Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/29

III ] language. The last accomplishment he was very dubious of—"God grant it be not at the cost of their timely and eternal welfare."

A speaking example of this he found when he arrived in Strasbourg. The city had just been won without a blow by the French. How? Because the commandant, a Strasbourger, had learned French in his youth in Paris, and when the general of the besieging troops spoke to him in this language, offering him a large bribe to sell out, his soldiers didn't understand what was going on and the city was lost.

Not always edified by the behavior of German Lutherans on the sabbath, "God help us, what didn't I see there and they living in the midst of Catholics," he was enthusiastic about the results of drilling people in the catechism, and he came back to Sweden, and to Albrecht, his first child, full of the returned traveler's desire to improve his own country.

His zeal was tempered by prudence, however. Very early in his career, he says himself, "I laid down two chief rules for myself. Firstly, never to meddle in affairs that had nothing to do with my office, especially not with political or worldly affairs. Secondly, never to speak ill of anyone were he my greatest enemy and persecutor."

Not only in the late seventeenth century would those have been excellent rules for a preacher to follow who desired to leave apostolic obscurity, but Jesper Swedberg had positive ability as well.

This ability was largely dramatic. In those times sermons could stretch to three or four hours of tedious doctrinal disquisitions. Not so Jesper Swedberg's. He could, and did, do that as well, so as to show off his vast (often inaccurate) learning, as he does with battalions of footnotes in his autobiography; but even in the book this man who had "the word" in his power can flash out, and in the pulpit he must have given a stirring performance, revivalist style.

His use of simple, strong-smelling words and pungent, homely similes was not original with him, Luther had authorized that, but in Jesper Swedberg there was a native vein of poetry. He wrote hymns that sometimes had a clear folk-song quality. Above all, he could tell a story.

At the beginning of his Stockholm career, when he had King Charles XI in the church one day, he launched into a vivid poetic