Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/227

XVI ] Now Solomon was shown to him (as he was supposed to be after death) "that he had no knowledge of spiritual things." 29 And doubt was thrown on David's financial statistics, if not his probity. The Bible said that David had collected a hundred thousand talents of gold for the temple, but the script said "this everyone is apt to doubt who knows the value of a single talent of gold." Not a fifth nor a tenth part of it could have been expended on the temple, so the "speaker" asserted.30

This furor theologicus does not resemble Swedenborg. Much more like him was the other stream of discourse, the one on man as matter molded by spirit, and on love and wisdom, truth and good. Different from putting Moses in the dock were little tranquil sayings such as, "the sole object of understanding is truth; not however for the sake of truth, but in order that from truth it may see what is good." 31

One might almost imagine that some calm Neoplatonist took turns with the hair-shirt monk in using the "instrument" of Emanuel Swedenborg's hand.

Now in automatic scripts the handwriting is likely not only to vary from the subject's normal writing, but also to vary in accordance with the different "spirits" who claim they are moving the hand or dictating the topics.

Obviously it occurred to the writer of this book that one did not have to be a handwriting expert to detect differences in Swedenborg's manuscript between the pages allegedly dictated by spirits and the ones in which he seemed to be his normal self. Therefore when she was in Stockholm, tracing other Swedenborgiana, she applied for permission to study Swedenborg's original manuscripts, most of which are in the custody of the Library of the Royal Academy of Sciences, among them the manuscript of The Word Explained, the work just discussed.32 Permission was granted by the kind Librarian, and it was an odd sensation to sit down with these firsthand records before one, brown ink on the good heavy paper of those days, to inquire whether the pages in which Swedenborg claimed to be guided by the controversialists, seemingly from the second century, should be markedly different from his normal hand.