Page:A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/33



the men who have been instrumental in contributing to the moral and spiritual progress of our kind, there is no one in any age who has claimed to have rendered a more important service than Emanuel Swedenborg. If we can accept his own declarations, he was the immediate instrument of the Lord in making intelligible to men a new and incalculably important order of truths, upon a class of subjects which most directly affect man's spiritual nature and destiny; he claimed to have explored entirely new and unattempted regions of truth, to have discovered new degrees of human faculties, their qualities, their laws of action and development; to have entered consciously into the highest realms of spiritual existence, and to have brought away with him a full, clear and absolutely authentic account of what he observed of the new and better worlds to which he was admitted.

His reports were listened to at first with distrust or derision. They gradually arrested the attention of a few thoughtful men who took the trouble to study and explain them. His hierophants rapidly assumed the proportions of a sect. And it is not to be denied that the steadily increasing influence which his teachings are exerting upon human society is a phenomenon in some respects quite unprecedented. The American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society was organized and has been sustained for a quarter of a century, exclusively for the publishing and popularizing of his writings. This Society, with other agencies in the United States, has supplied not less than fifteen hundred libraries with his works, and has circulated