Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/37

III ] Sara Bergia was her name, and she had already been twice married. "She was barren," Swedberg records, "and now all of a sudden she had seven children."

To them she was a good mother, and her favorite was Emanuel. In his notebook of "other-world" experiences, he startles one by mentioning "my mothers," with equal affection.

It was an age of dutiful children and strong family bonds. Kinship implied much. Love, or at least the expression of it, was obligatory. A kinship term was hardly ever used without the word "dear" (käre) preceding it, often abbreviated to the first letter. You wrote about d:father, d:mother, d:aunt, unless you were actually going to law with your aunt. D:brother and d:sister extended to in-laws.

Set tributes to d:parents were the thing, and Emanuel made several of them to his d:father.

Probably while he was young he shared many people's belief that his father was the bluff, kind, modest man he obviously felt himself to be, and indeed said that he was. Nor can it be denied that Jesper Swedberg along with feathering his own nest was often willing to help others, especially that extension of himself, his family. He took personal trouble in a good cause, preferably in public, and he had sound, commonsense ideas on educational methods. He advocated better pay and a higher status for teachers. He helped to prepare a better translation of the Bible. It horrified him to have Swedish interlarded with French words. His children must often have heard him speak the ringing words he wrote: "I'll care for our noble mother-tongue while I eat Swedish bread and drink Swedish beer."

His delivery of the obvious was always in the stateliest manner, unhampered by any hesitancy of self-criticism.

Emanuel could hardly at this time have begun his reflections on the tawdriness of good works undertaken mainly for self-glorification, nor on the grim discord which is so apt to exist between the inner and the outer man. But in later life while reading his father's autobiography he cannot have helped noticing many things, illuminated by recollection.

He may have remembered the banquet to the paupers of Upsala