Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/30

18 account of how he had been walking in a green meadow after his hard work and how he had met two troops of children. One lot was weeping and wailing. Why? No one had taught them how to get to heaven. The other troop was joyful, they had been rightly taught. But why were the first lot in such a bad state?

He said he went to their schoolrooms to find out, and here he became shrewdly realistic. In a grammar school he found the pupils in a state of indiscipline, in spite of plentiful blows from a drunken schoolmaster, when they couldn't untangle the complicated doctrinal puzzles they were given. "Why are you drunk so early in the morning?" "Oh, I am very poor," he said, "at home I have a sick wife and a house full of children with neither bite nor sup. It muddles my head and when I leave the house I'm only too glad to be asked to have a glass of brandy. My salary is small and I hardly get half of it."

Previously, Jesper Swedberg said, he had visited a couple of private schoolrooms in noble houses. They knew their catechism all right, but only by heart, not in their hearts. Grand French finery hung all around, which was all they cared about—that and the French frivolity which was taught them by a French governess. What they saw and heard at table from their elders was such that he wished himself far from there. They even heard reflections on the King—no wonder their souls were lacking in spiritual nourishment.

The picture he gave of a lapdog-kissing, arrogant nobility was full of dramatic detail, it could have gone into any proletarian description of the wicked capitalist, but that was not his animus. The rich children, like the poor, were being deprived of true religion, something which he vaguely summarized as the Fear of God.

Undoubtedly sincere in his charges, Jesper Swedberg was not so foolhardy in attacking the nobles as he might seem, because King Charles XI, clearing the ground for absolute monarchy, was busily shearing them of both property and power. Preferment for the clergy came from the King, and Charles XI was quick to be both entertained and pleased by Swedberg and to see his usefulness. The King was one of those stern and pious warriors produced by Sweden. He took being the Lord's anointed seriously, believing that this entailed more responsibilities than privileges. Jesper Swedberg's