Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/372

354 of something that had been gradually taking place, the union of the human Jesus with the Divine from which his soul had sprung, or with his, symbolic, "Father" (or with his Real Self). As a man he had combated the temptations of men, not turning aside even from the cross, though, humanly, he had had the desire to do so. But that was his last temptation, and he conquered it.6

For, Swedenborg said dryly, but with much autobiographical feeling behind his words, "it is by means of temptation that conjunction is effected." Though man feels bitterly, left to himself, God is really with him in this struggle of the "internal and external" man, and therefore "when man conquers temptation he is inmostly conjoined with God."

How Swedenborg felt about the doctrine that God had to be propitiated for the sins of mankind by having His Son die horribly, and that men's "salvation" consisted in crediting them with the "merits" of Christ, he expressed, or let an "angel" express, in this book.

"Can the Christian world be so insane, and wander away from sound reason into such madnesses, and from such paradoxes draw conclusions about the fundamental dogma of salvation? Who does not see that these things are diametrically opposed to the very Divine essence, that is to God's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, and at the same time to his omnipotence and omnipresence? No good master could so deal with his manservants and maidservants, nor even a wild beast or a bird of prey with its young. It is horrible. Is it not contrary to God's Divine essence to annul that call which has been made to the whole human race and to each individual? Is it not contrary to the Divine essence to change the order established from eternity, which is that every man is to be judged by his life?" 7

Three was: "Evils should not be done, because they are of the devil and from the devil."

It was indeed hard to tell from article three that Swedenborg had not believed in any personal "Devil" for a great many years. He seems to have done so in the brief attack of orthodoxy he had while he was undergoing his "temptations" in the religious crisis period, but he very soon dropped the Devil. He believed, however, in devils—that is, in human beings who had so consistently chosen evil that everything which made them human had died. In the