OPINIONS OF THE PRESS AND OF EMINENT MEN ON

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG AND HIS WRITINGS.

BISHOP HURD, Author of "Lectures on the Prophecies."

It has been said by some, and received implicitly without further examination by others, that Swedenborg, after receiving his extraordinary commission, was mad, and became totally deprived of his natural senses; but this insinuation is such a palpable contradiction to truth, and such an insult to common sense (being overruled by every page of his writings, as well as by every act of his life after that period), that we should have thought it altogether unworthy of notice were we not aware that it operates powerfully with many, even at this day, to prejudice them against a character which otherwise they would revere, and against writings from which they would otherwise receive the most welcome instruction.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I have often thought of writing a book, to be entitled, "A Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded," and at such times, the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg. I remember nothing in Lord Bacon superior, few passages equal, either in depth of thought, or of richness, dignity, and felicity of diction, to the weightiness of the truths contained in these articles (Swedenborg's "Economy of the Animal Kingdom," Nos. 208–214 inclusive). I can venture to assert that as a moralist, Swedenborg is above all praise.— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Vol. IV. p. 423.

EMERSON.

Swedenborg's writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student. Not every man can read them; but they will reward him who can. One of the missourians and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars.

PROFESSOR BUSH.

Viewing Swedenborg's system as a whole, it is seen to be replete with a philosophy which covers the whole ground of its disclosures. It gives a rationale, not only of all the physical facts, but of all the intellectual and moral doctrines, of which it treats. It satisfies the reason, not only as to its grand asserted truths, but as to the grounds and modes of those truths. It shows a how and a why for everything. The truth of this philosophy will, of course, be admitted no farther than it is understood, and it cannot be understood without study. This study, except to a very limited extent, has hitherto been withheld, from the bare force of prejudice; and so it will probably continue to be for some time to come, but it will inevitably be exacted in the end.-George Bush, M.A., Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Literature, New York University.

HIRAM POWERS, the Sculptor of the celebrated "Greek Slave."

I am a "Swedenborgian," without any reservation whatever, and wish it to be known. I have always wished this to be known. Swedenborg is my author, all other writers (in comparison) seem moving in the dark with tapers in hand, groping their way, while he moves in the broad light of the sun. Therefore, if it will do good, publish me as a New Churchman.

Prof. THORILD, a celebrated Swedish poet and metaphysician, and Professor of the Swedish language and literature in the University of Greifswalde. What are we to think of this truly extraordinary man? That he was a fool, say those little men whose good opinion never did good to anyone. That he was an arch-heretic, bawls orthodoxy, with loud and ferocious voice. What the philosopher sees in him, is, a man of vast and consummate learning, an honor and glory to his nation, who preserved the veneration for his genius by the truly apostolical simplicity and purity of his morals.

From the American “SOUTHERN QUARTERLY REVIEW."

Who ever thought so profoundly on great and noble themes as Swedenborg? The fame of Bacon and Newton and Locke, of Milton and Shakspere and Scott, pales and grows dim before the brighter glory that clusters around the name and acts of this renowned individual. They acquired distinction for the splendor of their success in par. ticular departments of inquiry, and in certain spheres of intellectual labor; but it was reserved for the more fortunate and celebrated Swede to master, not one science, but the whole circle of the arts and sciences; and to understand and reveal the great connecting links that subsist between mind and matter, time and eternity, man and his Maker, in a far clearer manner than any of the most gifted and inspired of his predecessors. The world may be challenged in vain to produce in the history of any single individual such a combination of gigantic and well-balanced powers of mind, with vast and magnificent attainments of all sorts.

The late Hon. THEOPHILUS PARSONS, Author of several works on Jurisprudence of high authority, and for 22 years Professor in the Cambridge (U. S.) Law School. I regard him (Swedenborg) as a man of remarkable ability, and great and varied culture; taught, as no other man ever was taught, truths which no other man ever learned; and thus instructed that he might introduce among men a new system of truth or doctrine, excelling in character, and exceeding in value any system of truth before known ; a new gift, demanding, as the instrument by which it could be communicated, a man not only possessing extraordinary capacity and cultivation, but in both capacity and cultivation definitely adapted to the peculiar work he had to do.

Rev. B. F. BARRETT, formerly a Unitarian Minister, and Author of several works. Slowly, yet through ten thousand avenues, the teachings of Swedenborg are gliding into the mind and heart of Christendom. They are working noiselessly and unseen, like the mighty but invisible forces of nature. They are gilding with their light, and ennobling with their spirit, all the best literature of our times.

