Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/165

XII ] a bright symptom of the fact that Swedenborg had emerged from orthodoxy and melancholy at the same time.

He had used his own tragic emotions as material for the book, always an excellent sign of returning emotional health in a writer. When Adam was puzzled by the same questions as Swedenborg, then "Wisdom," a daughter of his soul, answered them just as if she had read his books. And she used some pretty similes. When he wondered if it were really true that man is governed by his "loves" or desires, and in that sense has little or no free will, his "Wisdom" asked him if he had not noticed the ringdove violently beating the air with his wings. It seemed to the dove that he chose the shortest and quickest way home, but in reality "his loves—his fledged young and his mistress—excited his mind and his mind moved his wings."

"Wisdom" did not miss the chance to note that "it is the life of our love which we live, and that life is of such quality as the love is." 28

And Swedenborg in a footnote asked, "What are truths without an ultimate regard for goodness! Or . . . the intelligence unless to know how to choose the Good . . ."

Disguising it slightly, Swedenborg wrote even of the vision when he had felt himself to be in the bosom of Christ, who in this book was called "Love Himself." When Adam emerged from a similar experience in which he had, like Swedenborg, heard the divine words "spoken within himself," he too began to wonder what it had really meant. "Where now," Adam asked, "is that Love in whose bosom I was held? . . . Am I fallen down or am I deluded? Tell me, my wisdoms! I entreat you by God—where have I been; rescue me from this darkness." 29

An honest cry, one not uttered by a man who was longing to be self-deceived for the sake of ecstasy.

Adam was told by one of his "wisdoms" that he was still in "His bosom," that only a thin veil kept him from seeing this. If that veil were but a little withdrawn "He will again appear, for He is in our inmost principles and also in the highest; Himself and His Heaven being in the former and in the latter." 30

Swedenborg had found his religion again—the spiritual religion or "Perennial Philosophy" that sees the "inmost and highest"