Chapter II

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster.

TENNYSON.

I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and
voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of
1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical
sagacity. He publishes ‘_A New Method of finding the Longitude_,’
simultaneously with the ‘_Apocalypse Revealed_.’

He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward
respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation
enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of
the external air, while his outward senses continued their
operation.[391]

Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He
contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he
declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of
the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have
renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable
or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful
temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured
with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of
charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking
themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the
heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of
Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases,
the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life
of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is
just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general
as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares,
tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of
charity.[392]

‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to
memory, but to _life_;‘—a goodly saying.

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. But I put an inner sense into these _Relations_,
and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and
elegant in style.

What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in
a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The
general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the
main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is
an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check
curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after
all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the
motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents
them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation
of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome
the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven
and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain,
an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all.
There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes.
Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain
grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice
or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a
long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his
doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his
heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the
feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[393]

It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed
concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in
the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and
theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law,
and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof
are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[394] Our notions
here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure,
from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of
the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear
cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be
regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular
conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the
two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at
death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and
societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell
and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief
or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence
can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the
occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not
our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.

Very beautiful is Swedenborg’s description of infants in heaven, and
the instruction they receive ‘from angels of the female sex, who in
the life of the body, loved infants tenderly, and at the same time
loved God.’[395]

Even wicked men, immediately after death, are kindly received by
good angels—such mercy is there for our poor mortality at the last
trying hour. But the evil nature of such persons soon resumes its
former ascendancy. The society of those pure associates grows
irksome, and is forsaken by the sinful for evil companionship
similar to themselves.

Swedenborg cannot be considered mystical in his doctrine concerning
spiritual influence—that customary seat of mysticism. Such influence
he pronounces immediate on the divine part, but not perceptible on
ours, nor such as to exclude the necessity of instruction and the
use of means. The good we do, God alone worketh in us; but we are
conscious only of effort on our own part, though believing that we
receive divine assistance. There is to be no tarrying, he says, for
magical grace; no crying ‘Wash me!’ while the divinely given means
of purification lie unused at our side. The _proprium_, or own-hood
of every angel, spirit, or man, is only evil. (All angels and devils
were once good and bad men.) To live only from God and not from
self, is the true purity. Every man is an organ of life, deriving
his life and free-will from God, and receptive of the Divine
influx—enjoying more or less, as he opens or closes his nature
thereto. If the lower regions of his spiritual nature be closed
against this influx, God is still in him, but he is not in God.[396]

Swedenborg declares that the Church has been corrupted by the
doctrine of three divine persons existing from eternity. He
maintains that such a belief must in reality involve the conception
of three several gods, however loudly those who hold it may profess
to acknowledge the Divine Unity. In his theology, the Father, Son,
and Spirit, are ‘the three essentials of one God, which make One,
like Soul, Body, and Operation in man.’

The doctrine of Swedenborg concerning the work of Christ appears to
have received its peculiar complexion, at least in great measure,
from his repugnance to Calvinism. He saw that the theology of the
Reformation had unduly elaborated into doctrine, the forensic and
pecuniary metaphors of Scripture, concerning justification and
redemption. In his reaction, he is too much inclined to give to
those figures a meaning considerably short of that which a
consistent interpretation must assign them. Yet the results at which
he arrives are not so decidedly opposed to those reached by the
theology usually termed evangelical, as might have been anticipated.
But the process of redemption in Swedenborg’s system differs widely.
He says he cannot believe that the Father, in his wrath, condemned
the human race, and in his mercy sent his Son to bear their curse;
that out of love for his suffering Son he cancelled the sentence of
damnation, yet only in favour of those for whom the Son should
intercede, who was thus to be a perpetual Mediator in the presence
of the Father.[397] He declares it a fundamental error of the Church
to believe the passion of the Cross to be redemption itself. He
pronounces imputed righteousness a subversion of the divine
order.—So much for what he denies. On the other hand, he affirms
that in the fulness of time, Jehovah assumed humanity to redeem and
save mankind. Both in the spiritual regions and among men, evil had
been gradually outgrowing and threatening to overpower good. The
equilibrium between the heavenly and hellish worlds was lost. It was
as though a dyke had been broken down, and sin were about to
overflow the universe. Then God took to himself our nature, to
subjugate the hells and to restore to order the heavens. Every
victory gained by Christ over the temptations which assailed Him,
distanced and enfeebled the powers of evil everywhere. It was the
driving back of ravenous beasts to their dens,—the delivery and
feeding of his flock, both men and angels. This victory of the
Saviour is our victory, is that redemption in virtue of which we are
able, believing in Him, to resist and vanquish evil. Mediation,
Intercession, Atonement, Propitiation, are forms of speech
‘expressive of the approach which is opened to God, and of the grace
communicated from God, by means of His Humanity.’ Thus Swedenborg
also believes in a violated order and an impending perdition; in the
redemption of the race from such a fate by the incarnate One; in the
vindication or restoration of the divine law and order by his
conflict and victory on our behalf; and in a life lived _for_ us,
which becomes also a life quickened _in_ us. He appears to object to
the idea of sacrifice as necessarily concentrating the work of
redemption in the shedding of the Saviour’s blood. Such may have
been the limited conception of sacrifice in the theology he opposed;
but that error could be no good reason for explaining away the idea
of sacrifice altogether. The language of Christ concerning himself
must be strangely misinterpreted if no such idea is to be found
there. But that sacrifice was constituted by his whole life, as well
as by its last act—the laying down thereof. The distinction drawn by
some divines between the active and passive obedience—as though the
death alone were our atonement, and the life alone our example—is a
most unhappy refinement.

