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FROM THE LIBRARY
OF
JOHN WHITEHEAD
1850-1930
PRESENTED TO
BY HIS HEIRS

This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in
cooperation with Yale University Library, 2008. You
may not reproduce this digitized copy ofthe book for
any purpose other than for scholarship, research,
educational, or, in limited quantity, personal use. You
may not distribute or provide access to this digitized copy
(or modified or partial versions of it) for commercial purposes.

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THE BIBLE
THAT WAS LOST
AN D IS FOUND

By
JOHN BIGELOW

"... I hope in thy word."
" Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live:
and let me not be ashamed of my hope."
"I am thy servant; give me understanding, that I may
know thy testimonies." Psalm cxix, 81, 116, 125.

NEW YORK
NEW- CHURCH BOARD OF PUBLICATION
1912

Copyright, 1918, by
New-Church Board of Publication.

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INTRODUCTION.
While John Bigelow was yet visibly among us,
he was frequently besought to give wider publicity to
the account which he prepared for the inner circle of
his family and spiritual companions of how he came to
have such an abiding faith in Emanuel Swedenborg as
a divinely commissioned interpreter of the Sacred
Scriptures and a revelator of truths of angelic wisdom.
Those of us who were privileged to know him well, and
who loved to hear him converse on spiritual themes,
know that he treasured this part of his life's experiences
as something that was peculiarly sacred. Implicit as
was his faith, unbounded as was his enthusiasm, there
never was the slightest trace of self-confidence or pride
of intelligence. Firm in his belief, he was never dog
matic. He was unflinchingly loyal to the system of
truth to which he felt he owed so much of his life's
happiness, but he was extremely catholic. The spirit
of sectarianism was not in him. He longed, rather, to
see the truths which had made the Word of God
a veritable lamp to his feet and a light to his path avail
able to all who might profit by them, irrespective of any
claims of denominationalism. He found satisfaction
in going Sunday after Sunday to the Church on East
Thirty-fifth street; and, while he never faltered in his
attachment to it, truth compels me to say that his in
terest and his hopes were never confined to the local
I

organization which prized his spiritual fellowship, and
for which he did so much.
It was in the spring of 191 1 that I went to Mr. Bige
low and asked him, for the sake of the good that might
be accomplished, to allow me to edit this present volume.
I urged that at the time when the tercentenary of the
Authorized Version of our English Bible was being
celebrated, it was peculiarly fitting that he should make
public his testimony as to how the Bible had been
established for him as the veritable Word of God.
He listened to me patiently as I tried to persuade him
that the narration of his religious experiences might
be helpful to many outside of his own immediate circle
of friends. He was unfeignedly modest on this point,
but he promised to consider the matter. A few days
later he wrote that he felt he had no right to withhold
anything that might prove useful, and that he would
leave the matter entirely in my hands. He sent me a
copy of his "Bible That Was Lost and Is Found," in
which he had indicated changes and additions that
should be made, and with it a large number of letters
from friends who had received copies of the original
edition. In his characteristic way he said that he felt
I was entitled to any assistance he could place at my
disposal, inasmuch as I was willing to act as a midwife
in the birth of this new progeny.
A little later, at a time when he felt that the last
hours of his earthly life were drawing to a close, he
dictated the following lines:
"I am very ill. It is doubtful whether I shall
ever see you again in this world, or live to see
the little book you have so kindly volunteered

to mother. It is a satisfaction to me to reflect
that, before I am called away, I am permitted
to make a contribution to the Christian Church
which you think may prove useful to the world
I am soon to leave behind me. I am too feeble
to say anything more, except to invoke the
blessing of our Father in heaven upon
* * * the modest Church with which we
both have so many glorious associations."
It could not be otherwise than that in preparing this
book to go forth on what I confidently expect to be a
mission of wide usefulness, I have counted it a labor of
love; a labor of love to one of the grandest of men,
whom the Lord in His good Providence has raised up
to be so worthy a witness of the truths of His New
Church. Julian K. Smyth.
New York City,
June, 1912.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
My Dear Children :
When Joshua was about to cross the Jordan with the
Ark of the Covenant to enter the Promised Land, he
was commanded by the Lord to select one man from
each tribe to take charge of the ark who, "out of the
midst of Jordan where the Priests' feet stood firm,"
were "to take twelve stones ; carry them over with them,
and lay them down in the lodging place where they
should lodge that night." Joshua complied with these
instructions, and when the people came up out of
Jordan, the Lord said to them, "When your children
shall ask their fathers in time to come saying, What
mean these stones? then ye shall let your children
know, saying, 'Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.
For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan
from before you until ye were passed over, as the Lord
your God did to the Red Sea which He dried up from
before us until we were passed over ; that all the people
of the earth may know the hand of the Lord that it is
mighty, that they may fear the Lord your God
forever/ "
The duty here imposed by the Lord upon Joshua and
his followers to commemorate the passage of Israel in
safety through the Red Sea and over Jordan, was not
a duty imposed merely to meet a temporary exigency of
5

a transient population, but like all duties imposed by
Jehovah-Lord was of universal application, and as en
during as Truth and Right; and every person who has
the grace to realize that he has been led by the same
mighty hand and outstretched arm safely out of the
bondage of false doctrines and through a wilderness
beset with temptations and peril, into the freedom of
those whom the Truth makes free, is bound to testify by
some equally unequivocal memorial a grateful sense of
his deliverance.
Under the inspiration of this sacred lesson, and in the
humble hope of rendering my experience possibly of use
to you and perhaps to some others, I have prepared the
following narrative of the circumstances which led to
my own deliverance from a spiritual bondage no less
oppressive and degrading, nor, I imagine, very different
from that which the Israelites endured in Egypt. I hope
that with God's blessing it may help you to remember
the Red Sea and the Jordan which every regenerating
soul must cross, and encourage you on the journey to
put your trust absolutely and exclusively in the guidance
and protection of Him who never leaves a prayer unan
swered; who never refuses an appeal to Him but in
mercy, and who never neglects an opportunity of pro
moting the welfare of any of His creatures.
Your Affectionate Father.
21 Gramercy Park,
New York, Christmas, 1893.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The narrative which is here, and now for the first
time submitted to the public, was prepared and privately
printed some years ago for the information of my
children and a few friends who, for personal reasons,
were likely to take an interest in its revelations. From
most of the latter, and among them were many whose
judgment was entitled to great weight with me, I
received earnest appeals to give it to the public. I
shrank, however, from incurring even a suspicion of
attaching undue importance to experiences and opinions
of such a strictly personal character, or of presuming to
commend them specially to the consideration of an
exoteric circle. Since then times have changed, and I
have changed with them. I have allowed myself to be
persuaded that the time has arrived in the ecclesiastical
evolution of our own country at least, when it is not
impossible nor even improbable that there are many who
may find deliverance from baleful doubts or pernicious
illusions, and have an impaired faith in the Bible
strengthened by the process to which I feel myself to
be supremely indebted and which I have attempted in
these pages to describe.
The Christian Church rests at evfry point for its
foundations upon the Divine authorship and inspira
tion of at least the greater part of what is known as the
7

Holy Bible. To displace one stone of that foundation
is thought by many, and I think correctly, to convert the
Christian Church into a group of quasi religious clubs
having only secular charters, and with no better guaran
ty for endurance than a Bank or an Insurance Corpora
tion. Between the labors of the Scientists outside the
Church, and the Critical miners inside the Church,
teachings that would have imperilled the liberty if not
the lives of their authors a century or two ago, are not
only publicly taught from pulpits and professional
chairs, but are sanctioned by the most highly accredited
ecclesiastical organizations in our land. The Bible is
dealt with by scholars of influence and distinction as
literature merely, and judged by them in the same
literary spirit as they would judge the Sentences of
Marcus Antoninus. From one Episcopal pulpit we were
recently told that "it is probably true that ninety per
cent, of our bishops believe and teach views for which
Bishop Colenso was deposed." Another speaks of the
New Testament as "a bundle of left-over documents."
Still another insists that the first two chapters of
Matthew form simply a beautiful legend.
Even in the face of these painful disclosures, I hope
it is with becoming diffidence that I venture to dissent
from those who quarrel with what it is the fashion to
call "Higher Criticism," and who denounce it as, "Evil
and for evil only good." I cannot believe that more
harm can come from the study of God's Word than
from the study of His works.
We are all united in encouraging the application of
Higher Criticism to the stars, to the garb of the earth
and the treasures concealed in its bowels ; we erect monu-
8

ments in honor of the men who correct our erroneous
impressions of any of Nature's laws; why should we
honor the critical student of God's Word less than the
critical student of His works, if both are working with
an equal singleness of eye to the truth?
Nor will I disguise my conviction, without in the least
undervaluing the work of the Christian Pulpit, that it
has accomplished far less than has the Higher Criticism
during the last century by stimulating throughout the
world an inclination "to search the Scriptures," and
rallying the nobler energies of humanity to their
defence. Accustomed as most Christians are to listen
to ministers and associate with people who take the
Divine origin of the Bible for granted, we grow up
knowing little or nothing about its everlasting founda
tions. It is only when they are assailed that earnest
Christians set to work to investigate the imputed weak
ness of those foundations, and are thus equipped to
demonstrate their impregnability.
It was in the Wilderness, according to the prophet
Isaiah, that the way of the Lord was to be prepared
and made straight; and "a highway for our God" in
the desert.
So, false ideas, superannuated dogmas, sectarian
prejudices must be overcome and exterminated before
we are prepared for the unconditional reception of
new truths.
To abandon a class of opinions and replace them with
one of opposite opinions involves our being for a time —
for a moment at least — without either ; when our minds
are vastated, a desert without grass or herb yielding
seed. Our condition may be compared to that of a man
9

on the top of a mountain having occasion to cross to the
top of an opposite mountain. He must descend to the
valley that separates these mountains before he can
begin to ascend the mountain opposite. So we must
descend the mountain of fallacious dogma to the valley
of absolute unbelief, before we can ascend the Holy
Mountain of Divine Truth. Hence it rarely, if ever,
happens that a person changes what he calls his religion
without becoming, for a time at least, an agnostic or an
unbeliever. The Israelites were required to wander
forty years in the Wilderness before they could be cured
of their polytheistic delusions and made to believe that
there was but one God and He the Maker of Heaven
and Earth, without whom was nothing made that was
made. Only our Heavenly Father knows whether at the last,
Peter or Thomas would have made the greater sacrifices
for his Lord and Master.
Perhaps one of the greatest troubles with which the
visible Church on earth has had to contend, has been the
fact that its members have not searched the Scriptures,
that they have perused them too commonly with the
eyes only, and like the penitent counting her beads, as
a pious ceremonial, rather than with any expectation of
drawing from that affluent fountain, "living water of
which, whosoever drinketh shall never thirst." If the
Bible be the Word of God, it is necessarily infinite truth.
It can be nothing else. No finite being can therefore
hope to understand all that it expresses. No book of
which finite man could comprehend all or any part of
the contents entirely, could possibly be the Word of God.
We learn the lessons of God's Word as we learn those
io

which are taught by His works, which constitute our
earthly or natural environment, little by little; and yet
the navigator of the ocean of Natural Science finds its
shores recede from him as fast if not faster than he
approaches them. So it will ever be. The truths of
God's Word must also and always be mastered little by
little, and only so far and so fast as we qualify our
selves to receive and assimilate them in our lives. We
can never know absolute truth, but we can always be
increasing our knowledge of what seems to us truth,
and which therefore is to us ethically true. While we
can never expect to understand all the wisdom of God's
Word, whether recorded in the Bible or in nature, we
can always be growing more and more into His image
by studying both. Anything therefore that concentrates
attention upon God's Word and invites or provokes men
to the study of it, enlarges the sphere of its influence.
The only faithful student of the Bible is the critical
student, he who searches to find its hidden meaning.
But he will at no time find in it so much of what seems
to him to be truth, that his estimate of it may not be
greatly modified by subsequent perusals. Unless the
Bible seems like a new book every time it is read, no
matter how frequently, it is because it has not been
read thoughtfully, reverently, indeed I may say, critic
ally. All the lessons of the Bible can no more be appre
hended from a single perusal than the productive power
of a farm can be harvested in a single crop. There is
nothing more fatal to the diffusion of spiritual truth
than using the Word like a chaplet or leaving it in too
costly binding for use as a profession of faith on
the parlor table. The eloquent Bishop of New York
n

improved a recent occasion to probe this evil in an
official communication, in the course of which he
said: "A modern fetichism which has dishonored the
Bible by claiming to be its elect guardian, has shut
it up these many years within the iron walls of a
dreary literalism, robbing it thus alike of interest and
of power."
Criticism even in a hostile spirit has never succeeded
in seriously obstructing the diffusion of God's truth or
the coming of His kingdom on the earth. The Bible
has been no end of times like Jesus of Nazareth,
dragged to the brow of a hill to be cast down from it;
but like Jesus, it has always passed through the midst
of its enemies, and gone on its way in every such crisis
giving new and more impressive evidence of its Divine
mission. Voltaire's presumptuous boast that he had given the
Christian Church its coup de grace provoked the syn
chronous establishment of the British Bible Society
which has spread the sacred record throughout the
world in every written tongue, and among millions who
had never heard either of it or of its divine author.
When the learned Bishop of New York proclaimed that
a modern fetichism which has dishonored the Bible by
claiming to be its elect guardian, had shut it up through
many years within the iron walls of a dreary literalism,
he administered a more serious and wide reaching re
buke to the bishops and other clergy of his Church than
had ever before emanated from the Episcopal bench in
our time. And he uttered a truth, too, which promises
to mark an epoch in the evolution of Bible religion. It
12

has brought the religious communion of which he is
the hierarchical head in his diocese face to face with
several questions of considerable gravity.
Here are some of them :
i. What does his Reverence mean by the word
"literalism," whether dreary or otherwise, that has
made the Bible for many years the victim of a modern
fetichism; does he mean that the Bible is not literally
true, and therefore to that extent at least not inspired ?
2. Must not any book which is not literally true, be
to the same extent literally untrue, and so far mis
leading? 3. If true in any sense, how is that sense to be ascer
tained ?
4. Does the Bishop propose to let his Church mark
time while Dr. Briggs and other critical students find
out the portions of the Bible which are inspired, if
any, and those which are not; or would he restrict the
reading of the entire Bible to a class set apart and
trained to select the portions suitable for the flock, as
the Latin Church has done?
5. What tribunal have we that is competent to guar
antee the superiority of the Canon of Dr. Briggs, to
that of St. Jerome?
To all these questions is there any answer which
would not be fatal to any pretensions of the Bible to
be regarded as the Word of God or as a Rule of Faith
to men, that is, better than that which was embodied in
the words of Paul when writing on behalf of himself
and his companions to the Romans, he said that now
"We serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the
oldness of the letter"? 13

Let it be observed that Paul notices the oldness of the
letter, but seems to have had no notion of its dreariness.
What he meant by oldness here may be inferred from
what he said in his famous 13th Chapter of his first
Epistle to the Corinthians, "When I was a child I spake
as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now
that I am become a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass darkly [the letter of the
law] but then [when that which is perfect is come] face
to face : now I know in part, but then shall I know even
as also I have been known."
This comparison of the thoughts and feelings of the
childish mind with those of the adult, expresses to my
mind the precise distinction between the uses of the
literal garb of the Bible and of its spiritual contents.
Paul does not pretend to undervalue what he felt,
thought or did as a child. He merely calls attention to
the difference between the natural and the spiritual in
telligence, the one enlightened by love, and the other
not, or only partially, so enlightened.
Here I am prompted to ask whether the Bible may
not be true to some in one sense and to others in another
sense ? No book is true to a child in the sense that it is
true to a grown person. In fact, science has never been
able to teach us anything which did not expand or con
tract in its dimensions with increasing knowledge and
experience. The world believed, no one knows how
many thousand years, that the sun revolved around the
earth, and the only Church, which claims dogmatically to
be infallible, treated as a blasphemous heresy any denial
of it. Even to this day we all speak of the sun's rising
and setting, a statement scientifically absurd but per-
l 14

fectly true as understood by both speaker and hearer.
The sun does rise and set to us, for such is the report of
the fact as daily made to us by our senses.
When a ship leaves the port of San Francisco for
Japan no one ever questions the report that she is sailing
westward, and yet in point of fact she is moving with
incalculable rapidity in precisely the opposite direction.
^sop's fables of the wolf complaining of the lamb
for polluting the stream at which both are drinking;
of the grasshopper asking alms of the ant ; of the com
petitive trial of the wind and the sun to compel the
traveller to take off his cloak, are all as true as any
history is to the child, but no less true to the adult
though in a very different sense. Why may not the
literal sense of the Bible be the repository of as much
and as important truths to undeveloped and untutored
minds, a class which would include by far the larger
part of the human race, and at the same time to more
developed minds teach a class of truths far more pro
found, but in no important sense inconsistent with
them ? No one would propose to prohibit the reading of
^Esop's fables because he represented animals as talking
a written language. There is little doubt that children
absorb more important truths by the perusal of those
fables according to their measure of intelligence than
adults do, though not a single fact as stated in them is
literally true.
To do precisely what Paul said he had done, is what
the so-called orthodox Churches of our day have
hitherto refused, or rather perhaps neglected, to do, but
what they must do before they can emancipate the Bible
from the "dreary literalism" in which it is immured.
IS

Their clergy must be ministers of a new covenant ; not
of the letter, but of the spirit. To emphasize that
necessity at a moment which seems specially propitious
for its consideration, has been my only excuse for pre
suming to enlarge the circle for which the following
narrative was originally prepared.
The Squirrels June 7, 191 1.

