Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/158

142 The day before he had taken communion and still he had been depressed about hell, his only consolation Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter 5, in which Christ's death as an atonement for our sins is stressed. Yet the depression had passed into such a state of indescribably mystic joy that "if it had increased my body would have dissolved from mere joy."

And still, there he was, sitting before a fire in Delft the next evening full of the "temptation" of doubt again. But he "looked at the fire" and said to himself that he might better doubt the evidence of his fallible senses and say there is no fire than to doubt God who is Truth Itself, "and so I passed the hour or hour and a half, and laughed in my heart at the tempter."

The entry for this night of April 6, I744, Swedenborg has marked with three capital NB's. He might well, for from the experience he records here undoubtedly stemmed both his conception of his mission and his feeling of divine authority for it.

He went to bed early, after laughing at the tempter, and about half an hour later he heard a noise under his head (he was evidently by now used to strange noises) which he interpreted as the departure of the tempter. He says he shivered several times (throughout this diary of 1744 he often notes that shivering precedes the "psychic" phenomena), but then he fell asleep and "about twelve or one or two o'clock I trembled violently from head to foot and there was a great sound as of many storms colliding, which shook me and threw me on my face. In the moment I was thrown down I was fully awake and saw how I was thrown down." (This sounds as though he means that he was "in the spirit" or with his consciousness external to his body.) "I wondered at what it meant, and I spoke as though awake when yet it seemed as if the words were put into my mouth. I said, 'O thou almighty Christ, how canst thou condescend to come to such a great sinner, make me worthy of such grace.' I held up my folded hands and prayed, and then a hand came which clasped mine hard. At once I continued my prayer and said, 'Thou hast promised to pardon all sinners, thou canst do no more than keep thy word.'

"In the same moment I lay in his bosom and saw him face to face. It was a face of such holy mien and everything indescribable