In Swedenborg’s doctrine concerning union with Christ there is
nothing mystical. From the passionate and sensuous union of some
mystics, and from the pantheistic confusion of others, he is
completely free.

It is to be regretted that the work of redemption should still be so
partially regarded by opposing sections of the Church. On the one
side are those who hold the doctrine of an exact satisfaction (the
commercial theory); who suppose that, in virtue of imputed
righteousness, God sees in his people no sin; and who would say that
men _may_, rather than that they _must_, be exhorted to maintain
good works. This covert and generally theoretical antinomianism is
happily rare. Yet there are some well-meaning men, desirous of doing
a reforming work among us, who actually imagine such an extreme as
this to be the ordinary evangelical doctrine. On the other side are
those whose tendency is to resolve the historical into the inward
Christ. From any such leaning Swedenborg is more free than George
Fox. On this side, too, stand those with whom Christ’s work is
rather a first sample of restored humanity than the way of
restoration, and who seem to suppose that in admitting God to be
just, they make Him cruel. In this extreme aversion to acknowledge
an external law, and an external danger consequent on its violation,
Swedenborg does not share. But, like most of the mystics, he
conceives of redemption as wrought for us only as it is wrought in
us; takes justification for granted, if we have but sanctification;
and regards our sins as remitted just in proportion as we are
reclaimed from them. If we must lean towards some extreme, this is
the more safe, because containing the larger measure of truth. It
appears to me that the ‘divine order’ requires that man be accepted
of God in a way consistent with the divine righteousness; and so
also as, at the very same time, to become conformed to that
righteousness. The sacred writers constantly combine those two
aspects of redemption which our systems are so prone to separate. On
the one side, Christ’s example is pressed upon us, even in those
very acts which are peculiar to Himself as divine. On the other, the
blood of Christ is represented as sanctifying us—purging our
consciences from dead works to serve the living God; while it is
also stated expressly that He died, the just for the unjust.

Similar as Swedenborg’s theology is in its spirit to that of Behmen,
I find him expressly stating that he had never read the German
theosophist.

Concerning the Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg says, ‘Since
the Lord cannot manifest himself in person (to the world), which has
just been shown to be impossible, and yet He has foretold that He
would come and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem,
it follows that He will effect this by the instrumentality of a man,
who is able not only to receive the doctrines of that Church in his
understanding, but also to make them known by the press. That the
Lord manifested Himself before me His servant, that He sent me on
this office, and afterwards opened the sight of my spirit, and so
let me into the spiritual world, permitting me to see the heavens
and the hells, and also to converse with angels and spirits; and
this now continually for many years, I attest in truth; and farther,
that from the first day of my call to this office, I have never
received anything appertaining to the doctrines of that Church from
any angel, but from the Lord alone, whilst I was reading the
Word.’—_True Christian Religion_, § 779.

Footnote 391:

Wilkinson, pp. 79, 130.

Footnote 392:

_Heaven and Hell_, § 360.

Footnote 393:

_True Christian Religion_, § 796.

Footnote 394:

See the description of the heavenly palaces, of divine worship in
heaven, and of the angelic employments, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 183,
221, 387. _True Christian Religion_, §§ 694, 697. Also concerning
marriages in heaven, _Heaven and Hell_, §§ 366-386.

Footnote 395:

_Heaven and Hell_, §§ 329-345.

Footnote 396:

_True Christian Religion_, chap. vi. 6, 7; _Heaven and Hell_, § 592.

Footnote 397:

_True Christian Religion_, chap. ii. 1-7. I give here Swedenborg’s
idea of the evangelical theology. See especially §§ 132-135, where he
represents himself as correcting the false doctrine of certain spirits
in the other world concerning the Divine Nature.

BOOK THE THIRTEENTH
CONCLUSION