16

I
Could I believe that any one event in our lives was
more strictly Providential than another, I should say
without hesitation that the event or series of events
which led me to the island of St. Thomas in the winter
of 1854 deserves that distinction. When I left home I
had but one well defined purpose, aside from a little rec
reation; that was to visit Hayti to see what sort of
work, Africans born and bred in slavery, were making
of self-government, a question about which public senti
ment in the United States was then seriously divided
and in which both as a journalist and a patriot I then felt
a special interest. I had no thought of going farther.
I had no curiosity to see St. Thomas or any of its in
habitants. I was borne thither, too, by a chain of inci
dents, every one of which I would gladly have avoided.
It proved to be the only way by which I could get home
to the United States without indefinite delay. Port-au-
Prince, where I had my headquarters while in Hayti,
was desolated by yellow and other malignant fevers to
such an extent that for four or five weeks of my stay
there, most of the vessels in port were prevented from
leaving for lack of sailors. Of the entire crew of the
bark that brought me to Hayti, all but two were in the
cemetery within four days after my arrival. Thus,
when ready to return, I was compelled, to my serious
inconvenience, to cross to St. Thomas in the hope of
17

there getting a steamer for New York. On my arrival
at that island, however, I found that the New York
steamer — there was then but one on the line — had met
with an accident on her last homeward voyage ; at least
such was the information given out by her agents, and
had gone into dock in New York for repairs, how long
to be detained there, no one at St. Thomas professed to
know. I afterward had reason to suspect that the acci
dent, if any had been sustained, had been sufficiently
magnified to make it serve as a pretext for withdrawing
her temporarily from an unprofitable service, St.
Thomas being at this time in a more distressed sanitary
condition, even, than Hayti. A French emigrant ship,
bound to some port in South America, had been driven
in there in distress only a few days before my arrival,
and compelled to discharge her cargo there. The negroes
of the island who were employed for this work, were
stimulated to unaccustomed fatigue and exposure under
a broiling sun, by extra pay. After thus being over
heated by day, they knew no better than to lay them
selves down to sleep on their door mats as usual at night,
without any covering and in most cases without a roof
over them. The consequence in nearly every instance
was a chill, for the temperature at midnight was from
40 to 50 degrees lower than at noon; and the cholera
broke out on the very next day with such virulence that,
within a month after the arrival of the distressed vessel,
one-tenth of the population of the island were in their
graves. This state of things necessarily prolonged my
detention, for the vessels in the harbor by which I
might have hoped to get to Havana or to some other
Spanish port in steam communication with New York,
18

could get no charters for any of the Spanish islands be
cause of the rigorous and prolonged quarantine to
which they were sure to be condemned for having sailed
last from a cholera-infected district. Consequently I
had no alternative but to take up my quarters at the
principal, indeed the only hotel on the island, — by no
means a bad one, — kept by a Creole Spaniard who had
formerly conducted a similar business at the city of St.
Domingo, and there await the slow revolution of the
wheel of fortune.
The only guest sleeping in the hotel — though a num
ber of residents took their meals there — was a Danish
lawyer by the name of Kjerulff, who had practised his
profession for many years in St. Thomas, but like my
self, was temporarily established at the hotel, awaiting
an opportunity of getting to the United States where he
had some pecuniary interests which he seemed disposed
to increase. We naturally fell into a sort of acquaint
ance that commonly follows contiguity, and which
ripened rapidly when he discovered that we had some
common difficulties to overcome and a common desti
nation. One morning during the second week of my sojourn
on the island, Mr. Kjerulff and I chanced both to be
seated in the spacious, but then deserted dining hall —
deserted by every one but ourselves, I mean — he at one
end and I at the other, and both with books in our hands.
I was reading the Bible. II
It is necessary for me here to premise that both my
parents were Presbyterians by inheritance and convic-
19

tion, and I was brought up according to the straitest of
the sect. In my eleventh year, however, I was sent to
boarding school, and it was never my privilege to live
at home again with my parents except in my school and
professional vacations. As a consequence, I suppose, of
being thus thrown very much upon my own resources, I
early in life fell or rose, I cannot say which, into the
habit of judging for myself, according to my limited
lights, of the logical and theological merits of what I
heard from the pulpit and read in the Bible. I began
quite early to discern what looked to me like incon
sistencies and improbabilities in its pages. Their num
ber multiplied with my growth, and all the faster from
the fact that my spiritual guides, for the most part,
failed to impress me as men of strong convictions, or t
as having a particular call to break the bread of life to
hungering souls. Bad logic and sectarian sophisms in
the pulpit have unquestionably a tendency to encourage
a propensity to question the truth of everything that
comes from the same fountain. They certainly had
that effect upon me. Besides, young men always ex
perience more or less satisfaction in detecting what
they suppose to be the errors of those who aspire to be
thought wiser or better than themselves. So, between
vanity and honest doubt, I fear I had been spending more
time in looking up what I considered inconsistencies in
the Word than in searching for what might have been
useful in forming my character and in directing my
daily walk and conversation. With the light which
the pulpit offered me in those days, I did not see how
God could have loved His only-begotten Son less than
the world, which was under His condemnation for its
20

sins; nor how the wicked could be any better fitted for
heaven by the death of any one, and especially of an in
nocent person; nor how God could derive any satisfac
tion from the suffering of His innocent offspring; nor,
if Christ's death was a satisfaction for the sins of the
world, why any sinner, after His expiatory death,
should suffer or be called to account for any sins subse
quently committed, His redemption having been duly
purchased and paid for; nor was it at all clear to me
how Christ's death could be the infinite sacrifice it was
represented to be, when He knew He was to rise again
three days after His crucifixion and resume His seat
on the right hand of the Father. I was accustomed
from my earliest youth to repeat the prayer recom
mended by our Lord as a model to His disciples, in
which the Father is asked to lead us not into temptation.
When I came to read in James that "God cannot be
tempted with evil, nor tempteth He any man," I was
puzzled to comprehend the propriety of this invocation,
which virtually reproached God with doing what James
gives us to understand it would be sinful even to sus
pect Him of doing.
The Mosaic Cosmogony also bristled with difficulties. V
I tried in vain to reconcile the indisputable fact that the
sun is the source of all light on our planet, with the
record in Genesis that the creation of light was the work
of the first day of creation, vegetables of the third, while
the sun, without which there obviously could have been
neither light nor vegetation, was not created until the
fourth day. And how could the days have mornings
and evenings, as they are reported to have had, before
the sun was created ? And when I found the champions
21

of the Bible pretending to have reconciled the 6,000-
year-old theory of creation with the teachings of ge
ology, by maintaining that the "days" of creation, as
given by Moses, meant not a day of twenty- four hours,
but an indefinite period of time — hundreds, thousands,
millions of years — I not unnaturally inferred that they
had taken refuge in a greater absurdity than the one
they sought to avoid, for the seventh day on which
"God rested from all his work which he had made,"
must have been as long as either of the days which
preceded it.
This taste for hunting and running down what
seemed to me incongruous, inconsistent or inconsequen
tial passages of the letter of the Word grew by what
it fed on, and it is mortifying and painful for me
now to think how blind and stupid I was all this
time, while flattering myself that I was profitably
\ employed. About 1842, and soon after my admission to the bar,
circumstances threw me into more or less intimate re
lations with a lawyer, who had won for himself con
siderable reputation as a barrister. He subsequently
held one of the highest judicial positions in the State.
He was twelve or fourteen years my senior; he took a
fancy to me for reasons I do not yet quite understand;
perhaps because I always had a rather uncommon ca
pacity for tolerating the eccentricities and peculiarities
of others, for we had very little in common. I respected
his talents and manly character, I enjoyed his conversa
tion, which though somewhat critical, not to say cen
sorious, was always sparkling, and usually instructive,
at least to one who was so much his junior. We had
22

lodgings under the same roof and took our meals at the
same hotels for many years and until he married, when
I served as one of his groomsmen. Before coming to
New York to reside he had been captivated by the
teachings then novel of Gall and Spurzheim, and had
been one of several gentlemen who united in inviting Dr.
Combe, of Edinburgh, to come to the United States to
expound their new science. He adopted the views of
this school of philosophers unreservedly, and by degrees
he drifted so far toward fatalism as to deny moral ac
countability, rather than admit that a man's cranial de
velopments, rather than his will, were not binding upon,
or determinative of, his conduct and character. He had
not been brought up by his parents to entertain any rev
erence for the Bible or respect for the Church or clergy,
and when my acquaintance with him began, he was ac
customed to speak of the sacred volume as the "razor
strop," that being, according to his view, and the view
of many of his early friends, the most useful purpose to
which they had seen it applied. Though destitute of any
particle of reverence for the Word, and though he
rarely put his foot inside of a Church, he was notably
conscientious. The ethical side of his character was as
fully developed on the natural plane as in any person
I had then ever met. In judging men or conduct, he
habitually looked to ethical though not spiritual
conditions as the decisive ones. He was a fine, often an
eloquent talker, and his spectroscopic methods of analyz
ing the motives of human conduct were new to me then,
and in some respects extremely profitable. Unhappily,
with them he did much to quicken into new life, sus
picions that had been slowly germinating in my mind,
23

that what I failed to comprehend in the Bible was a de
fect in it instead of in myself.
This suspicion gained upon me as time rolled on,
though the devastation of the religious notions in which
I had been trained was not rapid. I could not name any
particular event, or any particular time, from which
my faith in the Revealed Religion began consciously to
weaken; nor when in my spiritual horizon the sun ac
tually stood still upon Gibeon and the moon in the Val
ley of Ajalon. I drifted with a current, the force and
direction of which never attracted my attention nor oc
cupied my thoughts till I found myself approaching the
open sea of disbelief.
At the time of my visit to St. Thomas I suppose I had
pretty much ceased to regard the Bible as possessing
any higher sanction than the writings of Marcus Aure
lius or of Confucius, except that it taught a loftier and
more comprehensive system of morals. Jesus of Naza
reth I regarded as one of the best of men, if such a man
ever existed, of which I was not at all clear; but the
method of His incarnation, His miracles and resurrec
tion, I sometimes doubted. I inclined to class them with
the stories of Hercules and Theseus. I did not hesitate
to ask myself, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of
Mary, the brother of James and of Judah and Simon?"
If I attended any Church, it was usually that of Dr.
Follen or Dr. Dewey, who then occupied the only two
Unitarian pulpits in the city, where I repaired for
literary rather than for spiritual refreshment.
The Old Testament I regarded, at least I thought I
regarded, pretty much as Cobden once told me that he
regarded it, as a book written for the Jews only, but not
24

for us. I say I thought I so regarded it, but I have since
doubted whether I really thought much about it; and
whether these doubts of the divine origin of the Word
were not mere surface indications, manifesting them
selves during a period of rapid physical and mental
growth, while the wiser lessons and training of my early
youth were hibernating in the heart in a state of tem
porary torpidity; for even in those days I could never
treat my Bible with neglect or disrespect, nor could I
hear it spoken of in a profane way without an unpleas
ant sensation. Why I had this feeling or whence it
came, I had then no suspicion, and, perhaps, if provoked
to explain or defend it, like Peter I should have dis
owned it. I dare say that in this respect my experience
is not uncommon. Bunyan, in his "Grace Abound
ing," reports a somewhat similar confirmation of the
old proverb that the horse that drags its halter is not
lost. "This I well remember," he says, "that though I
could myself sin with the greatest delight and ease, and
also take pleasure in the violence of my companions;
yet, even then, if I had at any time seen wicked things
in those who professed goodness, it would make my
spirit tremble. And once above all the rest, when I was
in the height* of vanity, yet hearing one swear that was
reported for a religious man, it had so great a shock
upon my spirit that it made my heart ache."
With all my critical difficulties I still found the Bible
about the most interesting book in my library, nor had
I any other book to which I so frequently turned for
entertainment, even after I had ceased to turn to it for
any better purpose. As Herod feared John, knowing
that he was just and holy, and heard him gladly, so I
25

must have feared the Word, knowing that it was just
and so far holy, and, despite my Pyrrhonism, I read it,
though perhaps with only a pagan's interest.
Ill
We will now return to the dining hall of the hotel of
St. Thomas. I have said that I was reading the Bible.
I had read everything readable that I had brought with
me from home, and had bought and read everything
readable in the solitary bookstore at St. Thomas. In fact
I had procured from it a copy of Macaulay's History
of England then fresh from the London press, and
which, in my then starving condition, I had greedily de
voured. I had done the island thoroughly, and my
Bible was all that was left upon which to expend my
superfluity of leisure. It so happened that I was read
ing the 12th chapter of Genesis, which gives the account
of Abram driven by a famine into Egypt. When I had
finished it I said to Mr. Kjerulff, "Is it not extraordin
ary that this book should be accepted by the most highly
civilized nations of the earth as the Word of God ? Just
listen." I then read the verses, with which the chapter
to which I have referred concludes, in which the pa
triarch passes off Sarah his wife for his sister.
"This Abram," said I, "is the man whom it is pre
tended our Father in Heaven had selected from all the
people of the earth as most deserving of His favour;
had promised to make of him a great nation; to bless
him; to bless them that bless him; to curse them that
curse him, and that in him all the families of the earth
should be blessed. And yet almost the first thing we
26

hear of him is his commanding his wife to tell a false
hood, which inevitably exposed her to insult and de
gradation, apparently for the sole purpose of saving
himself from apprehended, but, as the event proved,
imaginary dangers. Does not the Egyptian," I asked,
"whom the Bible represents as the oppressor of God's
people, appear, according to our standards at least, to
have been the better man of the two?"
"Well, yes," replied Mr. Kjerulff, "it does appear so
at first."
"But," said I, "does it not appear so all the time ?"
Mr. Kjerulff seemed rather to avoid a direct answer
to my question, and in turn asked me if I had ever read
any of the writings of Swedenborg. I said that I could
not say that I had, that a friend had once lent me a
treatise on "Conjugal Love" when I was a law student,
but I then considered my friend* something of a crank,
and his recommendation of a book, therefore, did not
help it much to my favor ; besides, I was not at the time
interested, nor possibly capable of being interested, in
the subject of which it treated, so that I had no recollec
tion of anything I read in it, which at most could not
have been much. "Well," said Mr. Kjerulff, "in his
Arcana Ccelestia, Swedenborg has given an exposition
of the chapter you have been reading, which, perhaps,
would satisfy you that there is more in it than you seem
to suspect." I intimated mildly that there was no ob
scurity about the meaning, and that I did not see how
any one could get any impression of those verses dif-
* This was Dr. Hemphill, a learned young German, who sub
sequently became a physician of the Homoeopathic School and
author of some valuable works on Homoeopathic Science.
27

ferent from mine. Mr. Kjerulff then went on to ex
plain something about an interior meaning and spiritual
correspondence, etc. Failing entirely to understand
what he was talking about, I asked him if he had the
work to which he referred. He said he had it some
where, but he was not sure that he had it with him in
his luggage at the hotel; he would see. He left the
room and after a little returned with the first volume of
the Arcana C&lestia, which contained, as I found on
examination, Swedenborg's exposition of the verses of
which we had been speaking. I first read the title, which
ran as follows:
Arcana Ccelestia — The Heavenly Arcana contained
in the Holy Scriptures or Word of the Lord unfolded,
beginning with the book of Genesis, together with
wonderful things seen in the World of Spirits and in
the Heaven of Angels. Translated from the Latin
of Emanuel Swedenborg.
I then looked for a preface, the part of a book which
usually first engages my attention, but found none. On
the first page of the text, however, I found what was
a partial substitute for one. It read as follows :
the book of genesis.
i. tfhat the Word of the Old Testament includes
arcana of heaven, and that all its contents, to every
particular, regard the Lord, His heaven, the Church,
Faith, and the things relating to faith, no man can
conceive who only views it from the letter. For the
letter, or literal sense, suggests only such things as
respect the externals of the Jewish Church, whereas,
it everywhere contains internal things which do not
in the least appear in those externals, except in a very
28

few cases, where the Lord revealed and unfolded
them to the Apostles — as that sacrifices are significa
tive of the Lord, and that the Land of Canaan and
Jerusalem are significative of heaven, on which ac
count they are called the Heavenly Canaan and Jeru
salem — and that Paradise has a like signification.
2. But that all and every part of its contents, even
to the most minute, not excepting the smallest jot
and tittle, signify and involve spiritual and celestial
things, is a truth to this day deeply hidden from the
Christian world; in consequence of which, little at
tention is paid to the Old Testament. This truth,
however, might appear plainly from this single cir
cumstance; that the Word, being of the Lord, could
not possibly be given without containing interiorly
such things as relate to Heaven, to the Church, and to
Faith. For if this be denied, how can it be called the
Word of the Lord or be said to have any life in it?
For whence is its life ? that is except from hence, that
all things in it, both generally and particularly, have
relation to the Lord, who is the very life itself?
Wherefore, whatsoever does not interiorly regard
Him does not live ; nay, whatsoever expression in the
Word does not involve Him, or in its measure relate
to Him, is not divine.
3. Without such a living principle, the Word, as
to the letter, is dead. For it is with the Word as with
man, who, as all Christians are taught to believe,
consists of two parts, an external and an internal.
The external man, separate from the internal, is the
body, which in such a state of separation is dead ; but
the internal man is the Lord, and the Word as to the
letter alone is like a body without a soul.
4. It is impossible, whilst the mind abides in a
literal sense only, to see that it is full of such spiritual
contents. Thus in these first chapters of Genesis,
nothing is discoverable from the literal sense, but
29

that they treat of the creation of the world and of the
Garden of Eden, which is called Paradise, and also of
Adam as the first-created man ; and scarcely a single
person supposes them to relate to anything besides.
But that they contain arcana, which were never here
tofore revealed, will sufficiently appear from the
following pages, where it will be seen that the first
chapter of Genesis, in its internal sense, treats of the
re-creation of man, or of his regeneration in general
and specifically of the Most Ancient Church ; and this
in such a manner that there is not a syllable which
does not represent, signify and involve something
spiritual. 5. That this is really the case in regard to the
Word, it is impossible for any mortal to know, how
ever, except from the Lord. Wherefore, it is expe
dient here to premise, that, of the Lord's divine
mercy, it has been granted me, now for several years,
to be constantly and uninterruptedly in company with
spirits and angels, hearing them converse with each
other and conversing with them. Hence, it had been
permitted me to hear and see things in another life
which are astonishing and which have never before
come to the knowledge of any man nor entered into
his imagination. I have there been instructed con
cerning different kinds of spirits and the state of souls
after death; concerning hell, or the lamentable state
of the unfaithful; concerning heaven, or the most
happy state of the faithful; and, particularly, con
cerning the doctrine of faith, which is acknowledged
throughout all heaven, on which subjects, by the
divine mercy of the Lord, more will be said in the
following pages.
Having perused these introductory paragraphs, I
turned to chapter 12 to see what the privileged Swede
had to say in behalf of Abram. After reciting the
30

chapter at length, he proceeded to give what was en
titled "The Internal Sense," and in terms which were
calculated to arrest my attention. They ran as follows :
1403. From the first chapter of Genesis, as far as
here, or rather to the account of Heber, the narratives
are not matters of true history, but compositions in
the form of history, signifying, in the internal sense,
things celestial and spiritual. In this and the follow
ing chapters the narratives are not compositions in
the form of history merely, but matters of true his
tory. These, in the internal sense, equally signify
things celestial and spiritual; as may appear from
this consideration alone, that it is the Word of the
Lord. 1404. In these narratives, which are matters of
true history, all the declarations and words, and each
of them singly, have, in the internal sense, an entirely
different signification from that which they bear in
the literal sense; and the historical facts themselves
are representative. Abram, who is first treated of,
represents in general the Lord and in particular the
celestial man ; Isaac, who is afterwards treated of, in
like manner represents in general the Lord and in
particular the spiritual man. Jacob, also, in general
represents the Lord, and in particular the natural
man. Thus they represent the things appertaining to
the Lord, to His Kingdom and to His Church.
1405. But the internal sense is of such a nature as
has thus far been clearly shown, that in it all things
are to be understood, even to the minutest particulars,
abstractly from the letter, and just as if the letter did
not exist ; for in the internal sense is the soul and life
of the Word, which does not appear, unless the literal
sense is as it were evanescent. It is thus that the
angels, by gift from the Lord, have a perception of
the Word when it is read by man.
3i

Then follows an exposition of what Swedenborg
terms the interior or spiritual meaning of each verse, I
might say of almost very word of each verse of the
chapter, and occupying forty-five broad octavo pages. I
could not make much out of his exegesis; but I was a
little disappointed in one respect. Nothing was farther
from my thoughts than to suppose that in this book,
written over a hundred years ago, of which I had never
before seen a copy, and to which, in all my not incon
siderable and varied reading of the English classics, I
had rarely seen an allusion, I should find anything
that could change or in the least modify my opinion of
Abram or of the Bible. I read from curiosity merely,
expecting to drop the book as soon as I came to some
thing — and I did not in the least doubt I soon should —
that would be so absurd, or improbable, or illogical, as
would justify me, without rudeness, in returning the
book to my Danish friend with thanks.
Though I understood but imperfectly what I read, I
did not find what I was looking for; I found nothing
that I could point to with confidence and say, "There,
you see your man Swedenborg must have been either
a fool or an impostor, if not both." On the other hand,
I did find several curious and striking things which
piqued my curiosity. For example, his opening com
ments on the first verse of the chapter showed me that
at least I was following a thoughtful guide. I had
neither heard nor read anything like it before.
1408. These, and the subsequent circumstances,
historically occurred as they are related; but still the
historical facts are representative, and each word is
significative. The case is the same in all the histor-
32

ical narratives of the Word, not only those in the
books of Moses, but also those in the books of Joshua,
of Judges, of Samuel, and of the Kings. In all these,
nothing is apparent but a mere history ; but although !
history is related in the literal sense, still in the 1
internal sense are heavenly arcana, which lie con
cealed within, and which can never be seen so long \
as the mind, together with the eye, is confined to the j
historical relations, nor are they revealed until the j
mind is removed from the literal sense. The Word/
of the Lord is like a body investing a living soul. I
The things belonging to the soul do not impress \
whilst the mind fixes its attention only on corporeal
objects, insomuch that the existence of the soul is
scarcely credited and still less its immortality ; but no
sooner is the attention of the mind withdrawn from
things corporeal than those belonging to the soul and
its life begin to appear. This is the reason, not only
that corporeal things must die before man can be
born again, or be regenerated, but also that the body
itself must die before man can be admitted into
heaven and see the things of heaven. So it is with
the Word of the Lord ; its corporeal parts are the con
tainers of the literal sense, whilst the attention of the
mind is fixed on which, the internal contents do not
appear ; but when the former become as it were dead,
then first the latter are presented to view. Neverthe
less, the things appertaining to the literal sense are
like the things in the body of man, viz.: like the
scientifics appertaining to the memory, which are de
rived from the things of sense, and which form
common vessels containing things interior or internal.
It may, hence, be known that the vessels are one
thing and the essentials contained in the vessels
another. The vessels are natural things: the essen
tials contained in the vessels are things spiritual and
celestial. Thus, also, the historical facts related in
33

