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BENEDICT CHASTANIER 1179
return to his native country, and to work there for the spread of
the New Church. Accordingly we find him in 1801 in Paris, whence,
on November 11, he addressed the following letter to a friend
of the New Church in Sweden: "Having been obliged for a long
time during the prevalence of the great revolution which has
shaken the whole of Europe-to suspend my periodical publication
of the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg in the French
language, and as I do not know whether there are still any of the
members of the Exegetic Society, which existed while I published
in London my Journal Novi-Jérusalémite,-I write to you for in
formation on this subject, as I require it for carrying out my pro
posed plan, which induced me in the month of May of the present
year to return to my native country . . . .
"I desire to inform you that under the Divine Providence I have
resolved to resume my periodical publications, and to begin with the
inestimable Apocalypsis Revelata, to which I shall prefix a translation
of the excellent preface by our respected friend John Clowes, and
at the close I propose to append the letter which the same Mr.
Clowes addressed to Mr. Smith, the member of Parliament- in order
to refute thereby the abuse which the ex-Jesuit Abbé Barruel in
his frivolous book on ’Jacobinism,’ which was printed four or five
years ago in London at the expense of the English nobility,
poured forth with a genuine Roman Catholic priestly acerbity against
your countryman Emanuel Swedenborg, and his enlightened writings.
I have already received much encouragement in my native country
for the publication of such and similar works, and I hope that Sweden,
our author’s native country, will not be the last to interest itself
in breaking asunder the emptiness of the shades of night, and in
spreading truth and light ... I have great pleasure in informing
you that here in town I am associated with a number of scholars
and literati, some of whom may be justly regarded as writers of the
first rank, both in respect to their scholarship and their purity of
language."
The whole of this project seems, however, to have miscarried,
for as we have already seen, Mr. Henry Servanté wrote in 1806,
that Chastanier "through indiscretion had experienced many un
pleasant vicissitudes in the natural world, and was at that time
in a very languishing state." The difficulties under which
Chastanier then laboured, and which induced him to part with the
MSS. of Swedenborg which were in his hands, are described in
Document 309, p. 812 ; where reference also is made to his
melancholy end. On this subject Mr. R. Hindmarsh in the "Rise
and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church" (p. 30) gives us the
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