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Doc. 256. ] 473
CUNO’S LETTER TO SWEDENBORG.
versed in that spiritual sense ; nay, I acknowledge it with
admiration. Your little treatise on "The White Horse’ would
please me above your other works, if towards the close you
did not rashly deny the inspiration and Divine authority of the
apostolic epistles ofPaul, Peter, John, James, and Jude ; because,
in your opinion, they have no internal sense. Yet I pass over
these things with many others.
"I will now say a few words about your conversation with
spirits, which no one will believe, or deem worthy of belief, so
long as it rests on your own, and no other, testimony. Most
reverend man, by my intercourse with you I have been con
vinced of your probity and your sincere love of the truth.
Your idea of the incarnate Word, the Redeemer of mankind ,
who can never sufficiently be venerated and loved, has inspired
me with the deepest reverence for you. But I will not enter
more into details.
"Permit me, my dearest friend, to value this pledge of your
love most highly, viz. that I may tell you freely and candidly
what your haughty and envious readers are unwilling to tell
you. Pardon me, if I do not acknowledge as sufficient your
own testimony on the things you have heard and seen.’
Ecclesiastical history informs us, that many distinguished,
pious, and most learned men, by indulging too much in their
meditations in religion, have fallen into Scylla, while endeavouring
to avoid Charybdis. I will mention but one instance-Theo
phrastus Paracelsus.214 This great investigator of nature, and
finally of the mysteries of religion, was a real ornament of
his age and a paragon of learning. His contemporaries admired
in him the great physician and chemist ; and posterity will
still admire these qualities in him. Yet the church and
Christendom abhor him as a mystic, and as a man who would
judge of Divine things from natural things. Men in en
deavouring to avoid faults are apt to run into extremes.
"But let me use your own words. You say in your work
on ’Heaven and Hell,’ no. 249 : * [To speak with spirits is at
* As Cuno quotes here the words of Swedenborg, we consider it due
to the reader, to quote the whole of the paragraph, of which he cites a
portion.
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