-1

the Word, and all the particular expressions used in
the Word, are common, natural, yea, material vessels,
containing in them things spiritual and celestial, and
these cannot possibly be brought to view, except by
the internal sense. This may appear to every one,
solely from this consideration, that many things in
the Word are spoken according to appearances, yea,
according to the fallacies of the senses; as what is
said that the Lord is angry, that He punisheth, that
He curseth, that He killeth, and many other things of
a like nature; when, nevertheless, the internal sense
teaches quite the contrary, namely, that the Lord
cannot possibly be angry and punish, much less can
He curse and kill. Still, however, to those who, from
simplicity of the heart, believe the Word just as they
comprehend it in the letter, this is not hurtful, pro
vided they live in charity. The reason is because the
Word teaches nothing else than that every one is to
live in charity with his neighbor, and to love the Lord
above all things, and they who do this, have the inter
nal contents of the Word within themselves , and then
the fallacies arising from the literal sense are easily
dispelled.
' This idea, that the Word had degrees of significance
which varied and expanded in exact proportion to the
spirituality of a man's life, was one that had never
crossed my mind before, in a way to distinguish the
Bible as a literature from Dante or Plato, and it seemed
to me as though there might perhaps be something in it ; | |
but what? And how did he know, and where were the
proofs? Still I could not say, "this is nonsense; this is
unscriptural," though the distinction made between the
chapters preceding the twelfth and those following, by
which it was claimed that the narratives of the first
34

eleven chapters of the Old Testament, embracing the I
careers of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, the deluge, /
the building of the tower of Babel, etc., "were not mat- 1
ters of true history," had a somewhat heretical not to;
say profane ring. I was, however, so pleased to find I
that any one had found a way of retaining his faith '
in the divine origin of the Bible, without being obliged
to accept its account of the creation as history, that I
did not feel like having Swedenborg burned as a heretic
for that. In spite of these redeeming features in his
writings, however, I did not in the least despair of
bringing him to the stake before I had done with him. I
persuaded myself that he had built up a theosophy from
his imagination, and I knew enough to know that no
human imagination was capable of producing anything
of that kind that would not bristle with weak points,
which could not all escape the penetration of even so
poor a theologian as I was. So I turned to other places
to see what he said, for example, of Abram's subse
quent misrepresentation to Abimelech, what of Isaac's
repetition of the same fraud in Gerar; of the tower of
Babel ; of Hagar ; of Jacob and his mother's scheme to
defraud Esau of his birthright; what of Jacob's method >
of enriching himself at the expense of his father-in-law,
Laban; of Rachel's fib to her father about the images,
and so on. In this way I spent the entire day, I looked
through the whole volume. Much of it was too mystical
to be intelligible to me then ; but, to my mortification, it
began to dawn upon me that it was unintelligible to me,
much for the same reason as the Mechanique Celeste
would have been. While I ran upon many things that I
were quite new to me and seemed wise, I did not find j
35

[anything upon which I could move to put the author out
of Court. On the contrary, the desire to read on, grew
by what it fed on, and begat a longing to know some-
v thing of the author's personality.
When Mr. Kjerulff came in to dinner that evening, I
said to him that I had spent the day with his friend
Swedenborg, but that the value of what I had read de
pended so largely upon the tenor of his life and the
character he had borne in the flesh that I felt as though,
before spending any more time upon his works, I would
like to be enlightened on these points. Mr. Kjerulff,
thereupon, ran over the prominent events of Sweden-
borg's life in a rather enthusiastic strain, as it seemed to
me, and wound up by assuring me, in substance, that he
doubted if in the history of our race another man could
be found, who had ever succeeded in delivering himself
more completely from the sway of the World, the Flesh
and the Devil. I asked if he had any biography of
Swedenborg. He replied, after a little reflection, that
he believed he had in his luggage a collection of docu
ments relating to Swedenborg compiled by a Mr. Bush,
of New York, where he said I would find, in the testi
mony of Swedenborg's contemporaries, the best of
evidence in regard to his singular purity of life, his con
spicuous elevation of character, and the completeness of
his consecration to the service of the Master. I asked
if the Bush to whom he referred was the professor of
Oriental languages in the New York University and a
Presbyterian clergyman, who had written commentaries
on the Bible. All he knew about his antecedents was
that he had been a clergyman, though of what denomina
tion he did not recollect, and that since becoming ac-
36

quainted with the writings of Swedenborg he had with
drawn from it, whichever it was, and was then settled
as pastor of the New Church (Swedenborgian) in
Brooklyn. As I had long known Prof. Bush, and es
teemed him very highly for his eminence, both as a
scholar and as a Christian, I was greatly surprised to
learn that he had been dabbling in heresy. Of one
thing, however, I was quite sure, that he was entirely
incapable of lending himself to any sort of imposture,
and that absolute confidence might be placed in the good
faith of anything published with his name or with his
sanction. The fact that he had so far separated him
self from the Church organization in which he had been
bred, in which he had worked with distinction as pastor
and author for many of the best years of his life, and
had sacrificed to his convictions what to him no doubt
seemed and was, in a worldly point of view, his all, in
creased my interest in his book and its hero. So I
begged Mr. Kjerulff to let me see it. He promptly
complied with my wishes. The book was entitled,
"Documents Concerning Swedenborg," and consisted
chiefly of letters and publications of Swedenborg's con
temporaries, showing the estimate and reasons for the
estimate in which he was held by them. I read
the book almost at a sitting. My first feeling
when I laid it down was of mingled surprise and
mortification that I had lived till then in such
dense ignorance of the career and work of so remark
able a man, at once so great and so good as Sweden
borg was there shown to have been, while I had spent
so much of my life in trying to make myself familiar
with the lives of men, who were unworthy to unloose the
37

latchets of his shoes. Whatever doubts I had enter
tained of Swedenborg's good faith and sincerity, this
book effectually dispelled. He might have been subject
to illusions, but I had no longer any suspicions of his
being an impostor. These convictions naturally in
creased my curiosity to know more of his writings, and
especially of his theology, though my curiosity was
still of a purely intellectual origin and character.

IV
Though getting to be somewhat absorbed by this
new acquaintance, I did not forget that I was a long way
from home; that the time I had proposed to be absent
had already expired; that I had not heard either from
my family or from my business colleagues since I left
New York, nor had I any reason to presume they had
heard from me. Mr. Kjerulff and I had studied up the
destination and plans of every vessel in the harbor of
St. Thomas to no profit, till at last we opened negotia
tions with a skipper in command of a fore and aft
schooner of 130 tons or thereabouts, owned in Balti
more, to take us to some port in the United States. As
he could get no freight, for which he had been hoping,
from or to any Spanish port, on account of the cholera,
he finally decided, if we would take passage with him,
to go to New Orleans and look for a freight there. An
arrangement with him was concluded; we laid in a
stock of extra provisions, and, with more alacrity than I
ever left any port before or since save one, we took
leave of St. Thomas bound for New Orleans. Before
sailing, however, I begged Mr. Kjerulff to take with
38

him all the books he had by or about Swedenborg. With
this request he very obligingly complied.
Our voyage was prolonged both by calms and storms,
and more than twenty days elapsed between the time of
our departure from St. Thomas and my arrival at New
York. I do not recollect but one day in all that interval
— a day that I spent in New Orleans, where the editor
of the Picayune drove me out to Lake Ponchartrain —
that I did not pore from ten to twelve hours over these
writings. In fact, they absorbed all my time that was
not devoted to eating and sleeping. It would not be
possible to convey to any one, who had not had a similar
experience, the effect they produced upon me, the almost
insane appetite with which I devoured them, the com
plete revolution that they wrought in all my opinions
about spiritual matters, and especially about the Bible.
Though, like the blind man in the gospel, I as yet only
saw men as trees walking, before I reached home I had
acquired a thorough conviction that "these were not
the words of him who hath a devil," and that Sweden
borg was "a scribe instructed unto the Kingdom of
Heaven." It seemed to me that every line I read re
moved some difficulty, cleared up some doubt, il
luminated some mystery, revealed spiritual wealth in the
Word of which before I had no conception. If I had be
come possessed of Aladdin's lamp or had discovered a
new continent, I could not have been more completely
rapt, more wildly intoxicated with my acquisition. I felt
literally that .whereas I was blind now I saw ; as if my
eyes had opened to a world of which till then I had only
seen the reflection or shadow. Saul of Tarsus could not
have been more utterly surprised and carried away
39

when "there fell from his eyes as it had been scales and
he received sight forthwith," than I was as my mind
was opened to the new truths which were revealed to me
during this voyage. Before reaching New Orleans I
found myself on my knees, exclaiming, "Lord, I be
lieve, help Thou my unbelief." The terms in which the
Rev. John Clowes described the impression produced on
him by his first perusal of Swedenborg's "True Chris
tian Religion," would at one time have seemed to me
rhapsodical and extravagant. They now seem to me
perfectly natural and not in the least exaggerated.*
* The Reverend John Clowes, formerly fellow of Trinity Col
lege, Cambridge, England, was the Rector of St. John's church,
Manchester, for sixty-two years. He was born at Manchester
in October, 1743, and died the 28th of May, 1831. He says: "It
is impossible for any language to express the full effect wrought
in my mind by the perusal of this wonderful book. Suffice it,
therefore, to observe that in proceeding from the chapter on the
Creator and Creation to the succeeding chapters on the Re
deemer and Redemption, on the Divine Trinity, on the Sacred
Scriptures or Word of God, on the Decalogue, on Faith, on
Charity, on Free-will, on Repentance, on Reformation and Re
generation, on Imputation, on Baptism, on the Holy Supper, on
the Consummation of the Age, the Advent of the Lord, and the
New Heaven and the New Church, it seemed as if a continually
increasing blaze of new and recreating light was poured forth
on the delighted understanding, opening it to the contemplation
of the most sublime mysteries of wisdom, and convincing it of
the being of a God, of the existence of an internal world, of the
interior sanctities of the Holy Scriptures, of the true nature of
creation, redemption and regeneration, in a manner and degree,
and with a force of satisfactory evidence, in which those inter
esting subjects had never been viewed before. The mind,
therefore, was no longer perplexed about the proper Object of
its worship, because it was enlightened to see clearly, as by the
light of a meridian sun, that Jesus Christ, in His Divine Human
ity, is that Object, He being the Creator from eternity, thus con
taining in His own Divine Person the Sacred Trinity of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit ; the Father being His hidden essence, the
Son His manifested existence, and the Holy Spirit His proceed
ing operation. In like manner all difficulties and doubts were
removed respecting the Sacred Scriptures, or Word of God,
40

When I left the steamer at Cincinnati to take the
train East it became necessary for me to part with my
good friend Kjerulff* and his books. As I was to be
detained a few hours in Cincinnati, I lost no time in
looking up a bookstore, where I was fortunate enough
to find a nice copy of Swedenborg's Divine Love and
Wisdom and of Divine Providence bound together.
The price I paid for it led me to suspect that it was
not regarded by the proprietor as very valuable mer
chandise, but I would not have exchanged it for any
other book in his shop. In fact, I felt then as though I
should never care to read any other books but Sweden
borg's and the Bible. I devoted the daylight hours dur
ing the remainder of my journey to my new treasure,
every line of which seemed to set a new star in the
heavens for me. By the time I reached home, though
not quite clear in my mind about the nature or extent of
Swedenborg's illumination, if specially illuminated at
all, nor indeed caring much to know, not doubting that
he believed he was, I had got over not only all my dif
ficulties about Christ's mysterious birth and miracles,
but I had become equally well satisfied of the Divine
through the bright and heretofore unseen manifestation of their
spiritual and interior contents, by virtue of which discovery
apparent inconsistencies vanished, apparent contradictions were
reconciled, and what before seemed trivial and nugatory, as
sumed a new and interesting aspect; while the whole volume
of Revelation was seen to be full of sanctity, of wisdom and of
love from its Divine Author, and also to be in perpetual connec
tion with that Author, who is its inmost soul — its essential
Spirit and Life."
* Mr. Kjerulff died in 1874 in the island of Santa Cruz,
where he had resumed the practice of his profession. Two
daughters survive him. A letter written by his daughter Rose,
giving an account of her father's death, will be found on page
117. 41

authority of the twelve chapters of Genesis over which
I had so often stumbled. If there were any parts of the
Bible about the Divine origin of which I was less clear,
I presumed they were given for our edification, but
upon what precise authority I did not pretend to know,
nor then much care. I felt like one who had sold all he
had and bought a pearl of great price, but at such a
bargain that he did not care to wait for his change.
I embraced an early opportunity, upon my return,
to look up Dr. Bush. I found him where I had occa
sionally seen him before, in what he called his "den," a
small room in the upper part of the Morse Building,
since replaced by a more imposing structure bearing the
same name. The room was nearly full of books. He
had reserved a place for himself at his desk and scant
room besides to seat a visitor or two. I was much in
terested, of course, in hearing from his own lips of the
revolution through which he had passed. He seemed
very happy and well assured that he had found "the
Way, the Truth and the Life." It turned out that he
had already for several years had the advantage of
Swedenborg's teachings. In a little pamphlet which he
published about 1845, entitled, "Statement of Reasons
for Embracing the Doctrines and Disclosures of Swe
denborg," he had given an interesting account of the
circumstances which first turned his studies specially in
that direction. As the "Statement" is now pretty much
forgotten, and as the journey his mind travelled, the
difficulties he encountered and the processes by which he
surmounted them were in many respects similar to my
own, and I suspect of most persons who have found in
Swedenborg, as he had done, deliverance from spiritual
42

disorders for which the Church, in which we had been
reared, had neither cure nor anodyne, I cannot doubt
that those who have followed me thus far will be edified
by it. "In the retrospect of the last five or six years of
my moral and intellectual life, I am compelled to fix
upon the date when I was first led to question the re
ceived doctrine of the Resurrection, as the point from
which my progress really began to tend towards
the New Church, although then profoundly ignorant
of the fact. I had previously acquired no precise
knowledge of Swedenborg's system, nor formed any
intelligent estimate of his character. With the mass
of the Christian world, I had contented myself with
the vague impression of his having been a man of re
spectable talents and attainments, but who had un
happily fallen into a kind of monomania, which made
him the victim of strange delusions and dreams — the
honest but real dupe of the wildest phantasies in re
spect to the state of man after death, and the constit
uent nature of Heaven and Hell. As to anything like
a consistent or rational philosophy of man's nature
or the constitution of the universe, I should as soon
have looked for it in the Koran of Mahomet or the
Vedas of the Hindoos, or what I then deemed the
senseless ravings of Jacob Behmen. Having never
read his works but in fragmentary extracts, I was
unprepared to recognize in him anything beyond the
character of a well-meaning mystic, who had given
forth to the world a strange medley of hallucinations
that could never be supposed to meet with acceptance,
except in minds which had received some touch of
a similar mania, and which had lost, if they ever pos
sessed, the power of accurately discriminating be
tween visions and verities. Such was my general
estimate of the man up to the time when I had become
43

settled in the belief that the current dogma of the
resurrection of the material body was a gratuitous
hypothesis, equally unsupported by a sound interpre
tation of Scripture, or by the fair inductions of rea
son. The grounds of this opinion I have given to the
public in a work ("Anastasis, etc.") expressly de
voted to the subject.
"I had already begun to announce my conclusions
on this head in a course of public lectures delivered
in this city and elsewhere, maintaining that the true
resurrection took place at death, when, at the close of
one of these lectures in an eastern city, a lady inci
dentally remarked to me that the views I had
advanced bore a striking analogy with those of
Swedenborg on the same theme, and intimated her
impression that I must have been conversant with his
works. The supposition was unfounded, but my curi
osity was excited, and I determined, at the first
favorable opportunity, to acquaint myself with the
system, and thus supply a conscious desideratum in
my knowledge.
"Not many months elapsed before a copy of Noble's
Appeal in behalf of the views of the New Church
fell into my hands, by the perusal of which I was very
deeply impressed. I was compelled to form an entirely
new estimate of the man and of the system. I not only
saw my own general views of the nature of the resur
rection abundantly confirmed, and illustrated, and
planted upon the basis of a philosophy and psychology
which I still deem impregnable, but an exhibition also
of the doctrine of the Lord's Second Advent, which
came home to my convictions with a peculiar power
of demonstration. I was struck, too, in the perusal
of this work, with the Scriptural character of the
evidence adduced in support of the doctrines. I had
previously no adequate conception of the amount of
testimony from this source going to sustain the lead-
44

ing positions of the New Church scheme, and to this
hour I do not scruple to regard Noble's Appeal as an
unanswerable defence of the system.
"Hitherto, however, I had read nothing of Sweden
borg's own writings, excepting occasional detached
paragraphs. The 'Heaven and Hell' shortly after
wards fell under my perusal. I read it with profound
interest, but still with great abatements from a full
conviction of its truth. I was rather disposed, on the
whole, to admit the possibility of the psychological
state into which Swedenborg declared himself to be
brought, and which alone could make him cognizant
of the realities of the spiritual world, because I saw
that a similar immission into that world had been
granted to the prophets and apostles, which showed
that such a state could exist, and if it had once
existed, I saw not why it might not again,
provided sufficient reasons could be pleaded for
it ; and the reasons alleged I felt to be sufficient if they
were but sound; a question that I felt myself willing
seriously to consider, but which I think the mass of
the Christian world is not. I found, however, in my
perusal of the work, such a violence done to all my
preconceptions of that world, that I doubted exceed
ingly the absolute reliableness of his statements. I
could not help distrusting the lucidity of his percep
tions. I was continually haunted by the suspicion that
his performed ideas on the subject had both shaped
and "colored his visions. This was more especially
the case in regard to his descriptions of celestial and
infernal scenery. I had the greatest difficulty imagin
able in conceiving the possibility that any objects sim
ilar to those with which we are conversant here
should even appear to exist there. Again and again
did I propose to myself the question, What kind of
an entity is a spiritual house, animal or bird — a spirit
ual mountain, garden, grove, or tree — a spiritual
45

cavern, lake, or stream — not dreaming that these
things exist there by the very laws of the human
mind, as outbirths or emanations of the interior spirit,
and as living representatives of its affections and
thoughts? It did not then occur to me that a spirit
dislodged from the body must, from the necessity of
the case, be introduced into the midst of spiritual
realities, and that these cannot in the nature of things
be any other than what Swedenborg describes them
to be — that is, they must be what we should term
mental creations or projections. A little deeper re
flection would have then taught me, as it has since
done, to assent freely to the truth of Swedenborg's
statement, that thoughts are actual though not
material substances, and that to spirits, that alone can
be substantial which is spiritual, and consequently
that alone can be real. We, indeed, in common par
lance, reverse these terms, and denominate that sub
stantial which is material, and which comes under
the cognizance of the external senses. But the spirit,
on leaving the body, leaves the region of dead matter,
and comes into a sphere where itself and its emana
tions are the real substances or the substantial reali
ties. Consequently, what is here subjective becomes
there objective.

