Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/32

20 navy), Jesper had to pay him the customary yearly tribute, only being let off during the first couple of years.

Swedberg gained great popularity through not ferreting out all the pennies of the poor, as the majority of the clergy had to. Very few of them had inherited copper mines or had married wealth. Nor did they have his knack of loosening the royal purse strings, whether it was to reimburse him for "giving" the catechism to the royal guards, or to rebuild his house in a bigger and finer style each of three times when his old enemy the Devil caused it to be burnt.

The "incredible sums" which he says he used for the publication of his many devotional books were of course spent only for the glory of God, though Jesper signed them, and he never forgets to remind the reader of the thirty thousand riksdaler he lost on his hymnbook, the one which he says his jealous colleagues prevented from being adopted. (He was able to unload some copies on the Swedish congregations in America, and they liked it.) At the same time he notes with satisfaction that he never really lost any money; somehow it all came back to him. The manner is not specified, but at the end of his autobiography he says he is just wealthy as he ever was. Inconsistency in his statements never worried him; knowing the Bible literally by heart, he had a barrage of scripture to support his most contradictory positions.

It is not surprising that this man, so sublimely self-occupied and self-deceived, should scarcely have mentioned his children in this book that was written for his children. Emanuel hardly figures in it, except as the author of some Latin verses which his father requested him to write on the occasion when a copper plate engraved with the Bishop's picture was "miraculously" preserved in a fire. But we know that in 1688, while Swedberg was still in Stockholm, his wife Sara gave birth to Emanuel, and that at the age of about two years he was moved to Upsala with the family.

The dean of the University of Upsala (and chief professor of theology) had his dwelling in the town which was dominated by the cathedral in more senses than one. Its Gothic towers rose not only over the medieval castle but over the town of about five thousand inhabitants and above the whole of the undulating