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640 NOTES TO VOLUME I.
as to revolutionize society, and to do away with the distinction be
tw rich and poor. This idea he connected in his mind with the
establishment of the New Church by the following process of reason
ing: as by the good and truth of the New Jerusalem the church is
to be re -organized, and man himself to be regenerated; so he concluded
that by gold and silver, which correspond to goodness and truth, the
world is to be revolutionized and to be regenerated on the natural
and political plane.
By his learning and the plausibility of his reasoning he exercised
great influence on other followers of Swedenborg, especially Bergklint
the mining engineer; nay, he even impressed Baron Munck, the
governor of Drottningholm , with the idea that he was capable of
making gold, so that this official built for him a laboratory in
Drottningholm , where A. Nordensköld, together with Bergklint, tried
for two years ( 1788 to 1790,) to carry out their scheme of mak
ing gold; but when they did not succeed, Munck employed Bergklint
and a Captain Appelqvist to coin false Russian gold, and to make
false Russian paper-money, making them believe that it was done by
order of the King. This matter leaked out, and in 1792 Munck
was deprived of all his offices and honours, and was exiled from
Sweden. A minute description of all these transactions is contained
in a paper read before the Academy of Finland in 1867, entitled :
" Finish Alchemists" ( Finska Achemyster), consisting for the most
part of letters written by Bergklint to the Nordensköld family in
Finland .
By mixing up the cause of the New Church with gold-making
on the one hand, and mesmerism on the other, the early followers
of Swedenborg did great injury to the cause of the New Church in
their own country. This too was the cause of the breaking up of
the Philanthropic-Exegetic Society, of which both A. Nordensköld
and Bergklint were members. It was not A. Nordensköld however,
but Baron Silfverhjelm (see Document 9C, Table IV, No. 2, p . 91)
who introduced mesmerism into that society, which was especially
broken up by the attacks and satires of the poets Kellgren and
Leopold, in “ Stockholm’s Post,” of which the former was the editor.
Augustus Nordensköld and C. B. Wadström ,36 who had been
the president of that society, left Sweden in consequence of these
attacks; Wadström as early as 1787, and A. Nordensköld in 1790;
C. F. Nordensköld alone remained in Sweden and defended the cause
of the New Church and its adherents against their assailants.
It is strange to see how A. Nordensköld, while being consumed
on the one hand with a fever for making gold, busied himself
intellectually on the other with developing the idea of the New
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