"This I am aware, will find with many but a slow
admission, on its first announcement, from their hav
ing been always accustomed to regard these manifes
tations of mind as simple acts, exercises, operations,
etc. But let the matter be pondered, and judgment
rendered, whether the fact be not actually so. How
can anything exist which is not a substance? How
can anything that exists act, but by the putting forth
of its qualities and functions as a substance? The
sun acts by the emission of its light and heat. Are
46

not the light and heat of the sun a part of its sub
stance? A flower acts by sending forth a sphere of
fragrance. Is not the fragrance as real a substance
as the flower, though vastly more rarefied and ethe
real ? So of the human spirit. A man's thoughts and
mental images are the goings forth of the substance
of his being; they are as substantial as his being; and
if a spirit himself can be an objective reality to an
other spirit, his intellectual conceptions, for the same
reason, must be equally objective. Consequently,
nothing more is needed, for one's being introduced in
the most splendid celestial scenery, than to find him
self surrounded by the mental creations prompted by
the pure and angelic affections of the countless multi
tudes which constitute that kingdom. These must be
beautiful, because they originate in a moral state of
the inner man, which can only be represented by ob
jects of a corresponding character ; and that they are
real, arises from the nature and necessity of the case.
Spiritual objects must be the real objects to a spirit.
The infernal scenery, though a counterpart to this,
depends upon the same law.
"A great advance was accordingly made towards a
full reception of the disclosure of Swedenborg, when
the objections on this score were overcome. I saw
that here was a rational and philosophical theory of
the dominant conditions of the other life; and yet it
was evidently a revelation of such a nature as to
transcend the utmost grasp of the unassisted human
faculties. The inference, therefore, was not only fair
but irresistible, that Swedenborg was brought into a
preternatural state, in order to his being enabled to
make it ; and the admission of this was a virtual ad
mission of the main item of his claim — the claim of
having been divinely empowered to lay open the veri
ties of man's future existence, and the essential
nature of Heaven and Hell. 47

"This primary fact, then, having been established to
my own satisfaction, I was, of course, very strongly
disposed to listen with the deepest respect to what
ever other reports he brought from that world of mys
tery and of marvel; although I was still very far —
as indeed I hope ever to be — from a blind surrender
of my own judgment, as to every point of his an
nouncements. I was not yet prepared to receive the
distinctive features of his theology, and more es
pecially was I stumbled by his unsparing critiques
upon the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone,
which I had been taught to regard as the grand tenet
established by the Reformation, and which I supposed
to be true, of course, simply from its having been the
result of that struggle, which is so often spoken of
as the glorious Reformation from the errors of
Popery. I had yet to learn that there were a great
many things in the Reformation that need much
further reforming. So also in regard to the peculiar
views advanced respecting the true nature of the
Atonement, from which the current doctrine of Justi
fication is inseparable. It was long before I could so
entirely emancipate my mind from traditional senti
ments, as to embrace fully what I now regard as the
far more Scriptural views of the New Church on that
subject, to wit, that the atonement was what is signi
fied by the word — reconciliation — God reconciling the
world to Himself, instead of reconciling Himself to
the world.
"But the great rock of offence with me was the in
terior or spiritual sense of the Word. This, I was
strongly assured, even if there were to some extent
a basis of truth on which it rested, was yet carried
to an entirely fanciful extreme in Swedenborg's inter
pretations; and I had scarcely a doubt that if I ever
accepted the system as a whole, it would still be with
a reservation on this score. One who is at all ac-
48

quainted with the general scheme, will see at once
from this, that I had thus far failed to apprehend the
true genius of the Science of Correspondences, on
which it rests, and from which it flows by inevitable
sequence. The truth of this science, however, grad
ually loomed up more and more to view, as I became
more clearly aware of the spiritual nature of man,
and of the fundamental fact, that all natural things
are pervaded, acted, moulded, vivified by the influx
of spiritual causes."
With Dr. Bush I afterward had many pleasant and
edifying talks. I promptly procured a copy of the "Ar
cana Ccelestia," and, as I felt the need of them, the
other theological writings of Swedenborg. I also looked
up the Church frequented chiefly by students of Sweden
borg in Thirty-fifth street, in which the Rev. Chauncey
Giles was then preaching, and which I have habitually
attended since when in town.

V

Highly as I valued Swedenborg as a Commentator
and an opener of the Word, I was not as yet prepared
to accept him as a revelator. Accustomed to regard the
Bible as a unit and unique, as a great light with which
God had endowed His people, I hesitated to believe that
His revelations could be incomplete, or could ever re
quire supplementation. It seemed more probable that
Swedenborg had read the Word more carefully, had
penetrated its mysteries more profoundly, and developed
truths equally accessible to any person endowed with
49

equal genius and equally free from sectarian delusions
and moral infirmities. If the Word required the light
which Swedenborg professed to shed upon it, why was it
withheld so long, and why had not preceding genera
tions been permitted to profit by it?
This question reminds one of an Italian who wrote
a book to prove that the four new planets discovered
by Galileo were imaginary, and concluded by asking:
"Of what use are they? Astrologers have got on very
well without these new planets hitherto. There can be
no reason, therefore, for their starting into existence
now." I ultimately found my answer where any earnest
seeker for truth, for truth's sake, may find a deliverance
from all doubts which obstruct his spiritual evolution —
in the Bible itself. The objection to a new revelation in
the eighteenth century I found, could, with equal pro
priety, be made to the revelations made by our Saviour
and by John, nay by Abraham, by Moses and by all the
prophets. Over a thousand years intervened between
the inditing of the Ten Commandments on the one hand,
and the prophecies of Malachi on the other, during
which interval the Lord appears to have been in fre
quent, not to say constant, commmunication with His
people. The call of Abraham occurred B. C. 1921. The
prophecies of Malachi were written B. C. 420. During
this interval of more than fifteen centuries the Bible
records over fifty distinct revelations of the Divine Will
to as many different persons and on as many different
occasions. I have taken the trouble to prepare a list
of some of the recipients of these revelations, with a
reference to the text where they are recorded.
5o

CHAP, verse.
i. To Abraham  See Genesis, 15 1
2. " Isaac  " " 26 2
3. " Jacob  " " 28 13
4- " Joseph  « " 35 1,9
" "  " " 45 5,7,9
"  " " 46 2,3
5. " Moses  " Exodus, 3 4, 5
"  " " 6 2-8
"  " " 20 1-2
6. " Aaron  " Num., 18 1,8
7. " Balaam  " " 24 4
8. " Joshua  " Joshua, 1 1
" "  " 10 12-14
9. " Deborah  " Judges, 4 4
10. " Gideon  " " 6 11,25
11. " Jephtha  " " 11 29
12. " Manoah's Wife  " " 13 3, 9
13." Samson  " " 13 25
" "  " " 15 19
14. " Samuel  " 1 Sam'l, 3 10
15. " David  " " 23 10
"  " 2 Sam'l, 2 1
16. " Nathan  " " 12 1,7
17. " Gad (David's Seer)... " " 24 10,12
18. " Solomon  " 1 Kings, 3 5
tt tt tt it Q "l
19. " A man of God  " " 13 1
20. " Jehu  " " 16 1
21. " Micaiah  " " 22 19
22. " Elijah  " " 17 2
23. " Elisha  " 2 Kings, 2 21
24. " Isaiah  " " 10 10
25. " Huldah the Prophetess " " 22 15
26. " Nathan  " 1 Chron., 17 3
27. " Azariah  " 2 Chron., 15 1-8
28. " Shemaiah  " " 12 5
51

CHAP.
29. To Jahaziel  See 2 Chron., 20

30. 3i-
32. 33-34-35- 36.
37- 38.
39-40.
41. 42.43-44. 45-
46.47- 48.49. 50. 5i-

Zechariah Haggai .
Ezra ....

The man of God that
came to Amaziah ... "
Prophet sent to Ama
ziah 
Jeremiah 
Nehemiah 
Esther  "
Job  "
Ezekiel  "
Daniel  "
Hosea  "
Joel  "
Amos  "
Obadiah  "
Jonah  "
Micah  "
Nahum  "
Habakkuk  "
Zephaniah  "
Malachi  "
Haggai  "
Iddo  "

24
Ezra, 5
6 7
25
2 Chron., 25
Jeremiah, 1
Nehemiah, 1
Esther.
Job, 38
Ezekiel, 1
Daniel. Hosea, 1
Joel 1
Amos, 1
Obadiah I
Jonah, 1
Micah, 1
Nahum.
Habak., 1
Zeph., 1
Malachi, 1
Haggai, 1

VERSE. 20 1
14 6 7
15

To these may be added the Psalms, in which Jesus is
often the speaker. These poems, too, are the work of
several inspired authors, and appeared not at one time,
but at intervals covering a period of not less than a
thousand years.
The New Testament equally presents a succession of
52

revelations, made to as many different persons and at
different times. Here is a list of some of them:

CHAP.

i
2
3
4 567
8 9
io
n
12 1314151617 18 19.

To Joseph  See Matthew, 1
John the Baptist  " " 3

Simon Peter 
Andrew 
James 
John the son of Zeb-
edee 
Philip 
Bartholomew 
Thomas 
James 
Thaddeus 
Simon the Canaanite. . .
Judas Iscariot 
Paul 
Philip 
Mark 
Luke 
Stephen 
John the Divine 

VERSE. 20 15

10

Acts, tt
Mark.
Luke. Acts, Revelation.

9 8

6
26

55

Here we have in the Old and New Testaments to
gether no less than seventy different revelations made
by the Lord to almost as many different persons and
on almost as many different occasions, within a period
of sixteen hundred years. What reason was there for
supposing that John, any more than Malachi, or than
Isaiah, or than Solomon, or than David, or than Joshua,
or than Abraham, or than Moses, was to be the last to
whom He would reveal Himself? And would it not
53

have seemed, reasoning from the past, more surprising,
had He not made any farther revelation of Himself in
the next seventeen centuries than that He did? What
did He mean when He said to His disciples, "I have
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them
now," if not that when His disciples were fit to know
more of righteousness, temperance and judgment to
come, more would be revealed to them — that they would
hear from Him again ?
As for the agent through whom to make new revela
tions, I had no difficulty in acknowledging the entire
sufficiency and fitness of Swedenborg, nor does my
memory suggest the name of any one man who lived
before or since the time of Jesus more thoroughly
equipped for such an extraordinary commission ; of any
medium through which the light of Divine truth would
pass with less refraction. It is not possible to find any
authority for supposing that any of those who had been
previously selected by the Lord as such media possessed
any qualifications for their mission which, mutatis mu
tandis, Swedenborg did not possess for his, while, hu
manly speaking, it is doing none of the others any
injustice to say that for his peculiar mission he possessed
many qualifications which all the others presumably
lacked. At his maturity, he was the most illustrious
scientific man living. He consecrated his extraordinary
talents to the loftiest and most elevating uses. He was
a favorite of his king because of his usefulness; there
were hardly any worldly honors or political distinctions
he did not receive, to which he might not have aspired.
He laid them all down to devote himself exclusively to
the work to which he believed the Lord had called him,
54

neither receiving nor desiring any reward from the
world for his labors or his sacrifices. He not only print
ed all his books at his private expense, but as fast as
printed gave them all away, mostly to libraries, to await
the time when the world should realize its need of them,
having implicit faith that the Lord would in His own
good time breathe into them the breath of life.*
I had no longer any difficulty therefore with what at
first seemed like an impeachment of the completeness
and sufficiency of the Bible, and I came to regard every
revelation of spiritual truth, from Moses down the
ages, as merely successive liftings of veils, the dispers
ing of clouds, for the revelation of vital truths of which
all nature is the Divine Scripture, and the Bible its
translation and interpreter, but which the children of
men are prepared to accept only, as it were, by instal
ments. Neither had I any farther difficulty in regarding
Swedenborg as a suitable agent for the reception of a
new revelation, as much so as any of the twelve Apostles
appear to have been.
* Concerning Volume I, John Lewis states in Document 258,
p. 494, "This gentleman (i. e. Swedenborg) with indefatigable
pains and labour spent one whole year in studying and writing
the first volume of the Arcana Caelestia; was at the expense of
two hundred pounds to print it, and also advanced two hundred
pounds more for the printing of the second volume ; and when
he had done this, he gave express orders, that all the money
that should arise in the sale of this large work should be given
toward the charge of the propagation of the gospel." He was
as indifferent about the fame, as about the pecuniary returns
his book would yield. The first public notice of the Arcana
Ccelestia and of five other treatises published in 1758, appeared
in Sweden in 1763, thirteen years after the appearance of the
first volume of the Arcana.

55

VI

In the perusal of these pages it will doubtless occur
to the reader to ask what, after all, did I learn from
Swedenborg of substantial value, that I did not know or
might not have learned from the pulpits of the Churches
open to me in New York ? Especially what, if anything,
to which I can attribute the great change wrought in
my views of my relations to the Godhead within those
few short weeks ? It would require volumes to answer
this question fully; but I can state in a brief space some
of the most striking and comprehensive truths for
which, by God's mercy, I think I am indebted to these
writings. First. They apprised me of the fact that I, in common
with most professing Christians, had been all my life a
pagan, believing or acting as though I believed in a
plurality of Gods. While at school in Troy and after
wards at Trinity College, Hartford — it was called
Washington College in my time — I had been required to
attend the Episcopal Church, and every Sunday to re
peat what is termed in the Prayer Book, The Apostles'
Creed, in which I proclaimed my belief in —
( i ) God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth. (2) In Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord, who was
conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,
etc. (3) In the Holy Ghost.
(4) In the Holy Catholic Church.
56

(5) In the Communion of Saints.
(6) In the forgiveness of sins.
(7) In the resurrection of the body.
(8) In the life everlasting.
Here were eight separate articles of belief, including
a belief in at least three separate and distinct Gods,
whom I was educated to recognize, and to whom I was
to address my prayers. Jesus Christ, the Son, was just
as distinct from the Father in this profession of faith as
the Communion of Saints was distinct from the forgive
ness of sins, or from the resurrection of the body. The
Holy Ghost was apparently a third person, equally dis
tinct from both the Father and Son. When I attempted
to pray I was always perplexed to know which of the
three I was appealing to or ought to address. This
difficulty got me some years latefinto the habit for a
time, of attending the Unitarian Church. As I advanced
in life, and in blindness perhaps, I used to address my
petitions to God the Father, closing my eyes, as it were,
to the other two, to avoid confusion.
If I am not greatly mistaken, the impression generally
prevails among what are called orthodox Christians,
that there is a sort of graded Godhead, to which the
Roman Catholics add the Virgin Mary, and now I be
lieve the Pope; to which the Greek Church adds the
Czar; the Moslems, Mahomet, and the Mormons, Joe
Smith. I am indebted to Swedenborg for showing me
the way out of this polytheistical tangle, and making
perfectly intelligible to me the great central truth of
Christian faith, that there is but one God, in Whom, as
Swedenborg describes it, there is a trinity of person,
not of persons; that Jesus was Jehovah Himself re-
57

vealed to us in the measure proportioned to our needs
and capacities for receiving Him, just as the light and
heat which enter our windows are the sun passed
through an atmosphere several miles deep to prevent
their blinding or burning us. In this way I compre
hended how in Christ was the fullness of the Godhead
bodily ; how the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are united
in the One Divine Person of the Saviour, forming One
Divine Being, in like manner as the soul, body and their
joint operation in man, form one human being.*
* This view was presented very effectively by the Rev. Mr.
Clowes, in the preface to his Commentaries on Luke, more than
half a century ago. "When it is said of the Father that He
created the world, of the Son that He redeemed it, and of the
Holy Ghost that He sanctified it, and when these three, viz., the
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, are called distinct persons, and
have distinct offices allotted to them, and lay claim to a distinct
worship, what is the necessary result of all these distinctions
but to establish a monstrous tritheism, fraught with the most
mischievous consequences by its direct tendencies to distract
the mind of the sincere worshipper, to perplex him as to the
proper object of his adoration, since it is absolutely impossible
for the human mind to pay its debt of religious gratitude, love,
praise and supplication to more than one Divine Being.
"To this denial of the Incarnate God of the sole exclusive
Divinity, the division of the Gojdhead into three persons and in
the allotment of a distinct office 'and operation to each person —
to the Father, the act of creation ; to the Son, the act of redemp
tion; and to the Holy Ghost, the act of sanctification — may be
ascribed an incalculable multitude of misconceptions and theo
logical delusions, among which are conspicuous the mistaken
notions of an imputed righteousness, of an arbitrary election on
the part of God, of justification by faith alone, of salvation by
immediate mercy. In what Church in Christendom are its
members taught even to-day — save the New Church — to address
their prayers directly to Jesus Christ, who has so expressly
said, "Come unto Me; abide in Me; without Me ye can do
nothing"? (See, also, John xiv. 6.) In what Church are we
taught to believe the Humanity of Jesus Christ to be a Divine
Humanity, in and through which the invisible Godhead is made
visible, the unknown God is made known, the unapproachable
Godhead is rendered approachable, and thus the penitent sin-
58

