Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/343

XXV ] and could heal people, and Swedenborg offered to place him with a good family in Stockholm where he could become educated.5 And he often wrote that all men could and should have been able to communicate with the other world, if they had only kept the spiritual part of themselves alive and open.

One day when a public execution had taken place, Robsahm was with Swedenborg in the evening, and asked him how a man who leaves the world in this manner feels at the moment he is executed. Swedenborg said that when such a man laid his head on the block, he was already so much out of himself that after decapitation when he entered into the world of spirits he didn't realize that the execution had taken place, but was terrified of it and tried to make his escape. Then good spirits would come to him and reveal to him that he was really dead, and, if he had been purposely wicked on earth he would escape from them as quickly as possible and lead himself to his likes in hell, but if he had committed his crime without premeditation, he could repent, receive instruction, and in time become a blessed spirit.

Another of Swedenborg's friends who put down his recollections of him, though it was eighteen years after Swedenborg's death, was the Danish Major-General Tuxen.6 Tuxen lived in Elsinore, the charming Danish town on the Sound, where sailing ships were often becalmed. Luckily for Tuxen, who was most curious to meet Swedenborg, having read some of his works, there was no breeze on a day in 1768 when Swedenborg was on board a ship off Elsinore, and Tuxen was asked to dine at the Swedish Consul's to meet the famous man.

Tuxen asked and received confirmations of the stories relating to Swedenborg's psychic powers, and he also asked for information concerning various Danish personages in the other world. He was given some interesting answers, and, without his asking, he was also informed as to the fate of the Russian Empress Elizabeth, that it was much better than might have been supposed.

Now it is only in our day that it has come out what Tuxen's job really was:7 the King of Denmark had practically forced him to be a Danish secret agent to secure information on Russian affairs, a charge which he held from 1742 till his death in 1792. Officially he had various other posts, so that Swedenborg's detailed and