order, and redeemed mankind forever from the absolute dominion of devils. But this was not all. The human nature that the Lord had assumed, full of hereditary corruption, was taken from the race of Jewish kings, the most depraved and perverted to be found on earth. ”

“ By these good angels, they are educated and brought up until they attain a suitable age, when they are transferred to other teachers. They grow up and become young men and women; are instructed in wisdom, and trained in the duties of the heavenly life: and when their character is fully developed, they become settled in some society, either of the celestial or spiritual kingdom, in agreement with their inherited genius or disposition. What a delightful faith is this! Do not its beauty and rationality prove its truthfulness? ”

“ The knowledge of sin, and the discovery of some particular sin in one’s self, is the beginning of repentance. Actual repentance consists in a man’s examining himself, knowing and acknowledging his sins, supplicating the Lord, and beginning a new life. True repentance consists in a man’s examining not only the actions of his life, but also the intentions of his will. Those also do the work of repentance, who, though they do not examine themselves, abstain from evils because they are sins; and this kind of repentance is done by those who perform works of charity from a religious motive. ”

“ In all the operations of the Divine Providence, human freedom is respected. The Lord forces no man to do what is good, or believe what is true. He drives none to heaven. It is of the Divine Providence that whatsoever a man hears, sees, thinks, speaks, and does, should appear altogether as his own. Without this appearance, men would have no reception of Divine Truth, no determination to do good, no appropriation of love and wisdom or of charity and faith, and thence no conjunction with the Lord; consequently no reformation and regeneration, and thereby salvation. ”

“ We should lose all faith in the instinctive prescience of the human spirit when great events are at hand, if we might not believe that a presentiment of something in the shadowy distance, connecting his future with the strange mystery of the city, did not cross, for a moment, the mind of Swedenborg, when he entered the once holy and revered metropolis of the faith. ”

“ Hence now it is that those who are in the spiritual affection of truth, enjoy an internal acknowledgment of it. As the angels are in that affection, they utterly reject the tenet that the understanding ought to be kept in subjection to faith: for they say, ‘How can you believe a thing, when you do not see whether it is true or not?’ And should any one affirm that what he advances must nevertheless be believed, they reply: ‘Do you think yourself a God, that I am to believe you? ”