Second. I first learned from Swedenborg that the
Atonement was not, as I had always been taught, a
reconciliation of God with the world through a barbar
ous and unnatural traffic arrangement, but a reconcilia
tion of the world with God; an at-one-ment effected
through the intervention of the Lord's Divine Human
ity. If the Father and Son really were one person, and
the unity of the Godhead assumed that they were, of
course neither could feel any resentment towards sin
ners not equally shared by the other, nor could either
have any claims of justice which were not common to
both. The Son, therefore, could not but feel as much
wrath towards sinners as the Father, and the Father as
much compassion for them and solicitude for their sal
vation as the Son. So that the idea of crucifying either
to satisfy the honour of the other, was not only at war
with any rational conception of God, the Good, the
Great, the Just, but struck a fatal blow at the unity of
the Godhead. Such a scheme of redemption requires at
least two Gods, or it strips Christ of His Divinity, in
which latter case His death ceases to be the infinite
ner always has access to his Heavenly Father? And yet we are
assured that "I and the Father are one," John x. 30; "Believe
Me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me," John xiv.
6-7, 9-1 1 ; "I am the door of the sheep — by Me, if any man
enter, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out and find his
pasture," John x. 7-9.
In what Church is it taught to-day that the Jesus of the New
Testament is identical with the Jehovah of the Old? Yet, see
Isaiah xxv. 9-40, 3-5-10. — Preface to the Gospel According
to St. Luke, translated from the original Greek, and illustrated
by extracts from the theological writings of Emanuel Sweden
borg, together with notes and observations by the translator, an
nexed to each chapter, by the late Rev. J. Clowes, M. A., Rector
of St. John's Church, Manchester, and Fellow of Trinity Col
lege, Cambridge, who was a member and pastor in full standing
of the established Church of England until his death
59

sacrifice which is claimed to have been the stipulated
price of our redemption.
Third. In clearing up my ideas on the Atonement,
Swedenborg helped me to see that Heaven and Hell
are not places, but states or conditions of the soul ; that
no sinner, whatever he believes, or thinks he believes,
can experience the joys of Heaven, except by ceasing
to be a sinner; and that this change is wrought, not
as I had been taught, from outside of him, or in and
through another being by transfer or imputation, but
by "a life according to the commandments" ; by works
as well as faith. He must actually be inhabited by the
righteousness which saves and justifies. I had been ac
customed to think that, when I was created, I was de
livered over to the world like a plough from its factory,
or a steamer from the shipyard; that my Creator was
to have no more to do with me, at least until the last
assize, than the maker of the plough and of the steamer
have to do with them; that I had been wound up, as it
were, to run like a clock for a few years, more or less,
and that I was to be the real author of everything I
did or thought until I should have "run down" — or like
Job, "I should lie down in the dark." It was Sweden
borg that first brought home to me the conviction that
every sin and every sinful propensity has its origin in
this self-love, in this sense of self-sufficiency, in this
primeval ambition to be as Gods; that it was only by
expelling, and only so fast as we do expel this self
hood from our hearts, that the Lord could come in and
dwell with us. It was not till I began to explore my
heart and study the motives of my conduct by the light
of this fearful revelation, so new to me, though it lies
60

on the very surface of all Christ's teaching and example,
that I began to realize how selfish and worldly my
life had been from the beginning; how habitually I had
appropriated to myself the credit of anything I thought
I had done well; how ingeniously I excused and justi
fied what I had done wrong; with how little charity I
had judged those whose conduct wounded what I
thought to be my interests, my vanity, or my pride;
how little concern I had felt for the happiness and wel
fare of others compared with that I felt for my own;
how impracticable seemed the Divine injunction to do
unto others as I would have others do to me ; how read
ily I thought evil of those who differed with me in
opinion; how slow to run to the relief of a fellow sin
ner waylaid and overcome by temptation, and left bleed
ing by the roadside, to suffer, and perhaps to perish, for
lack of timely sympathy and succor. I now realized
for the first time that the whole of the work of regen
eration consisted in expelling the self-hood which, with
the crew of devils in its service, was always trying to
persuade me that it was my own breath I drew, my own
thought I used, my own work in which I triumphed.
It was this self-hood which urged me to conciliate the
self-hood of others and which I yearned to have others
conciliate in me; it was to this self-hood that I found
political agitators and aspirants, philanthropists and re
formers, made their most successful appeals. As I
watched and became more conversant with this infirm
ity, I found, to my astonishment, that to its head-quar
ters might be traced every sinful thought, lust and act
which obstructs the Lord in the effort He is always
making to re-unite us with Him, and to perfect His
6 1

image in us ; that it was the germ of all dissension, dis
ease, misery and crime in human society, and that the
highest, not to say the only ambition which any mortal
can afford to indulge, is to pursue and extirpate this
self-hood — this proprium, as Swedenborg most appro
priately terms it — as persistently and unrelentingly and
unsparingly as the Israelites were instructed to pursue
and exterminate the inhabitants of Canaan, who, Swe
denborg tells us, represent the several classes of enemies
that beset every human soul.*
* Swedenborg's views of the proprium or self-hood, which
figure more or less conspicuously in all his writings, may be
gathered from a few extracts upon that subject taken from his
Arcana Ccelestia. "Man's proprium is in itself dead, and no one
has life from himself, as is shown so clearly in the world of
spirits, that evil spirits who love nothing but the proprium, and
obstinately insist that they live from themselves, are convinced
by sensible experience, and forced to confess that they do not
live from themselves. It has been especially permitted me now
for several years to become acquainted with the human pro
prium and it has been granted to me to perceive clearly that I
could think nothing from myself, but that every idea or thought
entered by influx, and sometimes, how and where this influx en
tered. The man, therefore, who supposes that he lives from
himself, is in the false, and in consequence appropriates to him
self everything evil and false, which he would never do, were he
to believe according to the truth of the case." Arcana Ccelestia,
150. A. C. 154. "Nothing evil and false can possibly exist which
is not the proprium, for the proprium of man is evil itself, and
hence man is nothing but evil and falsity. This was demon
strated to me by the fact that when the proprium of man is pre
sented to view in the world of spirits, it appears so deformed
that it is impossible to detect anything more ugly, although
with a difference, according to the nature of the proprium, so
that he to whom the things of his proprium are visibly ex
hibited is struck with horror, and wishes to flee from himself as
from a devil."
"It requires but little attention in any one to discover that
woman was not made out of the rib of man (Gen. ii. 22.) and
that deeper arcana are here implied than any person has hereto
fore been aware of. It must be plain, also, that by the woman
62

Fourth. It was Swedenborg who first made me com
prehend and realize that all causes are spiritual; and
all phenomena were only effects; that all things which
exist in the spiritual world are the direct or indirect
causes of all those effects, that the internal or spiritual
man and the external of natural man are related to each
other as cause and effect, the causes of all things oper
ating through the internal man and all effects through
the external man, and that whatever takes place from
any cause, takes place from and according to some law
of the Divine Providence.
Fifth. From Swedenborg I first obtained an idea of
Heaven and Hell, that seemed not irreconcilable with
my conception of a God of love ; the conviction that our
material bodies are but garments in which we are
clothed for a temporary purpose, and bearing no more
permanent relation to us than the husk bears to the
corn, or the shell to the walnut, or than the type to the
thoughts I am here trying to express with them; that
death, so far from being an interruption to man's life,
is rather a ministry unto life, and as necessary a step
in it as cutting our teeth or any other process of de
velopment; that through its gates we are admitted into
a state of existence in which our faculties will be eman
cipated from the restrictions of sense, and their embry
onic capacities indefinitely increased in proportions but
faintly represented by the growth of the giant oak from
the embryonic acorn ; that the spiritual life is but a con-

is signified the proprium, from this circumstance, that it was the
woman who deceived; for nothing ever deceives man but the
proprium, or what is the same, the love of self and of the
world."

63

tinuation of our life on earth, and that heaven consists
of a practically unlimited gratification of those prevail
ing loves in harmony with Divine laws, which the dying
carry with them; that hell consists of an equally free
indulgence of the prevailing lusts and passions not in
harmony with the Divine order, which the dying carry
with them; that, whether in heaven or in hell, we have
what in life we have prepared ourselves most to enjoy,
and that an abode in heaven would be as full of torture
to one without heavenly affections, as hell would be to
one with such affections ; and, finally, that God's mercy
or love, which "is over all His works," is manifested
just as unceasingly, and just as bountifully, towards
those whose loves have attracted them to the one place,
as to those whose loves have attracted them to the oth
er; that He is always in the effort to give to every
one, whether regenerate or unregenerate, all the hap
piness such person is capable of receiving. This I found,
when I had divested myself of some of the prejudices
in which I had been educated, was the teaching of the
Bible, and that the sensuous heaven and hell of the pop
ular theology was simply a vulgar expression of our
most corrupt and selfish instincts.
Sixth. That God's infinite love is bestowed as con
stantly upon the greatest sinner as upon the greatest
saint, is manifested as fully in what we regard as tribu
lations or calamities as in what, in the worldly sense, we
regard as blessings, as prosperity, as triumphs. That so
far from having a penal purpose, our tribulations are
merciful warnings that we are violating some of the
laws of our being, the observance of which is indis
pensable to our supreme happiness and are permitted
64

only to incite us to trace our errors to their hiding
places and to correct them.
Seventh. In confessing what I am in the habit of re
garding as the most conspicuous of my obligations,
under Providence, to Swedenborg, I reserve for the
last, the one without which I possibly should never have
had the grace to understand or appropriate those al
ready enumerated, and one which I regard as by far
the most important contribution made to the science of
theology since the death of the Apostles. I refer to his
disclosure of the correspondential language in which
God has chosen to reveal Himself to man in His Word.
To aid in the comprehension of this doctrine of cor
respondence, to which I attach such value, I must
pause for a little to consider what sort of a book we
should expect the Bible to be; how the Word of God
must have been written to serve as a lamp to the feet
and a light to the path of the children of men ; in what
sort of language infinite truth could be made intelli
gible to finite beings ; and, finally, in what respect such
a Book should necessarily differ from secular literature.
Obviously, God's Word could not be addressed ex
clusively to any particular stage of intellectual matur
ity, for "His tender mercies are over all His works."
It necessarily had to be written for the instruction of
the young, as well as of the aged ; for the weak, as well
as for the strong; for the ignorant, as well as for the
learned; for the idolater, as well as for the monotheist.
It had, also, to be written not for any particular nation,
nor for any particular generation ; no more for the saint
than the savage, for the Jew than for the Gentile.
Neither can we conceive of such a Book being writ-
65

ten for any particular era or stage of civilization. On
the contrary, such a message had to be suited to the
intelligence and spiritual perceptions of every genera
tion, of every nation, of every era, in every age and
stage of civilization, for God is no respecter of persons.
Nor is that all. It had to be adapted to all the changes
and spiritual fluctuations to which every human soul
ever has been or ever can be subject ; its lessons adapted
to every possible stage in the process of every human
being's spiritual regeneration or degeneration. It is
not possible to conceive of God the Infinite and Eternal
giving His preference to any nation or tribe, or provid
ing less carefully for one period of our lives than for
another, for the old than for the young, for the mature
than the immature — for the rich than for the poor, for
the learned than for the ignorant, for the saint than for
the savage. A book of instructions essential to salva
tion, addressed to any peculiar people or tribe, or to
the people of any particular epoch, age, worldly or
spiritual condition, would necessarily absolve all outside
of those categories respectively, from any culpability or
responsibility for disregarding those instructions, and
would imply limitations of God's interest in the
salvation of His creatures, which would be wholly
inconsistent with the essential attributes of the Divine
Nature. Nor is this all. The inferiority of all creatures to the
Creator is infinite. The angels are as much His crea
tures as any of their ancestors in the heavens or their
descendants on earth, and therefore must be presumed
to have as much to learn from the teachings of Infinite
Wisdom in the spiritual world, as when they dwelt
66

among men in the flesh ; indeed, more, for they may be
assumed to be more enlightened, and capable of receiv
ing more. The Book, therefore, which professes to be
the Word of God, and a guide in the ways of salva
tion, should express truths unconditionally adapted to
the spiritual needs of all His creatures, at all times,
under all circumstances, from the beginning and to all
eternity. Any other conception of God's Word to His
creatures could not be consistent with the essential at
tributes of Divinity.
It is plain that each of these conditions differentiates
such a book profoundly from any imaginable human
composition. Swedenborg assures us, and I think dem
onstrates, that in the Bible — the Books* — we have
God's Word precisely so conditioned and differentiated
from all other .books. What, then, are the structural
differences between the Word and all other human
compositions, which gives such limitless scope to its
teachings ?
The natural world in which we live, with all its
phenomena, is a world of effects. The causes of such
effects, as I have already stated, lie far back in the will,
or more properly speaking, in the spiritual world. All
the phenomena of life, by which I mean everything of
which we take cognizance by or through the senses, are
but the sensual manifestations or effects of spiritual
causes, the action of some will, without which action
* The Greek word Biblia, signifying the Books, is plural, and
passed into the Latin as Biblia, which at first was a neuter plural.
It gradually passed over into a feminine singular because of the
habit of regarding the Scriptures as one work. All the modern
translations have followed the usage of the old Church. Did
they and the late Revisers do so, erring?
67

they could not have been manifested. Phenomena are
representations of the will or purpose which begat
them. There must, therefore, be not only a rela
tion but a correspondence between every phenomenon,
which is material, and its parent will. This correspon
dence has been aptly compared to the relation of speech
to thought ; of the printed page to the ideas it expresses.
Every material object and phenomenon expresses so
precisely the motive or will of which it was begotten,
that a person as competent to read the language of
all phenomena as he is to read the books written in his
native tongue, would in one, as in the other, think
only of the idea, motive, or will it expressed, rarely
ever of the phenomenon or type by which the par
ent idea was made intelligible to him through the
senses. When we see a smile on the face of a friend,
or a tear in his eye, our mind does not dwell upon
the muscular change in the one case, nor upon
the fountain in the other, but upon the pleasant af
fection or tender sympathy of which they are the na
tural interpreters. The smile or the tear correspond
with the emotion which they manifest, though neither
haji anything to do with producing the emotion, or has
any consciousness of it. The human face reveals to the
most careless observer well-defined qualities of char
acter, and it is those qualities only, whether correctly
or incorrectly divined, that we commonly carry in our
memories. One person we say is cunning; another,
open and frank; a third, vain; a fourth, cruel, and so
on. The features represent or correspond with the
several qualities of cunning, frankness, vanity, and
cruelty, which have been indulged in to a greater or
68

less excess. This idea is happily expressed in a familiar
couplet of the "Faery Queen" —
"For of the Soul the bodie form doth take,
For Soul is forme and doth the bodie make."
There is nothing, there can be nothing, therefore, in
the natural world which does not represent something
in the spiritual world, or which has not there something
with which it corresponds. The natural world, its activ
ities and phenomena, are the language of God : the tones
or utterances of infinitude adapted to the comprehension
of mortal man, and when we read in the Word, of the
deluge, of the ark, of mountains and rivers, of lambs,
wolves, wars, honey, frankincense, myrrh, or of any
other natural objects or phenomena, we are reading
vital truths, disguised in a language suited to every
possible stage of spiritual enlightenment. This visible
world is in fact, the thought of God expressed in a lan
guage adapted to the intelligence and edification of all
its inhabitants, in every possible stage of spiritual de
velopment. "All nature, and each individual thing in nature,"
says Swedenborg, "has its spiritual correspondence;
and, in like manner, each and all things in the human
body. But hitherto it has been unknown what cor
respondence is. Yet it was very well known in the
most ancient times; for to those who then lived the
knowledge of correspondence was the knowledge of
knowledges, and was so universal that all their books
and manuscripts were written by correspondence. The
Book of Job, which is a book of the Ancient Church,
is full of correspondences. The hieroglyphics of the
Egyptians, and the fabulous stories of highest anti-
69

qulty, were nothing else. Also, the tabernacle with all
things therein as well as their feasts,— such as the
feast of unleavened bread, the feast of tabernacles,
the feast of first-fruits; — and the priesthood of
Aaron and the Levites, and their garments of holi
ness; and besides these, all their statutes and judg
ments, which related to their worship and life, were
correspondences. Now, since Divine things present
themselves in the world by correspondences, therefore
the Word was written by pure correspondences. For
the same reason the Lord, as He spake from the Di
vine spake by correspondences ; for whatever is from
the Divine descends into such things in nature as cor
respond to the Divine, and which then conceal things
Divine, which are called celestial and spiritual, in
their bosom."
"Without the spiritual sense," says he in another
place, "no one could know why the prophet Jeremiah
was commanded to buy himself a girdle and put it on
his loins, and not to draw it through the waters, but
to hide it in the hole of a rock by the Euphrates (Jer.
xiii. 1-7), or why the prophet Isaiah was commanded
to loose the sackcloth from off his loins and put off
the shoe from off his foot, and to go naked and bare
foot three years (Isaiah xx. 2, 3) ; or why the
prophet Ezekiel was commanded to pass a razor upon
his head and upon his beard, and afterwards to divide
them [the hairs] and burn a third part in the midst
of the city, smite a third part with the sword, scatter
a third part in the wind, and bind a little of them in
his skirts, and at last to cast them into the midst of
the fire (Ezek. vi. 4) ; or why the same prophet was
commanded to lie upon his left side three hundred and
ninety days, and upon his right side forty days ; and to
make him a cake of wheat and barley and millet and
fitches, with cow's dung, and eat it, and in the mean
time to raise a rampart and a mound against Jerusa-
70

lem and besiege it (Ezek. iv. 1-5) ; or why the prophet
Hosea was twice commanded to take to himself a har
lot to wife (Hosea i. 2-9, iii. 2, 3) ; and many such
things. Moreover, who, without the spiritual sense,
would know what is signified by all things belonging
to the tabernacle, — by the ark, the mercy-seat, the
cherubim, the candle-stick, the altar of incense, the
bread of faces on the table, and its veils and curtains ?
Or who, without the spiritual sense, would know what
is signified by Aaron's garments of holiness, — by his
coat, his cloak, his ephod, the Urim and Thummim,
the mitre and other things ? Who, without the spirit
ual sense, would know what is signified by all the
things which were enjoined concerning burnt-offer
ings, sacrifices, meat-offerings and drink-offerings?
Concerning Sabbaths also, and feasts ? The truth is
that not the least thing of these was enjoined which
did not signify something relating to the Lord, to
heaven and to the church. From these few examples
it may be clearly seen that there is a spiritual sense in
each and all the particulars of the Word."
The Book of Genesis, from its beginning to the call
of Abram (chapters i.-xi.), adds Swedenborg, was
not written by Moses, but is a fragment of an older
Scripture; neither are those early chapters matter-of-
fact history, but compositions, in the form of history,
symbolical of things celestial and spiritual.
"They who do not think beyond the sense of the
letter, cannot believe otherwise than that the Creation
described in the first and second chapters of Genesis
means the creation of the universe; and that within
six days, heaven and earth and sea, and things there
in, and men in the likeness of God, were created;
but who, if he ponder deeply, cannot see, that the crea-
71

tion of the universe is not there meant? Common-
sense might teach that the operations there described
were impossible; as, that there were days, and light
and darkness, and green herbs and fruitful trees, be
fore the appearance of the sun and moon. Similar
difficulties follow, which are scarcely credited by any
one who thinks interiorly: as, that the woman was
built from the rib of the man ; that two trees were set
in Paradise, and the fruit of one forbidden to be
eaten; that the serpent discoursed with the wife of
the man, who was the wisest of mortals, and deceived
them both ; and the universal human race was on that
account condemned to hell.
"Nevertheless it is to be noted, that all things in
that story, even to the smallest iota, are divine, and
contain in them arcana, which before the angels in
the heavens are manifest as in a clear day."
Swedenborg avers that in their highest state of ex
cellence, in the Church before the flood, men had an
intuitive perception of the correspondences that uni
versally exist in nature, so that their language was the
language of nature, that is, of correspondences; and
that consequently the rites of the Church became cor-
respondential, and representative of heavenly things;
but that in time men became sensual and lost their per
ception of correspondences, and the rites of the Church
lost, in their minds, their representative character. In
observing the rites irrespective of the spiritual things
they represented, they at length became idolatrous.
That there was a more ancient revelation than ours,
as Swedenborg affirms, is proved by abundant allu
sions to them in our Word: for example The Book of
the Wars of Jehovah is cited in Numbers xxi. 14 and
Joshua x. 13; the Book of Jasher is cited in II Samuel
72

i. 18; The Proverbial Enunciations are cited in Num
bers xxi. 27, 30. Besides there were the Sayings of
the Seers, II Chronicles xxxiii. 19, The Prophecy of
Aijah, cited in II Chronicles ix. 29, and The Book of
Nathan, cited I Chronicles xxix. 29.
All these records were written in the language of
correspondence or symbolically, and if they had sur
vived would not be intelligible except to those to whom
the language of correspondence had been disclosed, and
so far only as it had been disclosed. The scraps of
them which we find in the Bible are remnants only of
sacred books far older than any script now extant, and
which contained the wisdom suited to a people far
more simple, unselfish and intuitively wise than any
of whom history has preserved any record. To recover
this lost knowledge of correspondences, Swedenborg
claims that a new revelation from the Lord was neces
sary; that, for reasons which he assigns, he was
selected as the medium through which that revelation
was to be made, — at the time, and at the earliest time,
when the world was prepared to receive and profit by
it; just as the apostles, Moses and the prophets, were
severally and at different periods of human history, se
lected for their respective offices. Swedenborg's own
testimony upon this subject, already cited, is very re
markable. Nor did he shrink from reasserting his Di
vine commission on all suitable occasions.
He says in the True Christian Religion, No. 1779:
I testify in truth that the Lord manifested Him
self to me His servant, and sent me to this office ; and
that afterwards He opened the sight of my spirit and
so intromitted me into the spiritual world, and has
73

granted me to see the heavens and the hells, and also
to converse with angels and spirits, and this now con
tinually for many years; likewise that from the first
day of that calling I have not received anything
whatever relating to the doctrines of that Church
from any angel, but from the Lord alone while I was
reading the Word.
Again, in the Apocalypse Explained, No. 1183, he
says: It has been given me to perceive distinctly what
comes from the Lord and what from angels ; what has
come from the Lord has been written, and what from
the angels has not been written.
In his Invitation to the New Church he says also :
The things related by me are not miracles, but are
proofs that for certain ends I have been introduced by
the Lord into the spiritual world.
The chief results of these communications or revela
tions were recorded in three distinct works.
The first, entitled Arcana Coslestia* appeared in
eight quarto volumes, between the years 1749 and 1756,
at the rate of about one volume a year, and was conse
crated to an exposition of the internal or spiritual sense
of the books of Genesis and Exodus. Each sentence is
taken up in its order, and its spiritual import laid open;
for Swedenborg maintained that "there is not an iota
or apex or little twirl of the Hebrew letters which does
not involve something Divine." "This," he says, "has
been shown to me from heaven; but I know it trans
cends belief."t
* Arcana Ccelestia qua in Scriptura Sacra, seu in Verbo Do
mini sunt, detecta; una cum mirabilius, qua visa sunt in Mundi
Spirituum et ccelo Angelorum.
f Arc. Ccelestia, No. 4049.
74

