Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/322

306 the present time in a state of suffering in the other world; simply on account of having introduced the doctrine of faith alone; although he is not among the damned."

Gjörwell noted other things, among them that Swedenborg did not mention the doctrine of the atonement, which shows that Swedenborg was not telling everything he believed to a stranger, hesitating to express his horror at what he considered an immoral slander on God.

He said that "when a man dies his soul does not divest itself of its peculiarities," on which, Gjörwell reports, he could not refrain from asking with what Professor D. Nils Wallerius now busied himself. "He still goes about," Swedenborg said, "and holds disputations."

He also told Gjörwell that he enjoyed supernatural sight and hearing and could speak with the departed and with angels. Also that God had revealed Himself to him in May, 1744, in London (this might be what is called a memory displacement for the Delft vision of April that year), and that since this time God had been preparing him for the reception of a new revelation. This "light" which it was his mission to reveal consisted in this, that "a New Jerusalem is to be established on earth; the meaning of which is, that a New Church is at hand, about the nature of which and the way to enter it his writings really treat."

Swedenborg said nothing to Gjörwell about a reinterpretation of the Bible as his mission; clearly this had sunk into being a secondary task, the chief task as he saw it being the introduction of a more ethical system of religion, for which the vision had now become the supreme authority.

He also told Gjörwell that since the vision he had been in constant communication with God "whom he sees before his eyes like a sun" (a reference no doubt to Swedenborg's belief that the "sun" which he saw in heaven was in reality the "sphere" that emanated from the Lord).

"About all this," Gjörwell recorded, "he spoke with a perfect conviction, laying particular stress on these words: 'All this I see and know without becoming the subject of any visions and without being a fanatic; but when I am alone my soul is as it were out of the body and in the other world; in all respects I am in a visible