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1300 NOTES TO VOLUME II.
Swedenborg provoked by his treatise on Scortatory Love. In what
follows, however, he becomes guilty of the same "gross calumny,"
to which, he says, Swedenborg became "subjected" by writing the
latter part of his treatise on "Conjugial Love." He says :
"It is to be feared that Swedenborg’s own habits betrayed him
into this apology for Fornication." Mr. White evidently makes here
the charge of fornication against Swedenborg ; the calumnious nature
of which charge has been exposed in Note 27, and also in Docu
ment 255, p. 437.
Mr. White continues, "Amazing is his heathenish neglect of the
Woman in the prescribed transaction! A youth of vigorous passions
may keep a Mistress and thereby preserve mental and physical
equanimity ; but what of the Woman thus sacrificed? Nothing:
Swedenborg has not a word to say about her though Hell is her
portion. True, the Mistress must be neither Maid nor Wife; but
how Mistresses thus qualified are to be procured, he leaves us to
infer." Swedenborg says expressly that "a Mistress must be neither
Maid nor Wife;" from this, however, it follows that in case all
women are either Maids or Wives, an unmarried man can have no
mistress, and he has to do without one. But as to "hell being the
portion of a mistress," this is a fiction of Mr. White’s brain which
he falsely imputes to Swedenborg. In A. C. 1113, to which passage
Mr. White appeals in support of his assertion, we read as follows:
"There are girls, otherwise of a good disposition, who became
prostitutes, and were persuaded that there is nothing bad in it.
As these were not yet of age, and had not yet the requisite know
ledge and judgment of such a life, they have a severe master ap
pointed over them who chastises them whenever in their thoughts
they entertain such wrong notions. Of him they are very much
afraid; and in this way they are vastated. But adult women who
were prostitutes and enticed others, do not undergo vastation, but
are in hell." Swedenborg thus expressly says that the portion of
prostitutes and mistresses is not necessarily hell, but that those
who are "otherwise of a good disposition" are capable of being
vastated of their evils, and thus of being finally saved.
Mr. White, like the majority of those whom in 1856 he styled
the "sickly virtuous and the hypocritically pure," in 1867 is unwilling
to see those distinctions which Swedenborg points out between
"promiscuous fornication," and "keeping a mistress," and he condemns
as unpardonable any indulgence of the sexual passion except in
"honest wedlock;" for, says he, "To speak the truth is often highly
inconvenient, but a moralist does not encourage us to evade the
inconvenience by falsehood. No, he says, speak the truth and bear
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