Second. The Apocalypse Revealed, wherein are un
covered the mysteries there foretold which have hither
to remained concealed.*
Third. The Apocalypse Explained, wherein are dis
closed the mysteries there foretold, which have hitherto
remained concealed, t The former is more summary,
and the latter a more extended work, involving incident
ally an exposition of a very considerable part of the rest
of the Word.
"This year," says Swedenborg in a letter to his
friend Oetinger, writing from Stockholm, Sept. 23,
1766, "there has been published the Apocalypsis
Revelata, which was promised in the treatise on The
Last Judgment, and from which it may be clearly
seen that I converse with angels ; for not the smallest
verse in the Apocalypse can be understood without
revelation. Who can help seeing that by the New
Jerusalem a New Church is meant, and that its doc
trines can only be revealed by the Lord, — because they
are described there by merely typical things, i. e., by
correspondences; and likewise that these can be pub
lished to the world only by means of some one to
whom the revelation has been granted ? I can solemn
ly bear witness that the Lord Himself appeared to
me, and that He sent me to do that which I am now
doing; and that for this purpose He has opened the
interiors of my mind, which are those of my spirit,
so that I can see the things which are in the spiritual
world, and hear those who are there; which
* Apocalypsis Revelata in qua deteguntur arcana qua ibi
prcedicta sunt, et hactenus recondita latuerunt. Amsterdam,
1766, 4to, pp. 629.
f Apocalypsis Explicata secundum sensum spiritualem ubi
revelantur arcana qua ibi pradicta et hactenus recondita fuerent
ex operibus posthumis Emanuelis Swedenborgii. Londoni, in 4
vols., 4to, vol. 1, 1785; vol. 2, 1786; vol. 3, 1788; vol. 4, 1789.
75

[privilege] I have had now for twenty-two years.
The mere bearing witness, however, does not suffice
at the present day to convince men of this; but any
one of a sound understanding may be confirmed by
the testimony of my writings, and especially by the
Apocalypsis Revelata. Who has heretofore known
anything about the spiritual sense of the Word; and
about the spiritual world, or heaven and hell ; or about
man's life after death ? Should these, and many other
things, be perpetually hidden from Christians ? They
have now for the first time been disclosed for the sake
of the New Church, which is the New Jerusalem, that
they [its members] may know them; others indeed
shall also know them, who yet do not know them on
account of their unbelief."
Swedenborg does not profess to give all the internal
meaning of which the Word is the repository. So far
from it, he represents the Word to be infinite; to con
tain even profounder depths of wisdom than can be ex
pressed in the language of men ; adapted, by successive
unfoldings, to the angels of all the heavens, — to the
highest state of intelligence that finite minds can ever,
to all eternity, attain; and extending upwards even to
God Himself, as the rays of light extend to the sun. In
other words, that it is in the true sense of the term
Divine, and therefore infinite. Hence the necessity that
the natural language of the Bible should be that of
correspondences, capable of involving these hidden
things, and so of being adapted to every spiritual state
of men on earth and in the heavens. Swedenborg would
therefore claim that the highest evidence of the divine
authority of the Bible is to be found in the marvellous
light of the manifold but harmonious meanings inhabit-
76

ing its letter, which the devout and reverent-minded
may find revealed through the knowledge of its cor
respondences now again made known. He teaches, too,
that nature is a similar treasury of Divine wisdom,
and capable of similar unfoldings, — a vast, continuous
series of cause and effect within cause and effect, ex
tending up to God Himself. So that His revealed or
written Word and His Word in Nature alike descend
from Him, and lead up to Him, who is the inmost and
animating soul of both; not a mere undefined pervad
ing influence, but a Divine Personal God, — an infinitely
glorious Divine Man, the great Archetype, of which
man was created the finite image.
"Without such a living principle," he says, "the
Word as to the letter is dead. For it is with the Word
as it is with man, who, as all Christians are taught to
believe, consists of two parts, an external and an in
ternal. The external man separate from the internal
is the body, which in such a state of separation is
dead ; but the internal is that which lives and causes
the external to live. The internal man is the soul;
and thus the Word, as to the letter alone, is like a body
without a soul."
Have we not here an explanation and a so
lution of the difficulties which furnish the pre
texts of Higher Criticism so called, to distract the
various religious societies of Christendom and under
mine the faith of multitudes in the Bible, and in the
God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob? What
else is it but the "dreary literalism" in which, accord
ing to a former bishop of New York, the Bible has
been for many years walled up, or according to Swe-
77

denborg, the Bible as a body without a soul, which is
the same thing ? *

VII
There probably has never been a line written that has
unsettled the faith of so many in the Divine origin and
authority of the Bible, as the opening sentence of that
sacred volume:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.
Assuming, as the Christian world with practical un
animity has done, that the Mosaic chronology dates from
this "beginning" it holds to this day that our world is
about 6,000 years old, while science has demonstrated
that 600,000 years is much nearer to the truth. Falsus
in uno falsus in omnibus is a doctrine as conclusive in
ecclesiastical as in civil law, and the Agnostic exclaims,
* For the information of those to whom Swedenborg is com
paratively a stranger, and this unhappily includes most of those
who might derive the greatest advantage from an acquaintance
with his writings — the "Orthodox Clergy" — they will find, in the
Appendix, a list of the Theological writings of Swedenborg and
the dates of their composition embracing over forty distinct
works in nearly half as many volumes. Of these several works,
a concordance has been published in which a reference to every
passage in them with a brief extract is given, arranged in alpha
betical order, and ranging in length from a single line to many
pages. This gigantic work, as a monument of patient intel
lectual industry, does not suffer by a comparison with the most
laborious achievements of the Benedictine monks. It has occu
pied the compiler, editor and translator, the Rev. John Faulkner
Potts, over twenty years, and contains more words than the
Century Dictionary. I do not know where to look in all the
secular literature of the world for another publication so
abounding in luminous suggestions touching the loftiest themes
of human concern. 78

"How absurd to ascribe divine authority to a book that
begins with what appears to be either a gross blunder or
a falsehood!" Swedenborg tells us that this first chapter of Genesis,
which is commonly supposed to treat only of the creation
of the world, and of the Garden of Eden called Para
dise, and of Adam as the first created man, really treats
of the second birth or new creation of man, that is, his
regeneration, and that the six days of creation represent
so many successive stages of his regeneration. The first
stage is that which is referred to as the "beginning,"
and includes both the state of infancy and the state im
mediately preceding regeneration. This is called
vacuity, emptiness and darkness, and the first move
ment is the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the
waters. "The beginning," he says, "implies the first
time when man is regenerating, for then he is born anew
and receives life, hence regeneration, which signifies a

new creation."

"The people which shall be created shall praise the
Lord." Psalm cii. 18.
"Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created."
Psalm civ. 30.
Thus "the beginning," referred to in the first verse of
Genesis, does not refer to any particular epoch in time,
but is applicable to every regenerating soul in all time.
"Good," says Swedenborg, "has life in itself, because it
is from the Lord, who is life itself." In the life which is
from the Lord there is wisdom and intelligence, for to
receive good from the Lord, and thence to will good, is
wisdom, and to receive truth from the Lord, and thence
to believe truth is intelligence, and they who have this
79

wisdom and intelligence have life, and whereas happi
ness is adjoined to such life, eternal happiness is also
what is signified by life." The antithesis to this, the real
life, is that death which follows the extinction of spirit
ual life. It is the birth and development of the real life
in this sense, with which human science has found itself
hitherto so incompetent to cope. And it is difficult to
see how any one who is a seeker for truth, and not
merely for a confirmation of preconceived opinion, can
read Swedenborg's exegesis of it without approving of
his interpretation and without finding any difficulties of
a scientific character by which he may have been dis
turbed, completely dispelled; without finding in it "the
history of his own life in its progress from darkness,
desolation and chaos to the glory, beauty and peace of
an endless Sabbath."
I am here tempted to quote a very striking passage
on this very subject from the writings of William Law
to show how one of the most eminent divines of the
English Established Church reached the same con
clusion as Swedenborg, so far as to consider the word
"beginning," in the first chapter of Genesis, to refer to
a state and not to a period in time. And curiously
enough he published this conclusion about twenty years
after the appearance of Swedenborg's commentary, in
a paper entitled "An Appeal to all that doubt or disbe
lieve the truths of the Gospel, whether they be Deists,
Arians, Socinians or Nominal Christians," etc.*
* This appeal appeared in 1768. The first volume of the Ar
cana Cwlestia, containing Swedenborg's commentary upon the
first chapter of Genesis, was published in 1749. It is known
that Law was a subscriber for the Arcana, but neither in what
is quoted here, nor in anything he ever published, is there any
80

Properly and strictly speaking, nothing can begin
to be; The Beginning of everything is nothing more
than its beginning to be in a New State. Thus Time
itself does not begin to be, but Duration, which al
ways was, began to be measured by the Earth's turn
ing round, or the rising and setting of the Sun, and
that is called the Beginning of Time, which is properly
speaking, only the Beginning of the measure of Dura
tion. Thus it is with all temporal Nature and all the
Qualities and Powers of temporal Beings that live in
it. No Quality or Power of Nature then began to be,
but such Qualities and Powers as had been from all
Eternity, began then to be in a New State. Ask what
Time is ; it is nothing else but something of Eternal
Duration become finite, measurable and transitory.
Ask what Fire, Light, Darkness, Air, Water and
Earth are ; they are and can be nothing else but some
Eternal Things become gross, finite, measurable,
divisible and transitory. For if there could be Fire
that did not spring out of Eternal Fire, then there
might be Time that did not come out of Eternity.
It is thus with every temporary thing and the quali
ties of it ; it is not the beginning of Nothing, but only
of a New State of something that existed before of
Eternal Nature, and is nothing else but so much of
Eternal Nature changed from its eternal to a tem
poral condition. Fire did not begin to be; Light did
not begin to be ; Water and Earth did not begin to be
when this temporary World first appeared, but all
these things came out of their eternal state into a
lower, divided, compacted and transitory state. Hear
ing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling, did not then
begin to be, when God first created the creatures of
this World ; they only came to be Qualities and Powers
direct allusion to Swedenborg by name or to his works. Law's
practical works all betray an acquaintance, though hardly a
familiarity, with his writings. 81

of a lower and more imperfect order of Beings than
they had been before. Figures and their relations did
not begin to be, when material circles, squares, etc.,
were first made, but these Figures and Relations be
gan then to appear in a lower State than they had done
before; and so it must be said of our temporal Nature
and everything in it. It is only something of Eternal
Nature separated, changed or created into a tem
porary state or condition.*
The undervaluation of the Bible is the infirmity of
the flocks and the vice of the shepherds throughout
Christendom. Both treat the Bible mostly as the sav
ages treat the soil, harvesting and hunting only what
grows spontaneously on the surface. They too rarely
turn it up to see what wealth is stored up for them be
neath. Both look with more or less suspicion or con
tempt upon those who explore and toil for the hidden
wealth. This disposition is neither logical nor theolog
ical. No one can read the Bible, however superficially,
without finding himself occasionally obliged to go be
yond the literal to the spiritual meaning of its lan
guage to get any edification from it.
Solomon proposed to build a house for the name of
the Lord (I Kings, v. 5) ; and every time we utter the
Lord's prayer we say, "Hallowed be Thy Name.' How
shall the literalist expound these words? What does a
name need of a house? How does it occupy a house?
What kind of a house can a name occupy ? Farther on
in the 9th Chapter of Kings, the Lord says, "I have hal
lowed this house which thou hast built to put my name
there forever, and mine eyes and mine heart shall be
* William Law's Works, Vol. vi., p. 114.
82

there perpetually." The young and the very ignorant
when they read these passages may suppose that in some
way these statements are literally true; that the house
was built for a name, and that God did somehow put His
eyes and heart there. When, however, they begin to re
flect, it dawns upon them that the name here referred to
must signify something more than the numeral to which
the soldier or prisoner answers at roll call. No educated
clergyman would construe these words literally. They
would generally treat it as figurative, or metaphorical,
merely leaving the impression that another writer hav
ing occasion to record the same story might have em
ployed quite different words and illustrations. In this
way God's Word is treated as if it were subject to all the
fluctuations and caprices of human speech, a treatment
entirely irreconcilable with its Divine authenticity.
So when we pray the Father to give us our "daily
bread," no inconsiderable portion of the Christian world
regard this as simply a prayer that their daily recurring
bodily appetite may be gratified, assuming that the word
"bread" here is only a general term for any suitable
nutriment for the body. But one can have read the
Bible to very little purpose not to have discovered that
the bread in this prayer signifies not only the kind of
food that is essential to the growth and development of
the body, but also of higher and more enduring life in
man, in other words spiritual food; food suited to the
nourishment of our spiritual life day by day.
Bread (from grain), says Swedenborg, in general
corresponds to the affection of all good, because it
supports life more than other things, and because all
food is meant by it. On account of this correspondence
83

the Lord is called the Bread of Life. "Thou feedest them
with the bread of tears," says the Psalmist (Ps. lxxx. 5).
"The virtuous woman," says Solomon, "looketh well to
the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of
idleness" (Prov., ch. xxxi. 27). It is obvious enough
that in neither of the cases here cited is there any ques
tion of the nourishment of the body merely. Nor when
Moses said to the Children of Israel, "Neither fear the
people of the land, they are bread for us." The people
of the land here referred to, are the lusts, the passions,
the evil propensities of every human heart, and "he
that overcometh them shall not be hurt of second
death." "They shall eat of the bread of life." "He
that overcometh shall sit with me in my throne." Such
is the kind of bread that Moses promised to those of
his followers who bravely pursued and overcame the
enemies of their own households.
Again, when the Lord said to His disciples, "I am
the Vine and ye are the branches," He was not teaching
vegetable physiology nor talking poetry, as any one may
see by noting the stations of dignity and consequence
occupied by the vine and every product of the vine, as
well as the "branch" in nearly every book of the Bible.
The prophet forecasts the birth of our Saviour in
these words : "Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear
a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and
honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil
and choose the good."*
What have butter and honey in their literal sense to
do with our choice between good and evil ? It is no ir
reverence, we hope, to say that if it has no other than
* Isaiah vii. 14.
84

the literal meaning it is nonsense; but as representing
and corresponding with the faculty by which we love the
good and eschew evil it is everything.
When we read in John that Jesus cured the blind man
by anointing his eyes with His own spittle mingled with
clay, it is our first impulse to ask why did He not prevent
the man becoming blind, and why resort to such a pro
cess to cure him when He had but to say the word and
the man's sight would have been restored? Obviously
something more than blindness of the body was involved
in this miracle, and something more than a simple eye
ointment was employed in his cure. It is not until we
observe how frequently "blindness" is used to express
the absence of divine light that we see how perfectly
our Saviour's remedy was adapted to the infirmity.
If some words in any one book of the Bible have
a spiritual or interior meaning, why not in all of that
book ? Can a motive be conceived for giving a spiritual
meaning to some word of a Divine message and not
to all ? Is not a discrimination equivalent to an impeach
ment of its Divine authorship?
Swedenborg tells us, as I have already remarked,
that in the Most Ancient Church before the flood, the
language of the world was entirely correspondential,
and when natural phenomena were named they were but
as words that express the spiritual idea with which they
corresponded, the phenomena occupying no more of the
speaker's thought or attention than the paper or letters
of a book do of the thought or attention of its reader.
At the Deluge, the children of men had so far lost
the correspondential language that the phenomena of
nature had practically ceased to be intelligible to them ;
85

they had become as a page of a book to a child who can
not read, who can spell out the characters, but having
little or no suspicion of the thought those characters
were intended to express.
It is perhaps the greatest, as it is the most nearly
universal delusion of mankind to ascribe causality to
physical phenomena; to suppose the events in nature,
of which we take note through the senses, to be some
thing more or other than a series of effects from the
spiritual causes which they represent. True, the order
and connexion of events and circumstances appear to us
for wise reasons, which I will not interrupt this narra
tive to explain, to stand towards each other in the nature
of cause and effect; but the harmony and order which
we mistake for cause and effect are but the inevitable
consequences of the order, connexion and succession of
their spiritual causes, and of the Divine order reigning
through the whole.
This correspondency, therefore, between the two
worlds of spirit and of matter, of cause and effect, must
be universal. It can admit of no exception. It does not
consist in affixing certain abitrary meanings to certain
objects, nor in the tracing of a metaphorical or poetical
resemblance between a certain state of the mind and a
certain event in nature, but it is the necessary link, the
umbilical cord, which unites the spiritual world with its
natural progeny, and in accordance with which the state
of the human will and understanding are represented in
the sensible appearances of space and time.
"We must not suffer the natural semblance of phy
sical causes to affect our mental sight," says a pro
found student of Swedenborg's spiritual philosophy,
86

"for from physical causes there is but one step to the
belief in accidental cause, or in the existence of a
cause without an end or purpose. But he whose eye
is spirtually enlightened will see that from the uni
versality of the Divine Providence operating from
ends through causes in effects, there can be no such
thing as accidents; for those things which are falsely
considered accidental, with all their consequences,
have their causes as much in the spiritual world or
state as the words of language have their causes in
the thoughts which they indicate; or, as the expres
sion of the countenance is an effect which unfolds and
represents the state of the affections."*
"Wherever in the universe," says Swedenborg,
"any object appears, it is a representative of the
Lord's kingdom; so much so, that there is actually
nothing in the atmospheric and starry universe,
nothing in the earth and its three kingdoms, that
does not, after its kind, represent. For in nature
the whole, and every part of the whole, are ulti
mate images. From the Divine essence are celes
tial states of goodness, and from these, spiritual
states of truth, and, from both of them con
jointly, natural objects; and because all things,
as well as each thing singly, subsist from the
Divine essence — that is, continually exist from Him
— and as all their derivatives must of necessity repre
sent those states through which they become extant,
therefore, it follows that the visible is nothing else but
a theatre, representative of the Lord's kingdom, and
this latter a theatre representative of the Lord Him
self." t
"Throughout nature there is not a single thing
which can exist unless it have a correspondency with
* The Science of Correspondence and other Spiritual Doc
trine, etc., by Charles Augustus Tulk.
f Arcana Calestia, n. 3483. 87

the spiritual world, for without it, it would want a
cause for its existence, and, consequently, for its sub
sistence also. For all things in nature are nothing
else but effects, the causes of which are in the spiritual
world, and the causes of these which are ends, in the
interior heaven. The effect cannot subsist unless the
cause be continually in it, for the cause ceasing, the
effect must cease also. The effect considered in itself
is nothing else but the cause, but so extrinsically
clothed as to be subservient to the cause by enabling
it to act in a lower sphere. What is here said of the
effect in relation to its cause, is equally true of the
cause in relation to its end. For a cause is nothing
unless it exist from its cause which is the end; for
without an end it is a cause devoid of order, and with
out order nothing can be effected."*

