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1018 [Doc. 313.
SWEDENBORG’S WRITINGS.
we gave an account of a small quarto volume, containing some
of Baron Swedenborg’s lucubrations [see no. 140], which was
probably intended as an introduction to further publications of the
same kind. In that work, we had some information concerning the
family, rank, and office, as also of the peculiar turn and disposition
of this extraordinary person. The present much larger performance,
containing upwards of 500 pages, presents us with the same
enthusiastic reveries, and unaccountable sallies of imagination, of
which a specimen was given in the book above-mentioned. We
observe in it the works of natural good sense and ingenuity, as
well as of application and learning; but intermixed with so much
mysticism, and further accompanied with such astonishing accounts
of what the Author has seen and heard when he was admitted to
converse with angels and spirits in the invisible world, that though
his relations are delivered in a plausible and coherent manner, it is
impossible not to conclude that they are the productions of a
disordered brain. We meet continually with these memorabilia,
as they are called, which, it might be supposed, were only intended
as a kind of allegories to diversify his work, and by this means to
amuse and more strongly impress his readers : but he asserts with
the greatest coolness and confidence that he has frequently been
admitted, during the last twenty-seven years of his life, into the
unseen worlds, and that the accounts he gives are not chimeras or
inventions, but founded on what he has truly seen and heard; and
this not in a kind of dream or vision, but when he was fully awake.
"The baron has conceived some notion of a great alteration which
took place in the spiritual world in 1757, when, if we understand
him right, the New Church, or Nova Hierosolyma, as he elsewhere
calls it, began to be erected, and the last judgment (ultimum
judicium) was held in the world of spirits, which, says he, I do
attest, because, when I was broad awake, I beheld it with mine own
eyes. He tells us that all that is said in the Scriptures concerning
a new heaven and a new earth, and the second advent of Christ, is
to be explained and understood, not literally, but in a spiritual
manner.
"The doctrine and practice of this new church, of which our Author
seems to consider himself as a special messenger, are laid before us
in this volume. We observe, that he strenuously asserts the unity
of the Deity, although he acknowledges a Trinity; but, at the same
time, declares, that this Trinity was not till the appearance of Christ,
when the Supreme God united himself to the man Christ Jesus.
He contends that a trinity of persons was not the primitive faith
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