America; and that numbers of intelligent
and even learned men are found among its
votaries.

Emanual Swedenborg was no vulgar
fanatic. He was distinguished by his social
position, his eminence in science and literature,
his active pursuits as a man of the
world, and his high personal character
during his whole life. He was the son of a
Lutheran bishop, and was born at Stockholm
in sixteen hundred and eighty-eight.
He distinguished himself in the physical
sciences and the practical arts connected with
them; and his various works in mathematics,
chemistry, and physiology, hold a high place
in the literature of the day. He received
honours from the principal scientific bodies
of Europe, and was appointed by Charles XII,
Inspector-General of the Mines, as a reward
for important services rendered by him to the
king. The royal favour was continued to
him by Charles's successor, Queen Ulrica, by
whom he was ennobled, with the title of
baron. Such was his life till three-score and
ten, when he suddenly renounced the world,
resigned his public offices, and began to
proclaim his celestial mission, which, according
to his own account, he had received some
years before. In the preface to one of his
mystical treatises (De Cœlo et Inferno) he
says: I was dining very late at my lodgings
in London—(this was in seventeen
hundred and forty-three)—and was eating
heartily. When I was finishing my meal
I saw a sort of mist around me, and the
floor covered with hideous reptiles. They
disappeared: the mist cleared up; and I saw
plainly, in the midst of a vivid light, a man
sitting in the corner of the room, who said
with a terrible voice, Don't eat so much.
Darkness again gathered around me—it was
dissipated by degrees, and I found myself
alone. The following night the same man,
radiant with light, appeared to me and said:
I, the Lord, the Creator and the Redeemer,
have chosen thee to explain to mankind the
inward and spiritual sense of the Holy
Scriptures, and I shall dictate what thou art to
write. That night the eyes of my inner man
were opened, and enabled to look into heaven,
the world of spirits, and hell; and there I
saw many persons of my acquaintance, some
dead long before, and others recently. He
spent the latter years of his life in publishing,
in quick succession, a multitude of works,
reporting his conversations with God, angels,
and spirits of the dead, and describing visits,
not only to the planets of our solar system,
but to the fixed stars in the remotest regions
of the universe. He always speaks as an eye
or an ear witness: Such is what the Lord
hath revealed to me: Such is what the angels
have told me. He relates with minuteness
his dialogues and disputations with the beings
of other worlds; describes their personal
appearance, habits, and manners, in a familiar
and matter-of-fact way, which reminds us of
the writings of Defoe; and uses the same
style in describing the things he saw and
heard among angels and spirits, and even in
the presence of God himself. All these
revelations are given as the proofs and illustrations
of the mystical doctrines which he is
commissioned to teach, and he claims for
them all the authority due to immediate
communications from heaven. His visions,
and the mystical system founded upon them,
excited curiosity, heightened by the eminence
of his name. They began to act upon the
imagination and command the belief of many
educated people—for his books were written in
Latin; till the Swedish clergy took the alarm,
and obtained from the government a commission
to inquire into his heresies. Nothing,
however, came of the inquiry, and Swedenborg was
allowed to go on in his own way without
molestation. He lived very quietly in a small house
in Stockholm, where he had many visitors
drawn by his writings from other countries
as well as his own. In his reception of them
he exhibited a good deal of the charlatan.
Hia chamber was hung with mystical
pictures; and, when a stranger, after waiting a
due time, was admitted, the sage was
discovered in profound meditation, or,
unconscious of mortal presence, engaged in
colloquy sublime with some invisible visitant
from the world of spirits. His life, however,
is admitted on all hands, to have been
irreproachable; his habits were simple; and,
being in easy circumstances, he does not seem
ever to have turned his divine mission to any
worldly account. He died in England of
apoplexy in seventeen hundred and seventy-
two, at the age of eighty-five, and his remains
rest in the Swedish church in Ratcliffe Highway.

The Swedenborgian revelations, and the
strange creed founded upon them, have by
no means been a passing delusion. Though
Swedenborg's followers have not made a
great noise in the world, yet, they appear to
have been gradually increasing in numbers
from the time of his death down to our own
day. His theological tenets, though at
variance with the fundamental principles of
Christianity, were adopted in this country
by professed Christians and even by clergymen
of the Church of England. In the year
1770, the Reverend T. Hartley, rector of
Winwick, translated several of his works,
particularly one of the wildest of them all,
the treatise on Heaven and Hell, from which
we have already quoted his account of the
way in which he received his divine mission
from the lips of God himself. It is said that
above fifty English clergymen became early
converts to his faith. Among its most zealous
votaries was the Rev. Mr. Clowes, rector of
St. John's, Manchester, who, nevertheless,
remained in communion with the church and
held his benefice till his death in 1831. This
anomaly seems to have arisen from the
circumstance, that Swedenborg did not reject