Swedenborgianism

“ More than any other form of religious thought, Swedenborgianism is a leaven 'hid in three measures of meal.' To a careless reader of ecclesiastical statistics, the Swedenborgian Church would seem to be one of the least of the great household of faith. ”

“ Swedenborgianism is a product of a mind given to the pursuit of natural sciences, ignorant of theology, and transported into the dream-world—a sublimated materialism. There runs through all the writings of the followers of Swedenborg the assumption of a superior knowledge of spiritual truths, which allies it closely to the old heresy of Gnosticism. In kind, Swedenborgianism does not differ from modern Spiritism, only it assumes an air of greater respectability. ”

“ The Yellow Spring Community in Owen's time, and the Leraysville Phalanx in the Fourier epoch, were avowedly Swedenborgian Associations; but they failed as speedily and utterly as their contemporaries. Notwithstanding the claim of a wonderful affinity between Swedenborgianism and Fourierism which the Harbinger used to make, it seems probable that the afflatus of pure Swedenborgianism is not favorable to Communism or to close Association of any kind. Swedenborg in his personal character was not a Socialist or an organizer in any way, but a very solitary speculator ”

“ As a philosophy Swedenborgianism is the exact opposite of Materialism. Everything in nature, Swedenborg tells us, exists first in spirit. “We are created by the Lord, so that during our life in the body we may converse with spirits and angels, as indeed was the habit of the people of the most ancient times.” During his worldly life “he (man) is not p. 261seen in spirit, because he is immersed in nature.” God is in everything—is the life of everything. In heaven all is love—in hell all is selfishness. There is besides a spiritual world.
There are four Swedenborgian congregations in London. ”

“ For Swedenborg was one who, though entirely open and steadfast in the maintenance of his pretensions, knew how to live with kings, nobles, clergy, and people, without being the object of persecution to any. ”

“ Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the Memorable Relations. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic truth, for Swedenborg. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a speech and action. ”

“ The Swedenborgian Society of which I was a member while on earth, continues to exist as a body in the spirit world, though Swedenborg, the great seer and founder of that sect, is not a leader among them. He has his country seat in Swedenborgia, a beautiful and intellectual settlement named after him, where he retires within himself, and directs his great mind in developing his science of correspondences, which he proposes to arrange so systematically that it will become a part of the teachings of earth’s children. ”

“ I agree with you, sir, in this, that the Swedenborgian system is more comprehensible by our reason and less complicated than other systems; and while it forms virtuous men and citizens, it prevents at the same time all kinds of enthusiasm and superstition,—both of which occasion so many and such cruel vexations or ridiculous singularities in the world. ”

“ The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. ”

“ These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,- delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a beating heart. ”

“ The system opens a boundless range of doctrinal and ethical truths, and our object will be answered if we can succeed in attracting attention to the works in which it is embodied. We are well aware of the prejudices which array themselves against the candid investigation of the claims of this system. The very name of Swedenborg, the distinguished medium through whom these precious revelations of doctrine and life have been made to the world, has the effect with multitudes of minds, to transform the whole at once into an incoherent medley of visions and vagaries. ”

“ To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. ”

“ But, his perception enlarging, Swedenborg presently discovered that this was in reality only an intermediate state of existence; that beyond it at the one end was heaven and at the other hell, to one or the other of which the dead ultimately gravitated according to their desires and conduct. For, as he was to learn later, the spiritual world was a world of law and order fully as much as was the natural world. Men were free to do as they chose ”

“ We believe in no new church par excellence. Swedenborgians are to us those taught of Swedenborg, a great, a learned, a wise, a good man—also one instructed by direct influx from a higher sphere, but one of a constellation, and needing the aid of congenial influences to confirm and illustrate his. ”

“ When he turned to religion, he made the barren attempt to trim the mysteries of the Faith until they came wholly within the grasp of the understanding. This is a rationalizing process. Swedenborgians may object to hear their master called a rationalist. It is true that that term is usually applied to those who have no supersensual vision, and even deny its existence. Swedenborg is, of course, sharply distinguished from all such, but he has with them the same fundamental trust of reason, which in their case is used to gauge the things of this world, in his the things of the other. ”

