Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/34

22 He mentions that one theological student who wore such a wig as well as lace collar and cuffs was later mixed up in a murder.

Then as now the extravagance of women's fashions was a good target. Even Swedberg's first wife, Sara Behm, felt she had to be in the fashion. As her husband puts it, "Since every woman in those days wore a sinful and troublesome fontange or top-knot, she was obliged to do as others did and wear it, but, hearing that a cow in the island of Gothland had with great labor and pitiful bellowing brought forth a calf with a top-knot, she took her own and her girls' fontanges and threw them all into the fire."

Worse than these sins which reacted only on the individual (or innocent cows) was sabbath-breaking, of which a terrible instance threatened when the Court proposed a masquerade on a Sunday. From the pulpit Swedberg assured them that such doings were punished by the Lord with pestilence and war, so that the masquerade was canceled. But there was enough sabbath-breaking to account for the pestilence and war which soon did harass the country. So he notes, with the deep and melancholy satisfaction of the righteous.

Jesper Swedberg's God, who ought really to have been called The-Fear-of-God, was an Absolute Monarch, fond of endless adulation, before whom the worshiper groveled, and whom by egregious flattery he hoped to move to the granting of favors. Angels, devils, ghosts, demons, weird omens, and portents were all part of His supernatural cast with which to awe rebellious mankind. Freaks of nature, such as the Gotland calf wearing the fontange, showed His indifference to His own laws of nature. Enthroned above them He seemed indeed to be Caprice Incarnate, rather than the embodiment of eternal law.

Although there is so little information on Emanuel's childhood, there is a scrap which seems to show that, curiously enough, he passed unaffected by this creation of egoism and primitive fancies.

A tradition says that Emanuel (as is reported of other "psychic" subjects) had unseen playmates in his childhood. He would speak of things far beyond his years, and when his parents asked him