VIII
The Doctrine of Correspondences of which I have
endeavoured to give the reader some notion — he must
turn to Swedenborg's exegetical writings for an ade
quate comprehension of it — has been more or less recog
nized in all ages ; we find traces of it in the literature of
all nations. Saint Paul frequently refers to it; it was
distinctly recognized by the Fathers.
Origen in his account of Sarah and Abimelech, of
Isaac and Rebecca, and of the midwives of Egypt, says :
If any choose to understand this merely according
to the letter, he ought to seek his hearers rather
among the Jews than among Christians.
* Arcana Caelestia, n. 571 1.
88

The writings of the mystics owe pretty much all of
whatever vitality they possessed to the spiritual signifi
cance they have discerned within the letter of the Word.
During the interval between the Council of Nice and
the illumination of Swedenborg, the Christian Church
was engaged in struggles with the more or less bar
barous elements of society with which it had to deal,
elements to which the letter appealed more powerfully
than its spirit. During this long interval, the Church
was preoccupied first with the struggle between papal
and secular sovereigns for supremacy, and later with the
prelatical struggle which preceded and followed the
Reformation. The triumph of Protestantism in Ger
many and England emancipated Science and led to a
more careful study of the constitution and laws of
nature, and not only prepared the Christian world, but
compelled it to go to the Bible itself and not to councils
nor hierarchies for a reconciliation of its sacred teach
ings with the equally sacred teachings of Nature. Swe
denborg attended the lectures of Sir Isaac Newton,
whose discoveries gave the first important and enduring
impulse in Europe to the study of Natural Science, and
whose theological writings also betrayed an intelligent
discontent with the notions of the Trinity* then taught
by the Established Church, circumstances both indicat
ing him in a special sense, a providential precursor of
Swedenborg. Blaise Pascal, whose premature death deprived
France of one of the most acute and brilliant intellects
she has yet to boast of, and whose piety was not less
* "Newton's Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions
of the Scripture," addressed to John Locke.
89

extraordinary than his genius, came as near as any
one not specially illuminated for that mission, in divin
ing the structural principle of the Word as disclosed
by Swedenborg.
His argument that it was written with an internal
or spiritual, as well as with an external or natural sense,
is original and striking, though he gives no evidence of
possessing any exact knowledge of the science of corres
pondence, or of having any key to the precise spiritual
significance of the natural phenomena referred to in the
Word, except so far as their significance is disclosed in
the Bible itself. He inferred an internal meaning as
Columbus inferred a western route to the Indies. What
that internal meaning was, he had of course only a con
jectural knowledge.
In the sixteenth Article of his Pensees Pascal says:
To prove both Testaments at once we have but to
see if the prophecies of the one are accomplished in
the other. To test the prophecies, it is necessary to
understand them, for if we believe they have but a
single sense, it is certain that the Messiah will not
have come; but if they have a double sense (or a
literal and a spiritual), it is certain that He will have
come in Jesus Christ.
Farther on, and speaking of the literal inconsistencies
of the Old Testament, he says :
It is said that the law shall be changed ;* that the
sacrifice shall be changedf. That they shall be with
out a king,! without prince and without sacrifice; that
he will make a new covenant. That the law shall be
renewed ; that the precepts they have received are not
* Jeremiah xxxi. 31. f Daniel ix. 27.
| Hosea iii. 4.
90

good.* That their sacrifices are abominable.t That
God has not asked them4
On the other hand, we are elsewhere told that the
law shall endure forever, § that this covenant shall
be eternal.|| That the sacrifice shall be eternal,^
that the sceptre shall never depart from them till the
King eternal arrives.**
All these passages, are they to be accepted liter
ally ? No. Are they all to be taken figuratively ? No ;
but as reality or figure. But the first excluding a
literal interpretation, indicates that it is but figura
tive. All these things together can not be interpreted
literally ; they may all, however, be interpreted figura
tively. Then they are not meant to be interpreted
literally, but figuratively. Agnus occisus est ab ori-
gine mundi.'f'f
A portrait imports absence and presence, what is
pleasant and what is not pleasant. To know if the
law and the sacrifices are to be regarded literally
or figuratively we must see if the prophets in speaking
of these matters rested their view and thought in the
letter so as not to see but this ancient covenant, or if
they saw something more of which it was but the pic
ture ; for in a portrait one sees the thing figured. For
this purpose it is only necessary to study what they
say. When they say the covenant shall be eternal, do
they mean to speak of a covenant which shall be
changed, and so of the sacrifices?
The figure has two meanings. When one takes up
an important letter where he finds a clear meaning,
* Ezekiel xx. 25, 31. t Isaiah i. 13.
:: Hosea vi. 6. § Baruch iv. 1.
| Genesis xvii. 13, 19. If Jeremiah xxx. 18.
** Genesis xlix. 10.
ft These words of the Apocalypse xiii. 8, respond to the
thought of Pascal, that the sacrifice of the Jews pre-figured the
eternal sacrifice, that of Jesus Christ. 91

but wherein nevertheless it is stated that the sense is
veiled and obscured, that it is concealed so that he
shall see this letter without seeing it, and shall under
stand it without understanding it, what ought he to
conclude, if not that it is a figure with a double mean
ing, more especially when he encounters manifest
contradictions in the literal sense ? How highly, then,
ought we to esteem those who uncover this figure and
reveal to us its concealed meaning, especially when
the doctrines they derive from it are altogether nat
ural and clear. It is that which Jesus Christ and the
apostles have done. He has removed the seal, He has
lifted the veil, He has uncovered the spirit. We are
thus taught that the enemies of man are his passions,
that the Redeemer should be spiritual, that He should
come to us twice, once as a man of sorrows to humil
iate the proud, the second time in glory to raise the
humble; that Jesus Christ should be God and man.
The prophets have said plainly that Israel should al
ways be loved of God, and that the law should be
eternal. And they have also said that their meaning
would not be understood, that it was veiled."
Since Pascal's time the necessity of looking beyond
the letter of the Word for the means of reconciling its
teachings with the revelations of modern science has
been extensively recognized by many of the most prom
inent and influential members of the "Orthodox
Church." "You are to observe," says William Law, in his
discourse on The Spirit of Love, "that body begins
not from itself, but is all that it is, whether pure or
impure ; has all that it has, whether of light or dark
ness, and works all that it works, whether of good
or evil, merely from spirit. For nothing, my friend,
acts in the whole universe of things but spirit alone.
92

And the state, condition and degree of every spirit is
only and solely opened by the state, form, condition
and qualities of the body that belongs to it, for the
body can have no nature, form, condition or quality,
but that which the spirit that brings it forth gives
to it."*
Later, in the same paper,t Law says :
"And now, gentlemen, you may easily apprehend
how and why a God in whose holy Deity no spark of
wrath or partiality can possibly arise, but who is, from
eternity to eternity, only following forth in love, good
ness and blessing to everything capable of it, could yet
say of the children before they were born or had done
either good or evil. 'Jacob have I loved, and Esau
have I hated.' It is because Esau signifies the earth
ly, beastly nature that came from sin, and Jacob sig
nifies the incorruptible seed of the Word that is to
overcome Esau and change his mortal into immor
tality."John Keble, now most widely known as the author of
The Christian Year, in No. 89 of Tracts of the Times,
the purpose of which was to vindicate the fathers of the
Church from the supposed stigma attached to them on
account of their alleged mysticism, expressed himself in
language which would scarcely have been used by any
one not more or less imbued with the views if not the
teachings of Swedenborg, in regard to the structural
principle of the Word.
"The Scriptures deal largely in symbolical language
taken from natural objects. The chosen vehicle for
the most direct divine communication has always been
that form of speech which most readily adopts and in-
* The Works of William Law, Vol. viii., p. 22.
fP. 168. 93

vites such imagery, viz., the poetical. Is there not
something very striking to a thoughtful, reverential
mind, in the simple fact of symbolic language occur
ring in Scripture at all ? That is, when truths Scrip
tural are represented in Scripture by visible and sen
sible imagery. Consider what this really comes to.
The author of Scripture is the author of Nature. He
made His creatures what they are, upholds them in
their being, modifies it at His will, knows all their
secret relations, associations and properties. We know
not how much there may be far beyond metaphor and
similitude, in His using the name of any one of His
creatures in a translated sense, to shadow out some
thing invisible. But thus far we may seem to under
stand, that the object thus spoken of by Him, is so far
taken out of the number of ordinary figures of speech
and resources of language, and partakes henceforth
of the nature of a type.
"The text 'The invisible things from the creation
of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made,' lays down a principle or canon
of mystical interpretation for the works of nature. It
is the characteristic tendency of poetical minds to
make the world of sense, from beginning to end, sym
bolical of the absent and unseen ; and poetry was the
ordained vehicle of revelation, till God was made man
ifest in the flesh."
Those who are familiar with Keble's Christian Year
cannot fail to have been struck with the following im
pressive lines, in which the Doctrine of Correspondence
between the Natural and Spiritual Worlds is distinctly
recognized : There is a Book, who runs may read,
Which heavenly truth imparts ;
And all the lore its scholars need,
Pure eyes and Christian hearts.
94

The works of God above, below,
Within us and around,
Are pages in that Book, to shew
How God Himself is found.

The worlds are airs; 'tis only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within,
Plain as the sea and sky.
Thou who has given me eyes to see,
And love this sight so fair;
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere.
Few men differ more widely in their general tone of
thought than Keble and the late Charles Kingsley, and
yet Kingsley like Keble appears to have been quite as
deeply impressed with the mysterious relations between
the Natural and Spiritual, or the visible and the invisible
worlds. In fact, he went beyond Keble in the extent to
which he recognized the spiritual language of nature.
"The great Mysticism," he says, "is the belief
which is becoming every day stronger with me, that
all symmetrical objects, aye, and perhaps all forms,
colors and scents which show organization or ar
rangement, are types of some spiritual truth or exist
ence of a grade between the symbolical and the mystic
type. Everything seems to be full of God's reflex if
we could but see it. * * The visible world is in
some mysterious way a pattern or symbol of the in
visible one ; its physical laws are the analogues of the
spiritual laws of the eternal world."*
In a review of Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics,
Kingsley says again :
* Life of Kingsley, i. JJ.
95

"The works of God in creation and providence, be
sides their uses in this life, appeared to the old writers
as so many intended tokens from the Almighty to as
sure us of some spiritual fact or other which it con
cerns us to know."

How strange it seems for a man of as wide reading
as Kingsley, to be groping about in the dark for the ele
ments of a body of truth, which a century before Swe
denborg had unfolded as fully and as clearly as the prin
ciples of any modern science.
We do not realize how large a proportion of our
familiar speech depends for its excellence, by which I
mean its intelligibility, upon what we suppose to be the
relations and inter-dependence of nature and thought.
When we talk of "borrowing trouble," of the "fluctua
tions of fortune," the "milk of human kindness," of "a
hard head," "the scythe of Time," "an elevated charac
ter," "the frosts of age," "rosemary for remembrance,"
"a sweet face," "refined taste," or when we say of a
man that he is "true as steel," "cold as ice," "blind
to his true interests," "deaf to reason," that he has "a
voice of silver," "a face of brass," etc., we are more or
less rudely interpreting the language and lessons of
nature. It is the great weakness of modern science that its
students do mostly limit their investigations to phenome
na — that is, to facts cognizable by the senses — never
allowing themselves to look beyond the phenomena for
the Divine purpose of which they are the offspring. In
stead of looking up from nature to nature's God, to as
certain the will or motive which must have preceded the
96

phenomena, and inhabits them, they limit their inquiries
to the purely phenomenal relations of nature.
The man who did not consider whether the hand ex
tended to him by an acquaintance was intended as a
salutation or a blow, would be classed as an idiot; and
yet does the modern scientist work upon any higher
plane than this idiot? He will allow himself to know
and name all the letters on the printed page of nature,
and there he stops. He does not attempt to translate
and understand the higher lessons that page was in
tended to teach. Hence it is, perhaps, that the world is
so little indebted to the devotees of natural science for
ethical or religious truths, the only truths which in the
long run are of any value, and the very truths which
natural phenomena were specially intended to impart to
us. The time must come when no one will be regarded
as a philosopher, however familiar he may be with the
phenomena of nature, or eminent as an experimentalist,
unless he looks beyond physical to spiritual causes, and
does what in him lies to put his fingers upon the chords
of Divine harmony which connect every thing and event
in nature with their Author.
One reason, perhaps the only reason, why poetry and
poets have always enjoyed a larger measure of worldly
esteem than scientists of the same relative rank, may
fairly be attributed to the fact that all genuine poetry
depends largely for its charm upon its success in divin
ing the thoughts which lie concealed in nature as the
statue is concealed in the block of native marble. Is it
not the conatus of every true poet to decipher the spirit
ual truths which are expressed in the phenomenal world,
and which the Master has been pleased to adapt es-
97

pecially to our earthly limitations? May not the merit
of all, or at least of the highest order of poetry, be
traced to the skill of the poet in drawing illustrations of
abstract truth from natural objects? Let us turn to the
pages of the first of English poets to see whether there
is anything chimerical in this view. In each of the fol
lowing passages it will be found that natural objects
stand for, represent, correspond with and express some
abstract idea, thought or sentiment of which the object
itself could of course have had no conception; derive
from what is material somewhat that is spiritual and
for that purpose only is the material alluded to.
My salad days
When I was green in judgment.
— Antony and Cleopatra, Act I., Sc. 5.
But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through
another man's eyes. — As You Like It, Act V., Sc. 2.
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time. — Sonnet III.
Our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
— As You like It, Act II., Sc. 1.
Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
— Second part of Henry VI., Act HI., Sc. 1.
Out of the nettle danger, we pluck this flower safety.
— First part of Henry VI., Act IL, Sc. 3.
She was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather the herb
of grace.— All's Well that Ends Well, Act IV., Sc. 5.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitude.
— Troilus and Cressida, Act IIL, Sc. 3.
98

O Father Abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth for charity.
—Henry VIIL, Act IV., Sc. 2.
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of the field.
— Romeo and Juliet, Act IV., Sc. 5.
Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.
—Richard III, Act IL, Sc. 4.
How poor are they that have no patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees ?
—Othello, Act IL, Sc. 3.
'Tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perked Up in a glistering grief
And wear a golden sorrow. — Henry VIIL, Act IL, Sc. 3.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
— Merchant of Venice, Act V., Sc. 1.
Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
— Hamlet, Act I., Sc. 3.
Let's carry with us ears and eyes for the time,
But hearts for the event. — Coriolanus, Act II. , Sc. 1.
Why, what's the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?
— Much Ado About Nothing, Act V., Sc. 3.
Truth hath a quiet breast. — Richard IL, Act I., Sc. 3.
The expectancy and rose of this fair state.
— Hamlet, Act IIL, Sc. 1.
The fire of the fiint shows not till it be struck.
— Timon of Athens, Act I., Sc. 1.
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.
—Sonnet XXIX.
99

O two such silver currents, when they join,
Do glorify the banks that bound them in.
— King John, Act 1 1., Sc. I.
Nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defence.
— Sonnet XII.
When the sea was calm all boats alike
Showed mastership in floating. — Coriolanus, Act IV., Sc. I.
God be praised, that to believing souls
Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.
— Second part Henry VI., Act II., Sc. I.
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle.
— Henry V., Act I., Sc. 2.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
— Hamlet, Act IIL, Sc. 3.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop.
'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are
our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if
we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme. .. .have it sterile with idleness or manured with in
dustry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in
our wills. — Othello, Act I., Sc. 3.
If thou art rich, thou art poor,
For like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy burden but a journey,
And death unloads thee.
— Measure for Measure, Act IIL, Sc. 1.
It may be that in no single instance that we have
cited has Shakespeare discerned the true spiritual cor
respondence between his thought and the natural pheno
mena with which he has illustrated it ; nor yet is it clear
that the difference between the correspondence which
he has discerned and that which Swedenborg claims to
have had revealed to him in the interpretation of the
Bible is other than a difference in degree. May not
100

every truth of which we find confirmation or illumina
tion from nature, be a correspondence adapted to our
plane of intelligence and spiritual evolution? If we can
learn modesty from the fringed gentian, faith from
the skylark, patience from the maturing processes of
vegetation, trust from the succession of the seasons,
are we not mastering the alphabet of our Creator, are
we not recognizing the correspondence between His
thought and the language in which He has sought to
make that thought intelligible to us ?
"Wisdom," says the learned and pious Hooker in
his "Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," "hath diversely
imparted her treasures unto the world. As her
ways are of sundry kinds, so her manner of teach
ing is not one and the same. Some things she open-
eth by the sacred book of Scripture; some things
by the glorious works of nature ; with some things
she inspireth them from above by spiritual influ
ence ; in some things she leadeth and traineth only
by worldly experience and practice. We may not
so in any one special kind admire her, that we dis
grace her in any other ; but let all her ways be ac
cording unto their place and degree adored."
It has been objected by the literalists that the Holy
Scriptures, to be a perfect rule of faith, must be so
clear in necessary things as to require no interpreta
tion; that it cannot be a rule or measure where it is
obscure, and, therefore, deeper and more interior mean
ings than those primes impressionis would be inconsis
tent with a perfect rule of faith. If this be so, why
was an interval of several centuries allowed to elapse
between the appearance of the Old Testament and the
101

