Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/35

III ] where he heard them he said that it was from the boys with whom he played in the garden house. As they knew he was alone there, they opted for the marvelous and said that angels spoke through his mouth. 7

When he was old Swedenborg himself reported to an inquiring Englishman this saying of his parents. The words attributed to the child were marvelous enough, considering his youth. He said that from his sixth to his twelfth year he liked to discuss faith with clergymen, and that he said the life of faith was love and this lifegiving love was the love of one's neighbor; furthermore that God gave the gift of faith to everyone, but only those could receive it who had that love. "I knew of no other faith beyond this that God created nature, maintains it, gives reason and character to men and whatever follows from that. The learned belief which is that God credits his son's 'merits' to whom He wants to when He wants to, even to those who have neither repented nor improved, I knew nothing of then, and if I had, it would then as now have been far beyond my understanding." 8

He seems to have had a happy childhood, brothers and sisters to play with by the shining Fyris River that wound through the town. Upsala was a vivid place to grow up in. It mounted to the majestic, grim, rose-red brick of the old castle on a steep escarpment, and to the cathedral in which the soaring pillars were like many tall slender gray beeches grown together and vaulting out in the high dusk above. Besides the lacquer-red wooden houses of ordinary citizens there were several fine, well-proportioned buildings of a warm yellow and there were wide green spaces. Upsala was not a small town; it had architecture, it had history, going back to pagan times. Emanuel came out of the heart of Sweden.

Years afterwards he wrote about the unconscious innocence of childhood, with an accent of autobiography.

"Children do not take credit for anything themselves, all that they get they thank their parents for; they are delighted with the few trifling things that are given to them; they have no care about food and clothing and none about the future; they do not look to the world and covet many things from it; they love their parents and nurses and the little comrades with whom they play. They are