Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/370



HE title of the new work was The True Christian Religion, 541 quarto pages. It was truly a feat, what Swedenborg had done, but Cuno did not know about the rough draft and what writers are capable of when they have made up their minds what they are going to write. Even without angel guidance they have been known to do a chapter a day, and, though Swedenborg undoubtedly was in good faith when he said his angel dictated to him, it must be taken that both for him and for the angel it was a task made easier by the amount of repetition to be found in the new book from former works. More than half of the "memorable relations" had already appeared, and nearly all of the teachings.1

But still the book was an almost incredible feat, first of mere physical writing (it runs to about a thousand pages in a modern edition), and then of the system and structure which the man of eighty-two had imposed on this mass of crowded material. It was not, to our way of thinking, a rational system, except within itself, for naturally Swedenborg could not furnish a guide to the different levels of his consciousness by which or through which the book had been written. It had a good deal of the verbose repetitiousness of much automatic writing, but most of the matter was sound enough, from whatever point of view one regards it—whether as a product of Swedenborg entirely, or as at least partly due to the "angels and spirits" who, he felt, had guided his hand or whispered into his "internal" hearing or shown pictures to his inner sight of spiritual realities, ranging from the subtlest of Perennial Philosophy to rigid Bible worship by means of highly dubious personal exegesis.

As for the latter, it must not be forgotten, of course, that Swedenborg both wanted to and was required (given his times) to keep the doctrines of the New Church within the Christian framework. And that he had interpreted the Delft vision as being a manifestation of Jesus Christ to him.

Even before the new book, as well as in it, he had worked out a