New ? Why was the Old Testament written in tongues
which probably not a single one of the disciples of Christ
could understand ? Why were all the books of the Bible
written down in what for centuries have ceased to be
living languages, and most of them by men whose names
and connexion with the Word have long since passed
into oblivion? Upon this theory our Bible could not
be a rule of faith to any who do not thoroughly under
stand the Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic or Syrian, and
Greek tongues, a restriction which has only to be stated
to show its absurdity. Why do adults see more in the
Word than children ; the devout more than the worldly
minded ; and why does every devout person see new sig
nificance in its pages every time he reads them ? Nay !
Why has our phenomenal world so many mysteries?
Why did we have to wait until the Word became ancient
literature before we learned that the earth revolved
around the sun instead of the reverse; before the wa
ters of the ocean were rendered habitable by the dis
covery of the compass ; before electricity was made the
handmaid of civilization? Why does the great book of
nature continue to reveal to us secrets no less surprising
than any that it has ever previously yielded? Surely
we have no more reason for expecting to know all the
truths which God has written in His Word at one time
or indeed in all time than we have to know at once all
the secrets of His mighty works which constitute our
earthly environment.
Why do we not judge our fellow man alone by what
he says or by his appearance, instead of searching for
the motives which animate him? Why do we not talk
to our children as we talk to adults? If a ship-builder
1 02

wished to convey to a child or a ploughman some notion
of an ocean steamer, he would not repeat to him his cal
culations of the strength and quantity of materials, nor
his estimates of required power and the means to be
employed in securing it. Had we occasion to explain
to an illiterate man the ebb and flow of the tides, we
should not begin with Newton's famous demonstration.
No one's first step in the study of any natural science
would be likely to learn anything whatever of the science
itself. We could never become astronomers without a
knowledge of arithmetic, and yet one may become an
expert arithmetician without adding an iota to his
knowledge of the heavenly bodies.
There is no more reason why we should comprehend
the entire significance of God's Word at sight when
uttered in written tongues than when uttered in the lan
guage of nature. It seems to be quite as reasonable to
insist that man should know at once, even at his birth,
all of the phenomenal world that the sciences have
been gradually disclosing to us or can ever disclose,
or that we will ever need to know, as that he should
know at sight all of the spiritual world which the Bible
purports to teach. As I have already observed, a mes
sage from the Infinite God had to be adapted to every
possible stage of spiritual development. It is impossible
to conceive of His restricting His light to any nation,
tribe, class, age or condition of men. Like the light of
the natural sun, it dawns gradually, and the day is half
spent before it is diffused with meridian affluence.
It necessarily follows that such a communication does
not, and cannot, mean the same thing precisely to any
two persons, nor can it mean the same thing to any
103

one person at two successive perusals. Its lessons ex
pand or contract like the pupil of the eye in proportion
to the amount of light thrown upon them, and the light
will always be supplied and increased so far and so
fast, and only so far and so fast, as we carry the les
sons of the Word into our lives, for it is only thus and
then it becomes light to us. We may safely count upon
understanding just so much of the spiritual or interior
meaning of the Word as we are prepared to make good
use of. More light than that is mercifully withheld,
lest we profane it and become blinded forever to the
sacred truths it was designed to reveal, as we would be
blinded by the rays of sun if their brilliance were not
partially obscured by a planetary atmosphere. If our
gospel is veiled, said Paul, it is veiled in them that are
perishing, in whom the God of this world hath blinded
the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel
of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should
not dawn upon them. * There is no imaginable limit
to the heights and depths of the spiritual truths
of the Word, for they are infinite. The more
the object-glass of the telescope is enlarged, the
more extensive the horizon it sweeps and the greater
the number of stellar worlds it reveals; so the more
faithfully we carry into our daily life the precepts of
the Bible as they appear to us, the more light will be
thrown upon it and the more will its interior and spir
itual meaning well up from inexhaustible fountains.
/* I will only add to this confession made many years
ago, that I do not yet know of any book or lights out-
* II Corinthians, iv. 4.
104

side of Swedenborg and his interpreters which could
have solved the difficulties which confronted me in try
ing to find the proof in its letter, that the "Word was
God" ; and my difficulties, I am persuaded, were not un
like, nor less formidable than those which thousands,
nay hundreds of thousands, are constantly stumbling
over in every Christian land. What an insignificant
fraction of the so-called Christian population of the
world attend any Church, or participate regularly, or at
all, in any of the religious exercises prescribed by the
Church, except perchance at a funeral or a wedding?
How few comparatively have ever read or heard a chap
ter of the Bible in their lives ! Yet nearly every one of
this Gentile population that has been invested with the
elective franchise, exercises it. He sees an object in
voting; he does not see any object in going to Church.
The bread of life that is there broken to him is neither
palatable nor satisfying. What means the rapid spread
of rationalism throughout the world in these latter days ?
Whence the enthusiasm for the evolutionary and rev
olutionary doctrines of Darwin and Huxley and their
disciples? Whence the distinction so frequently made
even by the clergy between the Old and the New Tes
tament? Whence the increasing skepticism in regard
to the Divinity of Christ? Whence the schisms which
are rending some denominations, and the dogmatic
fatuities which are employed to buttress others? Is
it not because theology has not kept up with the thought
and spiritual growth of the world? Is it not because
the clergy continue to read and interpret the Bible much
as they read and interpret any new book just damp from
the press, with only the dullest kind of a suspicion of
105

the depths of wisdom it enfolds? Had not Tennyson
but too much authority for saying that in the present
condition of the Church,
"There is more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds?"

IX.
I ought not to close this narrative without referring
to another incident growing out of my St. Thomas ad
ventures, that I look back upon with great satisfaction
for many reasons, not the least important of which was
the additional evidence it furnished that in all this West
Indian excursion a wiser than I was directing my steps ;
that I was even then all unconsciously fulfilling the
prediction of the prophet, "I will bring you into the wil
derness, and there will I plead with you face to face."*
Just before sailing for Hayti, I received some letters
of introduction from Mr. B. C. Clark, of Boston, who
held the commission of Consul from the Haytian Gov
ernment for that city. I was not personally known to
Mr. Clark, but he was doubtless prompted to this cour
tesy by Mr. Simones, an agent of the Haytian Govern
ment, residing in New York, whom I had consulted
about my trip to his country. Among these letters was
one to Mr. B. P. Hunt, a merchant at Port au Prince.
On our arrival at that port and before we had moored,
an elderly gentleman came out to us in a boat, and after
briefly saluting the captain, was presented to me. He
* Ezekiel xx. 35.
106

gave his name as Mr. Hunt; said that Mr. Clark had
advised him of my contemplated visit to the island, and
if he could be of any service to me during my stay there
he wished to place himself at my disposal. I thanked
him, handed him my letter of introduction, and after
a brief conversation — it was then near sunset — he asked
me where I proposed to take my lodgings in Port au
Prince. I said I did not yet know, that I should remain
on board until morning, and then go on shore and look
up the best quarters I could find in the town. He said
promptly that that would not do, that it was as much
as my life was worth to sleep on the vessel in that
harbor until morning; he added that there was not a
hotel or boarding house in Port au Prince that I would
be content to pass a night in, and that I must go home
with him. After satisfying myself that it would be
imprudent to decline Mr. Hunt's hospitality, I accom
panied him to his quarters, where I remained during
my sojourn at Port au Prince, every successive hour
of which he made me feel more and more grateful
for the circumstances which had inspired him to in
vite me.
In due time it transpired that Mr. Hunt was a
graduate of Harvard College, in the same class with
Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom he had many inter
esting things to tell me; that without any literary pre
tensions, he was a man of varied and extensive reading ;
that he knew more about Hayti, its public men and peo
ple, and the books written by or about them, than any
one else I ever met there or elsewhere ; more, probably,
than any other man then living, and with an admirable
. faculty of communicating his information in conversa-
107

tion. He was a native of Massachusetts, and seemed
eminently qualified in every way for a successful career
in his native land. For reasons which I never ventured
to enquire into, but which I had some reason to sus
pect had their origin in domestic troubles of some kind,
he went out to Hayti, travelled over the island for a year
or two, and finally contracted a partnership in a com
mercial house in Port au Prince, where he had been
reasonably prosperous for some thirteen years previous
to my making his acquaintance. Aside from the grati
tude which I owed him for taking me into his house,
without which I probably would have been in the ceme
tery with most of my recent shipmates within a week
after my arrival, I acquired a sincere esteem for the
man, an esteem which I think was cordially reciprocated.
Mr. Hunt had pretty decided opinions upon most of the
great problems of life, and was tolerably familiar, much
more than I was then, with what the most eminent
writers had written about them. I found his religious
opinions, however, even more unsettled if possible than
mine. He was a rationalist, without much faith in any
future state of existence or in the* Divine origin of the
Word. He had a well-stocked library of books, with
the contents of which he was quite familiar. When I
returned to New York, I felt moved to send him an
account of the revolution some of my opinions had un
dergone since we parted, and the circumstances which
led to it. I also sent him with some other books, two
or three volumes of Swedenborg which I recom
mended to his notice. In the course of a few weeks I
received from him a letter in which he thus alluded
to my envoi: 108

Port au Prince, April 25, 1854.
My Dear Mr. Bige^ow :
I have received your letters of March 14 and 23,
with Evening Post, Swedenborg, Humboldt, Colonial
Sal Trade, yth Census, Medicine Chest and Homoeo
pathic Physician, Magazines and Riding Whip, for
all of which accept my most sincere thanks, and most
particularly for Swedenborg. He seems to have es
tablished a "raw" in your mind which I little expect
ed, and I little expected it because in some casual con
versation we had about ghosts and the "supernatural"
so called, which is perhaps only the natural unex
plored, I found you an unbeliever. Swedenborg is
not entirely a new acquaintance. About eighteen
years ago I had his Heaven and, Hell and Apocalypse
Revealed in a former collection of books, and they
then made a strong impression on my mind which
the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of trying
to get "riches" have not wholly effaced, and which
your kindness has enabled me to renew. On Sunday
last when I got these books I read them, and have
been looking into them by snatches ever since, if not
with pleasure at least with great interest, for now,
as earlier in life, they disturb me. I have not time
to say the tithe of what I have to say of this matter,
but during these eighteen years, I have considered
Swedenborg the father of all those who, in modern
times (since Jesus and the prophets) have been able
to see spirits, who have given us glimpses (very im
perfect) of the spiritual world, and who, in short,
have been, and now are, gifted with second sight,
animal magnetism and cognate phenomena. I never
sought the acquaintance of a Swedenborgian, but
when I have casually met them, to the number of half
a dozen at long intervals — scholars, ladies, seams
tresses, shoemakers, apprentices — I have left their
109

conversation with the impression that I have been
talking to a person pure, elevated, spiritual, and in
certain departments of the mind, tho' not strong,
highly intellectual. In 1841 I asked James Faxon, a
shoemaker apprentice in Boston, what was the dif
ference between a good man religious and a good
man not religious. He said "Great. The one is good
from love of God, the other from love of himself,"
and he sent me away sorrowful, like the lawyer in the
Bible.
In the course of the following year Mr. Hunt's health,
always delicate, compelled him to return to the United
States to secure the benefit of a higher grade of medi
cal advice than was accessible in Hayti. He took up his
residence in Philadelphia.
Knowing how completely he was engrossed by his
business when I left him, how little there was in his
environment to stimulate such a curiosity as the writ
ings of Swedenborg were likely to satisfy, and the many
prejudices which any book that takes the Divine origin
and plenary inspiration of the Bible as its point of
departure, has to contend with in trying to penetrate
the mind of an agnostic of his age and temperament,
I was not surprised, though disappointed, by the tone
of his letter ; nor was I surprised, though disappointed,
at hearing nothing more from him about Swedenborg
for many years.
In the spring of 1864 I was equally surprised and
proportionately gratified by the receipt of a letter from
him, most of which was consecrated to Swedenborg
and revealed the changes in his views, which can be
best described in his own language. no

Philadelphia, March 18, 1864.
My Dear Mr. Bigelow:
* * * Since these small matters have made it
necessary for me to trouble you with this letter, I
cannot omit the opportunity of mentioning another
and quite different subject.
You may remember that ten years ago this month
you sent me at Port au Prince some volumes of the
works of Swedenborg, accompanied by a letter which
at the time I thought rather remarkable. The vol
umes in question were The True Christian Religion,
Heaven and Hell, and Documents Relating to the
Life of Swedenborg. I looked into those books at
the time they were received and later, with awakened
curiosity (for earlier in life I had seen them), and
sometimes with a more direct interest, but only at in
tervals, and these often long. The impression these
readings made seemed to remain, however, for invari
ably, during the last three or four years, whenever I
have thought of a future state, I have found myself
looking at it from Swedenborg's point of view. This
winter my chronic complaint, co-operating with
choice, has kept me at home a great deal, and after
reading in this and that direction for some time I,
without any fixed purpose of doing so at the com
mencement, took up these books, and one after an
other went carefully through them. There are some
things in them which I have not been fully able to
appropriate. I do not find a satisfactory account of
foreknowledge in its bearing on foreordination, and
the persons whose condition in the spiritual world is
described are too strictly confined to the theological
class. But on the whole, the premise once granted
that Swedenborg was the appointed servant of the
Lord, the entire system presents the most logical,
rational and natural account of man's spiritual nature
in

and future life which I have any knowledge of. In
fact it is the only theology which has ever at all com
mended itself to my acceptance. Besides, the per
sonal character and life of the man have great weight
with me as collateral evidence of the truth. Sweden
borg did not, like all other, even good founders of
sects, Wesley included, seek personal power. He
never thought of being at the head of a new organiza
tion. He did not seek to make proselytes. He con
tented himself with simply placing on record the rev
elations he had been commanded to make, and left it
to the Lord to establish His visible Church in His
own way and time. He nevertheless speaks as one
having authority, and does not argue or beg the ques
tion, and this I like, for I am weary of conjecture. I
have no value for cases made out by construction. I
am seeking for more of his works, and must find out
whether Dr. Bush's lectures were ever published ex
cept in the Evening Post. Meantime I must thank
you anew for these volumes, which it has taken me ten
years to find the full value of. "Good seed, it seems,
will keep."
Some years before this letter was written Mr. Hunt
had retired from the commercial house with which he
had been connected, and the remainder of his life was
consecrated pretty faithfully to his Master's business.
He interested himself especially in the people of African
descent whom the war had rendered homeless and des
titute, and in collecting the children of colored soldiers,
orphans especially, into schools. His charity took this
direction partly because these people seemed at the time
most in need of assistance, protection and instruction,
and partly because he had acquired during his long resi
dence in Hayti an interest and respect for the race
112

which it rarely enjoys in countries where it occupies a
servile position. In 1867 he wrote me a letter from
which I take a single paragraph to show how closely
the Church was associated in his mind with his charities,
and how entirely he had come to regard life as a pre
cious opportunity which it pained him to see any one
neglect. 1724 Frankford Road, Phil., June 17, 1867.
My Dear Friend :
This is a country in which all social and govern
mental experiments that have not been tried on the
other hemisphere, or which have been tried badly,
are to have a fair field ; and the late war was the clean
ing process to get this field ready. Are you ready to
go into it? For, if the New Church is the True
Church, as I firmly believe, it must be made manifest
by able, practical men of the world, who earnestly
carry their faith into practice. *

X

In looking back over the series of incidents culmin
ating in the restoration of my faith in the Word, which
I have roughly outlined, how can I hesitate to believe
that I was led — should I not say driven — every step by
the Master ? Why did I go to Hayti at all, when there
were so many other places more interesting to visit and
* Mr. Hunt bequeathed that portion of his library which re
lated to the history and vicissitudes of the West India Islands,
and especially of their African population — some 700 volumes —
besides a valuable collection of MS. notes and charts, to the
Boston Public Library. "3

more accessible, that I had never seen ? Why was Mr.
Clark, whom I did not know, inspired to give me a let
ter of introduction to Mr. Hunt, of whom I had never
heard? Why did the fever drive me on to another
place I had no curiosity to see, and which I omitted
no effort to avoid; and why did I happen there just
when the disabled French steamer bound for New York
and the cholera left me no alternative but to remain
two or three weeks instead of as many hours? Why
was Mr. Kjerulff the only guest at the hotel with whom
I could enter into any social relations? Why did I
stumble upon a chapter in the Bible in a morning's
reading that provoked me to reveal my agnosticism to
this comparative stranger ? Why had I been for nearly
two months separated from all business cares and pre
occupations, and even from books and newspapers, my
mind meantime lying fallow, until it had grown hungry
and thirsty for something to feed upon, before Mr.
Kjerulff placed Swedenborg's books into my hand?
Why were we to be fellow-passengers and dependent
upon each other exclusively for society for most of the
succeeding month? Why, I ask, all these incidents,
none of which would have occurred to me if I could
have had my own way, unless it was necessary to make
me lie down to sleep like Jacob, upon a pillow of stone,
that when I should awake I might be ready to exclaim :
"Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know
it." Any one of the incidents from the time I left New
York, not to speak of those which decided me to go, fail
ing, and I was constantly struggling to make them fail,
I might still be without the Bible, if not without a God,
in the world. What an unexpected significance my ex-
114

perience has given to the words of the prophet, "It is
not in man to direct his way, nor in man that walketh
to direct his steps."
I waited patiently for the Lord;
And He inclined unto me and heard my cry.
He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the
miry clay,
And set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto
our God. — Psalm xl. 1-3.

H5

APPENDIX.

Miss Rose Kjerulff's letter:
Manitou, Colorado, December 18, '95.
Dear Mr. Bigelow :
The little book you so kindly sent me gives me much
pleasure. Of all I have seen written about our Sweden
borg, your estimate of him is the most satisfactory.
Such a book would be of immense use could it be gen
erally known, but I believe it is not published for the
public. Certainly yours was a wonderful experience in
our Islands, indeed Providential.
There are some friends of mine in the East whom I
would like to have read it, but I prize this copy that you
sent me too highly to part with it. One of these friends
resides in New York City, whom possibly you may have
met. She is of a strictly Presbyterian family, but I
believe has joined our New Church Society in 35th
Street. She told me she could not accept the cruel doc
trines of the old Church. I think hers one of the most
spiritual minds I have known.
My father went to heaven in- 1874 — he was in his
80th year. He was most happy when he knew he was
to go, and his spiritual or internal sight was open to
behold the other world. One of my sisters who died in
Boston in 1868 and a favorite aunt were present with
117

him three days before he went, and they told him that
he would be with them in three days. He told the fam
ily of this but it was hard to believe, as he did not seem
so ill, and the Doctor declared he would be well next
day. However, my sister insisted on staying all night
with him when she knew my father had said exactly
when he was to go, which happened exactly as indicated.
Of course they would not tell that Danish doctor how
my father knew he was to go just at that hour. I was
in New York at the time and only knew of the circum
stances on my return home a few months later. My
father was more than ever convinced in his last days of
the truth of Swedenborg's revelations, and he went joy
ously to the next world. He was a most spiritual man
and did much good while he lived. He had settled in
St. Croix the last years of his life, being fond of that
Island. I was residing there until the Negro Insurrec
tion in 1878, when my beautiful home there was utterly
destroyed, as was the best portion of the estates, and I
had to return to this country to my sister and brother-
in-law, Commodore Spicer, who then was in command
of the Boston Navy Yard. My brother then died in
testate, all I possessed in his hands, and then our Deal
ing Court (Chancery) took everything and gave us
nothing, as is the custom in those Colonies for absentees.
My youngest sister who had been in Europe a number
of years saved enough so that we can exist up in these
mountains in seclusion and quiet, which we prefer to
a fashionable life. You know something of our West
India habits ; now we have learned to wait on ourselves,
I think we are the happier for it. My nephew George
Butler (whose father you were so good to save from
118

consumption in 1868) is now on Government work of
irrigation for the Indian Reservation in Arizona, has
done masterful work in Montana and will be a useful
man to his country. He has great faculty, he was a
most wonderful child. We are ever most grateful for
your great kindness in helping us as you did when I
appealed to you on my arrival from Havana when his
mother went to her home in heaven. I trust not to
have wearied you with this long letter.
With much esteem I remain, Sincerely yours,
Rose Kjerulee.
B.
Chronological List of Swedenborg's Principal Theolog
ical Works, Translated into English:
Arcana Coelestia, 1747- 1758.
Heaven and Hell, i7$7, 1758-
The White Horse, 1757, 1758.
The New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrines,
1757, 1758.
The Earths in the Universe, 1756, 1758.
The Last Judgment, 1757, 1758.
The Apocalypse Explained, i757"I759-
Summary Exposition of the Prophets and Psalms,
1759, 1760.
The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Respecting the
Lord, 1 761- 1 763.
The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Concerning the
Sacred Scriptures, 1761-1763.
The Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem, 1761-
1763. 119

The Doctrine of Faith of the New Jerusalem, 1761-
1763.
Continuation of the Last Judgment, 1763.
The Divine Love and Wisdom, 1763, 1764.
The Divine Providence, 1763, 1764.
The Doctrine of Charity, 1764.
Apocalypse Revealed, 1764- 1766.
Conjugal Love, 1767, 1768.
Brief Exposition of the Doctrines of the New Church,
1768, 1769.
Intercourse of the Soul and the Body, 1769.
The True Christian Religion, 1 769-1 771.
The Coronis, 1771.

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