Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/323

XXIII ] there as I am here. But when I think of what I am about to write, and while I am in the act of writing, I enjoy a perfect inspiration; for otherwise it would be my own; but now I know for certain that what I write is the living truth of God." 10

Into such certainty Swedenborg's experience that tremulous night in Delft had now crystallized. He was unshakable on two points: that God had entrusted him with a mission, and that he had his "memorable relations" from first-hand observations in the other world.

After Swedenborg's death, his friend Count A. J. von Höpken said about these memorable relations: "I could wish the happy deceased had left them out as they may prevent infidelity from approaching his doctrines. I represented to him these inconveniences, but he said he was commanded to declare what he had seen in the other world; and he related it as a proof that he did not reveal his own thoughts, but that they came from above." 11 In other words, understandably though illogically, Swedenborg continued to feel, as he had in 1745, that the "reality" of his otherworld experiences—seeing people he knew—guaranteed the reality of his religious visions.

At any rate, when a new book came from Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, published in Amsterdam, 1768, he yielded not a fraction of his claims, let his friends deplore it or not.

The very first lines were: "I am aware that many who read the following pages and the memorable relations annexed to the chapters will believe that they are fictions of the imagination; but I solemnly declare that they are not fictions but were truly done or seen; and that I saw them not in any state of the mind asleep, but in a state of perfect wakefulness . . ."

After which he again claimed that he had a mission from the Lord to teach about a New Church, and he reaffirmed that he had been able to be in the spiritual world with angels and at the same time in the natural world with men, "and this now for twenty-five years."

Then he plunged into a memorable relation, so long as to be almost a short novel. It was so brilliantly suited to jolting the complacence of his fellow-Christians that only his truthfulness prevents one from thinking it a conscious "fiction of the imagination."