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580 REFUTATION OF FALSE REPORTS. [Doc. 269.
clergyman of the Church of England declared to me, on the
very first visit he paid me in 1778, at my house, then in
Grafton Street, Soho, that three or four days before Sweden
borg’s death, he waited on him with Dr. Messiter,2 and in
the doctor’s presence earnestly pressed him openly to declare
whether all he had written was strictly true, or whether any
part or parts thereof were to be excepted ? I have written,’
answered Swedenborg with a degree of warmth, ’nothing but
the truth, as you will have it more and more confirmed here
after all the days of your life, provided you always keep close
to the Lord, and faithfully serve Him alone, in shunning evils
of all kinds as sins against Him, and diligently searching His
Sacred Word, which from beginning to end bears incontest
able testimony to the truth of the doctrines I have delivered
to the world. * Dr. Messiter, lately deceased, has also more
than once affirmed to me this plain declaration of his intimate
friend, the Rev. Thomas Hartley, as witness my hand on the
Lord’s day, May 9, 1790.
2
"BENEDICT CHASTANIER."
In the preface to a work published by him in 1786 under
the title : " Tableau Analytique et Raisonné de la Doctrine
Céleste de l’Église de la Nouvelle Jérusalem," he makes the
following additional statement respecting the charge which had
been brought forward against Swedenborg, and which has been
refuted in the preceding pages :
"As we were engaged in preparing the present compilation,
a report reached us, that a certain Swedish Count whose
name we have forgotten, is circulating in Holland a fictitious
account respecting our author, which, he says, he has learned
from a very good quarter, viz. ’that Emanuel Swedenborg in
the hour of his death resolved to make a general recantation
of everything he has written since 1743 ; that he has done so
in the presence of the Swedish clergyman who administered
to him the last sacrament of the holy eucharist ; and that he
declared to that minister that it was all false, and that nothing
of what he had communicated to the world in his theological
* Compare Mr. Hartley’s own statement of this occurrence in Docu
ment 259, no. 16.
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