“ From what has now been said, we trust that Swedenborg's meaning, when he says that heaven is in the human form, will be sufficiently plain. And although the heavenly societies are innumerable, and all different from each other, yet there exists the most perfect union among them—a union corresponding to, and beautifully symbolized by, that among the different organs of the human body. ”

“ The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. ”

“ Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. ”

“ We have followed Swedenborg in his search for the life and soul of the universe through the geometry and physics of the inanimate world, then through the living organism of the human body, the soul's home and body-servant, and lastly in the soul's reception of life from the Creator, in its duty to this Source of its life, and in its dependence on God-man, the Son of God, as the means of conjunction with the Divine Itself. ”

“ This is to us the greatness of Swedenborg and the ground of our pleasure in his works, that in them we can expatiate freely; there is room enough. We can take what does us good, and decline the rest: we may delight in his theory of forms or of correspondences, may be aided in tracing the hidden meanings of symbols, or animated by the poetic energy of his vision, without being bound down to things that seem to us unimportant. We can converse with him without acquiescing in the declaration that all angels have, at some time, been men, or the like, which seem to us groundless and arbitrary. ”

“ Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into it, as the blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child ”

“ By the Reformed, upon whom the Last Judgment was effected, Swedenborg means those who professed a belief in God, read the Word, heard sermons, partook of the sacrament of the Supper, yet lived in all manner of evils. Living like Christians in externals, and outwardly in unity with heaven, while inwardly united with hell, they were permitted after death to form societies, and to live as in the world ”

“ Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature;- being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every sentence ”

“ Thus, whilst in England supernaturalism under the influence of Swedenborg became a religious craze, in France it grafted itself upon philosophy, and in Germany infected the secret societies in which the theories of the French philosophers found active political expression.
The secret of this universal appeal is not far to seek. It was one of the articles of faith with the old Rosicrucians that by them “the triple diadem of the pope should be reduced to dust.” The theosophy of Swedenborg presumed the liberty, equality, and fraternity of mankind. ”

“ For it shows, by extracts from the letters of more than a hundred ministers, and copious quotations from the published writings of a few of the most eminent, that the prevailing prejudice against Swedenborg's teachings has arisen wholly from ignorance and current misrepresentations of their true character, and that the fears of innocent and uninstructed people are altogether groundless. And this testimony is not that of pronounced Swedenborgians, which might be open to the suspicion of being prompted by a desire to strengthen and build up a particular denomination ”

“ In this hurried paper I have neither space nor leisure to attempt an analysis of the great doctrines which underlie the "revelations" of Swedenborg. His remarkably suggestive books are becoming familiar to the reading and reflecting portion of the community. They are not unworthy of study; but, in the language of another, I would say, "Emulate Swedenborg in his exemplary life, his learning, his virtues, his independent thought, his desire for wisdom, his love of the good and true; aim to be his equal, his superior, in these things; but call no man your master." ”

“ THE theo-philosophy of Swedenborg is the most beautiful, comprehensive and perfect system ever presented to man. It is the only system in the world which is based upon the Word of God, and claims to have been derived from heaven. The claim itself is so stupendous as to paralyze curiosity by exciting suspicion of insanity in the man who makes it. ”

“ Now Swedenborg's great merit is the 'immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience.' The 'atmosphere of moral sentiment opens to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe,' and 'all men are commanded by the saint.' If Emerson's optimism leads him to dwell upon the 'good of evil,' and to see the use of 'scourges of God' and vulgar political scoundrels, it is because they are for him the instruments of an essentially moral force. ”

“ Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.
He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him who can. ”

“ Swedeuborg claimed also to have learnt by his admission into the spiritual world the true states of men in the next life, the scenery and occupations of heaven and hell, the true doctrine of Providence, the origin of evil, the sanctity and perpetuity of marriage, and to have been a witness of the “last judgment,” or the second coming of the Lord, which took place in the year 1757. ”

“ What we specially observe with Swedenborg is their vigor and power, eminent by inheritance, and conserved in remarkable degree by a freedom from all ignoble passions and weak indulgence, which we can attribute only to the protection that came with a deep sense of duty to God and to man. ”