Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/224

208 He early began to lose faith in the declared identity of the spirits, and it is evident that he was worried by their claim that they were doing the dictating. What then became of divine authority for it? He tried to retain this by saying that although he talked with these spirits "concerning these matters both before and after the writing . . . it was not allowed me to tell anything here of what was dictated to me orally by any one of them. When this was done, and it happened at times, the writing had to be obliterated [this may account for some of the crossed-out lines]; it being allowed to tell only such things as flowed in from God Messiah alone, both mediately through them, and also immediately—which yet was manifest to me." 21

He does not explain in what way it was manifest; indeed he often complains that meanings are yet obscure to him, nor does he always know whether the spirit is good or evil.

In a more cautious passage, meant for publication as it were, he says, "For with me it has many times so happened that when I was writing my hand was directed by a superior power into the very words, and this even to the point of sensation . . . Wherefore I then said that those words were not written by me, but by someone outside me. Sometimes it was also granted me to know by what angel of God Messiah they were thus written." 22

Here, as early as 1746, the foundation was laid for the statement he stuck to in later life, that he never had instruction from anyone except from the Lord himself, or, as he sometimes put it, from the Lord in the Word—that is, through reading the Bible.

He was of course perfectly honest about this assertion, and yet it was a bit of a quibble. Since essentially he was a monist, believing that all creation was a manifestation of the One Life, that of God, naturally he felt he could say it was really God who spoke through these spirits that called themselves by various names—so long, that is, as they spoke things not too contradictory to his ideas of religion.

His idea of religion and of God was again the same in 1746 as it had been in the Economy of the Animal Kingdom and as it continued to his death, becoming more and more dominant and purified. "Love therefore is the very essence of man," he wrote in 1746, "for man is man from understanding, and the understanding is from love. That which is holy is love, for to love God above all