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334 VII. TIME OF FREEDOM AND NEOLOGY.
Swedenborg (16881772). He was third child and
second son of the famous Jesper Svedberg, Bishop of
Skara, already several times mentioned, and his first wife,
Sara Behm. He inherited from his father the visionary
temper, which had such strange manifestations in the last
thirty years of his long life. But this was only one side of
his character. Both father and mother came from the Stora
Kopparberg, the mining district of Dalarne, and Sweden
borg inherited from his mother and maternal grandfather,
not only mining property, but in all probability his re
markable interest in and intelligence of all matters there
with concerned. Swedenborg is certainly one of the most
extraordinary combinations of the speculative, and the
practical, the visionary and the materialist characters that
the world has ever seen. He is the greatest of the
encyclopaedic geniuses produced by his native country, or
as one of his admirers calls him,
"
the most grandly super
ficial writer who had then arisen a rare qualification in
its good sense
"
(Wilkinson :
p. 53).
For the first ten or twelve years of his life he had marked
religious instincts, and he was happy to remember in his
Hood :
Swedenborg : a Biography and an Exposition, London,
1854, is wordy and diffuse, but rather interesting. I have not
seen Tafel s works. The other books I have consulted are the
article in P.R.E.8
,
Vol. 19, by W. Kohler, and older articles in
biographical dictionaries; Schuck and Warburg :
I.L.S.H., ii.,
234-9 and particularly Hjalmar Holmquist :
Swedenborgs
fdrsta Verksamhet-s period in the Bib eljorshare, February,
1909, and Alfred H. Stroh :
Grunddragen af Swedenborg
1
s Lif,
Stockholm, 1908. I have used Dorner s H. of Prot. TheoL,
E. T., ii., 240-5, as a criticism of S. s theological position.
R. W. Emerson s essay on Representative Men, provides
criticism of another kind.
Of Swedenborg s own works I have The true Christian
Religion, containing the Universal theology of the New Church
(translated from the Latin published at Amsterdam, 1771),
London ; Swedenborg S. B. and F., 1890, and Rev. Augustus
Clissold s 4 vols. :
Spiritual Exposition of the Apocalypse,
Lond., 1851. William White s analyses are sufficient for most
purposes. I quote the second edition of both White and
Wilkinson.
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