Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Sidor ...
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
EXTRACTS FROM THE MONTHLY REVIEW. 209
oils classes of schoolmen he appears never to have attached himself, excepting
for different purposes from theirs. He pursued mathematics for a distinctly ex-
traneous end. As a student of physiology he belonged to no clique or school,
and had no class of prejudices to encounter. In theology he was almost as free
mentally, as though not a single commentator had written or system been
formed, but as though his hands were the first in which the Word of God was
placed in its virgin purity. Add to this that he by no means disregarded the
works of others, but was learned in all useful learning. He had a sound prac-
tical education, and was employed daily in the actual business of life for a se-
ries of years. He was thoroughly acquainted with mechanics, chemistry, math-
ematics, astronomy, and the other sciences as known in his time, and had eli-
cited universal truths in the sphere of each. From the beginning he perceived
that there was an order in nature. This enabled him to pursue his own studies
with a view to order. He ascended from the theory of earthy substances to the
theory of the atmospheres, and from both to the theory of cosmogony, and came
gradually to man as the crowning object of nature. He brought the order of the
macrocosm to illustrate the order of the microcosm. His dominant end, which
he never lost sight of for a moment, was spiritual and moral, which preserved
his mind alive in a long course of physical studies, and empowered him to see
life and substance in the otherwise dead machinery of the creation. He was a
man of uncommon humbleness, and never once looked back, to gratify self-
complacency, upon past achievements, but travelled onwards and still onwards,
* without fatigue and without repose,’ to a home in the fruition of the infinite
and eternal. Such was the competitor who now entered the arena of what had,
until this time, been exclusively medical science ; truly a man of whom it is not
too much to say, that he possessed the kindhest, broadest, highest, most theo-
retical and most practical genius that it has yet pleased God to bestow on the
weary ages of civilization."
XLIV.
EXTRACTS
FROM THE EARLIER VOLUMES
OF THE LONDON MONTHLY REVIEW,
RESPECTING
SWEDENBORG’S THEOLOGICAL WORKS.
The ensuing articles are presented to the reader simply as a literary curiosity. They
consist of perhaps the earliest notices of several of Swedenborg’s theological works on
their first appearance in English. To one who can now look abroad over the hundreds
of churches and thousands of believers that, from the profoundest conviction, regard
Swedenborg as the selected and illuminated herald of the New Jerusalem, it canno^ but
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
