Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/376

358 into the same class as the useful, you've opened the way to the breaking of spiritual laws. There are spiritual laws. I have seen them in operation.

Long before the melancholy Kierkegaard, Swedenborg propounded "existentialism," if that rubbery word be taken to mean that you can't know until you try.

Swedenborg was visiting, he reported, one of the lower societies in the spirit world where excessively learned men were arguing about religion. He asked: "What kind of religion is necessary for the salvation of mankind?" They answered: "We will divide this question into several; and until these are decided we can give no reply. The investigation will proceed as follows: (1) Is religion anything? (2) Is there such a thing as salvation or not? (3) Is one religion more efficacious than another? (4) Is there a heaven and a hell? (5) Is there an eternal life after death? besides other questions."

They admitted that it would take at least a hundred years to decide the first point, and, Swedenborg said, "Meanwhile you are without religion." He reproached them for doing nothing but argue "whether a thing is so or not so." That, he said, "is to reason about the fit of a cap or shoe without ever trying it on . . . have a care for yourselves, lest your minds, while standing outside the door of judgment, grow hard within and become like pillars of salt."

Then they threw stones at him.12

One might say that Swedenborg in his unremittent emphasis on practical, do-something-about-it, religion was Western and Christian. But he was also, probably without knowing it, and via the Platonists, not far from Hinduism in his worship of God in His Avatar, and he was at one with Buddhism in his insistence on the reality of spiritual law, or Karma. With Buddhism too he believed in the power of the understanding to change wrong feeling to right feeling, so that man would keep the commandments because he "desires to do so," like a free man and not like a slave. Nor was he far from the Dhamma, the Good Law, of Buddha, when he declared in The True Christian Religion: "The Christian world