It is not

without reason, therefore, that one of the leading religious weeklies of our country (the New York Independent) says:-"Whoever desires to understand modern theology, and the elements which have contributed to its formation, has need to study the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg." No Christian minister should fail to acquaint himself with the main principles of his system.

HENRY JAMES, Author of " Substance and Shadow," and several other works.

I fully concede, indeed, to Swedenborg what is usually denied him-namely, an extreme sobriety of mind displayed under all the exceptional circumstances of his career, and which ends by making us feel at last bis every word to be almost insipid with veracity. I cordially appreciate, moreover, the rare destitution of wilfulness which characterizes all his researches; or, rather, the childlike docility of spirit which leads him to seek and to recognise, under all the most contradictory aspects of nature, the footsteps of the Highest.

His (Swedenborg's) books are a dry, unimpassioned, unexaggerated exposition of the things he daily saw and heard in the world of spirits, and of the spiritual laws which these things illustrate; with scarcely any effort whatever to blink the obvious outrage his experiences offer to sensuous prejudice, or to conciliate any interest in his reader which is not prompted by the latter's own original and unaffected relish of the truth. Such sincere books, it seems to me, were never before written.

The Rev. EDWIN PAXTON HOOD.

Swedenborg was one of the profoundest mathematicians of his age; a deep and acute thinker; a subtle logician; a various and versatile scholar-above all, a calm and most quiet bookman and penman, indisposed for any company, and never seen to court the company of the ignorant and the vulgar-ever the resort of the fanatic; a man of few words, until compelled to talk, or talking for a purpose; cool in temperament; never rocked by passion or impulse; always, as far as humanity can be, in equilibrium, weighing all his thoughts and all his actions; perpetually bent upon giving reasons for things; a man of strong inductive habits and powers, and consistent; a whole life of invariable rectitude. He was a Titan, and must take his place among the very highest and widest minds of our world.

Dr J. J. GARTH WILKINSON.

The career of Swedenborg, as traced in his writings, is an epitome of the religion and philosophy of mankind. The first half of his life supplies the archetype of whatever is worthiest in philosophy; of whatever the intelligence of the best heathens of all ages has reclaimed from ignorance or idealism; of whatever man has been given to know without the direct assistance of revelation. Therefore, it is a noble mirror in which to contemplate the history of philosophy. Not that Swedenborg was an eclectic otherwise than because he made use of all matter suitable for his designs. But his designs were new and living; and, accordingly, notwithstanding he accepted everything, yet he modified everything. Hence, though the salient points of numberless theories are in his works, and appear to be common to Swedenborg and their original authors, yet from Swedenborg they have received a new essence, and are truly differenced thereby. His education was somewhat as follows: by ample instruction and personal remark he learned the chief facts of the natural world, and perceived in them a philosophy reaching almost to the heavens, but strictly "terminated in matter" at the lower end. After this, his spiritual senses were opened, and again by ample instruction and personal remark he learned the general facts of the spiritual world, and the Word of God was unfolded to him as thus prepared, By all which we are lawfully confirmed in Bacon's doctrine of the necessity of experience, for until experience was given, the spiritual world was unknown; and until an adequate intellect was sent, and added to such experience, its quality was unknown. The experience without the reason had existed in the prophets of the Old Testament, and in the Book of Revelation; nay, from time to time immemorial in dreams and supernatural manifestations of proved authenticity; the reason without the experience is what philosophers have attempted since the date of history. But nothing came, or could come, of either, until the two were adequately combined in one organisation; that is, in Swedenborg. And that in him they were combined will survive and defy contradiction. Swedenborg's writings are a library in themselves, and display the most careful method and the most indomitable energy. He was eminently conservative; he quarreled with no church; he set himself in opposition to no organized body. He did not stand apart in all the loneliness of prophetic fury, and denounce vengeance on degenerate man. He was too catholic to found a sect; he spake the truth entrusted to him, and left it to permeate the lives and opinions of succeeding ages. His charity was as broad as the ocean which rolls its waves on every shore, wide as the firmament which foldeth all the orbs of heaven within its ample bosom. He was the most magnificent scholar of his age, and was at the same time the humblest Christian. Favored by kings, intimate with nobles and statesmen, and the learned of every land, he was without one particle of vanity, and labored as assiduously and devotedly as the humblest parish priest.

Dr IMMANUEL TAFEL, Professor of Philosophy, and Librarian in the University of Tübingen.

