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224 DOCUMENTS CONCERNING SWEDENBORG.
scepticism, and eclecticism, which, through so long a course of human history, have been
the obvious intellectual means of counteracting the plainness of the blessed Gospel, and,
in a word, of * bringing life and immortality to’—darkness."
XLVII.
TESTIMONY
OF
ULRIKA, QUEEN OF SWEDEN,
AND OF
THE CELEBRATED GERMAN SAVAN, WIELAND,
RESPECTING SWEDENBORG’S INTERCOURSE WITH THE SPIRITUAL WORLD.
{From the Intellectual Repositoryfor May, 1845.)
As Swedenborg’s writings are addressed to the unsophisticated rational mind, and not
to the sensual, still less to " the carnal mind, which is enmity against God," he, more than
any other writer, has showed the total inefficacy of miracles to affect the rational mind,
and has demonstrated that nothing but the calm contemplation of truth, from the love of
truth, can lay the foundations of a genuine faith ; and consequently from first to last he re-
pudiated the merely external testimony of miracles as a means of moving, and of inducing
the mind|to embrace and love genuine truth. Now although this is the testimony of Swe-
denborg as to the total inefficacy of miracles as a means of moving the rational mind to the
love and reception of truth, yet there are several authentic and well-established facts re-
corded of him (as incontestably proving that he had his spiritual senses opened to a com-
munication with the spiritual world, according to his own constant assertion from 1745 to
1772, a period of 27 years, during which he wrote and published his Exposition of the
Spiritual Sense of Scripture, his Doctrines of genuine Christianity, or of the New Jerusa-
lem) and of his information concerning Heaven and Hell, or the state of man after death.
These writings he addressed to the principal Universities of Europe, and to the bishops
and heads of the different Churches both in Britain and on the Continent, and requested that
they would read them and institute an examination into the ideas and doctrines they unfold
from the Scriptures. Swedenborg, therefore, appealed to the Word of God as the only
standard according to which his writings on all subjects of Christian doctrine should be
judged ;
—" if they speak not according to that Word it is because there is no light in them"
—(Isaiah xiii. 20)—and no writer has ever placed the Word on so exalted a pinnacle of
holiness, and no author has ever shown, to the defeat and dismay of the deist and infidel,
in what its divinity consists so clearly and powerfully as Swedenborg.
There are very many minds (whose number, however, is decreasing) who will not see
truth with their own eyes, in its own light, but who still adhere to creeds, doctrines, and
opinions, which are supposed to rest upon the Word as their authority and foundation, but
which, in reality, are only based upon human tradition, and the dubious results of mere
learning and ingenuity, and not upon the Scriptures of Truth. All such " having drunk
old wine, do not straightway desire new, for they say the old is better"—(Luke v. 39)
—
that is, having been educated in the perverse principles of a fallen and consummated
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