Page:A Brief Account of the Character and Writings of the Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg.pdf/3

 THE LETTER.

“D S,

“I sincerely join with many impartial Lovers of the Truth, in congratulating you on having undertaken, and thus far so successfully conducted the translation of the last volume of the highly illuminated Swedenborg's Writings, which may be considered as the Seal and Crown of his Message to the World; for as a divine Messenger I esteem him, and count it a high honour to have known him, and to have received some friendly letters from him.

“The writings of this honourable Man recommend them selves, at first sight, to the discerning reader, by their genuine simplicity, by the profound veneration of the author for the Sacred Scriptures, and also by his deep penetration into, and his clear elucidation of their spiritual sense, and of the mysteries contained therein, carrying with them a convincing evidence to the judgment of simplified impartial minds, between which and truth there is a certain congruity that disposes the former for an immediate reception of the latter; and this simplicity is termed in Scripture the single eye, according to those words of our Lord, (Matt. vi. 22.) If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light.

“There are two main hindrances to the admission of Divine Truth, when offered to us, the one consists in wilful Attachments to sinful Habits, called in Scripture the hardening of the heart, through the deceitfulness of sin; the other, in such intellectual Prejudices, as blind the Eye of the Mind, so that the Light of Truth cannot shine into it, and this has always been found common even among the decent and learned professors of religion, in every age and dispensation of the several churches, wherein holy Men and Prophets, commissioned by God to reclaim, exhort, and instruct the world in righteousness, were contemned, rejected, or, persecuted by it: And when the Lord of Life, God manifest in the flesh, came into the world to accomplish all the types of his sacred Advent, to fulfil all righteousness, and to instruct mankind in the perfection of wisdom, the most zealous professors of Religion, as the Scribes, Pharisees, and Doctors of the Law, were the most strenuous opposers of his doctrine, whilst their love of dominion, and an invincible conceit of self-pre-eminence, on account of their supposed superior knowledge, so darkened their understandings, that they could not see the types and prophecies under the law that so plainly pointed at the Kingdom of the Messiah then come unto them, which brought upon them that reprehension from