Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/246



EANWHILE, as to that "earthy loan," his body, Swedenborg had moved about a bit. In the summer of 1747, after he had finished all the work connected with the Board of Mines, he went to Amsterdam. At the end of September, 1748, he went to London, and about September, 1749, he returned to Holland.1 Perhaps the house in Stockholm had not been secluded enough after all, but in any case he intended to begin publishing some of his new writing, and that could only be done abroad.

The interpretation of the Bible, his mission, was of course his chief interest. He settled down to this about the end of 1748 in lodgings in London, "at six shillings a week for half a year," with a reduction should he stay a whole year. The new interpretation (of Genesis and Exodus) was called Arcana Celestia ("Heavenly Secrets"). It was published in London during the years 1749—56, without the name of the author, which was not disclosed till 1768. The work ran to eight large quarto volumes. It received almost no public attention, and this despite the fact that his publisher, John Lewis of Paternoster Row, declared the author to have a "depth, which if once fathomed (and it is not unfathomable) will yield the noblest repast to a pious mind." To ward off low suspicion he added, "But if anyone imagines that I say this to puff a book, in the sale of which my interest is so nearly concerned, any gentleman is welcome to peruse it at my shop, and to purchase it or not, as his own judgment shall direct him." 2

John Lewis was plainly overcome by Swedenborg's personality; especially by his insistence that the books must be sold cheaply, though printed in so "grand and pompous a manner." The first volume cost the author, so the printer tells us, two hundred pounds, and he had advanced as much for the second, yet any profit was to go to the "propagation of the gospel." Quite understandably the publisher found this author modest, benign, and generous, but he had no hope of the immediate success of the work, comforting