Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/156

140 Protestant mystical literature with which Swedenborg was certainly acquainted. It was not strange to have that form of the Godhead appear to Swedenborg's distraught soul as his one salvation. All the patterns of his boyhood, all the strong traditions of his early environment rushed to reinforce the "vision," and he yielded himself unreservedly not only to it but, in his present great bewilderment, to the orthodox Lutheran theology of grace and faith and atonement that was associated with it.

More correctly expressed, he tried to yield himself unreservedly. Intellectual habits of forty-odd years are not easily given up. And it was mainly this struggle that the diary portrayed. It was Swedenborg's outcropping scientific self that "tempted" him, especially to doubt the literal truth of the Bible. It was chiefly this which caused the melancholy that made him smile inwardly at mere money worries, and even made him tremble briefly at thoughts of hell, thoughts hitherto foreign to him.

It must be remembered that Swedenborg belonged to a people which had fought fiercely in the Thirty Years' War for the right to appeal to the Bible as the ultimate authority instead of the Church of Rome. In a sense they had fought for freedom, and they had bought the right to the Bible with their blood. To Protestants of that time everywhere and very much so to Lutherans the authority of the Bible was the same as belief in the Revolution to orthodox Bolshevists now. They had secured the Bible for themselves through a revolution, and while the Book was to become a yoke it was still the last court of appeal and source of justification for almost any proposition.

(It is well to remember also that as late as in the 1880's even a man like Henry Sidgwick had to read a great deal of modern Bible history before he could free himself from this kind of orthodoxy.)

Swedenborg was not troubled because he was still writing on scientific subjects; indeed, he noted that he sometimes was impatient and blamed God when his work did not move easily as he thought it should, "since I was not doing it for my own sake." He knew that in his painstaking effort to explain the relationship of mind and body he was really pursuing a spiritual goal, and one of which he still thought as his life work.

But the "new man in Christ" that he wanted to become turned