May make one music as before,
But vaster.
Tennyson.
I find Swedenborg, in the midst of his spiritual interviews and voluminous authorship, taking his part for some time in the Diet of 1761, and presenting three memorials with high repute for practical sagacity. He publishes ‘A New Method of finding the Longitude,’ simultaneously with the ‘Apocalypse Revealed.’
He appears to have possessed a remarkable power of inward respiration. He says that he received from the Lord a conformation enabling him to breathe inwardly for a long time, without the aid of the external air, while his outward senses continued their operation.[[391]]
Swedenborg is strongly opposed to ascetic practice in every form. He contradicts all the cloistered contemplative mystics, when he declares that ‘man cannot be formed for heaven except by means of the world.’ He represents the ‘religious,’ and devotees who have renounced the world for pious meditation, as by no means agreeable or enviable personages in the other life. They are of a sorrowful temper, despising others, discontented at not having been honoured with superior happiness, selfish, turning away from offices of charity (the very means of conjunction with heaven), soon betaking themselves to solitary places. Truly, many of the first in the heaven of the Romish calendar are the last in the heaven of Swedenborg. And I doubt not that his arrangement is, in such cases, the more near the truth of the two. For, as he justly says, ‘a life of charity towards our neighbour (which consists in doing what is just and right in every employment) can only be exercised in general as man is engaged in some employment.’ Such a life, he declares, tends heavenward,—not so a life of piety without a life of charity.[[392]]
‘In heaven,’ says Swedenborg, ‘instruction is committed, not to memory, but to life;‘—a goodly saying.
Swedenborg’s ‘Christian Religion’ is a system of theology, calm and orderly throughout, illustrated with plates—the Memorable Relations. I interpret these marvellous narratives much as Swedenborg does the Mosaic record. I do not question their historic truth, for Swedenborg. Such things he saw and heard; for to such a mind all abstraction takes substantial form. His mental transitions are journeys. Every proposition has its appropriate scenery; every group of verities incorporates itself in a drama, and becomes a speech and action. But I put an inner sense into these Relations, and so reading them, find charming allegories, just in moral and elegant in style.
What Swedenborg tells us about a future state I am certainly not in a position to contradict, for I know nothing about such matters. The general conviction of the Christian world seems to me true in the main,—that the silence of the scriptures concerning such details is an argument for their inspiration—was wisely designed to check curiosity and to exercise faith. Yet it cannot be denied that after all Swedenborg’s disclosures, the Christian conflict, and the motives to that holy warfare, remain very much as the Bible presents them. Selfishness is still the root of evil; God the sole foundation of truth and goodness; faith alone, working by love, can overcome the world. If the arrangements he relates as finding place in heaven and hell, be regarded as the unconscious creation of his own brain, an extraordinary genius for legislature must be allowed him by all. There is generally an obvious fitness in the economy he describes. Here and there he is whimsical and Quevedo-like. Sometimes a certain grim satire peeps out. As regards individuals, we suspect prejudice or caprice. He represents Melanchthon as faring but poorly, for a long time, in the other world, because he would not let go his doctrine of justification by faith. He elevates Mahomet in his heaven, and lowers Paul. Who does not think of Dante, carrying the feud of Guelph and Ghibelline beyond the grave?[[393]]
It shocks such preconceived ideas as we may most of us have formed concerning heaven, to find it represented as so like earth. That in the spiritual world there should be towns and cities, gymnasia and theological discussions, sermons and book-writing, courts of law, and games, yea marriage, of a refined species, the progeny whereof are inward joys and virtues;—all this is novel.[[394]] Our notions here are mostly taken from Milton, and his, in considerable measure, from ecclesiastical and scholastic tradition. After the sublimity of the poet, the homely circumstantialities of the theosophist appear cruelly prosaic. Yet Swedenborg’s view of the future state may be regarded as, in many respects, a wholesome corrective to the popular conception. The truth, I should dimly surmise, may lie between the two. The general apprehension does perhaps make the transition at death too abrupt; forgets too much the great variety of degrees and societies of spirits which must distinguish the inhabitants of hell and heaven,—how completely the inward tendency will make the grief or the joy,—how little mere change of scene and mode of existence can constitute the bliss or woe,—and how various must be the occupations and enjoyments of a world which is to consummate, not our adoration merely, but active love and knowledge.