Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/352

334 Swedenborg might have forgotten how his interpretations of the Bible had come to him through his hand being moved involuntarily, or how voices had dictated to him, or how he had even written without knowing what he was writing (in any case he never suspected that some of these messages might have come from his own unconscious), but he had not forgotten his Vision. It had come to him resolving his long religious crisis, it had given him the mystic's direct experience of the Godhead, and all his conscious and subconscious life after that had been focused on the interpretation of it. After seventy it had become inextricably connected in his mind with the reinterpretation of the Bible, since he had to have both the Bible and his doctrines of the New Church for that new spiritual orientation which he wanted mankind to have.

This for him was his mission. He came to believe he had been "commanded" to announce it; in the spiritual world he said he had seen his theological books with the words "the Lord's Advent" written on them.14 Not in pride but in what he considered obedience did he announce that a man filled with the spirit of the Lord would, at the command of the Lord, receive the internal sense of Scripture in his understanding and publish it in the press. This release of the Lord in the Book was to be the real Second Coming.

But no one of any importance in Sweden, except the undeniably woolly-minded Beyer, seemed to take him seriously on this, for him, so vital point that he had a commission to elucidate the inner meaning of the Bible by means of "correspondence."

Men like Höpken were delighted with the ethical and philosophic aspects of his books; they approved, if not publicly, of his attacks on what Höpken in a letter called "the polytheism taught by the priests," but Swedenborg, not they, had had the Vision. Some of them believed that he could really talk with spirits, but the thing to which he considered his spirit-communication a testimony, his mission to interpret the "Word," fell on deaf ears, or at any rate on ears very hard of hearing.

No Stockholmer has left a detailed account of how in this matter Swedenborg struck a sensible burgher of his time, but luckily an Amsterdammer has done so. The story of Swedenborg's friendship with Johan Christian Cuno gives us not only some valuable glimpses of the seer's personality but an account of how that extraordinary