From all these testimonies it appears that Swedenborg was by far the greatest scholar of his country; an adept in the oriental and occidental languages; a thorough mathematician; a successful mechanician; a perfect metallurgist; an accomplished statesman; a profound philosopher; a sound theologian; and a man in whose character were combined noble and pure sentiments, with a spotless, industrious, virtuous, and holy life; and who was adorned with all social virtues, so that he was venerated and beloved by all who knew him.

BARON BERZELIUS,

The father of modern chemistry, an unprejudiced and high-minded man of science, expressed himself in a letter to Dr J. J. Garth Wilkinson, the translator of Swedenborg's Regnum Animale, as follows:-I have gone through some parts of The Animal Kingdom, which have interested me especially; and I have been surprised to find how the mind of Swedenborg has preceded the present state of knowledge, writing his work at the time he did. I hope the anatomists and physiologists of our day will profit by this work, both for the sake of extending their ideas, and of rendering justice to the genius of Swedenborg. In another letter he says,-I am surprised at the great knowledge displayed by Swedenborg in a subject that a professed metallurgist would not have been supposed to have made an object of study, and in which, as in all he undertook, he was in advance of his age.

From the "NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.”

His (Swedenborg's) books teem with the grandest, the most humane, and generous truth; but his reverence for it is so austere and vital, that, like the lover who makes nimself willingly of no account beside his mistress, he seems always intent upon effacing himself from sight before its matchless lustre. Certainly the highest truth never encountered a more lowly intellectual homage than it gets in these artless books; never found itself so unostentatiously heralded, so little patronised-in a word, left so completely for its success to its own sheer unadorned majesty.

Dr ARNOLD,

The late Master of Rugby School, in acknowledging to the Committee of the Swedenborg Society, the receipt of a set of Swedenborg's Writings, wrote:-I beg to return to the Committee, in whose name you have written, my best thanks for the mark of kindness which they have shown in presenting me with the works of Swedenborg, which I have just received. It is a pleasure to me to find that they approve of the views of prophecy which I ventured to put forth two or three years since. I had a notion that in a considerable part of what I then wrote I was in agreement with Swedenborg; but I had scarcely read any one of his works myself, and I know their substance only at secondhand from the accounts of others.

From the "PITTSBURG GAZETTE.”

No system of religion in these latter days has awakened so much interest as that of Swedenborg, and with it a desire to understand its deep, mysterious workings. There has always been a charm attached to it of the ethereal cast, which has attracted multitudes to its standard; and no wonder, as it is composed of such elements as will find followers. A careful perusal of this work ("Divine Love and Wisdom") can hardly fail to convey the impression that it is a remarkable combination of philosophical reasoning, and a species of illumination and seership which has rarely been produced in the field of letters.

From the "MONTHLY RELIGIOUS MAGAZINE.”

The distinguished author of "The Heart of Christ" calls this work ("Heaven and its Wonders, the World of Spirits, and Hell,") one of the golden books; and further says, the time will come when this treatise will be as much read as Milton's "Paradise Lost," and enter far more vitally into the popular conception of the life to come. The saintly Oberlin read it and preached it; and the late Mrs Browning was vastly delighted with its ideas, and tried to disseminate them among her English friends, and gain for them a lodgment within what she called " the husks of the old theology."

From the "NONCONFORMIST" (English.)

Significant traces of his (Swedenborg's) influence are to be found broadcast in society, often among those who are not conscious of any obligation to him. The storm of violent denunciation or angry ridicule which was launched against him by theologians a generation ago is scarcely remembered now, and is not likely to be revived. As a system of philosophical theology, we are disposed to place Swedenborg's teachings in a very high rank. There is a largeness of sympathy with all forms of life and action, which is too often lacking in theologians, and was highly characteristic of the man. There is a grandeur of conception flowing from his constant reference of all things to God.

Swedenborg makes great demand on our faith, but none on our charity. In the great and glorious roll of worthies who have ennobled humanity, there is no one that recurs to our memory just now who can stand a criticism with less fear of the ordeal than he can. Measure him as a man of science with Newton, and you will find him his equal in point of intellectual greatness; with Bacon and Plato, he is great among the greatest of the philosophers; -with Boerhaave and Haller he is in the first rank of physiologists; -with the theological writers and Bible commentators, from Origen to Adam Clarke, and who has equalled him?

INDEX.

(See Conversation and passim).

Clowes, John, recollections of, 51, 78, 155, 189

Autobiography of J. Clowes, 8, 9, 11, 13, 92-95 Clowes, John, his sister, 2, 81

Charity, necessity of, 11, 40, 63, 68, 93, 94, 117, Duchè, Rev. Jacob, 29, and Appendix