Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/159

XII ] and smiling so that I believe this was how he looked when he was alive. He spoke to me and asked if I had a certificate of health, I answered, 'Lord thou knowest that better than I.' He said 'Well, then act,' which seemed to me to mean: Love me really, or do what you promised. God give me grace to do so, I thought, it was not within my own power. I woke, trembling, and came again into the state where I was neither asleep nor awake but in thought as to what this might mean, was it Christ, the son of God, whom I saw?"

First he thought it was a sin to doubt it, then he remembered the Biblical injunction to try the spirits, and he recalled the "series mystica" of blissful gyres in which he had been the previous night, deciding that he had been thus prepared by the Holy Ghost for this night's experience. Then he considered his impression that although he had spoken the words of his prayer himself, yet they had somehow not been his, they had been put into his mouth—that is, he now thought, Jesus himself had told him he was Jesus. And he prayed to be forgiven for having doubted it.12

In 1710 Swedenborg was very near death for having broken the London quarantine. No doubt it sank deep into him then how important it was to have one's health certificate in order. As for the injunction to act, it may not be out of the way to remember that Descartes, who had meant much to the young Emanuel, had had "Fac" (Act) in his brief device.13

This need not hurt those who believe in the possibility of divine theophanies to loving and anxious souls. If any such Impulse can come from a Beyond it must clothe itself in material comprehensible to the recipient, and perhaps use material in the recipient.

But why should Swedenborg, who certainly was not a great and hardly even a little sinner, have gone through this concatenation of what would now have been dismissed as "guilt feelings"?

In the dossiers of mystics (those who feel they experience God directly) one often finds that it is some glimpse of mystic joy which has set them on their path. The experience may have come unexpectedly, and, they often feel, undeservedly, but from then onward they only live to taste it again. Withdrawn from them, by that species of coquetry which Divinity seems to practice, they begin to torment themselves to find the reason for the withdrawal, and they