Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/157

XII ] a chill, analytic gaze on the various shortcomings of his old recalcitrant self. There were certain signs that, after all, his inclination toward the other sex had not entirely disappeared; one finds him hinting that he had been "in certain places" 9 with a Swedish boon companion, but he also suggests that he did not think God objected to this so much since he had not been warned about it as he had about some other things.10 Swedenborg seemed to be more shocked at another kind of overindulgence, namely that he had eaten and drunk too much at a banquet; this, he said, was leading "a pig's life." (He was in Holland, of course, and a sociable man.)

But still worse, he considered, with microscopic scrutiny of himself, was his personal vanity. Once while listening to a medical lecture he caught himself wondering if he would be mentioned as one who knew more about such things. And then there was the time when he went past a book store and felt that his books would do more good than others; something for which he reproached himself severely, adding that probably every book did some good in its own way.

Worse yet, he thought, was the tendency he found in himself to boast of the grace of God. When somebody did not seem to value him as he felt he ought to be valued he caught himself thinking, " 'Oh, if you only knew what grace I have, then you would act differently' "—and "that was impure and due to self-love, which I at last discovered and asked God's pardon for, wishing that others might have the same grace, as they perhaps already had it." 11

But the most persecuting sorrow of all was the fact that he could not become "as a child," could not simply believe without reasoning. He says he prayed and sometimes fasted and sometimes wept and beat himself, but it is evident that the rational thoughts, his lifetime habits, would assert themselves. One night, that between April 6 and 7 in 1744 when he happened to be in Delft, he was reading about the miracles God did through Moses. But critically. "I both believed and I did not believe. I thought that was why the angels and God appeared to the shepherds and not to the philosopher who brings his own reason into it, which always leads him to ask why God used the wind to bring up the locusts with, and why did He harden the heart of Pharaoh and not act directly," and other such things.